Time Past (17 page)

“The Invidi, if they’ve got any nous at all, will say thanks, pay their respects to the custodians of the land. You don’t do this sort of thing at your place?”

“Not in Las Mujeres, no. We never had many guests.”

There was no public access to the landing site itself. Despite well-advertised complaints, media reporters were confined to carefully escorted groups right back in the terminal buildings. Those who felt cramped by this drove up and down the foreshore roads, or rode in helicopters around the no-fly zone. They complained, too, because their satellites could not cut through the electronic interference. The authorities would allow only a few press representatives at the actual landing.

We were close to another large group that milled around the bridge on this side. It was hard to see where the ordinary crowd ended and they began, but they seemed to be a curious mixture of inner-city types dressed in sleek grays and outer-suburb workers of both sexes. They yelled at the soldiers on duty at the gate and waved placards at the press. The signs pleaded for their carriers to be allowed to meet the aliens. One sign said WE ARE THE CHOSEN. I wondered if they had any chance of being let in.

Murdoch saw me staring at them. “Nope.” He kept his voice low. “You’d need a foolproof ID and a reason to go in there. Unless you can prove you’re an expert in alien physiology... ?”

I could make an attempt at it—we knew more about actual alien physiology than anyone else on Earth at the moment. But I’d have to explain from where I arrived, why I didn’t have an ID, and how I got the knowledge, or at least give a plausible reason for being unknown to the rest of the scientific community. I spent a few minutes imagining Murdoch masquerading as an eccentric biologist, then returned to craning over the heads of those in front of me. More waiting.

“They haven’t absorbed it yet.” Murdoch leaned back and lowered the lenses. “It takes a while to sink in. Then the trouble starts. People realize the implications. Remember the riots in Europe and North America? They had whole towns denying alien existence for decades.”

“I know. Is it time yet?” The landing was due at noon and we’d arrived early to make sure of a place. Some people had camped here overnight. Murdoch and I had taken turns through the morning to sit on the sand and doze. I was sunburnt, even with a hat on, and red-eyed from staring at the bright waves.

The man on our other side yawned with an irritating yelp. He’d been doing it all morning. “I don’t think they’ll come,” he said. “It’s a hoax.”

“It’s only five to twelve,” Murdoch said to me, after glancing at his neighbor’s wrist timer.

The woman beside me bumped her broad bottom on my hip as she turned to speak to someone behind her. The brim of her sunhat scraped the top of my head yet again.

“Have a biscuit, luv?” She offered me a gingernut from the box passed along to her.

“No thanks.” I leaned away from the hat.

She began to munch.

Somehow I’d expected the first historic meeting between human and Invidi to be more... momentous.

“Maybe they’ll be late,” said another voice. A couple of people laughed behind us.

I shook my head. Invidi were never late. Or early.

“I remember the Olympics,” someone said. “Squeezed in like this.”

“Yeah, the rich bastards got the best seats then, too.”

We all laughed. Then silence. Murdoch’s neighbor spoke again.

“We’re gonna look pretty stupid if it is a hoax.”

A media copter burred too close overhead and everybody covered their faces from blown sand. A couple of pithy comments whirled away in its slipstream and my neighbor waved.

“We’ll be all over the world,” she said, and waved again, but the copter had veered up and away to focus on the Invidi ship as it descended with little ceremony and less noise onto the runway.

The ship was a typical single-pilot barque, bigger than the little yacht our resident Invidi on Jocasta maintained, but smaller than the chemically powered shuttles humans used in this time. It hovered, reflecting green off the concrete, then settled with a sigh that actually came from the throats around us.

The glow around the vessel’s base dimmed, and without further ado the hatch opened.

I leaned closer to Murdoch. “They haven’t got much style, have they?”

“Nope,” he said, also low enough for our neighbors not to hear. “K’Cher would’ve razed the landing zone and given us some fireworks.”

“Mind you, K’Cher wouldn’t care who was underneath the thrusters.”

“True.”

I looked around—all the faces showed such wonder. Some recoiled in disgust or horror, but most were lost in contemplation of the incredible.

