Trang Read online

  Chapter 14

  George looked at him for a moment, clearly unsure if Philippe was kidding or serious. “So, it’s been a good day for you, I take it?” he finally said.

  “Is there a camera on?” Philippe asked, looking around. “There was a camera in here when I was recovering from my attack.”

  George shook his head. “That’s on only when I need to monitor someone. Don’t worry: If you need a medical consultation, it’s confidential. Trang, what’s wrong?”

  Philippe took a long, deep breath.

  “I’m losing my sanity,” he said. “Something’s happened to me—I think maybe that attack did something bad.”

  “Well,” said George, gesturing for Philippe to sit on a bed as he pulled up a chair. “Let’s sit down and have a talk. I’ve been noticing that you’ve been looking very tired and stressed out lately. You’ve stopped working out with Baby and me.”

  “I haven’t had the energy,” said Philippe, defensively.

  George nodded. He clearly wasn’t taking it personally.

  “Have you been sleeping?” he asked.

  “Oh, God, not at all,” said Philippe. It felt so good to finally be able to talk to someone about it—he told George all about the nightmares, the headaches, the rashes, the knuckle wound that wouldn’t heal.

  “And I’m—” Philippe stopped and took a deep breath. This was the hairy bit. “I’m seeing things.”

  George did not, as Philippe had feared he might, immediately drop his scroll, seize him by the jacket, and toss him into a padded cell. Instead, George nodded his head, as though seeing things that weren’t there was a totally normal, totally healthy occurrence.

  “What sort of things?” he asked.

  “In my nightmares, I see a Host who glows. And I’ve been seeing him when I’m awake, too, in other Hosts—they glow, too.”

  George nodded again. “So when you look at the Hosts, they’re glowing.”

  “Yes,” said Philippe. “They glow with a golden light. And they’re more yellow than they usually are.” He put his face in his hands. “Doesn’t that sound crazy?”

  Philippe looked up at George, who still looked not the least bit shocked.

  “Is that all the time, or only every now and then?” he asked, in a calm, conversational tone of voice.

  “Every now and then,” Philippe replied.

  George cocked an eyebrow. He looked—confident, Philippe realized.

  “The glow that surrounds them—does it shimmer?”

  “Shimmer?” Philippe echoed.

  He had been expecting to be asked questions more along the lines of Do you want me to notify your family that you’ll be living in an asylum from now on? He also hadn’t really carefully observed the glow—it hadn’t occurred to him that the type of glow might make a difference—so he had to think back on it a bit.

  “I guess they shimmer,” he said after a moment. “A little bit.”

  “Let me ask you,” George continued, “do you have a headache right now?”

  Philippe nodded. “I’ve had a headache all week,” he said. “All month, really.”

  “And analgesics aren’t helping.”

  “Right.”

  George adjusted his posture. “How would you describe the headaches?”

  What kind of stupid question is that? Philippe wondered, beginning to feel downright irritated by George’s calm. “My head aches—there’s pain, whatever. You know, I seem to be going crazy. I think that may be more medically significant than how my headache feels.”

  “Not necessarily,” said George, with a small smile. “Would you describe it as a throbbing pain?”

  “Kind of,” Philippe said, irritably.

  “Hmm,” said George. “Any nausea?”

  “Sometimes,” Philippe replied

  George went “hmm” again. “Aside from the glowing, have you noticed other visual distortions? Blind spots or zigzagged lines?”

  “Zigzagged lines?” said Philippe. “No, nothing like that.”

  “No rainbows? No other hallucinations?”

  “Are you pulling my leg?” asked Philippe. “No, nothing like that, just the glow around the Hosts—isn’t that enough? And they’re a different color, a yellow-gold color. Like the guy in my nightmares, that’s what they look like.”

  George nodded. “You say you’ve had problems sleeping. Have the headaches you’ve been having been bad enough to wake you up?”

  Philippe nodded. “Well, the nightmares are what wake me up—the Host shrieks like those Swimmer drones did when I was attacked. But, it’s true, a lot of the time when I wake up from the nightmares, the headaches are pretty bad.”

  “How much caffeine do you usually consume?”

  “Um, usually not so much,” Philippe replied, aware that he was evading the question. “Lately, however, I’ve been taking a lot more, you know, because I haven’t been sleeping so well. The extra-caffeine bars.”

  “Just for breakfast?” asked George.

  “Breakfast and lunch,” said Philippe. “And sometimes dinner.”

  “What about stimulant patches?” George asked, his expression becoming, if anything, even more bland, even less judgmental. “Are you wearing a patch right now?”

  “Um, yes,” said Philippe.

  “Just one?” George continued. “Or more than one?”

  “More than one,” Philippe replied, feeling a little guilty.

  “How many?”

  “Five.”

  George made a note on his scroll. “And that’s pretty typical? In this past month or so?”

  “Just lately,” said Philippe, defensively. “Before, I didn’t need it—I could sleep.”

  “You don’t have any hardware up here, do you?” said George, tapping his head with his stylus.

  “No,” said Philippe. “Do you think I’m going to have to get some?”

  The doctor shrugged.

