Alienist Read online

  ALIENIST

  Copyright ©2001 by Laurence M. Janifer

  Cover art copyright © 2014 by Andrea Danti /Fotolia.

  *

  Published in 2014 by Wildside Press LLC.

  ALSO BY LAURENCE M. JANIFER

  The Counterfeit Heinlein

  DEDICATION

  This one is for

  (as I am)

  my dearest Exactly—

  and for the entire

  Basement

  with love

  PART ONE

  FOLLA

  CHAPTER ONE

  There are some very strange people in the universe. I don’t mean human beings—human beings are strange, God knows, but we’re used to human beings. We’ve had less than two hundred years to get used to the others—the aliens, as people used to call them before we met some—and now and then it does take just a little doing. There are the Berigot, for instance—nice enough folk, true, but you do have to allow for that passionate interest in information-collecting, and the lack of interest in anything else. There are the Vibich, too, whom we’ve never figured out at all, and who seem to have no interest in us whatever—which simplifies matters without clarifying them any. The Kelans aren’t exactly strange; they’re more like the Wise Old Uncles (and Aunts) of the Universe—but the Tocks, who may know almost as much (in their own weird way), are anybody’s strong contenders for the Strange Award, and name your year. There are, as we’ll see further along, the Gielli, who take a little more getting used to than you think they’re going to.

  Well, even the small piece of the universe we’ve managed to get to see, so far, as 2300 A. D. has come and gone, is the Hell of a big place, and you can expect Strange to crop up anywhere. No real problem, and some of my best friends, if I may preen a little, are among the strangest.

  Or at least, they used to be—before the real aliens popped up.

  You may not have heard much about them yet—Folla and Dube and all the others. The Comity was the Hell of a long distance from where they did pop up, and the Comity had no official authority over the matter; but the actual (not official) authority of a government is as stretchable as an old girdle, if every bit as smelly, and Colonization, External Affairs and the entire damn Dichtung turn out to have a reach that makes the ancient Long Hand of the Law look like your favorite carnival’s Armless Wonder. The lid has been put on, and soldered damn well shut, and there is a general feeling that maybe, just maybe, if nobody mentions anything, the whole situation will give us one small embarrassed smile, and fade into the woodwork.

  If you’ve got this report in your hands—or feet, or mouth, or beam—you know better Or you will, by the time I’m through here. Because Folla and Dube and all their friends and associates are not, I assure you, likely to fade into any kind of woodwork at all, and we had better know something about them. One way or another, we’re going to have to live with them.

  If possible.

  Let’s start from the beginning, shall we?

  I was going from Here to There through space-four, which I do a lot of. The specs don’t matter, because I never did arrive at There, and it took me several hours of sweat and fret to locate Here all over again, from a position that turned out to be eleven thousand light-years from anyplace any human being had ever seen before—astronomical surveys excepted. What I was, God damn it, was lost.

  This is not supposed to happen, but of course it does; uncertainty is built into space-four, and everybody knows it, and everybody figures it will bite some other body. I popped back into normal space on schedule, looked around for the field and towers, and found out that, this time, it had by God bitten me: I was traveling at the Hell of a clip, my instruments told me, through what my viewboards told me was empty space.

  Well, as empty as space gets—littered as it mostly is with hydrogen atoms, radiation, and occasional junk. And I was not at all sure I could trust the boards; I punched up my locator and got, instead, a lovely 3D graph that didn’t seem at first glance— or at eleventh—to make any sense. The graph was labeled (lower right front, as usual): INFORMATION CONSUMPTION (PRELIMINARY), and it was scaled in minutes, parsecs and kilojoules.

  I shut my eyes and uttered something or other—prayer, curse or simple steam—and when I opened them the graph hadn’t changed, but the label had. PRELIMINARY had been replaced by EXIGENT. While I watched, EXIGENT faded away, and was replaced by FIFTH READ.

  Four seconds ticked by. Then the label vanished, taking the damn graph with it, and a blinking sign appeared.

  FORMAL ERROR, it said: PLEASE RECHECK DATA FEED.

  It took the words right out of my mouth; the data feed, and the data, were what I was going to check, and recheck, till Hell wouldn’t have it. I needed some solid answers, and I needed them in a hurry.

  Step one: define “hurry.”

  All right: I was still breathing, and the air did not seem noticeably odd in any way. Water and food supplies were computer mediated, of course, and if I did a full readout to find out what I had, I’d get figures I couldn’t trust, given what the boards had been doing. But I did have two water bottles, and iron rations, stowed under the never-used co-pilot’s couch (well, never used in flight; there are always a few rosebuds who find a tour of your ship an exciting way to spend an evening). Thirty-six hours was my best figure for what the supplies to hand meant.

  Unless, of course, the damn ship took it into its head to explode. That, I reflected, might happen at any second.

  It might not happen, too, and there was nothing whatever I could do about it, pro or con. I fished a portable tester out of the pilot’s locker and it told me the air was air, normal for composition and pressure, at the temperature I’d set it for—78F/25.3C, if it matters. There are people who claim that a cold ship increases alertness, and I make it a point not to travel with these people if I can help it.