“It’s true, it’s really true.” Tears streamed down the biscuit woman’s face.

Behind us someone prayed. “Lord, thank you for letting me live to see this.”

I felt so alone. Everything changes now, I wanted to scream at them. It will never be the same again.

But in that moment, when three Invidi rolled down onto the runway under a bright sky, nobody was thinking of the future. The present held enough wonder.

We threaded our way back among the groups of people who still lined the sand. Nothing had happened after the short welcome ceremony. Two Invidi trundled off to a large tent set up near the barrier that divided the east-west runway from the rest of the airport. According to the televid programs, that tent was where the initial talks would occur. We assumed the authorities were worried about disease or perhaps that the Invidi might do something drastic if let inside a real building. In any case, there didn’t seem much more happening today, so Murdoch and I agreed to head home.

“So that’s how it happened,” said Murdoch. “I always wondered what it was really like.”

I nodded. For a brief moment the Invidi had seemed unfamiliar, as if seen through my ancestors’ eyes. Tall, thick, irregular shapes in silvery suits that draped, skirtlike, to the ground so that we couldn’t see how they moved so smoothly in any direction. No distinct head, no features. Long, prehensile appendages in protective silver coils.

“We could go by boat.” I noticed the sails far out in the bay for the first time. “It’s not far across that channel.”

Murdoch shook his head and pointed to the sleek shapes of Customs ships dotted around the bay. “Plus they’ve probably got the whole perimeter wired. And see those poles on the fence?”

“The thin ones?”

“Yeah. Those probably have visual pickups, with infrared for night vision. Pretty primitive, but good enough to keep us out.”

“Bloody hell.”

A young couple beside us drew back a little and eyed me worriedly.

Murdoch edged closer to me so there was no chance of us being overheard. “Let’s think what we’re going to say to them.”

I didn’t bother dropping my voice. It didn’t matter if I was overheard—there were plenty of UFO-lovers around today. “We’ll say to An Serat, you made sure we’d get here and now we want to go home. We’d like help with repairing our ship and getting it back through the jump point.” I rubbed the Seouras implant in my neck impatiently. “Get me in there to talk to them, Bill. We’ve only got twenty-seven days until the neutrality vote goes through.”

“I’ve been thinking. If we make it back to our time, what are you going to do?” he said.

“We will make it back. We don’t belong here.”

“Then we need to work out a way to keep you a free agent when we do,” said Murdoch. He held my arm as I skidded down the side of the dry-grassed verge and onto the hard black of the road. “As soon as you enter Abelar space, EarthFleet Security is going to hold you for questioning about
Calypso II.
And I guess ConFleet will be waiting to find out where you’ve been without leave for five months.”

A young woman looked at him curiously from under a wide-brimmed straw hat, and he waited until she shuffled forward out of earshot.

“Unless I’ve arrested you already,” he said slowly.

“What?”

“I can say I got a tip-off about where you’d gone. Brought you back for questioning. If you’re in my custody, they can’t drag you off until we’ve processed the first...”

A series of strident whoops from behind made us both jump. The noise was projected from a slow-moving ground-car, its red, shiny surface visible through gaps in the crowd. We tried to climb the half meter onto the verge from the surfaced road but the verge was crowded too, so we were forced back into single file along the shallow runoff ditch. As the alarm grew closer and louder it was accompanied by the low hum of an electric engine and by cries of surprise and pain from the crowd. The sleek, bullet-nosed shape crept forward and people fell back on either side. Its windows were pearly and opaque—impossible to see who was inside.

Murdoch shoved open a space on the verge, then reached over to pull me up beside him. The groundcar was about a meter away. I felt a strange sensation as though a giant hand had swatted me to one side, followed by a sharp pain that disappeared as swiftly as it came.

“Shit.” Murdoch shook his hand that had held mine. “What was that?” He looked down at me and I realized I was sitting on hard, dry grass. Around us, people cursed and picked themselves off the road. The back of the ground-car disappeared slowly into the crowd. As we watched, it rose slowly on its maglev boosters and soared away, as if in relief at leaving the crawling ground life behind.

I shook my head, throat constricted. My body tingled all over.