  “I doubt it. I can give you a scan if you really want,” he said, his expression making it clear that he would consider that a colossal waste of time and effort. “But it sounds to me like there are two things going on, and they’re probably making each other worse. The first thing is post-traumatic stress disorder, also called PTSD. That, as you may know, can emerge well after a traumatic event, and it can be triggered by a new trauma, such as—and I’m reaching for an example here—being electrocuted in an unprovoked attack by a hostile alien. PTSD can cause insomnia, nightmares, and heightened anxiety.

  “The other thing is migraines, which can cause visual hallucinations like the kind you have described—glowing halos around objects—as well as many other kinds of hallucinations. And of course, they cause pain. Migraines can be triggered by not getting enough sleep, too much caffeine, and stress.”

  Philippe stared at George, stunned. Could it be that simple? he wondered.

  “Not like you’ve experienced any of those things,” George continued, dryly.

  Philippe started laughing.

  “Oh my God,” he said. “Oh, thank God. I really thought I was losing my mind.”

  “Not just yet,” said the doctor.

  “God, that’s just—that’s such a relief! Migraines! They can do all that?”

  “And more,” said George, smiling. “You forget, Trang, that I talk to you every day. You’re not disassociated from reality. You’re not crazy. Tense, yes. Crazy, no.”

  Philippe flopped back on the bed, his body limp with relief. “Oh, that’s really good to hear,” he said to the white ceiling.

  After a moment, he sat back up. “So,” he said, “since I’m not crazy, what do you think I should do for this other stuff?”

  “Well, there are a number of treatment options,” said George. “But I think the first things you should try are cutting down on your caffeine and stimulants, and reducing your stress. Don’t stop the caffeine cold turkey—that will make the headaches worse. I’ll give you a schedule for tapering off. As for the stress—well, you’ve been s
tuck here for three months. Have you considered taking some leave?”

  It was easy enough to arrange a vacation. Philippe’s parents were delighted to have him visit the farm for as long as he wanted, and the DiploCorps already had a back-up person ready: Arne Ljungqvist. Philippe had worked with Arne in the Sudan, and he liked and respected him—Arne was dedicated, he believed in what he was doing, and he worked hard.

  Arne also made it clear in a message that he would gladly drop everything to come to the station for as long as Philippe needed him to stay. Within a few days, it was set: Arne would arrive on the same ship as Baby, whose leave was up, and then Philippe and whichever SFer won the draw would get on board and be gone.

  Philippe made the rounds of the station, ignoring the occasional glowing Host and telling the aliens that he would be on leave for a while, but that his replacement would be there immediately. Not unexpectedly, the only one who reacted to the news as though it was anything out of the ordinary was Max, who said darkly, “You cannot avoid what the universe has chosen as your destiny. You can only disappoint yourself and those who rely upon you.”

  As he was leaving that tense meeting, Philippe was waylaid by the Host merchant, who asked to speak with him. The merchant was still getting the hang of using the translator, and when he was excited, he tended to use what Philippe thought must be colorful Host expressions that utterly confounded the device.

  He was very excited at the moment, so his speech was pretty garbled: At one point Philippe heard, “cannot translate disgraceful cannot translate barely hear cannot translate as though the Snake Boys were cannot translate cannot translate historical period cannot translate household object.”

  But Philippe managed to get the gist. Now that the merchant could actually talk to the Snake Boys whom he had supplied with food for so long, he had become aware of their need for more living space. He strongly believed that they should have more space, but he had discovered that on the station, a merchant had virtually no influence with the priests.

  This merchant in particular had no pull: The fact that he had gotten translation equipment was held against him by many of the priests, who either were jealous of their privileges or genuinely believed that he had gotten his translator as part of a dirty deal with Ptuk-Ptik. Some of the priests had even accused the merchant of wanting the Snake Boys to have more space so that they would reproduce at a faster rate and need more food, boosting his business.

  The merchant was apparently a person of some standing back on the Host planet, and he was not accustomed to taking no for an answer, much less no with a side helping of insult. Frustrated by his dealings with his own people, he was now trying to round up support from the aliens.

  Philippe was sympathetic, of course, but he had to point out that humans were a new arrival on the station and therefore were highly reluctant to criticize the way it was run. Earth would offer neither support for nor opposition to his crusade.

  Philippe’s last day on the station finally came. He had expected it to be quiet, but an incident that morning not only put him through his paces but also led to the cancellation of the leave draw.

  Early that morning Patch had been walking around the station, somewhat bored. A Swimmer drone had struck up a conversation with him about his equipment, and the two realized that they both were carrying laser sights—or at least, Patch was carrying a laser sight, and the Swimmer had something that very much resembled one in its operation. The discovery had led to a disastrous game of laser tag that had ranged across three floors. It came to a sudden end when the drone collided with a Blobbo vehicle in the café area outside the Hosts’ living quarters. Patch, distracted by that accident, proceeded to have one of his own, falling off a dining platform.

  Patch sprained his ankle. Thankfully, he was the only one injured. In the course of the chase, however, he had run across four Host dining platforms with his feet—feet that had touched the floor—without having had what the Hosts considered the basic decency to sterilize them first.

  Philippe first had to make extensive apologies to the Hosts for that gaffe and then interview Patch to verify that he had stomped over only those four specific dining platforms with his filthy, disease-ridden feet. Fortunately Patch was able to identify the four platforms he had defiled, so the Hosts didn’t have to sterilize or perhaps burn all the dining platforms in the station.

