Lost and Found (6 page)

George looked back over his shoulder. “Not particularly. But food makes me feel better. Any taste of Earth is better than none at all.”

Nodding, Walker moved to follow. “I think there are still a couple in my last box. I’ll split one with you.”

He doubted very much, as they headed back toward the tent together, that they were any longer anywhere near the warm, friendly, ocean-swathed ball of dirt both knew as home.

Days, like gas, continued to pass. Walker knew it was days because his watch, thankfully, continued to function. In addition to telling the time and date in three different (and now utterly irrelevant) time zones, holding a small address book, providing a connection to link to the (now unavailable) Internet, serving as a stopwatch, and offering half a dozen other functions, it contained within its chip brain two different mini video games. Boredom notwithstanding, Walker did not play either of them. He was afraid of sacrificing too much battery power. If nothing else, knowing the time (Pacific, Central, and Eastern) kept him, however tenuously, in touch with home. Peripheral as it was, he was inordinately terrified of losing that contact.

With little else to do to pass the time beyond marking it, he and George tried to make the acquaintance of as many of their fellow captives as possible. There were the reticulated Irelutes from A’ba’prin III, the bounding Mirrindrinons from the system of the same name, the lanky ciliated Tacuts from Domiss V and VI, and many more. Some were friendlier than others, some more talkative, some withdrawn, some barely capable of speech despite having been given cerebral kick starts and verbalizing implants. All shared in a common captivity.

Ultimately, it was the solitary Ghouaba who turned him in.

He was not looking for the blade when he stumbled upon it. Actually, it could not properly be called a blade. It was more like a sliver of sharp ceramic. About a foot long, it lay half buried in the sand that lined one side of the grand enclosure’s largest stream. Kneeling, Walker stared at the shiny exposed portion of the fragment, noting how it caught the light. Noting that it held an edge. A quick glance showed no one in his immediate vicinity. George was off somewhere chatting with friends. A brace of Moorooloos slip-slid past, skating on slime-coated foot pads, their attention on one another.

The origin of the ceramic sliver was a mystery. Something left over from the original construction of the enclosure, perhaps. Or even better, some kind of forgotten tool. Either way, it might prove useful. Moving forward so that his body concealed his actions as much as possible from unseen monitors, he reached down and quickly pulled the sliver from its sandy bed. That’s when he discovered that it held a sharp edge. It would be good to have a weapon, however primitive. And if the sliver turned out to be a tool of some kind, it would be interesting to experiment with its capabilities. Perhaps it might even be capable of passing through or otherwise disabling a Vilenjji restraining field.

As he rose, he was momentarily startled to see a small alien staring in his direction. He recognized it as a Ghouaba, citizen of a world known as Ayll VI. A male of its species, the Ghouaba was a short, slim biped whose long arms caused its four-fingered hands to drag on the ground when it walked. It had large, owlish eyes; ears that were capable of facing backward or forward; a wide, toothless mouth that seemed to split its flattened, ovoidal skull almost in half; and a small, constantly wiggling proboscis. It looked at him for a moment before turning and walking away with a loose-limbed stride that made it appear virtually boneless, which it was not.

Taking a deep breath, Walker headed back across the grand enclosure, taking as direct a route as possible toward his own personal environment. Once there and safely back inside the tent, he carefully drew the souvenir out from beneath his shirt. No one had challenged his acquiring of the prize.

On closer inspection, he saw to his growing excitement that the fragment was indeed more than just a broken shard of ceramic or other construction material. There were markings in unknown script on one side and several lightly tinted depressions on the other. When he cautiously pushed a finger into one of the large, shallow depressions, it glowed with life. So did the sharp edge of the device. Moving his free hand toward it, he quickly sensed the heat it was generating. Better and better. Was the device some kind of cutting tool? That would not only serve as a weapon, but might even offer a way out of the great circular enclosure. Of course, once outside he had nowhere to go, but it would be nice to have a choice if, say, the Vilenjji started rounding up captives for medical experimentation or some equally disturbing activity. Better to have the option to delay the inevitable rather than to quietly accede to it.

As he was studying the remaining depressions, wondering what they might do, something wrapped tight around his lower right leg and yanked forcefully. He went down hard on his face and chest, the air whooshing out of him as he was dragged backward out of the tent. Furious, he twisted around—to see a pair of Vilenjji towering over him. One had an arm flap wrapped securely around his ankle, the suckers gripping firmly. The other was gazing down at him with that creepy horizontal, wraparound stare. Its sucker flaps held a long, tapering instrument whose point was aimed directly at Walker’s chest. He went very still.

He also noted the care with which the Vilenjji who had dragged him out of the tent took the ceramic sliver, pulling it gently free of the human’s reluctant fingers. This accomplished, it turned to its companion and hooted softly, like an owl in training for an avian rendition of Handel. Automatically, the implant in Walker’s head translated. The Vilenjji was customarily terse.

“Got it.”

“How comes a jiab to be in the compound?” the alien wielding the rifle, or whatever it was, responded.

Hairs, or cilia, atop the other’s tapering skull fluttered slightly. “Lost. Carelessness. No damage done.”

Together, they examined the recumbent human, who was watching them closely and breathing hard. The tip of the weapon device moved slightly. Walker closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the two Vilenjji were departing. Slowly, he sat up. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of a much smaller figure standing just outside the boundary of his private bit of transplanted Sierra.

The Ghouaba was looking straight at him and grinning. At least, Walker thought it was a grin. He might be completely misinterpreting the expression. But he was not misinterpreting the Ghouaba’s stance, nor the ease it exhibited in the company of the two withdrawing Vilenjji. It was instantly clear to Walker how his captors had learned of his possession of the device. There was no other reason for the Ghouaba to be there with them.

