Diplomatic Act

Chapter Two

Richard was a creature of habit.

He embraced a number of comforting bits of routine, but the walk up the hill behind his house had both an end-of-the-day and a start-of-the-day familiarity that had been part of his life since he and Megan had moved here four years ago. Technically he lived at the end of a cul-de-sac, but the winding little road actually continued on up the hill that loomed above his house like a purple-gray monolith, a path into what he thought of as his own little patch of wilderness. Every evening before turning in, he let himself and a bouncingly eager Jimbo out of the house and turned right. A steel barrier had been placed at the end of the drive, but the road kept going, transformed from asphalt to gravel, then to deeply rutted dirt, twisting ever upward between sheer rock and dirt escarpments that in places had been lightly plastered over with cement to keep them from washing away and into the civilized lands below.

That was how Richard thought of it as he trudged up the dirt road that evening with Jimbo dashing and frolicking ahead. Behind him was civilization. Up here, it was possible to imagine that he and Jimbo were a million miles from traffic, studio execs, bean counters, polysyllabically wordy writers, I-really-oughta-be-in-features directors, and fifteen-percent-of-the-gross incompetent personal managers. Above and ahead, the road twisted higher through a sharp, S-shaped double-switchback into terrain that might have been primordial wilderness had it not been for the road itself and the cement erosion barriers. At one point, the road swung abruptly around a curve past a guard-railed overlook. From there, he could see the rooftops of the houses lining the box canyon far below and, beyond, the flat and colored-light glitter of after-dark San Fernando Valley spread out like a psychedelic carpet vanishing into the late-evening smog on the horizon.

The sky was as clear as he'd ever seen it in L.A. The stars were out, all five of them . . . no . . . six, a bonus, and the moon was half-full high overhead, embedded in a silvery halo. He liked the stars, even though it was hard to see more than a handful from here. They created a mood, helped him focus on his character.

"We are destined for the stars!" he cried, putting on the slight accent he used to flavor Harmon's speech, emoting as he would later in front of the cameras. "Together, we, your people and mine, will probe deeper into the Great Beyond."

He paused, silently pacing off the seconds it would take Jeremy Winston to deliver his lines. Humans have to keep reaching out, blah, blah, blah . . . opening up new frontiers, blah, blah . . . new worlds, and new civilizations, blah . . .

"True, my human friend, true," Richard said. "And maybe, just maybe, there's hope for all of us yet in this large and wonderful universe."

He held character just a moment longer, then sagged, closing his eyes. What incredibly stilted, mouthy, tang-toungling bilge. . . .

Richard often practiced his lines up here, out where no one could hear but Jimbo. It was a chance to be alone, away from Hollywood's urgent and chaotic insanities, to go over the day's shooting script, to try some things out. He was having trouble with these lines, though. Was it his imagination, or was the writing becoming steadily worse?

"What we really need," he said, maintaining Harmon's accent, but ad-libbing now for his own amusement, "is a nice, decent little war. An alien invasion! Perhaps I could talk R.M. into coming up with a nasty, warlike alien race, just for a change, instead of all this sweetness and light."

Something crunched in the darkness beneath his feet. He stopped, looking down, then stooping to see in the silvery moonlight. Odd. The thin shell of cement holding back part of the hillside had cracked and crumbled, spilling fragments, rock, and dirt onto the roadway. That often happened when there'd been an earthquake, but he'd felt nothing today, and the avalanche hadn't been here this morning, when he'd walked this road last. What had caused it?

"Woof!"

"What is it, Jimbo?"

The golden retriever was fifty yards ahead, at the spot where the road crested the hill, then descended into a deep and tightly circumscribed valley. The road's S-curve, in fact, started at the base of a man-made dam, looped away and up, then back and up still more, coming out at the top of the valley behind the dam's concrete intrusion into his wilderness. Behind the dam, the valley was in fact a dry lake bed, filled with sagebrush and weeds in the summer and turning into a real lake only during the rainy season, when it helped keep the box canyon below and its pleasant little houses from vanishing beneath a sudden neighborhood renovation program--a swift-flowing flash flood.