  The distress and disgust of the Hosts was nothing compared to the reaction from the Blobbos, however. Although their person had been hit by a Swimmer drone and not by Patch, they were apparently a sensitive species and had already begun to suspect that bad things happened around the humans. The lethal response of the soldiers to the attack on Philippe and the injury the SFers had caused the Snake Boy who had wanted to walk on his hands had both greatly perturbed the Blobbos. They seemed to take very much of a hard line where violence was concerned: Despite the fact that the humans had maintained relations with the Cyclopes, the Blobbos had cut off relations with them following the attack on Philippe. After Patch’s escapade, they informed Philippe that the humans could expect the same if they were involved, however tangentially, in any more such incidents.

  Patch needed to stay off his ankle, so it was decided that he would go on leave. The next day, Philippe found himself standing next to a hobbled Patch as the door to the shuttle opened.

  Arne stepped off—he had gained a bit of weight since Sudan, so his tall frame looked less gangly than Philippe remembered. They greeted each other happily.

  Then a blond woman came into the hallway.

  “Philippe!” she said. “Hey! Thanks so much for sending me that thing from Ptuk-Ptik! That was real nice to see!”

  The blond woman sounded like Baby, but she didn’t look at all like her. Her hair was cropped close in the normal SFer style, but it was curly, and her skin was a deep honey color. Her eyes looked different—they were dark, almost black, and there was something different about their shape or maybe the shape of her eyebrows. Likewise her lips were thicker and her top lip was slightly rounder than before.

  But she was built like Baby and was acting like Baby, so Philippe went along. “Yeah, he looked good,” he said. The woman turned to Patch and started questioning him about his injury, and Philippe took Arne to his quarters.

  About a half-hour later, Philippe was sitting next to Patch in the shuttle, traveling from the station to the portal.

  “Was that—that was Baby, right?” he asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Patch.

  “She looks different.”

  “She always does,” said Patch, nodding. “They won’t let her get bodywork done, because you know, it affects your strength and shit. But whatever she can get done, she gets done often.”

  Philippe was baffled. Baby was perhaps a bit stocky for his tastes, but she certainly had been an attractive woman before. “Why?”

  Patch laughed. “I dunno, she just does. A lot of times she’s the only gal on the roster, so there’s that. You know Baby: She likes to be liked. Awesome! Look at Saturn!”

  Philippe leaned forward to look out the front window. They were through the portal.

  The next two days were spent in quarantine on Titan, with Philippe and Patch kept in separate quarters. Philippe spent his time answering queries from Arne, dealing with the backlog of his less-important mail, and catching up on his passive entertainment.

  He never once saw a golden alien.

  The enforced leisure and absence of hallucinations were relaxing, and Philippe’s sense of humor seemed to return. He was definitely less irritable—even Hoopen, who dropped by, seemed pleasant enough with his small talk, if still the insipid antithesis of all Philippe held dear.

  Philippe spoke with the SF debriefers as a courtesy—a member of the DiploCorps was by no means obligated to answer questions from the Special Forces. Even in his mellow mood, Philippe felt a mild, perverse pleasure as one of the interrogators struggled with the concept that he couldn’t actually make Philippe
do anything.

  The best part of it, however, was the sleep. Philippe slept gloriously, dropping off without the least effort and waking up ten hours later with no memory of what had happened in between—no dreams, no nightmares, no screaming, no waking up with his head pounding and his arms waving about. The cut on his hand finally began to close, and his rashes started to clear. He had cut back on the caffeine and stimulants during his last few days on the station, and he continued with George’s tapering-off program on Titan—it worked well, and Philippe had not the least twinge of a headache.

  When he got on the ship back to Beijing two days later, he felt ten years younger. He sat next to Patch, who also looked refreshed, if a bit antsy. Philippe couldn’t imagine that someone like Patch would deal well with the idleness of quarantine, but Patch said that his ankle had benefited from the rest and was feeling much better.

  They discussed Patch’s plans for leave as the ship slammed backward and took off. The soldier apparently faced a quandary. Some friends of friends were currently in the midst of an “aerial tour” of Shanghai—apparently there were enough koffie shops in that city to keep a dedicated “flyer” aloft for months. But the Union Police was discarding explosive ordinance in the wastelands of northern Korea. Some SF buddies of Patch’s had wrangled an invitation, and they had asked him to come along.

  “They blow it up?” Philippe asked, as the ship shuddered into alpha drive.

  “Yeah!” said Patch. “It’s supposed to be a really good blow. It’s not just the regular outdated stuff, it’s a lot of treaty stuff that got surrendered. So that means it’s not all the normal Union stuff. It’s weird, homemade shit—you know what I mean? People get creative.”

  “Sounds neat!” chirped Philippe. He was being a little insincere, but he felt an obligation to steer Patch away from a two-week koffie-shop bender. “And it’s not like you ever get to blow things up on the station.”

  “Yeah,” said Patch. “On the other hand, this aerial tour is supposed to be epic.”

  “Aren’t there koffie shops in Korea?”

  “Oh, yeah, but you know,” said Patch. “For one thing, we’re going to be in the wastelands, and it’s pretty far even to Pyongyang. And the other thing is, these are guys I know through the SF, and I don’t know if they’d be into flying.”