“You little big-eared bastard!” he growled.

Perhaps the Vilenjji were out of translation range. Perhaps they chose simply to ignore the biped’s angry comment, which was not directed at them in any case. But the Ghouaba heard, and understood, as its own implant deciphered the human’s comment. Despite the fact that Walker was twice its size and many times its mass, it did not appear intimidated.

“Touch-eh me-eh and Vilenjji see-eh,” it countered. “Hurt-eh me-eh and ugly Earth-thing die-eh. Eh-theht!” Turning away, it confidently showed the human its back. Possibly also its backside, though Walker was wholly ignorant of Ghouaban biology.

Rising, ignoring the warning, he started for the grand enclosure, intending to follow the little betrayer until the Vilenjji had absented themselves. Then he remembered George’s story of the Tripodan, who had attacked and killed another of the Vilenjji’s specimens. “Never saw it again,” the dog had concluded the tale by telling him.

As he stood debating what to do, all but shaking with rage, a vista of all-too-familiar mountains and forest and sky appeared, replacing his view of the grand enclosure.
No,
he thought wildly as he rushed forward. But there was no mistaking the reality of the illusion, if that was not an oxymoron. Sure enough, as he attempted to push through the forced perspective of the restored panorama, he came up against the familiar tingling, and then pain, of a reactivated restraining field.

It took only a couple of moments to confirm what he feared. His access to the grand enclosure—to its rolling terrain, its varied vistas, its running streams and astonishing assortment of alien verdure, his fellow captives and their own enclosures—had been cut off. Over the past weeks the opportunity to converse, to share thoughts and commonalities with other intelligences, had become important not only to his daily routine but to preserving his sanity.

And George. With the reestablishment of the restraining field on all four sides, contact with his only real friend, with his fellow abductee from Earth, was also denied to him. It struck him immediately what was happening.

He was being disciplined.

For finding the ceramic device and not turning it in, though how he was supposed to have done the latter he did not know. In that he was being disingenuous, he knew. He could have waited for a Vilenjji passing down the corridor and waved the device in its direction. That was what a good prisoner would have been expected to do, no doubt. Like that smirking Ghouaba doubtless would have done. Well, Walker wasn’t a good prisoner. A stupid one, maybe.

Whatever happened now, the experience had at least taught him something valuable. Whatever it consisted of, his captors’ surveillance system was not perfect. He had managed to find, uncover, conceal, and slip back to his tent with the ceramic device. If not for the Ghouaba having informed on him, it was entirely possible the Vilenjji would not have known about it.

They were not omnipotent.

Thus slightly encouraged, all the rest of that day and on into the next he waited for the Sierra panorama to vanish, or for the barrier between his enclosure and George’s uprooted urban environment to fall. Neither happened. Nor did it the following day, nor the one after. Bereft of sentient contact, lonelier than he had believed he could ever be, he sat outside his tent or beside the scrap of Cawley Lake and stared morosely at fake sky, false beach, phony forest. So dejected did he become that he forgot to eat his food bricks or cubes, though he did manage to swallow and keep down some water.

He lost track of the days, forgetting to check his still-reliable timepiece. Perhaps, aware of the Ghouaba’s role in the betrayal of the human, the Vilenjji were fearful of losing another specimen to internecine fighting. Eventually, his term of punishment was deemed sufficient, his sentence fulfilled. Whatever the reason, on a day he did not mark, the mountainous vista in front of him and the forested one on his right both abruptly and without any warning blinked out of existence, offering unrestricted access once more to the grand enclosure and that of his four-legged canine friend.

As it happened, George was taking it easy outside his crumbling Cadillac condo, gnawing on a grayish blue food brick, when entrée was restored. So happy was Walker to see him that he put aside any thought of marching off in search of the perfidious Ghouaba.

The sight of the mutt jumping into the human’s arms and licking his face profusely must be profoundly intriguing to the watching Vilenjji, Walker was convinced. No doubt they were monitoring the release to see how their newly liberated specimen would react to its restored freedom of movement. Silently, he evoked enough seriously bad words and concomitant suggestions for physiological impossibilities to prove conclusively that the Vilenjji were not telepathic and could not monitor his thoughts. Or else they simply didn’t care.

Eventually, George got tired of licking him and Walker got tired of being licked. Together, they strolled away from the tent and out into the comparatively spacious confines of the grand enclosure. Espying the disparate pair from Earth, a few other aliens acknowledged Walker’s return to their midst. No one rushed over to congratulate him on his release, however, or to question him concerning his activities during the time when he had been kept incommunicado. Curiosity about such matters was not always healthy. It was an attitude Walker, now more than ever, respected.

George could have cared less. He was simply glad to see his friend again.

“I was worried they’d keep you shut away permanently,” the dog commented, his tail wagging like a fuzzy metronome. “Then I’d have nobody to talk to about the really important things. Like the taste of hamburger.”

“Nice to know I was missed,” Walker replied dryly. More seriously he added, “I was beginning to wonder the same thing.”

Suddenly, he paused. Shambling slackly across the ground cover not thirty feet in front of him was his betrayer, the oily little specimen from Ayll VI. Preoccupied, it was not looking in his direction. Always a fast sprinter, Walker knew he could be on top of the malicious little being before the Ghouaba realized what had hit him or could react. Without warning, a stinging pain shot through his calf, startling him. His expression transformed by surprise and shock, he looked sharply down at its perpetrator.

“You—you
bit
my leg.”