40
THE PORTRAIT GALLERY
Twenty-four hours earlier Myra Subramanian would have taken an oath that there was only one thing that she desired in the world, and that was to learn that, against all the odds, her daughter was alive and well. That was then. Now she had that word. She even had the word of the emergency crews who had instantly responded to Natasha’s SOS. They radioed to the waiting world that the missing young woman was not only alive and as far as they could determine quite well, but she was now even safe, because they had her in their rockets, already heading for the LEO juncture point of the Skyhook.
That wasn’t enough for Myra. What she wanted now was for her daughter to be in her arms. Not thousands of kilometers away, and with no chance of physically getting there for all the weeks it would take Skyhook to get her home.
But then, that evening, Myra was studying the news screens in the hopes of finding one item that wasn’t either frightening or incomprehensible, when her scream brought Ranjit running. “Look!” she cried, waving at the image on the screen. That nearly got a yell out of Ranjit, too, because what she was looking at was their daughter, Natasha—and not, she was sure, that unreal copy of her Natasha that had spent fifty-odd hours questioning all those members of the human race.
What she was saying Ranjit didn’t know and didn’t at that moment care about. He headed for his study, Myra by his side, leaving the image on the news screen behind. He didn’t waste time trying to get a regular phone call through to the Skyhook car that contained his real returning daughter, either. Rank had its privileges. He called on the executive channels that were open to him as a member of the Skyhook board, and it was less than a minute before he had his own actual daughter looking out at him from her tiny bunk in the car’s radiation-shielded capsule. It took longer than that for the actual Natasha to reassure her mother that this Natasha—hair mussed, bra stained, nothing like the immaculacy of the narrator-Natasha—was really the specific Natasha that Myra had wanted.
She was also, she finally succeeded in persuading her parents, alive and unharmed, though totally unable to say how she had come to wind up in the capsule that she had definitely not been in when it was searched.
That was all good, but not quite good enough to satisfy Myra. Having frighteningly, and seemingly irrevocably, lost her daughter once, she was not prepared to give up the present contact. Might indeed not have done so for hours, except that it was actually Natasha who ended their talk. She looked up from the camera first in irritation, then in startlement, and finally in something that was almost fear. “Oh my God,” she cried. “Is that the copy of me they were talking about? On the news channels—go see for yourself!”
They did, and then they dialed back to the beginnings of the thing’s message. It started with a blaze of light. Then the Natasha figure began to speak without introduction. “Hello, members of the Earth human race,” it said. “We have three matters to communicate to you, and they are as follows.
“One, the member of the Grand Galactics formerly nearby has left this astronomical neighborhood, we suppose to rejoin its fellows. It is not known when it will return or what it will then do.
“Two, our principal decision makers have concluded that you will find it easier to converse with us if you know what we look like. Accordingly, we will display images of about fifty-five of the races most active on behalf of the Grand Galactics, beginning with ourselves, who are known as the Nine-Limbeds.
“Three, and final, the One Point Fives cannot return to their home at present because of inadequate supplies. The Machine-Stored prefer not to leave without them. Both species will therefore come to your planet. Those three species just mentioned include all of the species charged with dealing with the problems arising from your kind. Do not be alarmed, though. The Grand Galactics have rescinded their orders to sterilize your planet. In any case, when the One Point Fives arrive, they will be occupying areas that your people do not use. That ends this communication.”
It did. Myra and Ranjit looked at each other in bafflement. “What areas are they going to occupy, do you think?” Myra asked.
Ranjit didn’t try to answer her, because he had a more urgent question of his own. “What do you suppose they meant about sterilizing our planet?” he asked.
The creatures who called themselves the Nine-Limbeds not only showed all the beings they had promised—over and over, on all the world’s screens—they gave a running commentary. “We are called Nine-Limbeds,” the voice said, “because, as you see, we have nine limbs. There are four on each side used mainly for transportation. The one at the rear is used for everything else.”
And on each screen was a picture of the creature the voice was describing. “It looks like a beetle!” the cook exclaimed. Indeed it did, provided a beetle might wear girdles of bright metallic fabric between each of its four pairs of limbs. As the voice promised, there was another limb at the end of its body, a thing like an elephant’s trunk, Myra thought, but skinnier and long enough to reach to the front end, where there seemed to be a mouth and eyes.
And if the Nine-Limbeds looked bizarre—well, face it, they really were quite bizarre enough for any normal purpose—the next contestants down the runway were markedly weirder still. The second species displayed most suggested something like a skinned baby rabbit, though one of an unhealthy pale lavender color instead of the more familiar pink. (The accompanying commentary referred to them as the One Point Fives, though it was some time before any human being knew why.) The third was the nearest to human-looking (though not very) of mankind’s newly discovered galaxy mates. Some of the species displayed later in the broadcast enjoyed up to a dozen limbs or perhaps even more tentacles (it was sometimes hard to be sure). This third species, though, oddly termed the Machine-Stored, had only the familiar two arms, two legs, and single head. There was no way of judging scale. It could have been marmoset-tiny or circus-freak huge, but it was certainly not the kind of thing one would like to meet on a dark night. It was hideous. In fact the kindest adjective any of the world’s news commentators used to describe it was “diabolical.”
