Trang Read online

  Chapter 11

  Philippe was soon out of the infirmary, and the next several weeks went by in a blur.

  First, he had official meetings with the Cyclopes and the Pincushions in their living areas, as well as a meeting with the Blobbos in the common area.

  The meetings were about what he expected: the Cyclopes and Blobbos were painfully polite, and both species held the type of meeting where no one could possibly be offended because nothing of substance was said. While Philippe wasn’t allowed to see the Blobbos’ living area, that of the Cyclopes was quite warm and incredibly humid—Philippe couldn’t help but wonder whether the walls had been painted their dark brown color or had grown it.

  The meeting with the Pincushions was a much more casual, even chaotic, affair, held in a living area that was the temperature of the inside of a meat locker. A large group of Pincushions attended, and there was no one Pincushion who appeared to be in charge. Philippe got the impression that only long experience with the limitations of translation technology kept them from all speaking at once. During the meeting the Pincushions expressed surprise that the mighty Scaled One did not kill Philippe’s attacker, explained that they were lured to the station by curiosity and the promise of lucrative trade in rare alien products, and casually held an orgy.

  In addition, Philippe had an emergency meeting with the Snake Boys, thanks to an utterly stupid incident. A Snake Boy, inspired by tales of Ofay, had decided that he wanted to try walking on his hands. Some of the SFers were reckless enough to help, flipping the alien over only for all to discover that the Snake Boys’ arms were never meant to bear the weight of their bodies. Fortunately the Snake Boy was expected to recover from his injuries, and his people readily agreed that the folly was equal on both sides. Indeed, Philippe’s meeting with the Snake Boys was far more genial than the one Shanti had with the offending SFers.

  The Hosts were never able to set up formal meetings with the White Spiders or the Magic Man, but Philippe ran into the latter several times after the attack. The Magic Man was almost always in human shape or would take human shape as soon as he saw Philippe, and he seemed much more willing to talk than before. Conversation was still extremely difficult, but it was gratifying that the Magic Man at least seemed to want it.

  The Magic Man’s ability to dematerialize fascinated the Union brass, and Shanti was amused to no end by a suggestion by someone fairly high up in Union Intelligence that her soldiers capture the Magic Man for study. She sent back an obscenity- and insult-laden message (composed in front of Philippe, who fruitlessly pointed out that people in the UI were probably not accustomed to the direct casualness of the SF) explaining that kidnapping was contrary to their mission and requesting suggestions for how best to capture a creature that could vanish and reappear at will.

  For his part, Philippe tried to talk the Magic Man into allowing George to give him a physical examination. The Magic Man didn’t seem to even understand the suggestion, however, and introducing him to the doctor didn’t help.

  Other than the unrealistic suggestion that they capture the Magic Man, the Union responded to the attack on Philippe in a measured way, appearing to accept his contention that a counterattack or significantly heightened security was unnecessary. Like the SFers, the Union brass seemed almost relieved—something bad had happened, to be sure, but it wasn’t the catastrophe all had feared.

  The only real change was that the Titan station sent the manned supply ship more often after the attack, whereas before they had relied almost entirely on unmanned drones to ship supplies and mail. Now the SFers saw Cheep and Pinky a couple of times a week, which was a welcome diversion. Everyone was allowed to go on the ship while it was docked, but much to George’s amusement, the pilots had what he called “medically illiterate” orders not to set foot on the station. As a result, the SFers brought their ration bars onto the ship and took their meals there in order to get the latest gossip from Titan.

  Along with mail, supplies, and tittle-tattle, the ship carried Sucre and Mo back and forth to Titan for their counseling sessions. Apparently, three counseling sessions were mandatory for an SF soldier after a fatal incident. Someone on Titan suggested that, since Sucre and Mo did not kill a human, they did not require the sessions—a suggestion that infuriated the SFers, who apparently viewed three counseling sessions as a right granted by God to all members of the Special Forces that was not to be abrogated under any circumstances. Sucre and Mo did not appear at least to Philippe to be particularly traumatized, and they had to stay in quarantine while on Titan (Cheep and Pink were never quarantined, however, which amused George to no end), but they were more than willing to suffer the inconvenience in order to receive their rightful due.