  Philippe shrugged. “You could always go by yourself if you had to—it’s not like you actually know these Shanghai people.”

  “That’s true—you make friends pretty quick in a koffie shop.” Patch smiled and nodded. “So that shuddering earlier—that was the alpha drive, right?”

  “Yes, you can hear the whine now.”

  Patch gave a little laugh. “Yeah, alpha D,” he said.

  The SFer looked out the window for a while, and then said, “You know, I wonder why, if we’re going so fast, everyone isn’t all old when we get there.”

  “They’ll be a few minutes older than us, that’s all,” said Philippe, delighted to actually know the answer. “And when we travel, we get a little shorter than normal, but we grow back up when we stop.”

  Patch looked astounded. “Guy!” he exclaimed. “You, like, know everything! I wish I was half as smart as you are.”

  “Oh, I don’t know anything about this,” said Philippe, laughing. “I sat next to an astrophysicist on my first trip to Titan, and I asked the same question you just did.”

  “An astrophysicist!” said Patch, looking no less amazed. “And you, like, had a conversation with him! Guy, I would never be brave enough to do that.”

  “Her,” said Philippe. “The astrophysicist was a woman.”

  Patch nodded and grinned. “Awesome.”

  Philippe left Patch in Beijing. The SFer was checking the schedule to Pyongyang, and Philippe mentally crossed his fingers that there was a flight soon—going to Shanghai from Beijing was, of course, extremely easy, and Philippe strongly suspected that Patch would wind up there if the trip to Korea proved in any way inconvenient.

  He himself flew to Calgary, live-messaging his parents from the plane to find out if they were planning to pick him up. They were, and he embraced them at the airport. They were looking well—a little grayer, maybe, but they moved easily and looked fit.

  “Oh, my goodness!” said his mother. “Philippe, what have they done to your ear!”

  They went to the car, which Philippe was surprised to see was on auto-drive.

  “You have to do that here now,” said Papa, who sat in the driver’s seat regardless as the vehicle drove itself through the city. “Calgary’s gotten too big to let people drive themselves. Of course, that means whenever people from Calgary come up to where we live and decide that they want to drive, they get into accidents because they’ve forgotten how to do it.”

  “We can’t even take the other car into Calgary now because it doesn’t have auto-drive,” said his mother. Despite her objections, she sat in the front passenger seat, while Philippe sat in the back.

  They asked him about his trip. “It was fine,” said Philippe. “I had an interesting conversation with one of the Special Forces guys on my way to Earth. He’s quite the character. He joined the SF when he was 16, because it was that or juvenile detention. He was blowing up abandoned buildings for fun—I don’t think he was even going to school by then; it sounds like his parents weren’t around much. Anyway, when he finally got arrested, they realized he was making his own explosives. One of the officers knew some people in the SF, and they were, like, ‘We’ve got the job for you.’”

  “‘Can’t let that talent go to waste!’” said Papa, laughing as they passed a sign indicating that they had traveled outside the mandatory zone. He promptly clicked off the auto-drive and took the controls. “Sounds like the Special Forces, all right.”

  It was the sort of comment Philippe would have unthinkingly made himself just a few months ago, but he found it mildly irritating now. “Those guys saved my life,” he said.

  Maman asked him about the migraines—he had told them about those but had kept the PTSD to himself. Predictably, his parents agreed with the decision to see if cutting out stimulants and taking a break to de-stress would do the trick, rather than relying on medicinal patches, or worse yet, brain implants. They both meditated and were eager to share all they knew.

  “So, are you going to be here for a month?” asked his mother.

  “At least,” said Philippe. “It wouldn’t be fair to the guy who’s filling in for me—that’s Arne Ljungqvist, I worked with him in the Sudan—to just be gone for a week or two. This way, he gets some time to get to know everybody and settle in. And then the next time I want to go on vacation, he’s not just going in blind.”

  “Maybe you two can split the job,” said Maman. “Trade off the post or something.”

  Philippe laughed. “I think that’s what Arne wants; he’s really excited to be there.”

  They sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the countryside roll past. Philippe’s father began to clear his throat. Uh-oh, thought Philippe, and watched his mother. She looked at Papa, sensing—as did their son—that he was getting ready to broach an uncomfortable subject.

  The decision whether or not to do so would be Maman’s, so Philippe watched her instead of his father. Papa cleared his throat, and then did it again. He did it a third time, and Philippe knew that he was stealing a glance at Maman.

  She nodded.

  “Philippe, there’s something we need to talk to you about,” said Papa. “We received a message a few weeks ago from a woman—”

  “Kathy Zobrist,” interjected Maman.

  “Kathy Zobrist,” Papa continued. “She said that she was a friend of yours from Ottawa, but that she’d lost your personal address and was afraid that if she sent a message to your work address, it’d get lost in the shuffle. So she wanted us to either send a message along from our address, or hang onto it until you came to visit. Of course we said yes—”

  “She said she was your friend,” said Maman
, looking at Philippe over her shoulder.

  “And we accepted the message without opening it, of course. And not an hour later—”

  “Maybe 10 minutes later, if that,” said Maman.

  “—the police call.” Maman’s remark hadn’t even interrupted Papa’s rhythm. “And they say that this Kathy person has been fired by the DiploCorps because she’s been sending you threatening messages. And the corps put a restraining order on her—”

  “Since you’re not here, they have to act in your interests,” Maman said.

