Alien Nation #4 - The Change Read online

  He had always known it, but had not known it. The night had opened a door.

  Except there are some doors that should not be opened. Maanka had a headache. It kept growing worse.

  The open door had revealed to Maanka worlds of possibilities that he had never imagined, possibilities that were no longer possible for Maanka Dak.

  Because of other rules.

  Important rules.

  Not material things. He had the ability to control others to provide him with whatever material objects he might desire. There were none, however, that he desired. The possibilities that were newly revealed to him were things of a more spiritual cast: different views of himself, goals to which he could have aspired, feelings he could have had. All beyond him now.

  Maanka pulled back the blackout curtain, allowing the dirty yellow haze of the new morning to filter into the back of the van. The sun hung apparently motionless, floating in a sea of pollution.

  “What a monument is a star,” he whispered to the emptiness surrounding him. He turned his head and looked through hooded eyes at the equipment he had pieced together since his arrest; machines that he had invested with the programs he had designed over his years at China Lake. He reached out a hand and touched the screen of the holographic imager, the invention of which had brought him to the attention of the world’s health services community. Now they could, in effect, take an organ completely out of the patient’s body, hold it up to the light, and examine it. The organ could be sectioned, its parts function cycled, its composition and condition determined down to the molecular level.

  In recognition of his achievement, the American Medical Association had established a scholarship fund in his name. Back in his cell were plaques, certificates, and framed letters of commendation from medical associations and academies around the world for that and other achievements of his. Before his escape, he had seen none of them. To Maanka they had been props lulling warden, guards, and parole board into a sort of stupor that would allow him to escape and work vikah ta on Stangya.

  He had done things that no one had ever before done. The evidence of that sat before him, silently flashing its lights. Controlling humans, preparing for some kind of invasion from outer space, superior interrogation techniques, this was the monument, clandestine though it would be, that MDQ had held before him.

  Insanity.

  The monument was too small; too well hidden; the need of the author too great to be fed by such concealed testimonials.

  Insanity.

  What of that? What of MDQ’s cover story? So many cures for so many mental and physical conditions? They were possible. He had done the work himself. To learn how to control a human, he had found it necessary to learn how to cure them. If only he could have figured out a new biofilament medium. The answer, he suspected, was somewhere in the enzyme attack on proteins, but he just didn’t have the background to know, even to find out. He, Maanka Dak, could have gone down in the chronicles of Planet Earth as the bringer of health, the end of insanity, the end of so many diseases.

  He could’ve spent those years since the crash studying, learning . . .

  Too late. Too late.

  The new player was on to him.

  There are choices that cannot be taken back.

  Why had that door opened?

  Something before his eyes changed. A flash, a new trace.

  He focused his eyes and looked at the screen. Voice-print identification, a line in yellow letters upon a red stripe: George Francisco. The route identification was from Mount Andarko Hospital to Francisco’s own home. Maanka Dak turned on the audio monitor.

  “Maanka? Maanka?” the voice of George Francisco called. “Maanka?”

  Maanka smiled and activated his collar pickup. “I’m here, Stangya.”

  There was a pause on the other end, and then Francisco said, “Okay, Buck. You can hang up.”

  “Dad, I just—”

  “I know, son. It’s going to be all right. Just hang up.” Another pause, then the receiver at the Francisco home was hung up. “Maanka?”

  The headache was growing worse. “I’m here. Stangya, I want you to know that it was not I who broke into your home last night.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you know who they were?”

  “They carried no identification, but I assume they were under orders from someone connected to MDQ. There were four of them. We took in two alive. Neither one is talking, but all four have organized crime records. The two we captured are looking at a lot of time. Perhaps we can persuade them to testify.”

  Maanka smiled to himself. “Not them. Their guild has an obsession with vikah ta. It’s too bad I can’t implant them for you, although I doubt if it would stand up in court.” He leaned his elbows on the table edge and rubbed his eyes. “I want to know something, Stangya. Will you tell me?”