  Shanti asked Philippe if he wanted counseling, too, but he declined—he had too much to do. Among his other duties, he was trying to decipher what the Magic Man had said to him in the infirmary. The alien’s strange speaking style, with its absence of inflection, frustrated Philippe’s attempts to understand. He listened to the speech over and over to no avail.

  Finally, he converted the speech to text and ran various styles of auto-punctuation on it. That helped somewhat. In his brief initial conversation with Philippe, the Magic Man had suggested that humans “join the body,” and as well as Philippe could figure, it seemed like the humans hadn’t yet joined it—but that the Cyclopes had, which was interesting.

  With that little understanding, Philippe went to Max and asked if the Hosts had ever explicitly entered into a formal alliance with the Magic Man. Max said no, and in response to Philippe’s other questions, said that there was no formal ceremony that aliens underwent once they came to the station and no formal alliance that any of the species had formed.

  “We have the rules that you already know, and we ask only that people abide by them,” said Max.

  “Maybe it’s a time thing?” said Shanti, when Philippe brought up the puzzle to her. “Like, if he’s known you for a certain amount of time, then he considers you part of this alliance, this ‘body.’ In any case, it sounds like he’s got some kind of mutual-protection society going on in his head. If you’re in it, he’ll protect you. If you’re not, he won’t, even if he wants to.”

  Philippe sat for a moment, looking at his scroll, which displayed the text of the Magic Man’s remarks. “So, if the protection is mutual, then you can’t attack him either, right? Maybe that’s why he seems to be saying that I was the target, not him.”

  “He thinks that?” asked Shanti. “It looked like that Cyclops was shooting at whatever was out in the open.”

  “Here,” said Philippe, “‘—if you had not realized that that one was not attacking one of the body, but instead attacking one not of the body, particularly you.’ Why would he think he wasn’t the target?”

  “Maybe because he knew it couldn’t hurt him?” Shanti said. “If it’s a time thing—do you know how long everyone’s been on the station? When did they all come?”

  Philippe didn’t know. They tried to look it up, but it was not contained in the information the Union had provided before they arrived at the station.

  “I mean, they were only talking to the aliens for five fucking years,” said Shanti. “You can’t expect them to get some pretty fucking basic information in that short amount of time.”

  “They weren’t actually talking for most of that time,” Philippe replied. “They were teaching the aliens English.”

  She glared at him.

  “OK, they probably should have asked that,” he acceded.

  They talked it over and decided to ask Baby to find out when the various species came to the station. “I want to keep this unofficial,” said Philippe.

  “It shouldn’t be a problem for her,” Shanti laughed. “I think the aliens are going to elect her Miss Congeniality.”

  Baby’s transponder put her in the infirmary, so Philippe said that he would talk to her later. Shanti, however, was not one to allow considerations of medical privacy
get in the way, so she commed Baby and determined that the younger woman was, as suspected, “yapping with George again.”

  Philippe joined her and George in the infirmary. After he filled in Baby on what he wanted, the conversation moved on to other topics, and Baby and George wound up inviting Philippe to join them in their daily workout. The two of them were practicing aikido, which to Philippe’s understanding was a style of fighting. But Baby insisted that it was “a totally nonviolent martial art, not fighting really,” and George went on a long ramble about how practicing aikido might prove really meaningful to Philippe because it was simply “a physical means of resolving conflict.”

  Philippe liked both Baby and George and wanted to be social, so he refrained from pointing out that fighting was also a physical means of resolving conflict. In any case, it didn’t sound like they would be beating each other up, so he agreed to join them.