“Theft-prevention device,” said a burly man next to us. He pulled the brim of his cap down firmly. “They’re not allowed to use them in pedestrian areas, but shit, who’s going to stop them?”

“They” must be people important or affluent enough to have watched the landing from one of the unoccupied buildings in the airports.

Murdoch pulled me upright and brushed off the dust with abrupt, angry movements. “You all right?”

“A bit numb. Must be a static charge. Wonder how they insulate...”

Farther back in the crowd, a woman’s voice wailed high and desperate. Another voice shouted for an ambulance.

“Heart attack, probably,” the man in the cap said, and walked on.

We hesitated. Murdoch turned and pushed back against the flow. I started to follow but was stopped by a wave of nausea. Bloody hell. The crowd was moving again and I didn’t dare sit down for fear of being trampled. Nowhere to lean—the closest fence was over to the right beyond a wide ditch. I stood there, sick and indecisive, until Murdoch returned a few minutes later.

He shook his head in answer to my unspoken question and we walked in silence for a while. At last a copter with a red cross flew overhead and landed back at the scene of the tragedy.

Murdoch sighed and rubbed his eyes with his sleeve.

“Don’t think they’ll be any use. Bloke in his eighties or so. That’s a good age for this century, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“Yeah, thought so.” He said nothing more and I thought he’d finished, then he spoke quickly, without looking at me. “Every time something like this happens I get sick to the stomach. Shouldn’t be this way.”

“Something like this?”

“People with power not using it properly. Innocent people getting hurt.” He risked a glance at me. “It pisses me off.”

Back on the station he had always been scrupulously fair in his dealings with both residents from the Four Worlds, those from the Nine, and the many species of refugees. I remembered now that he had originally been sent to Jocasta because he was unpopular at his previous post for accusing fellow officers of accepting bribes. The station manager, Veatch, himself one of the Four, had always found it impossible to persuade Murdoch that the K’Cher and Melot residents deserved special security privileges.

“We got it at home too,” he said, echoing my thoughts. “But in this time it’s worse.”

We walked for nearly an hour before finding a bus with standing room, a bus that headed away from the harbor, away from the future and back to the out-town.

Fourteen

A
week later, already 7 May, and we were still sleeping at Levin’s house, no closer to talking to the Invidi than on the day they arrived.

U.N. troops and army squads kept the public at bay. There were more media people than before, if that was possible, and the whole area was still a shambles. The government made cautiously optimistic announcements, which included phrases such as “meaningful dialogue” and “considering the unprecedented nature of the situation.” They were only human, after all, and must be as confused as everyone else.

As the days passed and the Invidi threatened nobody, the number of visitors to their “embassies” grew, until there was a constant twenty-four-hour stream. The heads of state of this region all had their turn, and now all of the U.N. organizations were forming delegations. Large multicorps were already sending researchers in with government scientists and academics. “They wanter see what they can sell the aliens,” joked Eric one night. “Good thing it wasn’t the K’Cher that got here first,” muttered Murdoch. I agreed. Earth’s future defined by an alliance between human capitalism and the K’Cher was an unpleasant thought.

The Invidi had spread their landing vessels impartially between rich and poor nations, north and south. In some places, the public had already been granted limited access. Not here, though. I seemed to remember from the history files that restriction of access to the Invidi and their technology had been one of the main reasons for the fall, in the 2030s, of many of the entrenched governments and the systems that supported them. People didn’t see why everyone should not share the bounties that the Invidi offered so freely. Blockers of addictive drugs, for example, or virus neutralizers. When the huge drug companies that had always monopolized new medicines attempted to do the same with the Invidi gifts, there was widespread outrage.

Maybe restriction of jump-drive technology in the future would prove the downfall of restrictive Confederacy governments also. The longer they kept the Nine Worlds out of the secret, the greater the resentment and anger would grow. I could feel it growing in myself, every time I thought about time passing on Jocasta. Twenty two days from now, the Confederacy Council, representatives of all thirteen member species, would vote to pass or refuse our request for neutrality. I wanted to be there, considering I’d made the initial request.