  “If I can.”

  “Do you know Vuurot Iniko? An Overseer. He’s in the FBI now.”

  “He was with me and my family at the house last night.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “He was seriously wounded, but he’s in fair condition here at Mount Andarko. They expect a complete recovery, if anyone can completely recover after having his guts torn to shreds.”

  Maanka Dak sat back and looked at the trace detector. Nothing was being run on the line. No one was trying anything. “Why did you call me, Stangya?”

  “I want to make a deal with you: I want to swap me for the tivati urih. I want the Niyezian implantation awl.”

  Maanka felt his head split with pain. “That would be for Matthew Sikes, your partner.”

  “That’s right. We’ll meet, you turn over the device to someone there, and I’m yours. The only condition I have is that the vikah ta ends with me. Once you’ve finished with me, it’s over.”

  “You wouldn’t try to con an old con, would you, Stangya?” Maanka Dak shut off the pickup and held his head with his hands. “I don’t understand,” he said to himself. “I don’t understand any of it.”

  Would Stangya try for an ambush?

  A trick?

  It made sense, if anything made sense, but when had anything ever made sense? Only in the depths of deepest madness was there sense. There, the answers could be relied upon not to change.

  Had Stangya gone mad? The player’s hand was in all of this unctuous self-sacrifice, wasn’t it?

  It was all a game, after all. But what was winning to Stangya? Maanka wondered. His own death? Stangya’s partner’s life? His partner’s life in exchange for his own life? Would he throw away his future, his family, for a human? A cop? A piece of that hated authority that they had all sworn themselves to destroy?

  That had changed. Where his obsessive hate for authority had resided, there was but a void. Now, what was winning to him, Maanka Dak?

  The vikah ta?

  It had been the vikah ta, but that had changed. So many things had changed.

  He engaged the pickup. “Stangya, listen. I want you to know something. I’m sorry. About your partner. About Duncan. About Kavit. About Tom Rand. About them all.”

  “Sorry?” Stangya’s voice exploded. “Sorry? How can you say that? How can you kill and injure all those men, women, and children and expect me to believe that you’re sorry! By Celine’s wrath, you monster! You raped Kavit! Do you know what she’s going through right now? My partner is just this side of death! My family, all of those innocent men and women! All of the dead! And you’re sorry?”

  Reaching out his hand, Maanka stared at the sound column as a thousand faces seemed to peer at him, scream at him, accuse him. “Quiet! Quiet! All of you, quiet!” He squinted and pressed his palms against his temples until the faces stopped screaming at him.

  “I don’t know,” he whispered. “I don’t know, Stangya. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. That’s all I know.” He nodded at the faces. They were whispering at him, and he had heard what they had said.

  “Stangya, I know you’re undergoing riana.”

/>   There was a moment of confusion at the other end, an audio stumble over the abrupt change of subject. “Yes,” Stangya said at last. “Yes, I am.”

  “Does it truly make you more intelligent? On the ship the Overseers who’d gone through it said that it made them more intelligent.”

  There was a silence followed by a sigh, a tired laugh. “Yes, in widely spaced touches, I suppose it does. Whether it’s going to be a net gain is still to be decided. Right now I feel quite stupid.”

  Maanka moistened his lips and let his chin rest on his chest. “I find myself in a strange corner. Is it you, Stangya? Are you the new player?”

  “No, Maanka. You’re still light-years beyond me in intelligence.”

  “Who, then? Who is my opponent? It’s not Grazer. Is it Iniko? I remember the watcher. I’ve searched the records. I know he’s in the FBI.”

  “No. He helped me last night, but it’s not Iniko. The player is much more brilliant than the watcher,”

  Maanka Dak seemed to weave in place as reality began losing its grip on planet Earth. “Everything exploded in my face last night, Stangya. Every move, everything I tried, was anticipated. I could not make a move without it having been thought of first by someone else. It’s destroyed something within me. Changed me. Who is the player?”