  He met Baby and George in the gym the next day. It was one of the few places where the soldiers did not wear lonjons—not that they couldn’t, George pointed out, since lonjons absorbed sweat and contributed only minimally to overheating.

  But the idea of sweating into one was not very appealing, even to George, so the three of them were just in regular workout gear. George was wearing a low tank, and Philippe noticed to his shock that the doctor had the SF cat logo burned onto his chest.

  “Did you—is that a brand?” he asked.

  “Oh, no,” George replied. “It’s tattooing. It just looks like a brand. They can do all kinds of crazy things with tattoos nowadays, keloids and the like. But you know, when I joined the SF, a lot of people actually got brands—if you can believe it. They had a big crackdown on it a few years ago, though, so now everyone just tattoos.”

  Because tattooing your employer’s logo on your body is totally normal, Philippe thought to himself. Especially when you make the tattoo look like a brand.

  “Have you seen Shanti’s?” asked Baby. Philippe shook his head.

  “Oh, you have to—you ain’t never seen nothing like it,” she said, her eyes widening with enthusiasm. She started to slap her chest, but then realized that she wasn’t wearing her com mike. “Just give me a sec. I think I know where she is.”

  She scampered out and ran back in a few minutes later, pulling Shanti by the hand. “Philippe wants to see your body art!” she exclaimed.

  “You know, I’ve got shit to do,” said Shanti, as she unceremoniously unbuttoned her uniform shirt. As she took it off, she caught a glimpse of Philippe’s doubtless alarmed expression, gave him a look of annoyance, and turned her back to him. She grabbed the neck of her lonjons with both hands, and with one firm motion, pulled the suit down almost to her waist.

  Philippe gasped.

  All across her back and shoulders were sparkling studs: some were silver, but most were faceted gems of amethyst, crystal, and jet.

  She had a pattern of suns and stars encircling each upper arm, but her back was the main canvas: A glittering bird, its wings outstretched and beak pointing upward, spread across her back on a field of stars. It emerged from a line of silver flames that curved up out from the lonjons still covering her lower back.

  “It’s beautiful!” Philippe exclaimed. He looked a moment longer, and then a realization dawned on him. “Those are your scales, right? The ones the Pincushions were talking about.”

  She turned her head over her shoulder and smiled. Her body turned a little, too, and Philippe could see that the sun-and-stars pattern continued across her collarbone. “I think so, yeah,” she said. “But it’s not scales. It’s a phoenix.”

  Philippe was swimming slowly in the warm, blue Mediterranean waters. The sun was shining, hot against his skin, and the warm ocean enveloped his body.

  He turned on his back to float and looked around him. There were vacationers frolicking on the beach. In the water, some kids were bodysurfing, while the more leisure-oriented adults lazily bobbed about on inflatable rafts.

  “Good day, Philippe!” several voices piped up from the water.

  Philippe looked down, and there were a dozen colorful Little Swimmers frolicking in the water around him.

  “Good day, my little cauliflowers! How is it going?” he said, delighted to see them.

  “It goes well!” said one with zigzagging blue-and-yellow stripes. “Hey!”

  Another one, with red-and-white splotches, had squirted water on him.

  “Oh, the cow!” said Philippe, making them all giggle.

  “Philippe,” said a serious voice.

  He turned around. There was a Host, the color of gold, bobbing on a blue inflatable raft behind him.

  “Hello, Host!” said Philippe, treading water and putting his hand over his eyes to shade them from the Host’s glare.

  “Oh, shit,” said the Host, looking at the Little Swimmers around Philippe. “You know these things?”

  “Yes, I do—they’re called Little Swimmers. I’m not sure where the big ones are.”

  “God, I was hoping they wouldn’t do things this way. Fucking bastards! They don’t understand anything! Shit!”

  Philippe was shocked that the Host would curse in front of the Little Swimmers. But then he realized that the Host was speaking English, so with any luck, the French-speaking Little Swimmers couldn’t understand him.