Jimbo was standing in the road, studying something in the lake ahead with keen interest. He started ahead, stopped, looked back at Richard with a questioning expression, leaped ahead again, backed up. "Urr-urf?" Something down there sure interested him. . . .

Richard was making his knee-weakening way up the last, short stretch of steeply canted dirt road when he saw the flying saucer.

At first, he couldn't be certain of what he was seeing, exactly. It looked like a spaceship rising above the crest of the hill directly ahead, as big and black and massive as a barn-sized boulder of pure coal. Quite unlike barns, boulders, and coal in general, however, it stubbornly persisted in hovering fifty feet above the ground, in glorious defiance of the laws of both physics and anything even remotely like common sense.

And yes, it was saucer-shaped, in an oblong, twisty, and modern-art kind of way. Red and blue lights pulsed along the rim, chasing one another in patterns that might have had meaning if Richard had been able to speak colored lightese. He might have noticed that more lights were coalescing on the bottom of the thing, forming words . . . if he'd been able to think anything more coherent than ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod. . . .

"Urf!" Jimbo sprang ahead, vanishing down the slope descending into the dry lake. Richard couldn't take his eyes off that hovering impossibility.

hi there, the lights said. He finally noticed them.

Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmy . . .

The lights changed, pulsing brightly, the letters shifting into new words.

no fear, they said now.

A plea for communication, beginning with the time-honored injunction that he shouldn't be afraid of them? A declaration that, no matter how big and strange and obviously powerful they were, or how small and knee-quiveringly insignificant he was, the occupants of the spaceship weren't afraid of him in the least? An advertising campaign of some kind?

Of course! His mind steadied, with the cold, nasty shock of an adrenaline-charged return to sobriety. There was always a rational explanation for this sort of thing, if you just looked hard enough. This had to be some kind of practical joke, right?

"All right . . ." he said, but the words came out as a dry-mouthed squeak. He cleared his throat, swallowed hard, licked his lips, and tried again. "Okay, Charlie! Steven! You've had your joke!"

He looked up into the night sky, searching for the helicopter that must be supporting that thing. That's how they'd "flown" the flying saucer at the conclusion of the L.A. Olympics, back in 1984. Normally, hovering and/or flying saucers were the province of the computer gurus who did most of the stranger SFX for science fiction shows these days, but he could imagine several ways that what he was seeing now could be faked.

The trouble was, first, that an effect this good had to be damned expensive. The money for helicopter and pilot alone would be . . .

Besides, nothing hung overhead but the moon and a few lonely stars. No helicopter. No booms. No way to keep that thing suspended silent and motionless.

no fear.

Okay. His first thought had been that some of the guys at the studio were playing an elaborate gag on him. His second was that it was an advertising stunt. No fear? It had to be!

But this revision in his thinking still failed to produce a helicopter, or any other way of explaining how the damned thing was floating there in midair, without propellers, jets, onboard movies, miserly bags of peanuts, or the other noisy appurtenances common to most Earthly aircraft with which Richard was familiar.

Jimbo was back, bounding up and over the crest of the hill with that excited expression on his tongue-lolling face that said, "Hey! Come lookit what I found!"

Richard took several steps forward, wondering if Jimbo needed comforting and wondering why he looked so darned happy and excited instead of scared out of his doggy mind. He needed comforting right now, he knew, and maybe a stiff jolt of reality to bring him back to a somewhat more logically grounded Earth than he seemed to be currently inhabiting. Goldens, of course, in common with most other canine breeds, had little need for logic of any variety.

Richard took a deep and somewhat shaky breath. Maybe if he ignored the thing in the air, it would just go away. That, of course, would be best for all concerned. The thought occurred to him--fleetingly and with no serious consideration attending it--that he ought to report the thing to the police or the Air Force or his agent or somebody. The trouble was, he could already picture the newspaper headlines that would attend such a report.

sci-fi actor sees ufo!

hollywood actor claims visit by flying saucer!

Yeah. Right. Not even Barney Rafferty . . . hell, not even his press agent would come up with a cornball piece of hoke like that.