  “You are, Maanka. You’ve been playing against yourself. All we did was back off.”

  “Back off?”

  “We shut down the command center, moved my family back home, went back to normal operating procedures. The only unusual order given was that officers were forbidden to separate when answering calls, and that’s because of another serial killer we’re after called the Black Slayer. He’s a very unhappy fellow who kills only police officers.”

  “Black Slayer?” Maanka wrestled his headache down to a place where his ears weren’t screaming. “If all he kills are cops, why Black Slayer? Why not Blue Slayer, or Officer Off?”

  “He’s just like you, Maanka. He’s hung up on a label. All he kills are what he thinks are black officers. His label includes anyone with a dark skin, which, thus far, has saved a number of folks who call themselves black, and has cost the lives of seven others, including an officer in Newton whose parents emigrated here from Calcutta, and an overtanned beach blondie on North Figueroa named Poswinski.”

  “What do you mean about me being hung up on a label?”

  “Vikah ta, brother! This is not the ship; this is not Itri Vi. Torumeh and the pain ministers are long dead. Vikah ta is your label, Maanka.”

  “The player! Who is the player?”

  Stangya paused for a moment, then said, “Perhaps there is a player. If it’s anyone, I’d say it’s a fifty-five-year-old human in an aloha shirt named Malcolm.”

  “Malcolm? Is he a genius?”

  “No. He simply uses what he has very well; he remains always teachable. When was the last time you could be taught anything, Maanka?”

  “Forever,” Maanka muttered to himself. “Forever is forever.”

  “Maanka, what about the implantation instrument? The tivati urih. If you’re really sorry for what you’ve done, that could make up for a little.”

  Maanka Dak laughed as everything in the universe suddenly fell into place. The new goals, the new view of himself, the new feelings, they were all still possible. That’s the lesson today, he thought. Nothing is forever.

  He stopped laughing and gasped to get back his breath. “Yes, Stangya. I’ll give it to you. I’ll give you the implantation awl. The Niyezian neural controllers.” He reached out his hand and touched the keyboard he had taken from the corpse of Brick Wahl. “Instructions. All my data. Everything I know. Do you understand, Stangya? Everything I know.”

  “Where? When?”

  “Patience, my brother. Have patience. There are things to do, people to see.”

  “Maanka, there won’t be much point to this exercise unless it happens soon. The doctors at Mount Andarko don’t think they can keep Matt Sikes alive much longer.”

  “Stay close to the phone, Stangya. I’ll call you and tell you where and when to meet.”

  He cut off the connection and took a breath as he slaved a remote and punched in a call. The headache was fading. It was gone.

  C H A P T E R 2 6

  RUMA KAVIT KEPT her gaze away from dark corners. Outside the window she could see the tops of three palm trees moving in the slight morning breeze. When she was released from the hospital, perhaps she’d go on a trip—somewhere quiet. The police therapist, a recovering rape victim herself, said that there were predictable stages of recovery. Denial was her current stage, moving over rapidly into anger. The feelings were scrambled, the pains so much deeper and sicker than the bullet wounds in her leg and arm.

  Time. It would take time.

  Her thoughts drifted back to Duncan. She had known him for less than an hour, yet she had known of him since she was accepted by the academy. He had been an anti-legend; a blue bogeyman. She saw the image of the palm trees smear with her tears, and she chased off the mental shadows once again. She tried to move her leg and winced at the pain in her thigh. The pain in the side of her head from the implant extraction acted as though it would never leave.

  The operation had been successful. There wouldn’t even be a visible scar. The same with her bullet wounds. There would be no visible scars. All of the scars would be inside. A yawning emptiness inside her knew something that others did not: the neural controllers had the potential to reach within the complexities of a nervous system and heal those scars. The strength that was needed to withstand the grieving that needed to be done could be bolstered. Perhaps the need for the grieving itself could be circumvented. Perhaps that might be an interesting area in which to work. The thought of wearing a uniform again was an instant trigger for more bouts of uncontrollable crying. Better to think of something else.