  “Excuse me, my friends?” he asked the little guys. “Can you tell me where your big cousin is?”

  “He is . . . there. And now he’s coming over here!” said one. “Who is your friend who is full of light?”

  “He is a friend from far away.”

  “Are you and your friend speaking English?”

  “Yes, we are.”

  “I speak English!” exclaimed another Little Swimmer. He paused for a moment to think. “Hello! Good-bye! Candy!”

  “Very good!” said Philippe. “You speak English very well!”

  The Little Swimmers went back to squirting water on each other.

  “There’s the Big Swimmer,” said Philippe, pointing to the dark shape coming up underneath him in the water. “He’s tickling my feet.”

  “Look, this is all very nice,” said the Host. “But there’s going to be a lot of trouble soon, and you’re the only person I can communicate with. Hey. Hey! Are you listening?”

  Philippe’s eyes had begun to close as the vibrating tentacles traveled slowly up his legs.

  “Look, damn it, you have to focus, OK?” snapped the Host. “You have to pay attention. This is your mind, it’s not mine, and you need to take me seriously. You can’t be flying around and forcing me to laugh—that really hurt, by the way. This is important, and you can’t treat me like I’m some figment of your imagination. I’m real.”

  The water suddenly went cold, and Philippe opened his eyes. There were dark clouds over the sun, and the wind was blowing. The Big Swimmer withdrew, and the Little Swimmers—sniffling and weeping—suddenly dived under.

  Run, thought Philippe. Run away.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You deserve better than what happened to you.”

  “All right then,” said the Host.

  “I’m sorry I let you down,” said Philippe, beginning to cry.

  “It’s fine, you know, as long as we can talk.”

  “I’m sorry. I failed you. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  Philippe and Brave Loyalty agreed to have regular meetings in a quiet floor of the common area where Philippe could record the Cyclops’ speech.

  At first, he tried to imitate it, much to the Cyclops’ amusement. “I do not think you are physically built to speak the language,” said Brave Loyalty. “The sense is emphatically affected by the speed of the quaver, and I do not know if you can control the quaver to the degree that is necessary to achieve the specificity of meaning you need to be understood.”

  “More practice may help,” Philippe said. “If it does not, I could program a speech synthesizer and speak that way.”

  “Is that an improve
ment over the translation technology?” asked the Cyclops. “Were you to record my speech and use the speech units to speak yourself, you would speak no better than the Magic Man does, and he is barely comprehensible.”

  “I will continue to try,” Philippe replied. “Do you want me to teach you some of our speech?”

  “No,” said Brave Loyalty. “I sufficiently risk having my loyalty to my people questioned without learning an alien language.”

  Philippe was taken aback. It hadn’t occurred to him the Brave Loyalty might get in trouble for meeting a diplomat.

  “I do not wish to put you at any risk with these meetings,” he said. “Do you think we should stop?”

  “I accept this risk, but my people do not trust other people.” The Cyclops’ expression, as always, was inscrutable, and any emotional nuance in his speech was obliterated by the translator.

  “Do you want to hear of how we first came to this station?”

  “I am most interested,” Philippe replied

  “It was assumed when the portal was discovered that the people on the other side of it would be emphatically hostile,” said Brave Loyalty. “So my people took warriors of extreme loyalty and asked them to go through the portal in a certain ship. The ship was loaded with emphatically powerful weaponry. The expectation was emphatically that the warriors would discover the hostile people and destroy them. It was also expected that they themselves would perish in this effort.”

  Philippe quickly suppressed any expression of shock.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “We had been in contact with the Hosts before the ship went through,” Brave Loyalty continued. “During that time, the Hosts had discovered how to patch into our video communications system. When the ship went through the portal, the Hosts sent the warriors a friendly video communication. The warriors believed that the Hosts were truthfully friendly, and they did not use their weaponry.”

  “That must have been a big relief for you,” said Philippe. A big relief for everyone, he thought.