  Conditionally, then, I had thirty-six hours to figure out where I was, and how I was going to get to some specific someplace else. It didn’t really seem like enough time.

  I had that portable tester, by the way—running on its own power source, unconnected to the ship—and the water, and the rations—and a few other things here and there around the cabin—for reasons related to my trade. My business cards read: Gerald Knave: Survivor, and a Survivor is, among other things, the kind of person who wears suspenders and a belt—with jogging pants. A certain amount of caution is built into the job: when what you do professionally is wander out to a brand-new planet, alone, and try to stay alive on it for a Standard year, you do get into the habit of putting safeties on your safeties. I had not been expecting to get myself lost—who ever does?—but, just in case I did—or was forced to hole up for a while in a ship whose machinery couldn’t be worked, say—or sixty other odd and unlikely emergency situations—I’d have something to fall back on. Not much, but just maybe enough.

  All right: immediate survival as assured as I could make it, I had two questions.

  1. Where the Hell was I?

  2. What instruments could I trust to tell me the answer to 1?

  CHAPTER TWO

  After a brief pause, and a little more steam let off, I punched for the locator again. This time I got it, but what the Hell did that mean? All was illusion, or might be; step two had to be an attempt to see what, in the thoroughly complicated innards of the ship, actually worked, and what had gone out for a long lunch.

  The pilot’s locker (and the co-pilot’s locker) had a fair assortment of instruments with their own power supplies, but there’s a limit to what you can build into a portable tool, and there are limits to what even a cautious Survivor type is likely to want to carry around. I could check my air, I could do some basic diagnostics on my engines, and I could debug a few programs built into the b
oards. Most of those did not immediately look useful—I carry a fair number of interactives to while away trip time, and I could debug most of those, some letter-writing equipment, and my several files of music tapes.

  And even they, I realized after the first few seconds, had some use for me, right there and then. I could check what the boards told me those programs were doing against what (according to the portables) they actually were doing—and get some idea of where my machinery was playing games.

  First things first, though: I was still, apparently, going at the Hell of a clip toward God knew where. Was this illusion?

  I dragged out a large, unwieldy box with snake attachments, thumbed its primary switch, showed it the relevant boards, and set it down at the rear of the cabin. The thing weighed about sixty pounds, and, I hoped, was going to be worth every last ounce.

  The snakes fished around, found connections, sockets and shielded holes, flipped shields open where indicated, settled into the sockets and connections, and hummed for what felt like ten or twelve years, and was actually (its little topside clock told me) thirty-eight seconds. Then its dials and displays began to read out.

  My engines, according to the tester, were putting out eight-tenths of max power, and exhaust was encountering minimal resistance.

  This defines as going at the Hell of a clip through empty space. I punched in a stop command, waited, punched in a stop-fuel-feed command, waited, punched in a stop-fusion-run command, and waited some more. Any one of the three should act to stop my engines, and perhaps, by some wild mischance, one of them would.

  The tester told me, a few seconds later, that one of them had. I was now, at least, not increasing the clip I was going at. Slowing down was going to be something else again, and putting the ship into braking mode might, it occurred to me, do something fatal to the works. I might be left with a ship I couldn’t control at all—or, if an explosion decided to happen, with no ship whatever.

  Well, what else was new? I punched in braking orders. By that time, I was holding my breath, and when I noticed the fact I told myself firmly that breathing was a necessary and even a desirable function, and climbed slowly back to something within hailing distance of normal.

  The tester couldn’t quite tell me that the brakes were on, but it could tell me that engine function had resumed, and that the direction of exhaust had changed. What I needed was a way of finding out what my speed was relative to the rest of the universe, so to speak, and I wished, a little bemusedly, for Sherlock Holmes’ tools. On a train from somewhere to somewhere—en route to Baskerville Hall, if memory served, where he was going to investigate a Houn’ Dog—Holmes had calculated the speed of the train he was on because the telegraph poles it passed were a quarter-mile apart, and “the calculation,” he told his publicist, a fellow named Whatsis, “is a simple one.”

  So it would be, if I could find some telegraph poles out there, at known distances. My locator would show me the local star field, and just possibly identify one or two of the handier objects—but how could I trust the information it gave me? There is no way to run a check on a locator, short of a full field shop; locators are what you expect to run checks with.

  Well, there might be a way.

  The board clock had gone on automatically when I’d dropped out of space-four, but I didn’t have to trust it; the big engine tester had a clock, and my alarm is a portable, because I can rig it to wake me and not disturb anyone else who happens to be sleeping aboard. Neither could tell me the precise millisecond I’d come back to normal space—the board clock would do that—but if both agreed not only with each other (which they did) but with the board clock, too, about what time it was being, I could then take the board figure for return to normal space as a first approximation. What eight-tenths max would give me for initial speed I knew without much thought, and the millisecond at which I’d got response to my brake command, the tester clock and my portable alarm would tell me—had told me, in fact, and identically, and I’d filed the readings, noticing both out of an eye-corner, without having to think about it. I would then have initial speed, and a start from which to measure duration of my braking burn.