  “—and so they are of the opinion—”

  “—which we share—”

  “—that she was trying to get around it by messaging us, but of course when they put an order on someone like that, they tag all their outgoing messages.” Papa’s voice came to a halt.

  They were silent some more.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say,” said Philippe.

  “Who is this woman?” exclaimed Maman.

  “When I was in Ottawa,” Philippe began carefully, “she and I were dating. But she was, as I’m sure you’ve gathered, emotionally unstable, so I broke it off.”

  “You didn’t tell us any of that,” said Papa. “We found out about her from the police.”

  “I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you,” Philippe replied

  “What happened?” asked Maman. “I mean, I always liked your other girlfriends. They always seemed like sensible women. Why were you seeing someone like that? The police said that she could be really dangerous. She was warned several times by the DiploCorps not to contact you, and she just kept doing it until she got fired. And then she did this, and I don’t know what they’re doing with her now.”

  “Look, I made a mistake,” said Philippe. “But the police and the DiploCorps are handling it, and I’m sure it’s going to be fine. Everything’s fine.”

  “Fine! Fine! Everything’s fine!” his mother exploded. “Ever since Cuba, it’s fine, you’re fine, everything’s fine. It’s not fine! We are your parents!”

  “You can’t just edit your life for us,” said Papa, calmer but obviously also upset. “We need to know the whole story.”

  Philippe sat in silence. The whole story of Guantánamo? he thought. People suffered and died. I wrote a useless memo, and for that I’m considered a hero.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about her, I really am,” he said. “I guess I was just hoping that if I didn’t bring the problem up, it would go away.”

  The house was the same as always, comfortable and cozy. Luxury was in the small things—real food (real food!), sunlight, fresh air. Being able to see the horizon. Scented soap. Animals and birds. Blue skies.

  It didn’t take long for him to settle right in. It never did; whenever Philippe came back to his parents’ farm, no matter how long he’d been gone, he felt like he’d never left it. Despite his age, Philippe had never really established a permanent home for himself—since he didn’t have a family of his own, there was really no need for one, and this way he could just pack up and move whenever his assignment changed.

  Farm work, while not the most intellectually stimulating activity, had its appeal—it was concrete and physical, you could take pride in helping things to grow and flourish. And Alberta in the late summer was glorious.

  It was wonderful—hard work, good sleep, beautiful weather, good food, loving parents. The days began to run into each other, and when Papa came out to tell Philippe he had a live message, he was surprised to see Patch and to realize that the SFer’s leave was very nearly up.

  “Yeah, guy,” said Patch. “I’m in Beijing and gonna board, like, any minute now. Korea was awesome—I’m glad I took your advice.”

  “Great!” Philippe replied.

  “Yeah, the koffie shops in Pyongyang are amazing. They really know their alpha D.”

  “Alpha what?”

  “Alpha drive?” Patch grinned with enthusiasm. “Guy, that’s the best shit to fly on—you have got to try it sometime. It’s incredible. They call it alpha D ’cuz it puts you in space.”

  Philippe smiled tightly and changed the subject. “So how did the ordinance disposal go?”

  “Oh, that was awesome, too. Some of that shit that the national armies and militias use is, like, rabid. Totally fucking unpredictable. We nearly lost a couple of guys.” Patch imparted that grim bit of information with no discernible lessening of enthusiasm. “Oh, but I didn’t want to talk to you about that—I’m leaving in a few, so I gotta tell you about the alpha D. Usually I don’t see shit when I’m on it, but this time, I totally did.”

  “Hmmm,” said Philippe, not feeling especially at ease with the subject.

  “Yeah, and it totally had to do with you, so one of the guys said it probably meant I was, you know, maybe a little worried and should check up on you.” Patch looked concerned.

  “Oh, well, I’m fine,” said Philippe, eager to reassure him. “I’m really enjoying visiting home—it’s very relaxing, and I haven’t had any migraines, which is great. I’m just really having fun spending time with my family and working the farm, you know? It’s so nice to be home.”

  “Yeah, you guys need to buy some cloned animals,” said Patch. “Support Shanti. Poor kid.”

  Philippe laughed.

  “I’m glad to hear you’re good,” said Patch. “’Cuz that vision I had, it was actually kind of freaky—it was really cool, but it was also sort of freaky. There was, like, this Host there. And he was, like, glowing, which was really cool, and maybe because of the glow, he was yellow, you know? Not red like they usually are. Anyway, he kept asking me about you—you know, how’s Philippe, guy? How’s he doing? He’s seeing really bad things, all the time, do you think there’s something wrong with him? He told me that you, like, had had a birthday party for me in your head—that was nice, guy—but it ended with his being cut up and set on fire, which, you know, doesn’t make it sound like it was a very good time.

  “It was stuff like that, over and over again, like he was really super-anxious. It kind of creeped me out—the guy seemed really worried that something might be wrong with you, and it made me worried, too. But, yeah, you’re fine. And you know, he looked so awesome—I’ve never seen a Host like that, it was like he was giving off light. He was really incredible.”

  Philippe wished him a good journey, and they hung up.

  He sat there for a moment, feeling a twinge in his left temple.