  “It was considered a shameful thing,” said Brave Loyalty. “The expected heirs of the warriors considered it a very emphatically shameful thing. There are Cyclopes who have never forgiven the Hosts for that historical incident.”

  They sat in silence for a moment.

  “We did a similar thing,” Philippe said, feeling as though one confidence deserved another.

  Brave Loyalty looked at him; Philippe did not know if it was with surprise or relief or terror. “You did?”

  “Yes. The first few times we sent ships through, they carried explosives, so that they could be blown up if they were attacked,” Philippe said. He did not add that, to the best of his knowledge, the ship Cheep and Pinky piloted still had the suicide rigging.

  “That is as it is,” said Brave Loyalty. “We must continue with your lessons.”

  In addition to trying to learn the Cyclopes language, Philippe spoke to the Swimmers about devising an alternative to the current translation technology. Given the response of Ptuk-Ptik to his idea, Philippe had assumed that the Swimmers would be highly reluctant to use translation technology that was developed by anyone else. But he was surprised to learn that the Swimmers had proposed alternative technologies in the past, only to have them rejected by the Hosts.

  “Our technology was designed to be used by two peoples from the same planet, whose experiences are more similar than those of peoples from different planets,” the drone of a language-oriented Swimmer told him. “But the Hosts are extremely reluctant to accept changes to the translation technology, even when the changes are improvements. The Swimmers’ translation technology is explicitly mentioned in the sacred texts of the Hosts, and therefore any change is resisted.”

  It was, as Philippe was discovering, typical of the way the station was run. The Hosts had their sacred texts, and everyone who was on the station was expected to live in accordance with them. There was no group decision-making—if you wanted something that you couldn’t do for yourself, you went to the Hosts and you asked for it. They usually were agreeable, but if they weren’t, which could happen if they considered your request to be somehow in conflict with their sacred texts, you were just out of luck. So the Swimmers’ improvements to their own translation technology were ignored, and the Snake Boys coped with overcrowding while dozens of living areas went empty.

  Philippe had to admit that as theocracies went, this one was far less pernicious than some he had had the misfortune to experience—Max and Moritz were a far cry from General Jesus. But it annoyed Philippe nonetheless, especially once he learned that these sacred texts were nothing more than the prophecy that allegedly had predicted the opening of the portal and the building of the station. This “prophecy” had obviously been revised at some point to reflect historical events, and Philippe didn’t understand why it couldn’t be revised again—although he was not so stupid in matters of religion as to make this suggestion to the Hosts.

  In any case, Philippe was well-versed enough in the ways of the station that when he decided (and Shanti agreed) a few weeks after his attack that things were peaceful enough to allow some scientists to visit, he knew he should run the idea past the Hosts early on.

  He decided first to talk it over with George, coming into the infirmary to find the doctor in the isolation ward examining the Cyclops arm.

  “Is it real?” asked Philippe.

  “Well, you’d have to chop one off a Cyclops yourself to know for sure,” said the doctor. “But it looks like a working arm, and there’s what looks very much like a scrambler fragment in it. The sealant—that lacquer stuff over it—is actually a monofilament. I’m trying to figure out if it’s synthetic or derived from some natural source.”

  Philippe explained that he wanted to invite some scientists on board. George’s reaction was more subdued than Philippe had expected: The doctor pointed out that, at the moment, the Union forbade the transport of alien materials back through the portal, so whoever came would have to do all their work on the station—and the living area wasn’t exactly set up for a high-tech lab.

  “There are astrophysicists on Titan already,” said Philippe. “I know that they haven’t been allowed to get very close to the portal on the Titan side because of all the defenses.”

  George nodded. “That might be the way to go—let them study the portal on this side. They wouldn’t even have to come onto the station, which is probably a plus as far as the Union is concerned. You know they still won’t let Cheep or Pinky get off the ship when they come here? And they’ve been kicking up a stink about me keeping this.” He waved the Cyclops arm at Philippe with a flourish.

