Voyagers II - The Alien Within (38 page)

“No.”

“You’ll die, and all that knowledge will die with you!”

Stoner closed his eyes. It would be good to sleep. Deep within him, the alien stirred. Is this the way the experiment ends? Have I come all this way merely to be snuffed out by the fears and angers of these advanced apes?

I can move, Stoner said silently. I can walk out of this chamber. He looked out across the bridge to the catwalk and the airtight door that led to safety. It seemed a million miles away.

His foot weighed several hundred tons. But he moved it. He actually lifted it from the metal flooring and forced it to take a step forward. Then the other foot. He reached out for the railing and leaned heavily on it. Sweat was streaming from every pore of his body, soaking his coveralls, blurring his vision. His hand slipped on the metal railing, and he fell heavily. He lay on the metal gridwork, thinking, Just like Nillson. I’m huddled here just like he was. At least I’m not whimpering.

A bolt of energy shot through his consciousness. With a sudden clarity he saw the control center again in his mind, saw Madigan in his space suit, his face white with shock and pain, saw Jo standing at the doorway, a slim steel-gray pistol bucking in her hand as she emptied its clip. Each time the gun fired, a fresh black hole appeared in Madigan’s gleaming white space suit and the lawyer twitched and jerked backward like a puppet in the hands of a mad, spastic master.

Then everything went black.

Slowly, reluctantly, Keith Stoner awoke. He opened his eyes and saw a ceiling of gray metal above him. He was lying on his back in a softly comfortable bed. The sheets felt like silk against his bare skin. They were perfumed, subtly, and his nose wrinkled at the cloying sweetness.

Turning his head slightly, he saw Jo sitting on the edge of the oversized bed, watching him intently. She was still in her coral coveralls, her hair slightly disheveled, her mouth an anxious taut line. But when she saw that his eyes had opened, her face relaxed into a relieved smile.

He began to sit up, but Jo touched a hand to his naked shoulder.

“It’s all right,” she murmured. “You can rest.”

Stoner let his head sink back into the pillow. He took a deep, testing breath, then said, “I’m okay. I feel fine.”

It was true. He felt perfectly normal. No pain or dizziness, only a slight headache that was rapidly fading away. He felt strong and good.

“Everything’s taken care of,” Jo assured him, her voice almost cooing like a mother gentling an infant. “There’s no need for you to do a thing except rest.”

Stoner luxuriated in the plush extravagance of the huge bed. It was warm, exactly body temperature. Sensors in the silken sheets, he decided. Not a waterbed, but almost as good. He realized that soft music was purring from speakers hidden somewhere above his head.

“We’re still in the orbital complex.” It was more than a guess.

“Yes,” Jo replied, a touch of tenseness returning to her face.

Looking around, Stoner saw that the bedroom was an attempt to bring Earthly creature comforts to the starkly functional compartment of a space habitat. Splendid antique furniture crammed the narrow room; a trio of wildly tortured Van Gogh paintings hung against the metal curving ribs of the walls. There were no windows, but a holographic projection of Earth spread across the low ceiling.

“This was Ev’s quarters,” Jo admitted. “He liked to flaunt his luxuries.”

Stoner nodded, then remembered. “Madigan.”

Jo’s lips pressed together even tighter. Her dark eyes flared with barely controlled anger. And guilt.

“He was killing you,” she said.

“So you killed him.”

“There wasn’t anything else I could do. There wasn’t time for anything else.”

“And your husband?”

“He’s in sick bay. I’m having him sent back to Earth, where they can care for him better.”

“Kirill?” he asked. “An Linh, Baker?”

“They’re all fine. On their way Earthward. But they want to see you as soon as they can, and thank you.”

“Thank me?”

“For stopping Everett and exposing Madigan. For saving the world.”

Stoner felt an echo of ironic laughter in his mind. “I haven’t saved the world.”

“They think you have.”

He looked at her. “What do you think?”

Some of the tension eased out of her face. She smiled tightly at him. “You’ve come back to me. That’s all that’s important. The world can take care of itself.”

Stoner studied her. Jo had been a beautiful, headstrong girl when he had known her eighteen years earlier. Now she had matured, grown in knowledge and strength. Now she possessed the classic womanly beauty of an earth goddess. For long moments neither of them spoke a word. Only the softly muted music kept the room from total silence.

“What is that?” he asked.

“What?”

“The music.”

“Oh! It feeds through the headboard speakers automatically. I’ll turn it off….”

He grasped her wrist. “No. I like it. Tell me what it is.”