  “Philippe? Are you done in there?” Maman’s voice floated in through the window.

  He looked up. “Yes?”

  “Could you come out here and help us, please?”

  He got up and went outside.

  Other than that, messages were few and far between. Philippe had already sent off the Cyclopes recordings to linguists at McGill, and whatever was happening there with them didn’t seem to require his assistance. Arne very quickly stopped asking for help, and since Philippe was no longer on the station, the flood of mail had stopped. Instead, there were routine reports, which Philippe first read, then skimmed, and then ignored altogether.

  The media interest in him had ebbed as well—his attack was old news, and his going to the station was older still. By local standards, Philippe supposed that he was something of a celebrity, but in a small farm community, that was necessarily a low-key affair: Most people just wanted to know if the earplant hurt. He was asked to make a presentation at a nearby school, which made the local news, and he and his parents received a lot of invitations to dinner from people they already knew and were happy to see.

  Philippe helped feed the animals and fix the fences, and he noticed that the leaves were turning. After a month, Arne asked if he could stay on the station a bit longer, and Philippe said yes. He got some of his warmer clothes out of storage and put them in his old room.

  “So, do you think you’re going to stay here another month?” his mother asked at dinner.

  “I don’t know,” said Philippe. “Arne wants a little mo
re time to settle in.”

  “Just be careful,” Papa said. “You don’t want Arne replacing you.”

  Don’t I? Philippe wondered.

  Of course, his parents could read his face like a map. “Or do you?” asked Maman. “Is there something wrong with the posting?”

  “Oh, no, not really,” said Philippe. “It’s just that—it was a lot of stress.”

  “It was a lot of stress for all of us,” Maman said. “Are you worried that you might get attacked again?”

  “No, I think that was pretty much an isolated thing,” Philippe replied. “It’s just that—there were some weird things happening there. I was having these repeating dreams with this glowing Host, and then I was seeing the glow when I was awake—”

  “I thought that was the migraines,” said his father.

  “That’s one explanation,” said Philippe.

  He paused for a moment, looking thoughtfully at Maman and Papa. He hadn’t mentioned this to anyone—not to George, not to Shanti, certainly not to the debriefers.

  “The Hosts have another explanation,” he continued. “They have this prophecy that they say is the reason why they built the station, and they—or at least one of them—seems to think that because of my dreams, I’m this chosen one mentioned in the prophecy.”

  “Don’t all prophecies have a chosen one?” asked Papa.

  “Yeah, but—you know how I spoke to that soldier a few weeks ago? He saw it, too, he saw the glowing alien,” Philippe said.

  “In a dream?” asked his mother.

  “In a koffie shop.”

  “Chemical enlightenment?” she scoffed. “Come on, Philippe. If you ever spoke to him about what you saw, or if your doctor wasn’t as discreet as he should have been, then this soldier friend of yours could very well have incorporated the image into his hallucinations.”

  Papa nodded. “Plus, a glow? That’s pretty vague. It’s not like you and he had some absolutely identical dream. I’d be surprised if any of the soldiers don’t regularly dream about the aliens. And even if your dreams were identical—if I dream of a talking goat and your mother dreams of a talking goat, that doesn’t mean that the goats really talk.”

  “I know,” said Philippe. “I know.”

  He chewed his food, mulling over their arguments—valid ones all. Patch had known about the birthday-party dream, which seemed awfully specific, but, of course, if George had gossiped . . . and it seemed sometimes like all the SFers did was gossip.

  Now that he thought about it, he had also mentioned that dream to one of the Hosts, to Max. That probably happened in one of the common areas, so it could have wound up on surveillance footage, which would mean that Vip or Thorpe could have seen it—and Philippe had noticed that Patch and Thorpe spent a lot of time together. So there were two ways Patch could have heard about it.

  Of course, it wasn’t like he had mentioned the torture. . . .

  Philippe swallowed. “I don’t really believe it, but—it’s just that the Hosts seemed so sincere. I mean one absolutely believes that I am this chosen one. The other claims not to believe it, but he’s really upset, so I think on a certain level he does believe it and is just unhappy about it. You know, they’re aliens—maybe they know something we don’t.”

  “The future?” asked Papa. “Other than this prophecy, which—well, don’t get me started on these Nostradamus-type things that are so vague and are constantly being revised and reinterpreted. Other than that, is there anything that makes you think that they really know what’s going to happen before it does?”

  Philippe took a deep breath. “No. This prophecy is supposed to be quite unique in their culture. They actually got very excited when they found out about dreams—they don’t dream, so it seems like a really odd thing to them. They thought that maybe we could see the future, and that really had them pumped up.”

  Maman started to laugh. “I’m sorry, honey, I just feel so bad for you. I mean, first you wind up having to cope with that animal in Cuba, and now these people—you do realize that there are religious people who are not lunatics?”

  Philippe looked at her, wishing he could laugh, too.

  “Son,” said his father, patting his shoulder. “Let’s say—just for the sake of argument—that it’s all true, and you are this chosen one. What does he do?”

  “The chosen one?” said Philippe. “Well, he fends off some sort of disaster, some massive catastrophe that otherwise would wipe out all the Hosts and apparently the universe as well.”

  His mother was trying without much success to stop laughing.

  “Well, you know, that does sound like you,” said Papa, smiling.