Then the displays got weirder still. The creatures that followed were of every imaginable color, and often of many colors clashing against one another in eye-aching camouflage-like patterns. They had scales or sparse and wispy feathers; they were of every imaginable architecture; and those were only the carbon-based forms. The ones that looked, more than anything else, like stubby alligators in old-fashioned divers’ suits were not that comprehensible, until it was revealed that they came from a world with an atmosphere as brutal as an earthly sea bottom, and the working fluid of their biologies was supercritical carbon dioxide.
Actually, the display that Myra couldn’t help calling “the freak show” didn’t stop with displaying all fifty-five of the galaxy’s most advanced races. It was a continuous performance. Once every one of the species had had its moment of fame on Earth’s screens, the procession started over, again with the Nine-Limbeds. The difference was that this time there was a context. The aliens were displayed along with their banana-shaped spacecraft and other parts of their world, and there was a different running commentary.
It was all interesting, of course. By the third time around, the Subramanians had learned that, measured against the approximate size of one of their spacecraft, the average Nine-Limbed couldn’t be much more than eighteen or twenty centimeters long. And, according to the commentary with the second showing of the Machine-Stored, that name described precisely what they were. They were machine-stored. The biological bodies shown were a historical fact, but now every member of that race survived only in electronic storage. So Myra informed Ranjit as he returned from carrying the sleeping Robert off to bed.
“Huh,” he said, returning to his favorite armchair. “That’s convenient. I guess then you can live pretty much forever, wouldn’t you say?”
“Probably so,” she agreed. “I’m going to make myself a cup of tea. Want some?”
r /> He did. When she came back with the two cups, the screen was displaying one of the Nine-Limbeds removing the fabric from between two of another’s hip joints and then rubbing the exposed flesh with his own ninth limb. “Hey,” Myra said, setting a cup before her husband. “What’s he doing, giving the other one a bath?”
“Maybe changing his oil,” Ranjit said. “Who knows? Listen, all this is recorded, so why don’t we turn it off for now and we can come back to it when we want to?”
“Good idea,” Myra said, reaching out and doing it for him. “I wanted to ask you something anyway. What is it that we haven’t seen in this parade?”
Ranjit nodded. “I know. The ones they were talking about. The ones they call the Grand Galactics.”
“They’re the ones, and they sound important. And yet they’re not showing them to us.”
41
HOME AGAIN
By the time Natasha, the real Natasha, was back in her own bed at the Colombo house, one would have expected that the running commentary delivered to the world by the not-Natasha would be long over. Well, it was…sort of. That is, all sixty-two hours of it had been repeated three times and then stopped, but for reasons of their own the Nine-Limbeds gave encore performances every few days.
The human race did not consider this a blessing. The Nine-Limbeds’ voice-over was not delivered in English only. It was repeated in just about every language and dialect used by any group of people large enough to command some broadcast time somewhere. That was a large number, large enough to tie up much of the world’s satellite links to the detriment of human affairs.
The other effect this had was to give young Natasha plenty of time to study her simulated self as it appeared on the screen—skimpy halter top and errant curl over her left ear and all. It never changed. It wasn’t a spectacle Natasha enjoyed watching, either. “Gives me the cold shivers,” she admitted to her parents. “There I am, saying things I know I never said, and it’s me!”
“But it isn’t, hon,” her mother said reasonably. “They just somehow copied you, I guess so that they could have someone to speak for them who didn’t look like a nightmare.”
“But where was I while they were doing that? I don’t remember a thing! I saw Ron Olsos trying to steal my solar wind, and then all of a sudden I was—Well, I don’t know where. Sort of nowhere at all. Only warm and comfortable—possibly the way I was when I was still inside you, Mother.”
Myra shook her head in puzzlement. “Robert told us you were happy.”
“I guess I was. And then the next thing I knew I was sitting at the controls, yelling for help, with Diana all collapsed around me.”
Myra patted her arm. “And you got help, love, because here you are. And speaking of the Olsos boy, there are four more texts that came in from him while you were sleeping. All saying how sorry he was and asking if he can see you to apologize.”
That made Natasha grin at last. “Sure he can,” she said. “Just not right away. And right now, is there any breakfast?”
For most of the human race those senseless repetitions of the alien roll call were a terrible waste of time and communications facilities. Not for all, though. The tiny church of satanists had seen the pre-storage images of the Machine-Stored and immediately decided that the spiky-furred humanoid was indeed the image of the devil—just as a few million other viewers had at once decided—but, they argued, that wasn’t a bad thing. His Satanic Majesty was to be worshipped, not loathed. Scripture proved it, if read with proper understanding, for Lucifer had been driven from heaven because of character assassination by rival angels. “He isn’t our enemy,” said one of their bishops rhapsodically. “He is our king!”