Jo leaned across his reclining form and touched a button on the keypad set into the bed’s headboard. Turning, Stoner looked at the computer screen display:
Maurice Ravel, Piano Concerto for the Left Hand; Robert Casadesus, piano, with The Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, conductor. Recorded 1955
.

Stoner closed his eyes and let the music reach into him. He felt a questioning probe from his alien brother, feather light yet puzzled, filled with wonder. Ravel was a Frenchman who wrote this concerto for a pianist who had lost his right arm in World War I. The pianist was an Austrian, an enemy of France during the war. Inside him, Stoner’s alien brother glowed with new understanding. Creation can rise above destruction. Human beings have the capacity to overcome evil.

“Keith?”

He snapped his eyes open and saw that Jo looked worried, almost frightened.

“I thought you had passed out again,” she said, her voice trembling slightly.

“No,” he said, reaching out to take her hand in his. He hesitated a moment, then decided he had to tell her. “Jo—you remember what we talked about that night at your villa in Naples? The alien inside my head?”

She nodded somberly.

“He really is there, Jo. Permanently. He’s within me. It didn’t matter that Ev destroyed his body. His mind, his memories, his soul—he’s part of me now.”

“In Naples,” she said, so low that he could barely hear her, “you were alive, and human. But…later, in that mountain base, with Temujin, and then in Moscow, and now here…”

She was fighting for self-control, Stoner saw. He said nothing.

“You were so distant, Keith. So cold and controlled. Like a machine. Like you had turned into an alien creature yourself. You frighten me, Keith! The things you’re able to do, the powers you have—they’re not human!”

“And yet you’re here, with me,” he replied softly. “Not because I’m controlling you, but because you want to be.”

“I love you, Keith,” she said, tears brimming over and spilling down her cheeks. “I’ve loved you all my life.”

“But you’re afraid of me.”

“I don’t know who you are! Or what you are.”

He smiled at her. “I’m human, Jo. Maybe more human than I’ve ever been.”

“But the alien?…”

“He’s there, inside my head. He’s become part of me.” His grin widened. “You’ll just have to accept the two of us, I guess. It’s a package deal: can’t have one without the other.”

She wiped at her eyes with the backs of her hands, like a little girl.

“It’s been like a new life for me, Jo. I’ve seen the world for the first time, really, since you revived me. In a way, I was an alien, too. Now—with the help of my brother—I’ve become a full human being.”

Jo looked troubled, almost fearful.

“It’s true,” he insisted. “I understand things now that I never even thought about in my earlier life.”

“What kinds of things?”

He took in a deep breath, puffed it out. “This will sound corny, Jo, but I’ve learned that I really am my brother’s keeper. Each of us is. We’re interdependent. One human being living alone in the wilderness isn’t a noble savage, he’s a dead naked ape.”

“But what does that mean to me? Or to you?” she asked.

“We’ve got to work together. Each of us. All of us.”

“The way you were talking about to Baker? Setting up a new economic system?”

“That’s part of it,” Stoner said, pushing himself up into a sitting position, feeling the intensity of the need to convince her. “We’re at a pivotal point in human history….”

“And you think a few people like you and me can change the course that the whole human race takes?” Jo sounded utterly unconvinced.

“Yes!” he snapped. “The forces of history are massive, like a glacier moving down a mountainside. But they can be changed, shaped, directed by human effort, if that effort is applied intelligently at the pivotal points.”

“I wish I could believe that, Keith.”

“You’ve already seen it happening! Nillson concentrated the world’s major terrorist groups into one worldwide organization….”

“Because Archie Madigan manipulated him into it.”

“More than that, Jo. It was the right time for the terrorists to combine forces. The movement of history pushed them in that direction.”

“The movement of history?”

“Yes. And once they were concentrated it was easy to shatter their organization.”

“So now a thousand little terrorist groups will spring up again out of the ruins.”

“Not if they can’t get arms,” Stoner said. “Not if they can’t raise money. Not if the multinational corporations and the national governments and the Peacekeepers can work together to alleviate the
causes
of terrorism.”

Jo gave him a skeptical frown. “Keith, it’s a wonderful dream, but…”

“But we can make the dream come true.”

“How can you believe that?” she demanded. “The world is disintegrating. It’s falling down around our ears! So you stopped the war in Africa. For how long? Nations are breaking apart, the whole social order is unraveling.”

“Look deeper, Jo,” he urged. “Look behind the politics, find the underlying human emotions. Okay, national boundaries are changing. So what? What looks like fragmentation to you is actually homogenization at the economic and social levels.”

“Homogeni…What do you mean?”