Panting a little, he reached the crest of the hill, a spot from which he could look down into the dry valley behind the dam. He groaned, closed his eyes, then opened them again. It figured. There was another spaceship there, smaller than the one overhead, but every bit as improbable . . . more so, in fact, since instead of floating in the air, which was an act usually associated with unidentified flying objects, this one appeared to be sinking slowly into the ground, something not normally associated with flying at all. He rubbed his eyes, then stared harder, trying to make out details in a night relieved only by the glow from the airborne spacecraft. It was sinking into the ground, as if normally solid earth had momentarily become as easy to descend through as water.

And there was much worse. A figure, a man, was climbing toward him up the slope.

It was all Richard could do to hold his ground. It was too dark to see the man clearly, but there was something familiar about him, about the way he was walking . . . about the way the moonlight gleamed from that high, round, naked dome of a skull and long, white hair. . . .

The man reached the top of the hill a few yards away, dusted himself off, then stepped closer, and Richard stared for a horrified instant into the eyes of his television alter ego, Harmon. It was, he thought wildly, just a little too much to be believed. If he'd seen himself, an exact double of Richard Faraday, well, that was something that could be believed, wasn't it? How many movies had come out of Hollywood in the past fifty years where exact alien duplicates had shown up to wreak havoc in human affairs?

But this was a duplicate of him as a TV character. He had the feeling that somebody was callously breaking all of the rules, and leaving him with the bill. . . .

"So, is that what you really look like?" the Harmon-duplicate said. "Or this? We've had some disagreements about the matter."

"Ah-wha . . . Ah-wha . . ."

Richard closed his mouth with a snap. He'd meant to ask what was going on and who the Harmon-duplicate was and why they were playing this particularly twisted and elaborate practical joke and why an advertising agency would go to so much trouble to push its no fear logo in the face of one lone and very scared television actor out in the middle of nowhere but, understandably, perhaps, that had not been what had come out. He shook his head and tried again.

"I . . . uh . . . wha?"

That wasn't much better, was it? Somehow, standing out here on the side of a mountain under the stars with two flying saucers--no, make that one flying saucer and one burrowing saucer--was not exactly conducive to meaningful conversation. The Harmon-duplicate was holding something that looked like a pocket calculator, but the way he was moving it up and down and back and forth suggested something more sinister than a sudden need to whip off some fast long division.

A dazzling shaft of light speared the earth, originating in the belly of the hovering saucer, an effect Richard had last seen rendered in an episode of The X-Files, and which he knew for a fact had cost several tens of thousands of dollars to produce. Of course, the X-Files effect had been more convincing, which suggested that this one wasn't as expensive . . . but by this time he had the definite feeling that he was not looking at special effects. This was real.

Of course, there were still several possible ways of describing reality and what it was doing to his mind just now, and how. Unfortunately, as the floating spaceship settled silently to the ground, he couldn't think of any of them. He didn't do drugs and he hadn't had a drink since lunch, and then just a single martini, dry, with a twist. There was, therefore, no reason he could think of for his mind to be playing such elaborate tricks on him, not unless it had simply had enough and gone around the bend without bothering to leave him an explanatory note.

"Ah . . . wha?"

He heard a noise to his right and turned, eyes wide and staring. Three red eyes stared back in a vertical line down an egg-shaped head that, by the light from the hovering spacecraft overhead, looked like pale translucence stretched over shadowy gray bone and blue muscle. Ribs--and other, more disturbing things--were faintly visible through the wall of its chest. Was that . . . was that a heart he could see beating in there? Wait a second. Two hearts! And it/they was/were in decidedly the wrong place/s. . . .

Where had it come from? No . . . strike that. He knew, because a second creature just like the first was walking out of a near-palpable glare of X-Files radiance. A door was open in the side of the thing, and they were coming for him.

Beam me up, Scotty. . . .

No! Wait! On second thought, that's why they were here, wasn't it? He could feel that, sense it somehow. They were here for him. No, don't beam me up!

One of the translucent creatures closed in from the left, the other from the right. The first raised something unspeakable in its long-fingered X-ray of a transparent hand.

