Alien Nation #4 - The Change Page 18

  When Buck said nothing, the man turned slowly, squatted down and picked two pale blue blossoms from the nearest bed. As he stood he handed the blossoms to Buck. “I have to talk to your father, kid. While I’m talking to him, I want you to take these, go to the back of the garden where there’s a stone bench; I want you to sit your narrow ass down on that bench and rethink the flower and the weed.”

  “But you’ve given me two flowers.”

  Malcolm Bone lifted his hand, pointed toward the back of the garden, and bellowed, “Go!” Buck walked a few steps, and Malcolm said after him: “A hint. What you’re looking for isn’t in your hand or out there; what you’re looking for is inside your own skin.”

  When Buck at last dragged himself out of sight among the plants, defiantly staying away from the granite bench, Malcolm turned to George. “How’d he injure his head?”

  “Saving my life. He took a bullet meant for me.”

  “He’s a good kid. Is the wound serious?”

  “It’s not a serious injury, but it’ll leave a permanent scar.”

  “What a wonderful scar to have,” Malcolm Bone declared. “It’s like a medal for saving his father’s life. Every time he sees it, he can remind himself of a good thing he did.” The man raised an eyebrow and looked skeptically at George. “Providing you were worth saving. Were you?”

  “I think so,” George answered, his anger making Malcolm Bone’s outline appear tinged with red.

  “Good. Then, what a wonderful scar to have.” Malcolm gestured with his fingers for George to continue, and George told the story of the Ahvin Yin, Maanka Dak, and the vikah ta that had already cost so many lives. Malcolm listened without comment, and by the time George had finished, they were inside one of the vo’s comfortable sitting rooms that opened onto the garden. While George sipped a cup of tea, Malcolm seemed to stare off into space. After a moment of this, he turned to George.

  “Did you want to know about riana?”

  George sat upright. “Yes. I believe I’ve fooled myself long enough.”

  “Okay. Good.” The Hila’s eyebrows went up. “Understand, man, it does mean your child-bearing years are over. Adios, sayonara, toucus, and that’s the way it goes. It’s a lot like female human menopause in that respect, except the physical and mental symptoms are quite a bit more bizarre.”

  “Blindness, hallucinations?”

  “You’ve gotten a few episodes of the light show?”

  “Yes.”

  Malcolm nodded. “Okay, great. Then it’s just about over. You might get a few more bouts, but they shouldn’t last for more than a couple of days. Until you’re sure they’re over, though, I’d hang up the gun and let someone else do the driving.”

  “That much I already had figured out.”

  Malcolm scratched the back of his neck and frowned. “Now where was I?”

  “Symptoms.”

  “Yeah.” Malcolm leaned forward and pointed at George. “Some of those mental symptoms are things you can change.”

  “Change? What? Change how?”

  “George, if you had to describe your feelings about riana with one word, what word would you pick?”

  “Terror.” The answer leaped from George’s lips before he realized it. He paused to reconsider his answer, and when he had, he nodded and repeated, “Terror. Riana then you die. Right?”

  “You tell me.”

  George looked into his feelings. “You can no longer breed, physically you enter a period of decline. You cannot perform as well, and the costs of maintenance increase, reducing the net return. Riana then you die.”

  “That’s something you can change, George.”

  “How?”

  “Man, everything you just said in the present tense is ancient history. It’s the past. The Overseers are emptying garbage cans for Lupini and Company, the ship is cut up and stuck in a museum someplace, and you live in a place that makes discrimination against someone because of age against the law.”

  George pondered what Malcolm had said. When he was finished, George shrugged and held out his hands. “The feeling is still terror.”

  “You ever hear the saying that a ten-mile walk into the woods is a ten-mile walk back out?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you’ve heard it now. Time takes time. The point is that it took you a lot of years to learn to feel the way you do about riana. It’s going to take some time to unlearn those feelings and begin feeling good about it.”