Grinning, Stoner replied, “Farmers in Chad want to be as rich as farmers in Kansas. Uzbeks and Ulstermen want to be free of distant governments that make bad decisions for them. Every group of people in the world is trying to achieve what Western society already has: economic plenty and individual freedom.”

“Blue jeans and a sports car,” Jo muttered.

Stoner ignored her sarcasm. “At the economic, the industrial, the social level, they all want to be rich and free.
That’s
what’s causing all the turmoil around the world. Instead of fighting it, instead of trying to hold on to the status quo, we’ve got to help the peoples of the world to get rich, and free. Instead of clinging to yesterday, we’ve got to help build tomorrow.”

“Christ, you sound like a politician.”

“God forbid!”

“Well, you do,” Jo said. But she was smiling.

“Listen, Jo. People want to make life better for themselves. But even more, they want to make life better for their children. That’s a basic human urge, to make life better for your kids. We’ve got to help them to win that struggle, Jo—without tearing down all the gains we’ve already made over the centuries.”

“You don’t really think you can….”

“
We
can do it,” he insisted. “You and me, Jo. And Kirill and Baker and a few billion others. Working together. Yes, we can do it.”

“You’re serious about this. You’re really going to try to save the world.”

He gestured up at the hologram of Earth on the ceiling. The planet seemed to float above them, a brilliantly beautiful sphere of blue, decked with streams of white clouds.

“It’s a world worth saving, Jo. We’ve got to try. Otherwise everything will disintegrate. It’ll all fall apart under the pressure of runaway population growth.”

Jo sighed deeply. “But for every one of us there’s an Everett, or a Madigan. Or worse.”

“It won’t be easy,” he admitted.

“It seems so hopeless.”

“No. It’s not. Never hopeless. As long as we live, as long as we can dream, we can hope. And work. We can heal their wounds, Jo. We can help them build a better world.”

Jo leaned her head against his bare shoulder. “So now you’re going out to save the world. I’ll lose you all over again.”

“Lose me?” He felt surprised, puzzled. “I thought you were going to work alongside me in this.”

Looking up at him, she said, “Keith, if there’s one thing I’ve learned about you, it’s that I can be right beside you and you’ll still be a million miles away.”

She seemed to hold her breath, waiting. For what? Stoner wondered. There was fear in her eyes. What could she be afraid of? What is she searching for?

In the sudden silence between them, the music flowed over Stoner, reached into him, drove along his nerves, lifted him with its exhilarating relentless power. He felt his alien brother’s confusion at the swirling turmoil building within him and laughed inwardly as he realized that he was feeling emotions, true emotions, pleasure and sorrow, joy at being alive, bitter regret at all the lost days, all the things he had been unable to do, all the pain he had seen or caused or failed to ease. His alien brother relaxed and began to sample complexities that he had never understood before.

Like ice breaking on a river that had been locked in winter, like snow packed deep on a meadow melting under the springtime sun, Stoner felt all the pent-up emotions within him suddenly released, thawed, freed from the iron control that had held them so rigidly. At last he and his alien brother were one, trusting each other, true brothers now, unafraid.

He gripped Jo tightly, held her closer than he had ever been able to before, felt the warmth of her body against his own.

“Jo…Jo…” His voice broke. His vision blurred as tears filled his eyes. “I love you, Jo. I really do. I know what it means now, I know what it is to love, and I love you, my dearest, dearest woman. I’ll love you forever.”

The fear and doubt in her eyes were washed away by fresh tears, and she clung to Stoner gladly, wildly happy at last.

They made love slowly, languidly, exploring each other’s bodies gently and patiently, unheeding of time, alone in their own secret universe where nothing else existed except the two of them and the rising heat of passion that grew fiercer and hotter until they felt like twin novas exploding into the star-filled night.

At last they lay side by side, their bodies covered only by a fine sheen of perspiration, the only light in the bedroom coming from the glorious shining sphere of the Earth revolving slowly in the overhead hologram.

Jo grinned at him knowingly. “You really are human, after all.”

“I told you, didn’t I?”

“Maybe just a little bit superhuman.”

He turned and traced a finger along her lovely cheek, her neck, her shoulder. She sighed and turned toward him. He kissed her lightly.

“Keith,” she whispered, her face growing somber. “I have a confession to make.”

“Is it something serious?”

“Very.”

“Then let it wait until later.”

“No, I’ve got to tell you now,” she insisted.

He propped himself up on one elbow. “Okay. What is it?”

“Those frozen embryos…”

“The ova that Nillson had fertilized?”

“They weren’t fertilized with Everett’s sperm,” Jo said.

Stoner looked down at her for a moment, then realized what she was trying to tell him. “My sperm? You took sperm from me?”