  The door to the private room opened and a nurse looked in. “She’s awake. Go ahead.”

  The nurse opened the door all of the way, revealing a Tenctonese male. The sight of him caused an automatic streak of fear, then anger, then resentment. The man, she recognized, was George Francisco. The fear, anger, and resentment remained.

  He limped over and stopped next to her bed as the nurse left the room, closing the door behind her. Francisco’s face was deeply lined, tired, the eyes sunken. “Officer Kavit, the nurse said you wanted to see me. How do you feel?”

  “I’m mending,” she managed to struggle out. “How’s your partner?”

  George closed his eyes and shrugged. “There’s not much hope unless we can get the killer to turn over his equipment. Is there something I can do for you?” He reached out his hand to place it upon her arm, but she shrank away from his touch.

  “Men aren’t my favorite creatures on the planet right now, Sergeant.”

  “Sorry. I understand.”

  “Understand?” She felt her eyes fill with tears and she damned her own eyes for crying. “How can you possibly understand?”

  “I understand enough to know why you don’t want me to touch you. Do you want me to leave?”

  “Yes! No! No. There’s something I needed to tell you, first. Bill Duncan?”

  “Yes?”

  Ruma Kavit laughed involuntarily. “Duncan. Christ, what a pig. Filthy-mouthed, fat, foul-smelling, bigoted son of a bitch.”

  “He was all of that.” George nodded and winced as he shifted his weight from his wounded leg. “Those cigars.”

  “That after-shave.”

  “Ya wanna bag of otter noses?”

  Ruma laughed again. “I wouldn’t let my daughter marry one, if I had a daughter—”

  “—and believed in marriage,” George completed. “What about him?”

  She turned her head on her pillow until she was looking into George’s eyes. “I found out something about Bill Duncan that you should know. The only reason I’m telling it to you is because it will make Duncan spin in his grave for you to know.”

  “Wh
at?”

  “Bill Duncan was proud of you. Very proud.”

  George’s eyebrows went up. “Are you joking?”

  “No. I’m not joking. If there’s anything in this universe you need to believe, it’s this: Bill Duncan was proud of you.”

  Ruma watched as George turned away for a moment and folded his arms. “You sure I can’t get you something, Officer Kavit?”

  “Nothing. It’s all right. You can call me Ruma, if you want.”

  He glanced back at her. “What are you going to do, Ruma Kavit? Once you get out of here, what will become of you?”

  She turned her head and looked again at the tops of the three palm trees. “Duncan was a pig, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes. He was also one hell of a police officer.”

  The door opened and a uniformed officer stuck in his head and said, “Sergeant Francisco?”

  “Yes?”

  “Telephone call at the nurse’s station. It’s the one you’ve been expecting.”

  “Thank you.” He turned and faced Kavit. “I have to go now. Maybe my partner still has a chance.”

  She reached out her hand. “Good luck, Sergeant.”

  He held her hand in both of his and nodded. “Good luck, Ruma. Good luck to us all.”

  She didn’t release his hand. She’d seen something in George Francisco’s face. “What are you up against, Sarge?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe nothing. Maybe I can buy my partner a chance at retirement.”

  “Remember Duncan’s rule number one.”

  “Right. Get home alive.” He nodded at her. “You’re going to do all right.”

  He released her hand and left the room, the door closing silently behind him. She watched the closed door for a moment, then let the tears come.

  C H A P T E R 2 7

  Rogers Dry Lake,

  Edwards Air Force Base

  “AMANDA, THIS BETTER be good. Middle of the night, stuck in this mobile unit out in the damned desert, freezing my ass off.”

  “Your ass could stand to lose about sixty percent, Jack.”