  Philippe went to find Max, and asked him if it would be OK if some humans came to study the Titan portal.

  “We always encourage people to contemplate the portals,” said Max. “They embody the mystery of the universe.”

  Philippe felt a need to be fully honest—better to be told no by Max now than to have him find out the whole truth later and feel betrayed. “I realize that the portals have great religious significance for your people, and they are indeed a wonder,” he said. “But these people would not be priests. They would be scientists who would be conducting studies.”

  “That is a crucial first step,” said Max. “You will attempt scientific study, and then when those studies reveal no truths, you will be forced to contemplate the more profound levels of meaning embodied by your portal. My people would be very happy if your scientists began their studies at this moment.”

  So Philippe was feeling like he was really accomplishing something when he sent off a proposal to the DiploCorps telling them that the scientists on Titan had an open invitation to come examine the portal from the station side. He felt like he was fulfilling a promise—a promise to humanity that engaging with the aliens and coming to the station would advance knowledge and make life better, and a promise to Yoli that he would open doors to exciting new scientific discoveries. It made it all the swe
eter that he knew, however casually, someone who would benefit directly from his work.

  When he got their reply, his disappointment was profound. In light of the attack on you . . . security situation unstable . . . not advisable to expose more people, etc., etc. There was a troubling vagueness to the message, as though the Union was not planning to send anyone else through the portal, ever.

  Since the DiploCorps was rejecting a proposal that Philippe had put time and effort into arranging, they included copies of feedback on the proposal from other sources. Philippe paged through the feedback with a sinking heart—not a single positive response from any quarter, not even from the Space Authority, merely neutrality or negativity.

  The last response Philippe read before giving up the effort stood out for its many layers of cowardice. The author not only held up and shook the bugaboo of an alien invasion (triggered by visiting scientists? who had permission to be there?), but managed in the process to warmly massage every Union department and official responsible for defending Earth against this nonexistent plague of warriors.

  Philippe was unsurprised to see a familiar name attached to that response—Wouter Hoopen, general manager of the Titan Station.

  “Toady,” Philippe muttered to himself.

  He sighed and put down his scroll. Of course these responses were all from spineless bureaucrats like Hoopen—the actual scientists weren’t even allowed to know that this opportunity existed.

  He went to Shanti’s office to vent. “I know for a fact that there are scientists on Titan who would gladly take the risk, if there actually was one. If we’re not here to find out about the aliens and the portals, then why?”

  Shanti shrugged. “You did get attacked, you know. Maybe they want to wait a little longer and see what happens next. Maybe we’re bait.”

  Philippe rubbed his forehead. “You seem awfully philosophical about that.”

  She laughed. “I have no illusions about my standing in the SF. We’re disposable—if they’re planning something really desperate, we’re gonna be the last to know.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Philippe. “You’re the commander of a unit of highly trained combat specialists.”

  Shanti gave him a puzzled look. “I’m a freak. Did you forget? I’m a clone.”

  Philippe was incredulous. “Oh, at this point surely nobody cares about that.”

  Shanti returned his disbelieving look. “You don’t know the half, Trang. I had to take the Special Forces to court to get in, and two of my sisters had to do the same with the Union Police. Trust me, if we get eaten by aliens there are people on Earth, in the SF even, who will sleep better knowing they’ve got one less Pax kid to worry about.”

  Philippe took her point. “I suppose you would know more about being a Pax than I would—but you’re not the only soldier here. There’s the doctor, and your second—”

  “George is a freak, too,” said Shanti. “He keeps running off to school. I mean, medicine they could work with, but zoology? He almost got kicked out over that one. I know he had to accept some pretty significant cuts to his package, and the only reason they didn’t boot him was because the portal opened up, and they decided he might be useful after all. And Patch spends every off-duty minute in the koffie shops. He’s careful to keep it legal, but do you really think anyone is OK with that?”