  They were in the room, in the dark, all 13 of them.

  “Meeting called to order,” whispered Geirahöd.

  “At this point, all of you should have met with your alphabet group, explained the situation, and gotten either their backing or their opposition for the measure we are voting on today,” whispered Aife. “I trust you were all able to do that.”

  They nodded.

  “Did anyone have any problems?” Aife asked. No one replied, so she continued. “Considering the risks inherent in this measure, we must have a unanimous vote to enact it. A single ‘nay’ will prevent its passage. As the representative for A/B, I will begin. A/B votes ‘aye.’”

  They went around the table, Surpanakha voting “Aye” for S/T.

  “We have 11 ‘ayes’ and two abstentions,” reported Geirahöd.

  “The measure passes unanimously with 11 ‘ayes’ and two abstentions, and it is adopted,” whispered Aife. “I now open the floor for discussion as to how this measure should be enacted.”

  Surpanakha quietly put her hand up.

  “We recognize Surpanakha,” whispered Geirahöd.

  “I think we should shoot him in the head,” she whispered. “It’s simple, and it’s certain. We can’t have him survive the attempt, or he’ll unleash the Ultimate Weapon. And while shooting may seem violent, it would be a quick death, with minimal suffering.”

  “We recognize Nemain,” whispered Geirahöd.

  “I disagree,” whispered Nemain. “The Old Man cannot know what is coming, and if he saw someone walking into his room with a pistol, how would he respond?”

  “Shanti?” said a loud voice behind Surpanakha.

  She turned and saw a Host, bathed in golden light.

  “Can I talk to you?” it asked.

  “Shhh,” said Geirahöd.

  “We can’t talk here,” whispered Surpanakha. She turned back to the group and raised her hand.

  “We recognize Surpanakha,” said Geirahöd.

  “I request to be excused from these deliberations.”

  “Since you’ve already expressed your views on the question, we are willing to excuse you, but you should realize that if you are not here during deliberations, you will not be able to defend your proposal,” Aife replied.

  “I accept those consequences.”

  “Surpanakha is excused,” said Geirahöd.

  Surpanakha stood up and gestured to the alien. They walked out of the room.

  She opened a door that led to an open field filled with tall flowers. The sun was shining, and a light breeze blew fluffy white clouds across the sky.

  “We can talk now,” she said.

  “Why do they call you Surpanakha?” asked the alien.

  “That’s my name,” said Surpanakha.

  “I thought your name was Shanti,” the alien replied.

  “It is now,” said Shanti, nodding and remembering. “It is now.”

  She saw the bed. It was a massive, old-fashioned affair, made of carved wood that was almost black. A burgundy bedspread lay over it. It sat, heavily, in the middle of the field.

  She walked over to it. There was a body under the covers.

  “Who is that?” asked the Host.

  “The Old Man,” said Shanti. She raised her right hand, which held a pistol. “I was the back-up plan, in cas
e the poison didn’t work. But it did work—he was already on so much pain medication that the drugs did the job. I was so nervous about it going in, opening that door was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. But when I saw him there in the bed, I could see he was dead. I knew that he was gone and that everything was going to be all right.”

  “How interesting,” said the Host. “I need to talk to you about Philippe.”

  “Philippe?” she asked, turning to the Host. She looked back at the bed, and the body suddenly sat up and started laughing!

  “Philippe!” she shouted, overjoyed. “That’s a rotten trick!”

  “Come on, Shanti,” Philippe said, pulling the sheet down from over his head and smiling. “Get in.” He hit the sheets with his hand, and the bedspread changed from burgundy to a bright flower pattern, matching the meadow. The heavy wood dissolved, and the mattresses rested on the grass.

  “Oh,” said Shanti, embarrassed. “There’s somebody else here.”

  “Well, then you should get in,” said Philippe. “You don’t want him to see you naked, do you?”

  She looked down. Her gun was gone, too.

  “How did that happen?” she asked him as she crawled under the covers.

  “I don’t know,” Philippe said, holding up the sheet and looking at her body. “Where’s your tattoo?”

  She looked down, and the pattern of stars and suns slowly appeared. “It’s there now,” she said.

  He put his arms around her and nuzzled her neck.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” Shanti asked the alien, turning away from Philippe. “It’s good, life-affirming. It builds unit morale and cohesion.”

  “Whatever,” said the Host. “As I told you before, I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with Philippe.”

  “Oh, what’s wrong with Philippe and his braaaain?” Shanti sang, smiling at Philippe. He pouted and stuck his lower lip out. She kissed it. “Why do I keep having this dream?” she asked him.

  “It’s not always this dream,” said Philippe

  “It’s always that guy, for like, days now. And he’s always asking me about you. Do you think he wants to attack you?”

  Philippe smiled slyly, putting his hand on her waist. Shanti could feel her tension melt away. “Awww,” he said, “you care.”

  The alien made a noise, and Shanti turned back to him.

  “You keep asking about him, but I don’t know why you’re so worried,” she said. “He’s just got a little combat fatigue, that’s all. He got attacked, you know.”

  “And I didn’t get counseling,” said Philippe.

  “That’s right, you didn’t.” She turned to Philippe. “What was that all about?”

