More Things in Heaven Page 15

  When he was finished with that, I asked him for more details of his project and learned that he had not only been given an emergency staff to help Chambord maintain the official lie we’d concocted, but also a temporary UN rank one step below Assistant Secretary General, at Cas- siano’s special request. Apart from the cover story and tracking rumored appearances of the crewmen, he was also supposed to damp down speculation about skymonsters, and this, he assured me wryly, was by far the toughest aspect of the job.

  To my surprise, there was even yet no panic, as I’d half-expected. There was, however, a continued nervous argument in progress the world over, especially among scientists, and every paper and news bulletin was laying heavy emphasis on the fact that the experts were giving the problem their fullest attention. For years I’d done my best to discourage people from leaving

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  it to the experts; now I was profoundly glad I hadn’t succeeded.

  But the present situation wouldn’t last. Sooner or later our nerve was bound to snap.

  Brian had told me, back in Quito, that both the Secretary General and the Chairman of the General Assembly had been to confer with the scientists at the spaceport. Knowing this, I found that certain items in the news took on interesting implications. There was a debate, for instance, about the starflight budget for the coming year; it was likely to be up, not down, ostensibly to finance research into the psychological and physiological problems I’d helped Brian to invent and to fund a second flight by Starventure on which possible countermeasures could be tested. In fact, of course, this must be needed to fund the colossal research program already underway, which was being blithely disguised as “routine debriefing and medical care.”

  I felt a kind of irrational, helpless anger at the sky-monsters. They had so completely upset our ideas not only of ourselves but of reality! Was it because people were already failing to be fooled by official deception that so many of them were willing to listen to “Leon”?

  Cork-fashion, I bobbed and spun on a torrent of despair.

  Meantime, we probably had sixty human bodies with inhuman minds at large among Earth’s five billion population. Doing what? Something as innocuous as “Leon,” philosophizing to a chance-gathered audience . . . or something sinister, incomprehensible, dangerous?

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  Late that night, more reports came in for Brian at the Athens police headquarters on Bouboulinas Street, 'faxed from Quito by satellite relay. In a room assigned to us on the top floor, we sorted through them. There were over two dozen altogether, of which the majority were vague and tinged with hysteria. A few, however, had a ring of accuracy, and we concentrated on these. A number of respectable witnesses had described seeing Chandra Dan at a festival in the holy city of Benares; he had spoken to a vast gathering of people—by thousands where “Leon" had addressed hundreds—and his fame had spread like wildfire, some of the papers going so far as to call him an avatar of Krishna. Wisely, the Indian police had taken no action against him, but were keeping him under observation. And another crewman whom I hadn’t met, Yussuf bin Saleem, was reported in Mecca—again, attracting crowds of people and fascinating them with his preaching. (Preaching? Well, I couldn’t think of a better word.)

  Unfortunately the police at Mecca had been clumsier and attempted to take him in for questioning. He had vanished as “Leon” had, under cover of a confused melee.

  “What do you make of all this?” Brian snapped at me. With difficulty I ordered my muddled brain.

  “I have a wild idea,” I said after a pause. It had only this instant come to me.

  "I don’t care how wild it is, I want to hear it.”

  I leaned forward in my chair, staring at the floor. “It’s just a guess . . . but so far we have Athens, Benares, Mecca. Doesn’t that hint at a

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  pattern? All three are centers of human religious and ethical teaching. I’d say we ought to watch for more appearances in Rome, Jerusalem, and any other city from which a great teacher or a school has influenced the world.”

  Brian stared as though I were talking nonsense. Maybe I was, but his expression angered me.

  “Are you serious?" he demanded.

  “Why in hell shouldn’t I be?” I countered and cast around for reasons to convince him. They offered themselves instantly, as though the whole notion had been previously forged in my subconscious. “Look, maybe it was Mrs. Argyros with her reference to Socrates which put this into my head, but regardless of where it came from it makes a cockeyed sort of sense. We’ve been struggling to decide why the aliens”—the term was automatic by now—“should be acting as they are: transferring the crew’s minds into new bodies, borrowing the original bodies to visit Earth. I think there’s an explanation so obvious we’ve overlooked it!”

  “I...” Brian hesitated. “Yes, finish what you were going to say. I think I’m with you, and I’d love to believe you’re right!”

  “Figure it this way,” I said. “We’re working on the assumption that the aliens didn’t know about us until we started to fire our ships through hyperspace. Now suppose we were suddenly confronted by another species that was clearly intelligent, clearly capable of considerable technical achievements: what would be the second thing about them we’d want to investi

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  gate after satisfying ourselves that they were indeed reasoning beings?”

  “Their psychology,” Brian said at once. “Most of all, their attitude toward one another, from which we could try and extrapolate their probable attitude toward ourselves.”

  “Precisely. It would make all the difference to know if they looked on their fellow beings as rivals, or as friends and equals. But it wouldn’t be safe, would it, to generalize about a five- billion-strong species on the strength of a sixty- person sample?”