  Philippe shrugged. Patch’s off-duty activities on Earth hadn’t exactly been a factor on the station. “You seem to be.”

  “The fuck I am,” Shanti replied with vigor. “My mother died in a koffie shop. If it was up to me they’d all be closed down. I don’t think Patch is a bad soldier, but I wish he’d pick up some other hobbies. No, I think the only one they’d really mind losing is you.”

  “Me?” Philippe laughed. “Why? I’m just junior staff.”

  Shanti gave him a quizzical look. “You’re an up-and-comer, everyone knows it. You’ve been in a lot of tough places. And you were the only one who knew what was going on at Guantánamo.”

  “I didn’t know,” said Philippe.

  “But you suspected, and no one else did.”

  “I suspected, and I wrote a memo—big deal,” said Philippe. “It didn’t do the least bit of good.”

  “You were right. You have good instincts, and the DiploCorps has got to value that.” She nodded. “If they don’t fuck us over, it’ll be because of you. Only because of you.”

  He was walking down the hallway to the door. Behind the door was something awful.

  The hallway itself looked normal. Cheery and normal, like a regular hallway in a regular home. There was pleasant chatting coming from the other rooms. But Philippe knew there was horror here. Behind that silent door, in that room, was the place where it happened.

  It was important to stay quiet, or they would come and get him. If he could make it, if he could find out what was behind that door and get out alive, then he would have the evidence. Everyone would know, and he could stop it, stop it all. Stop it in time.

  “Hello, Philippe,” said a voice behind him.

  He whirled around. “Get out!” he hissed at the Host, who was not only talking loudly but glowing like a neon sign. “Get out now before—”

  The guards ran into the hallway.

  “Hello,” said Philippe, making a desperate bluff. “I’m Philippe Trang from the DiploCorps, and I have a meeting with General Jesus. Hello! Hello!”

  But they didn’t even look at him.

  They quickly surrounded the glowing Host. “What the fuck are you?” one snapped.

  “Philippe,” said the Host. “Cut this out.”

  “What the fuck are you!?” the soldier screamed.

  “I’m an alien,” said the Host.

  Oh no, thought Philippe.

  “Do you believe in Jesus?” asked another guard.

  “Who?” asked the Host.

  “He glows,” said the first guard. “Like an angel. He thinks he’s an angel.”

  “No, I don’t,” said the Host, offended.

  “Shut up!”

  They were forcing him back into one of the rooms.

  “Look, Philippe,” said the Host. “This is ridiculous, OK? This is all in your mind, and you need to get rid of these guys so that you and I—eiiiiiiiigh!”

  One of the guard had whipped the Host with a flail. It had sharp metal pieces attached to a half-dozen leather thongs. The guard whipped him again.

  The Host made that horrible shrieking noise, the noise that made the hair on Philippe’s arms stand on end and tied his guts into knots. Red blood dripped from the Host’s wounds onto the carpeted floor.

  “Philippe, that really hurt! And what is this red stuff? What are you doing to me?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Philippe, tears running down his face. The guards gathered around the Host, whooping with joy as they brought their flails down again and again against the Host’s back, his legs, his face. The men, the carpet, the walls became spattered with blood and small chunks of flesh.

  Philippe’s knees gave out from under him, and he sank to the floor. “I’m sorry,” he whispered into the carpet. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  Philippe felt like crap. He’d had another nightmare, another bizarre and upsetting combination of everyday life on the station and the horror of Guantánamo. That Host was there again, making the horrible shrieking noise the Swimmer drones used for an alarm, insisting that he needed Philippe and that Philippe was hurting him. And Philippe could only watch, utterly helpless.

  This time they had used electrified needles to burn out the heresy. The Host had been unable to move—his legs were mysteriously paralyzed—and he blamed Philippe for that, too, insisting that the diplomat had the power to intervene.