  “Good about it? How can anyone feel good about riana? I love children. Nothing has ever made me feel more fulfilled than conceiving and carrying my children.”

  “You’ve got children, George. More than that, the world is filled with children. No loss there. As far as actually conceiving and carrying children, part of riana is a gradual increase in the meaning and pleasure of lovemaking.”

  George’s eyebrows went up. “Really?”

  “Would your Hila lie to you, George?” Malcolm grinned and clasped his hands over his belly. The grin faded and the man nodded. “As for no longer being able to carry your own children, there are compensations.”

  “What could compensate for that?”

  “Well, the way it was explained to me, George, you know that burst of brilliance, that super mental clarity you’ve been getting glimpses of recently?”

  “You mean that amazing intelligence that fills in the cracks between those continents of absolute stupidity I’ve been experiencing? Yes,” he replied warily, “what about them?”

  “That’s a peek at what your mental abilities will be like when you’ve gone through the changing all five or six times over the next sixty or seventy years.”

  “You mean I’ve got to go through this again?”

  Malcolm nodded. “Sure, but the remaining times won’t be quite so spectacular. And, like I said, it’s all finished in the next fifty or sixty years. Maybe much sooner. Here at the vo we’ve heard from dozens who’re going through the same thing, and the one thing you all have in common is that you’re doing your first riana on average eighteen to twenty years earlier than when you were back on the ship. No one’s figured out why yet. The air, pollen, L.A.’s water, rap music, it could be anything.”

  “Does that mean life span is also shortened?”

  “Unknown.” The Hila’s eyes misted over for a moment.

  “Is there something wrong?”

  Malcolm shrugged and raised his eyebrows. “Nobody’s got a lock on the next ten minutes, George. I could be watching sunsets a hundred years from now or this second could be my last.” He glanced at his hands then shifted his gaze to the garden. “What could be safer than working in a grocery store? Stacking cans, doing inventory, and punching a cash register for a seventy-year-old grandmother. That’s where my son was killed in the ’ninety-two riots. He was just seventeen years old. My boy’s skin was very light-colored,” said the man, his voice cracking. “He was working for a Korean-American. We and they, us and them. The store was looted, my boy was killed along with the owner of the store, and the whole thing was torched. I spent quite a while trying to figure out who to hate: cops, gangs, Koreans, the rich, the poor, the media, the government. Us and them. Us and them.” His lips parted in a sad smile. “Red and yellow, black and white, we aren’t labels in his sight. I’m grateful your son is still alive, George Francisco.”

  He shook his head, blinked his eyes, and appeared to throw the whole thing temporarily off his back. “Back to today, George. Every time you go through the changing, your mental speed will increase. It’s like having another card thrown into a computer, expanding the memory, increasing the speed. As I said, riana has its compensations.”

  “Was Buck right, then? Are the Tenctonese as a race more intelligent than humans? They certainly do better in school.”

  Malcolm Bone looked out of the window onto the garden and watched Buck walk the paths among the trees, shrubs, and plants. “ ‘Intelligent’ is one of those labels, George. To me all it means is what you
do with the equipment you got. The statistical frog cutters, on average, figure Tencts have a little faster equipment than humans. What operators do with the equipment they have is something else, though. There are a lot of ‘thems’ that do better than the current ‘us’ depending on what someone wants to make out of it. But the winners of the past two national spelling bees were human boys. Does that make humans smarter than Tencts? Does that make boys smarter than girls? Flowers and weeds, George.”

  George Francisco nodded. “All it means is that two human boys worked very hard and won their respective spelling bees. They used what they had very well.”

  “See how smart you’re getting?” Malcolm said with a grin. “One guy I threw out of here had a different response when I told him about the spelling bees. His response was to ask me, ‘Were they black or white?’ ”

  George laughed, then paused, then frowned. “Incredible,” he muttered.

  “What’s incredible?”