What the church’s scrawny handful of members, mostly in the American Southwest, chose to believe would not have greatly concerned most of the human race—except for two factors. First, there was that worrisome remark about “sterilizing” Earth. That implied that those alien horrors did have the capacity to wipe humanity out if they chose, and that was not a thing easy to forget. And, second, the satanists weren’t just a handful of nutcases anymore. Even a nutcase knew what the sound of opportunity knocking at the door was like. They grasped their chance. Every satanist who had any status in the organization higher than pew-polisher went immediately on every talk program that would have them. Their hope was that the world was full of other nutcases like themselves who just had never been recruited to Satan worship because they had not yet been convinced there actually was a Satan. The satanists hoped these nutcases would be swung into line by the sight of the demonic Machine-Stored.
They were right. By the third showing of the horrid creatures called Machine-Stored, nearly a hundred thousand instant converts were begging for Satan’s sacraments. By the time of the first rerun, the congregation of the church of satanists was already in the high millions, and two competing—that is to say, heretical—satanist churches were already battling them for membership. Other cults and pseudo-religions prospered as well, but none prospered nearly as much as the satanists.
They were all, of course, crazy. “Or the next thing to it,” Ranjit told Gamini Bandara when he called. “Why are you worrying about it?”
“Because even a crazy person can pull a trigger, Ranj. Isn’t it true that Natasha has had death threats?”
Ranjit thought that over for a moment before he answered. His daughter had been very emphatic about not telling anyone about that, but still—“Well, yes,” he admitted. “Stupid stuff. She doesn’t take them seriously.”
“Well, I do,” Gamini informed him, “and so does my father. He’s ordering twenty-four-hour guards around your house and to go with any of you who goes out.”
Ranjit was shaking his head. “I don’t think that’s necessary—” he began.
“Doesn’t matter what you think,” Gamini said cheerfully. “Dad’s the president now, so he’s the one who gives the orders. Anyway, if it wasn’t the Feds, it’d be somebody else. Your pal Joris Vorhulst is getting threats, too. He’s already got a bunch of armed guards around the Skyhook base. Now he’s talking about putting Skyhook security forces around everybody connected with the project. You included.”
Ranjit opened his mouth to protest—not as much because he couldn’t stand the idea of being guarded twenty-four hours a day as because he anticipated his daughter’s reaction—but Gamini didn’t give him the chance. “So you see, Ranj,” he said reasonably, “it’s going to happen. There’s no sense in fighting it. And, you know, it just might save all your lives.”
Ranjit sighed. “How long?” he asked.
“Well, until those One Point Fives get here, at least,” Gamini said thoughtfully. “After that, who knows?”
And that was a really good question, Ranjit admitted to himself. Leaving only that quite different question of how he was going to tell Myra and Natasha about the plan.
The chance came almost at once. Once off the phone with Gamini, he went looking for his family and found them on the back porch with binoculars in the dark, studying the constellation that held much of the Oort cloud. Passing the glasses to Natasha, Myra said to her husband, “They’re getting close. Tashy? Give your father a look.” And she did. Ranjit had no difficulty in finding the bright splash of light that—so said the experts—was the exhaust of the deceleration rockets of the approaching One Point Five armada. It wasn’t the first time he had seen it. Even before the announcement that these One Point Fives were coming to stay, Earth’s giant telescopes had been providing much brighter and more detailed images for the world’s news screens.
But they were getting closer.
Ranjit lowered the glasses and cleared his throat. “That was Gamini on the phone,” he said, and relayed what had been said. But if he had expected his daughter to object to grown-up interference with her life, he had been mistaken. She listened patiently, but all she said was, “These guards are to protect us against the nut satanists, right? But who”—she waved at the gentle starry patterns overhead?
??“is going to protect us from them?”
That was the question the whole world was asking—asking itself and even trying to ask of the invaders, as half of the world’s most important people began talking into microphones that beamed their question in the direction of the approaching armada. There were many questions, covering their plans, their intentions, their reasons for coming to Earth in the first place—many, many questions, in many languages, from many people great and small.
They received no answers at all.
This wasn’t easy for the human race to handle. All over planet Earth—and in the lava tubes of the moon, and in orbit, and wherever else human beings had established a foothold—people were showing the strain of what was coming. Even the Subramanian family was not immune. Myra was biting her nails again, as she hadn’t done since her early teens. Ranjit was spending hours on the phone to almost every important person he knew (and that was a lot of important people), on the chance that any of them might have some wisdom to share that hadn’t occurred to himself. (They didn’t.) Meanwhile, Natasha was obsessively trying to teach young Robert how to read Portuguese. And then one morning, while they were all at breakfast, there was a sudden eruption of raised voices from outside. When Ranjit opened the door to look, what he saw was four of their uniformed guards with their guns drawn and pointed at half a dozen strangers. Well, not all strangers. Most of them were young, scowling, their hands in the air, but in their center was someone whom, though somewhat older than the last time he’d seen him, Ranjit recognized at once. “Colonel Bledsoe,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
The situation took a little negotiating. The way it worked out, Lt. Col. Bledsoe (retired) was allowed to come into the house, although only with the captain of the guard standing by with his gun in his hand. Bledsoe’s escort remained outside, sitting on the ground with their hands on their heads, with the rest of the Sri Lankan detail making sure they stayed that way.