  The alien had been so persistent that Philippe actually believed him for a moment, but then one of the guards turned to him and said, “You didn’t stop it,” and just like that, he was helpless again. At that, the Host had gotten angry, telling Philippe he would �
��get to” him some other way.

  The whole thing was disturbing on every level, one of those toxic nightmares that poison a whole morning with dread.

  Philippe went to the mess hall, picked up a ration bar with extra caffeine, and sat by himself to eat it. As always, he wasn’t alone long—George and Baby came in, got their bars, and sat next to him.

  “I got some dates,” said Baby. “You know, when the aliens came here. Did you know that this place is like 700 years old? I didn’t think it was no 700 years old.”

  “They must renovate a lot,” said the doctor.

  “Are those people years?” Philippe asked.

  “As opposed to dog years?” George replied.

  “As opposed to station years,” Philippe snapped.

  “Earth years, yeah, I did the math,” said Baby. “Ptuk-Ptik was saying that it took about 50 years to build, so I guess it’s actually 650 years old. And the Swimmers came about 70 years after they finished building it, so 520 years there. The Cyclopes are the most recent except for us, and they’ve been here 30 years. And the Pincushions got here less than 120 years before they did, so that’s 150 years for them. The parts in between I don’t know nothing about yet.”

  “Did you put all that in your report?” asked Philippe.

  “Yeah.”

  Philippe chewed in silence for a little bit, until something on the ceiling caught his eye.

  “There’s a White Spider in here,” he said, pointing up.

  “Why, so there is,” said George, looking at the silent, still alien.

  “When did it arrive?” Philippe asked, irritated. The two shrugged. “Why didn’t anyone tell me? People should tell me things like that. There’s a motion detector and a camera right there on the ceiling next to it, and someone must have disarmed the no man’s zone, so it obviously didn’t sneak in without anyone noticing.”

  “Maybe the night shift let it in,” said Baby.

  A slightly hurt edge had crept into her voice, and Philippe suddenly realized how rude he was being.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to Baby. “I’m a bit of a barbarian this morning. Thank you for finding all that out about when everyone came to the station. You did a really good job, as always. I always appreciate it, even when I’m being horrid.”

  “That’s all right,” said Baby. “A lot of people ain’t morning people.”

  “Are you not sleeping well?” asked the doctor.

  “I had a bad dream,” said Philippe. “I think I’m a little stressed by the way the Union is acting.”

  “What’d they do?” asked Baby.

  “They won’t let scientists through the portal to conduct studies,” said George.

  “That’s stupid,” said Baby.

  Philippe nodded in silent agreement.

  “They’re paranoid,” said the doctor.

  “Well, hey, you’re a science guy,” said Baby, giving George a nudge with her shoulder. “Maybe you can do something. Like, examine the aliens. It’d be a little science, right? It’s better than not doing nothing.”

  “We tried to get the Magic Man to agree to an examination, and he didn’t even seem to understand what we were asking him to do,” said Philippe.

  “Well, that’s the Magic Man for you,” said Baby. “I bet I could get Ptuk-Ptik to do it, though.”

  Baby and George both looked at Philippe—she raising her left eyebrow, he raising his right. Philippe thought for a moment.

  “We should try to do it through official channels, I think,” he replied. “I just have no idea how asking to perform something like a medical examination might be received.”

  “It’d be totally non-invasive, I promise,” said George.

  “I know,” Philippe said. “I just don’t want to step on any toes. Maybe I could offer myself up as a trade—you examine an alien volunteer, and their doctors can examine me. Anyway, I’ll float it past the Hosts first. Baby’s right: If anyone will agree to do it, they will.”

  So later that day, Philippe (with Bubba and Doug in tow) headed for the Hosts’ living area. Philippe got off the elevator platform and was walking through the cafés when he saw a light out of the corner of his eye.

  He turned. And there, walking and talking to two other Hosts, was the glowing, golden Host of his dreams.