  “What you said about the person you threw out for asking if the boys who won the spelling bee were black or white. The first thing that popped into my mind was to ask, ‘Was he black or white?’ ”

  “As a matter of fact, he was sort of between a Malaysian beige and a Chippendale rose.” Malcolm raised his eyebrows and closed his eyes. “A ten-mile walk into the woods, George,” Malcolm Bone reminded him. The corners of his mouth turned down as he held out his hands and looked back at the garden. “Anyway, neither the Tencts or the humans use more than ten percent of their mental abilities, so I don’t figure who’s the smartest has much meaning.”

  Without taking his gaze off Buck, the Hila said, “George, have you solved the mystery of the flower and the weed?”

  “I thought I had, until we had this little talk.”

  “What is it?”

  “A flower is a weed that someone decided to keep,” George answered. “A weed is a flower somebody decided to throw away. There are no weeds; there are no flowers.”

  Malcolm nodded. “You got it.” He glanced at George. “You understand why Buck has to learn to say the same thing his own way?”

  “Yes.” George looked through the window, and among the several persons walking the paths was what looked to be an incredibly old human woman who was moving along with the aid of a walker. Over her pale blue morning dress she was wearing a bright red T-shirt printed in green, yellow, and silver, with huge letters that read: SMART RAT. “Is she a Hila too?”

  “She’s a student. Once she figures out the flower and the weed thing, I expect she’ll be offered a position as an Elder here. She has over ninety years of experience to offer. She probably won’t take it, though.”

  “Why do you suppose that?”

  Malcolm turned from the window and leaned his elbows on his knees as he faced George. “Her name’s Molly Grey. She’s hung up on a label: age. Her label tells her that the older she gets, the stupider, uglier, and more useless she gets. As a result, the older she gets, the stupider, uglier, and more useless she becomes. Things got to where she could hardly remember her own name.” He looked out the window and smiled as Molly bent over to touch a rhododendron blossom. “You ever hear of the smart rat, dumb rat study years ago?”

  George frowned and harnessed his new abilities to retrieve an obscure bit of data. “That was the study where they found that a label stuck on a study group or sample will predetermine the results of the study?”

  “That’s the one. Tell a heap of grad students the bunch of rats they have to put through their maze is stupid, and the results will show that that bunch of rats is stupid. They did it with human students too. Instead of rats, they used kids. They told one teaching unit their kids had IQs in the eighties and the other unit that their kids had IQs of well over a hundred. Sure enough, the eighties group could only do eighty work and the hundreds bunch did hundred work. Both groups of kids were the same.”

  Malcolm nodded toward Molly Grey and her smart rat T-shirt. “She’s working on solving her own version of the flower and the weed. With her, there are no races; only people. The divisions are according to age. The classes aren’t black and white or rich and poor. They’re young and old.”

  George frowned and leaned back in his chair. “Buck is just the opposite. He’s almost reverent of the aged. He considers age where wisdom resides.” He looked at Molly Grey and studied her as she moved her walker painfully down the path. “Maybe she and Buck will meet. They have much to learn from each other.”

  “Anything’s possible,” Malcolm answered. “We all have much to learn from each other.”

  “You haven’t said why you think she wouldn’t take on the job of Hila.”

  “Simple. Because of her dumb rat label, there’s a lot of living she hasn’t done. For over thirty years she’s only gone out of her home four times for medical emergencies. Now that’s what I call doing hard time. Once she gets free of that label, she has a lot of catching up to do. I wouldn’t put it past Molly Grey to make Arnan Iri take her up some mountain somewhere and send her down strapped to a snow board.”

  Malcolm paused for a moment, turned his head, and faced George. “Do you see the smart rat T-shirt you and the rest of the cops put on Maanka Dak’s back?”

  Taken back for a moment, George’s eyebrows went up as he tried to hammer out the meaning of Malcolm’s question. “He is smart. Not just smart; he’s brilliant. The things—”

  “No doubt, George, no doubt. But I’m not talking about what he is. I’m not talking about what he thinks of himself. I’m talking about the label you and the cops put on him. See, it’s not how the label makes him act; it’s how the label makes the police department act. That’s the thing you people can control. By himself, Maanka Dak is just one guy on the run without a friend in the world. But he scared the shit out of everybody with the way he busted out of China Lake, didn’t he?”