  “Of course not. To start with, the crew of a pioneering ship like Starventure would be completely atypical. They’d have been hand-picked for qualities not found in every member of the race—adventurousness, self-reliance, exceptional initiative.”

  “Right. But you can’t choose which of this other race you’re going to come into contact with; you have to contact them as a species or not at all. So you’d want to know their ideals, the standards they’re attempting to live up to. And where those standards seemed to you to be inadequate as a basis for friendly contact, you’d try to influence people in your favor before coming out into the open.”

  “Is that what you think is being done to us right now?" Brian suggested. “A sort of—well, advance PR job?”

  “I don’t ‘really think’ anything,” I sighed. For a few moments I’d thought of my idea as an inspiration. Now it seemed to rest on so few crumbs of fact that it felt like a wildly optimistic guess, not a serious working hypothesis.

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  Brian, however, had a thoughtful expression. ‘‘I acted far too quickly,” he muttered. “My only excuse is that we’d had a week of no action at all. How the devil am I going to make our story about impostors square with instructions to the police to leave them completely alone? The rope to hang themselves bit, I guess . . . Well, it’s definite that we’re up against creatures with powers we’ve never dreamed of, so the less we do to offend them, the better. But where’s the borderline between proper caution and open hostility in an alien mind?"

  “How should I know?” I said wearily. “I’m not even sure whether I ought to take my own idea seriously now.”

  “Well, I’m going to,” Brian said with decision. “So seriously, in fact, I’m going to ’fax Rome and Jerusalem right away and warn them to expect crewmen to show up if they haven’t already done so. There’s certainty an Italian on board—what’s his name . . . ? Ugo Martinelli, of course: I remember. And I think there’s an Israeli engineer. Where’s my copy of that handout I showed you?�
� He turned and began riffling through a stack of papers.

  Suddenly, extracting the sheet he’d been looking for, he checked and gave me a sympathetic smile.

  “Sorry, David. You must have been through hell up there at the ship. I didn’t have any business dragging you away from Quito without a chance to rest up after the shock.”

  “I’d have been blind angry if you’d set off for Athens looking for Leon’s body without telling me,” I countered.

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  “Yes, but it’s been a wild-goose chase, hasn’t it? And there certainly won’t be any further developments here for a while. Look, I saw the way you flaked out on the plane. I know you didn’t get any sleep the night before last, and I don’t imagine you slept much when you were aboard the ship. You’re living on your nerves right now. Why don’t you go book a hotel room and sleep the clock around? I’ll keep you in touch if there’s any news. ”

  I got up. “Not a bad idea,” I said. “But I’m not going to catch up on my sleep in a hotel here. I’ll book a couch on a transatlantic express and head back to Quito.”

  “To keep in touch at the center of events?” Brian said. “Or for some—ah—more personal reason?”

  “A more personal reason.”

  “You’re quite right,” Brian nodded. “A man should have more than one other person in the world that he’s close to, and because of what’s become of your brother . . . Well, never mind my giving you advice; you know it all already, I’m sure. She’s a very attractive girl, your Carmen, even if she is a trifle fey. Are you thinking of marrying her?”

  “Thinking,” I said bitterly. “Right now, I don’t even know if I’ll find her again, and if I do find her I’m not certain I’ll recognize her as the same person.”

  XX

  ONE THING to be grateful for, I reflected dully as my cab rolled from the airport toward the city center of Quito, was that we’d grown into the habit of electing supporters of the status quo to govern us. It was scientists, delving deep into the nature of the world, who were suffering most from having it turned topsyturvy. For at least a little while longer we could rely on people whose attitudes were a bit more empirical, including government administrators, pretending that everything was still perfectly normal. After all, when Galileo’s news broke, most people probably waited a moment to see whether the world felt any different, found it didn’t, and kept right on going.

  So the big panic was in the minds of the Lenisters, the Graubmayers and the Sicos. Other folk were going about their business with only occasional pauses for anxiety. Here on the Calle Carpenter, for example, one of Quito’s newest and smartest shopping streets, the crowds were as thick as they always were, and only the odd glance toward the sky or short-lived look of worry betrayed the fact that—

  “Stop!” I shouted at my driver. Reflex made

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  him slam the brakes on, nearly hurling me over his shoulder. He half-turned, framing insults. I threw some bills at him, telling him to wait for me, and leaped out of the cab. Like a madmam I raced up the nearest escalator to the shopping level ten feet above the trafficway. I pushed frantically between the slow-moving shoppers, calling at the top of my voice.

  “Carmen! Carmen!”

  People I jostled swung around to complain; I was already past. I caught sight of her again, twenty paces ahead, apparently not having heard me, for she was walking steadily away. Putting on a spurt which made me nearly dizzy with lack of breath in spite of the oxygen-utilization pill I’d taken before leaving my plane, I managed to catch her up and clutch at her arm.

  Startled, she spun to face me. She was wearing black—an outfit I’d seen before. What I’d never seen before was dirt on her low shoes and bare feet, black rims to her fingernails, her hair hanging in a tangle on the nape of her neck as though she lacked the patience any longer to brush it smooth. She was wearing no makeup, and her eyes were even brighter than usual.