  “I’m sorry if you find my questions tiresome,” said the Host, “but I’ve had a lot of trouble talking to Philippe, and I find that I can communicate with you much more easily. So, is he a warrior?”

  Philippe laughed.

  “He’s, like, the opposite, actually,” Shanti told the alien. “He’s a diplomat—very anti-war. But he wound up in a bad situation several months ago, which sounds a lot like what you were describing before. So probably the attack dredged all that back up.”

  “No wonder I took a vacation,” said Philippe.

  “Please tell me,” said the Host. “I want to understand why it’s so difficult to be with him.”

  “The quiet ones are always difficult,” Shanti said. “But as for what happened, there’s this territory called Guantánamo. It’s part of this island, which itself is a country, Cuba. But despite that, Guantánamo belonged to another country, the United States, that for a long time didn’t get along with Cuba. So finally the United States realized, What do we need this dumb outpost for? And they wanted to give it back. And Cuba was basically trying to get some money out of the deal, because the United States was a lot richer, so they wouldn’t take it back. So for a long time, Guantánamo was just sort of nobody’s.”

  “And then General Jesus came along,” said Philippe.

  “Yeah, along comes General Jesus, and he just sort of moves in there with his followers, and he winds up using it as a headquarters for this massive cult. And this guy, his name wasn’t really Jesus—that’s not an uncommon name in a Spanish-speaking country, but with this guy, his name was something else and he changed it to Jesus, so you know that’s trouble.”

  “Who is Jesus?” asked the Host.

  “He’s the Christian messiah,” said Shanti, remembering that she was speaking to an alien. “Christianity’s a religion on Earth. This guy basically thinks he’s God, and he’s got a bunch of followers who also think he’s God, and they’ve taken over this territory. And finally Cuba and the United States decide that they really need to reach some agreement on what to do with this place, but there are all these people here. So they go to the Union, which sort of oversees all the countries, and the Union sends a delegation.”

  “And that was me,” said Philippe.

  “That was him, but there were other people, and he was like the junior guy,” Shanti explained. The alien was listening intently. “Anyway, General Jesus just snows these guys. He tells them that he’s OK and reasonable and wants to negotiate something and that everything is all right. But basically, he’s stalling for time. So the delegation goes back and forth, and they negotiate and all this stuff, and in the meantime, General Jesus and his men are torturing people and slaughtering them.

  “I mean, this guy’s nuts, and he thinks he’s Jesus, and he’s worried that if the Union or whoever takes this place away from him, he won’t be able to save mankind or whatever. So he’s trying to purify people and eliminate the people who don’t really believe in him, because if they really believed in him, he wouldn’t be about to lose his territory, and he’s just turning on everyone around him. And the only person in that delegation that had the least clue was Philippe, who wrote this long memo saying, I don’t think we should trust this guy, he’s nuts. But everyone else thinks this guy is OK, so Philippe is ignored.”

  “Diplomats want everyone to live in peace,” said Philippe, wryly. “And Jesus is the Prince of Peace.”

  “Not this Jesus,” Shanti said. “Anyway, Jesus’ people finally started wiping out entire towns, which is tough to hide, so everyone found out what was going on. And they called in my people, who actually are the warriors, and we blew that motherfucker into smithereens—they were sponging him off the vegetation when we got through with him, and, trust me, no one was shedding any tears over it. They found all these torture chambers—really fucking medieval stuff, all over the fucking place. I think Philippe was part of that, too—one of the fact-finding people who saw how bad things had gotten. And it was bad, too. General Jesus had a room in his house where he kept the ears of, you know, ‘heretics’ nailed to the wall. In his house—can you imagine the smell?”

  “Ah,” said the Host. “That explains some things.”

  “And do you know what else they found in that room?” she asked. “Semen. He would go in there and jerk off. That guy was one sick fuck.”

  “Yes, his people seemed quite unpleasant when I met them,” said the Host. “Tell me, what do you know about physics?”

  “What do you need to know?” asked Shanti.

  “There’s the law of attraction,” said Philippe, pulling her closer.

  “Yes, there is,” she said, warmly.

  Beep. Beep. Beep.

  Shanti woke up. Damn, she thought, always before the good parts.

  Beep. Beep. Beep.

  What the fuck was that?

  “Shanti Pax! Shanti Pax!” the voice spoke directly into her left ear. “Contact Central, emergency status! Contact Central, emergency status!”

  Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

  “Oh, shit,” she muttered, fumbling around in the dark. The fucking earplant, it would just repeat and repeat until she got a message back through.

  She felt around, finally finding the lamp. She turned it on and got up.


  Where the fuck did Keres keep that messenger?

  She left the guest room, which opened onto the living room. She turned on the overhead light and was momentarily blinded. Fucking useless fake corneas, she thought. Fucking useless earplant. They should let you at least turn it down.

  She finally saw the messenger and activated it. It took her a moment to remember how to work civilian equipment—and having a machine screaming “Shanti Pax!” in her ear didn’t exactly help her think. But she got Central’s message, sent an acknowledgment, and the fucking thing blessedly cut off.

  Keres stumbled in. “Surp, you all right?” she asked.

  Shanti looked at her darkly. “I’ve gotta go back,” she said.

  “But you just got here,” her sister whined, blinking in the light.

  “I’ve gotta go back now,” Shanti said. “Things are really fucked.”