  “That’s putting it mildly.”

  “And the next thing you know, he’s the single most important threat to life on earth as we know it. After you stuck that label on him, he became that.”

  “I think you’re overstating things a bit,” George said.

  “Oh, yeah? What’s the first thing you people did when you decided to track him down and nab him?”

  “The police?”

  “No, the El Segundo Center for the Farting Impaired. Yeah, the cops. What’d they do?”

  George held out his hands. “You mean setting up the command center?”

  “Yeah, I mean setting up the command center. You made him brilliant. If you’d left the communications the same, he never would’ve been able to tie into everybody’s lines and control them without owning the phone company. But to keep the smart rat down, you gathered all the wires in one place and handed the plug to Maanka Dak. I’m sure the guy has a few neurons chugging away up there, and I bet he got a whole row of gold stars in alien kindergarten up there in the ship, but you yahoos make him look like the brain that ate Chicago.”

  George frowned as he thought of something. “My wife and daughters.”

  “What about them? You give ’em some kind of special protection?”

  “They’re in a safe house.” He looked up at Malcolm. “A super safe house. The department went out of its way to make certain no one could trace them. The place doesn’t even have a telephone, so it wouldn’t appear in the phone company records.”

  “And how many places in L.A. don’t have phones?”

  “Thousands and thousands.”

  Malcolm nodded. “And how many of them don’t pay any property taxes, or pay them through the police department budget and have the funds rebated?”

  George frowned as he intertwined his fingers. “And how many of them have three or more unmarked police cars parked in the neighborhood? Dumb rat, dumb rat, dumb rat.”

  Malcolm Bone stretched his arms over his head then nodded as he clasped his hands over his belly. “Don’t be too hard on yourself. Your boy Maanka has a couple of big blind spots too. He’s got a big smar
t rat T-shirt on himself, for one thing.”

  “Isn’t that good?” George asked as he gestured toward Molly Grey.

  “It can be used for shaking things up, for shattering dumb rat labels, but it’s no view of the real world. Molly’s going to have to ditch that shirt before she can be healthy. See George, wisdom is beyond labels. It’s light years past black, white, wrong, right, smart, dumb, us, and them. Wisdom is seeing things for what they are and accepting that it is so.”

  George allowed the silence of the room to repeat the Hila’s words. When he had opened his entire mind to hear them, he said, “Hila, this is a fine place. The Rama Vo; it’s a fine place. I think I’d like to return.”

  “The door’s always open.”

  George looked at Malcolm. “You stated that Maanka had two blind spots. His view of his own brilliance was one. What’s the other?”

  “The vikah ta, of course. The destruction of you and the memory of you. It’s a dumb rat program running, and ruining, a great piece of equipment. You’re the label he’s hung up on, George.”

  “That’s it?”

  Malcolm grinned. “It’s an edge. Look, what’s the first priority of the cops?”

  “To catch or kill Maanka.”

  Malcolm nodded. “Yeah. You see, if Maanka Dak’s only goal was to escape, I wouldn’t give the LAPD one chance in a million of catching him. A flea gets around a whole lot easier than an elephant, and Maanka is one smart flea. But, see, escaping isn’t his first priority. Killing you and the memory of you is his big goal, and that’s where you’ve got him. See, all you got to do is switch the label tables on him.”

  “You make it sound very simple.”

  “Nothing complex about it. One thing, though. When you switch those labels, you’re probably going to disrupt that guy’s way of seeing things. It could change how he looks at you, at himself, at the universe.”

  George looked through the window at the garden and saw Buck talking with Molly Grey. They were splashed with iridescent purples, reds, and golds, but George knew that the color distortions would pass with time. Besides, he knew they were not real. He saw them, yet he knew and could act as though they were not real.