"Don't be afraid," the creature said in lightly accented English. It sounded, in fact, a lot like his Harmon voice. "We need to speak, you and we."

"We need your help, actually," the Harmon-duplicate said.

That, for Richard, was quite enough, and then some. When the obvious products of a deranged mind ask for help, you know you're the one who needs help. He started to turn away, trying to run. There was a flash, felt more than seen as a kind of delicious shudder that tickled up the back of his skull.

Richard wanted to scream, but he couldn't make a sound. Jimbo, sitting nearby with an appalling lack of concern about the whole affair, watched curiously as his master sagged silently to the ground. "Rrrrr . . . urf?"

The duplicate-Harmon reached down to pet the dog, and Jimbo's tail wagged in joyful doggy acceptance of a caressing hand. Richard remembered reading somewhere that it wasn't that goldens weren't loyal; it was just that they were loyal to everyone. Jimbo padded over to Richard, snuffled gently, and licked him on the side of the face.

Then the night closed in completely, smothering terror, consciousness, and wet cheek alike.

Dahnak stood on the hillside, watching as Vanandra and Thujan floated the Eldar's body into the ship and left him alone, save for the four-legged carnivore that had accompanied the subject up the path. His own ship was almost completely submerged now in the hard-packed ground of the dry lake bed. A moment later, the other ship rose from the ground, wobbled for a moment, and then it was gone, a star receding rapidly toward the zenith near this planet's moon. He let out a long, whistling sigh. At last!

"Urr-rr-rurf?" the carnivore said in a decidedly puzzled fashion. Dahnak turned his suit's mindlink on the creature, seeking to establish a more direct communication.

happyhappyexcitement!smellsfunnyhappyfood?excitement! smells--

Dahnak took a step backward, breaking the link. The surge of raw emotion and feeling from the creature was overpowering. Reaching up to the oddly shaped face he was wearing, Dahnak tugged at one of the fleshy flaps jutting from either side of the head, adjusting both the overall volume and the emotion filters.

happyhappyfood?excitement!smellsfunny--

Well, the volume was better, but he was still getting little but a tumbling, one-over-another cascade of bouncing, jouncing emotions. His mouth twisted in a gesture not easily duplicated by the nanomask he was wearing, a gesture that meant something like exasperation and something like resignation at the perversity of the universe. First contact with an alien species ought to be more dignified than this. . . .

Of course, it was possible that the organism before him wasn't sentient. Distinctly possible, in fact, now that Dahnak thought about it. This species generally appeared more intelligent than the humans on Earth television programs, even though they were definitely atechnic, but it would never do to make snap judgments about such things. Things could go very badly wrong indeed if you misjudged the sentience of the thing sitting opposite you and engaging you in civilized conversation. That dreadful mix-up with the Zanchedi ambassador and the Krong, for instance . . . or worse, the set-to between the Roc and that merchant prince. . . .

"Excuse me," Dahnak said, stooping to bring his face more on a level with the creature's. "Are you intelligent? I don't mean to insult you with the question, but I have the oddest feeling that we're not exactly in synch."

The creature extended its oral sensory and primary grooming organ and slooshed it across Dahnak's face . . . or, rather, the face of the nanomask he was wearing. The surface integument of the Eldar face rippled at the sudden abuse, turning, in rapid succession, metallic green, quicksilver reflective, and plaid . . . a rather loud yellow and black plaid reminiscent of Clan MacLeod. Dahnak tugged at the fleshy projection in the center of the face, adjusting the surface tension and hue-pigmentation stabilizers.

"Please don't do that again," he said.

"Urf!"

Advanced communication did not seem to interest the creature, which bounded away a moment later with a cheerful burst of happyhappyexcitement!run!run!food? burbling from its neurons in enthusiastic torrents. Dahnak stared after it for a few seconds, then began picking his way down the hill.

It was time to begin his impersonation of the mysterious Eldar.

Not to mention his own private project as well.

Both hearts thumped with rising anticipation and excitement.

happyhappyexcitement! "Urf!" food?