  “David!” she exclaimed, and for a moment my heart hesitated. Then she gave a pleased smile. “Oh, I’ve been looking everywhere for you! I called your hotel yesterday when I found Hermanos, but they said you’d gone away to Greece.”

  “You found Hermanos?” I said, my mind drained to a foolish emptiness.

  “Yesterday morning! I was sure I could, if I

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  could only learn to trust my second sight. Come with me, and I’ll show him to you so you 11 know everything’s all right, so you’ll stop worrying about Leon!"

  Standing here, it was my turn to be jostled and poked by passers-by. I took her hand and drew her to the side of the walk where we would be less of an obstruction. I took a deep unrewarding breath.

  “I’ve seen Leon’s body,” I said. "I saw it in Athens."

  “His . . . body?” Her slim hand with its un- Carmenlike dirty nails went to her mouth. “Oh, David! You mean he is dead?”

  “Worse them dead,” I told her curtly. “The body moves and speaks, but the mind inside isn’t Leon—any more than the mind in what you’re talking about is Hermanos.”

  Her lips a little parted, her eyes fixed on my face, she shook her head. “David, I don’t understand. Who should know Hermanos better than his family—better than I?”

  “You say you’ve seen him. Have you talked to him?”

  “Yes—yes, of course!”

  “Did he recognize you at once? Did his behavior seem normal? Did he sound like your brother when he spoke?”

  “Oh. he says wonderful things! You must hear him—”

  “Answer my question,” I gritted. “Did he recognize you?”

  A flicker of worry came and went behind her eyes. “It had been two years—” she began , defensively.

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  “I thought so. He didn’t know his own sister. Because the thing that moves him like a puppet on strings is not Hermanos, do you hear me?” I was suddenly terrified at my inability to convince her; I was suddenly afraid to trust my own memory of what had happened up at Star- venture. “Your brother is aboard the starship, trapped like mine in an alien body. Didn’t you believe what Suvorov told us? Didn’t you read in the papers or see on TV that there are impostors pretending to be—?”

  Like the shutter of a camera at the end of a time exposure, black disbelief closed over her mind. I broke off. Nothing I could say would reach her. This was as much a stranger in a familiar body as “Hermanos” or “Leon.”

  “Come with me, David,” she said. “I will show you the truth.”

  “Where?” I snapped. “Where is he?”

  “Come with me,” she repeated. “If you don’t see with your own eyes, you will never believe me. I don’t want to say where I shall take you. I don’t want strangers to come, police, people who might interfere.”

  “Then . . My mind raced. “Look, I have a cab waiting on the trafficway below. We can—” “There are radios in cabs,” she cut in. “The driver would have to say where he was going. No, David. We will walk to the place. I came to the city on foot this morning, and I shall go back the same way. It is up to you whether you come or not.”

  She intended to turn away with finality: take it or leave it. But at the last moment she

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  couldn’t; she checked and glanced back with a trace of hope. The appealing light in her eyes broke through my despair.

  I’d been wrong. She wasn’t a stranger. She was the same Carmen. My mistake had been to imagine that I knew her well, when in fact I was perfectly aware she was the only woman I’d ever met who would go on surprising me for a lifetime, not because she would change, but because she was such a complex person. Determined, but not obstinate; fey, but not superstitious . . . right, in uncountably many ways.

  How could I even blame her for insisting that what she had seen was her brother? Was it not more r
easonable to assume that a mind could be altered by a unique experience than to think it had been displaced from its body altogether? She hadn’t had the chance I’d had, to compare a personality to its mere physical envelope. In the same situation, I’d probably have clung myself to the “common sense” explanation.

  "All right,” I said. “I’m coming with you."

  Delighted, she seized my hand in both of hers, and for a moment I almost stopped thinking I was a damned fool.

  I walked beside her as obediently as a well- trained dog. She led me from the Calle Carpenter along the Calle Titov, from the glittering storefronts to the plain, rather makeshift apartment blocks of an artisan quarter which had been thrown up at the time when the spaceport began to bring fame and prosperity to this highland capital city. There were still peasant mar

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  kets here; on stalls each of which prominently displayed a municipal trading license men and women with markedly Indian features offered traditional handicrafts and foodstuffs. The crowds were as dense as those in the Calle Carpenter, but more purposeful. I sensed an air of haste.

  “People seem to be going our way,” I murmured when I finally read a pattern into the flow of the throng.

  “Yes. There was another angel in the sky last night.” She answered absently, as though her mind was on another subject.

  “Angel?" I echoed.

  She caught herself and turned a laughing face to me. “Well, one has to give them some name, I guess!”

  “Do you mean a monster, like the one we saw together from your apartment?”

  “Ah ...” She hesitated. “It doesn’t seem—I mean it doesn’t feel right to call them monsters. Huge shining creatures that move in the heavens—they might as well be nicknamed angels as anything else, mightn’t they?”

  There didn’t seem to be any future in arguing that point. I tried another approach. “Are all these people heading the way we are because something showed up in the sky last night?”