  So I could find out just when I’d be at a dead stop, and could at that point (I hoped) turn off the braking I’d just turned on.

  The calculation was a simple one—for a good hand calculator, suitably instructed. I watched my alarm, handier than the tester clock at the rear of the cabin, like a hawk, or a bandsaw, or something or other, and punched in all the stop commands at time zero.

  The tester told me there was no engine function.

  Cheers and applause. I was now somewhere, and I would be at the same somewhere for a while. Step two, at last, coming up.

  I fed in two interactives—the first two I happened to grab, Conversational Saurian and a little thing called Old Earth Burleycue—some Kurt Weill tapes (after reaching for Laura Quink’s Songs from the 20th, and deciding I wasn’t at all in the mood for charming antique folk guitar), and my letter-writer, one at a time. The debug programs told me that the things were doing what my boards showed me they were doing—but the boards insisted they were, each and all, doing their things perfectly. This was not quite the case.

  That was worrisome. There were some fascinating small oddities. The letter-writer worked just as specified, except that it did everything in duplicate. The Saurian tape—I was doing a refresher course, in hopes of getting back to Rasmussen some time soon—seemed to be all right.

  The Kurt Weill bits I tried—Surabaya Johnny and the Army Song—played at something like twice normal speed, boosting everything into a manic sprint and turning the rough baritones of the Army Song into chirping little sopranos. And Old Earth Burleycue did its usual cheery and stimulating job with the stage show, selecting two lovely and accomplished strippers from its varied cast, but kept going into freeze during my visits to the backstage dressing rooms.

  I punched for some beef, rolls, horseradish and the makings for coffee, added in iced mango as a dessert, and was faintly surprised that it all arrived at speed. I made myself a small scratch dinner and thought things over while I chewed.

  Uncertainty is built into space-four, as everybody knows. Figuring out what had done the damage was a job for a mathematician and a space-four theorist, and could wait any amount of time. Figuring out what damage had been done was something else again.

  Circuitry and wave guidance had been hurt, somehow; that much was clear. But what had changed, as far as I could trace, was in response circuitry: speed response for the Weill, singularity for my letters program, rate of response for the Burleycue. I wasn’t getting material out of left field; I was getting the material my boards said I was getting, delivered a little oddly.

  That, I could live with. It gave me some hope that my locator would provide answers I could trust, though possibly not at its usual speed.

  At any rate, it gave me enough hope to punch up the locator again, point it at the surround, and instruct it to tell me where the Hell I was.

  It took four full minutes to respond—not unheard-of, but very unusual. The response time for my rig averages about eighteen seconds; in difficult cases, perhaps thirty-one.

  And the response (I translate freely from the program) was, when it finally did arrive:

  “Damned if I know.”

  I did not scream and curse. Somehow, I’d been expecting as much; whatever had bit me was not, I had been assuming, going to be satisfied with dumping me, say, in orbit around Kingsley, or Alphacent, or within shouting distance of Mars Dome.

  No, it was going to do what it had done—the complete job. If I was going to be lost, it had decided, I was going to be entirely lost.

  The first query for any locator is Where am I? The second is Star Ident. If you need the second, you are in trouble, but how serious the trouble is you can’t know until the thing checks in with a set of idents. Or, of course, doesn’t—if there is nothing whatever that can be identified for H-R placement and spectral sig
nature, you are in more trouble than you ever wanted to imagine.

  Given my locator, and the stats I had lovingly fed into it over many weeks of maintenance, a total lack of star ident would mean that I was sitting somewhere not only outside the galaxy, but (at best) at the further edge of one of the local group. You never do know, but I hoped for better news than that, and I began to get it.

  I was, as I’ve said, eleven thousand light-years (and change) from the furthest-out spot humanity had yet managed—a planet called Debrett, which I’d never visited. It didn’t take me two minutes to find that out; once the locator had begun feeding me star idents, it took three hours.

  Few of the idents were tagged Absolutely Certain. At the distances involved, some fuzz had crept into the readings—and though a completely detailed spectrum is as individual as a fingerprint, I wasn’t getting complete details. The job was a long process of if-then: if that star over there was 1491 in my handbook, and that other one was 2200A, and the third little dot was Haven, then I was right here. If, on the other hand, 1491 and Haven were right, but 2200A was really 590B, I was, instead, over there. And if Haven and 2200A were right, but 1491 was really Cuchinar, then I was someplace else.

  What I had to do was to cross-check a large pile of such triples against each other, tossing out contradictory results as they turned up, and hoping that, in the end, I’d be left with one and only one possible location. Even with a lot of help from the boards, this is not a fast and simple kind of job, and I punched for, and carefully brewed, and slowly emptied, two complete pots of Indigo Hill coffee—why not go with the best?—before I had a location I was satisfied with.

  All right. I was at rest, and I knew where I was resting.

  Next step: find my way back.

  This was going to have to be done through space-four, whether I liked it or not: hopping eleven thousand light-years through normal space would take me something over eleven thousand years, no matter how hard I boosted for how long, and I didn’t feel I had that much time to spend.