V 07 - The Alien Swordmaster Read online




  Chapter 1

  Darkness: lisping, hissing, metal-tinged voices from reptile tongues. An alien speech: guttural, grating, incomprehensible.

  Cold. Dark. Frozen. Barely breathing. Unable to move. There were restraints around her limbs, her waist. It was like a nightmare where you were bound so tightly you couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t even wake up. Where am I? she thought. Something spongy, bulbous brushed against her face. She tried to open her eyes, her eyelids struggling against whatever it was—drugs? a force field?—but she couldn’t force them open. Again the wet, nasty, cold thing slithering across her face, tendriling around, like the caress of a serpent lover. Jesus God, let me wake up, she thought. Let me wake up!

  Voices again. She strained to hear; they seemed infinitely far away. They drifted in and out of her consciousness, buzzing, buzzing.

  Once more she fought the thing that kept her in her frozen bondage. But it was too much. My metabolism must have gone weird or something, she thought. In the cold, dark silence she could sense her heart beating, pitapat . . . pitapat—too slow! // this was a nightmare and I was this scared, I'd have adrenaline racing in my bloodstream; my heart would be pounding, pounding. It had to be some kind of drug then, pushing her down, down into this lethargy.

  What were these things clambering over her body then? Electrodes? No. They teased the edge of her numbness. . . . Tubes. Like ones used for saline solution or intravenous feeding, like the ones in a hospital maybe. Am I sick? She fished around in her memory but kept coming up empty. Except for—

  Eyes.

  Glaring, glowering lizard eyes; slitty, topaz colored, merciless.

  Where were they coming from?

  Abruptly, the voices returned, much nearei; still incomprehensible. Then one of them snapped in a language she recognized, “Enough of this! We’re to keep up the illusion at all times, don’t you understand? None of this home-planet talk. We’re to speak Earth tongues or shut up. Practice makes perfect.”

  Yes. She understood the language well enough. As an infant she’d learned it from her mothei; and then she’d taken it in college. And then, of course, as part of her field training, she’d—

  “What illusion?” Another voice, perhaps female. “Don’t you think it’s rather pointless to be keeping up illusions in front of the food? 1 mean, there’s such a thing as too much caution.”

  Why couldn’t she see? More gibberish followed, then a hideous hissing that returned the conversation to the Japanese language.

  “Turn on the light, someone. ” A red glow in front of her closed eyes. “What about that one there?”

  “I don’t think the leader wants a boy tonight.”

  “Oh. I can’t tell the difference myself. Ugly, hairy things!”

  “There is something to them, though. Sometimes I look at myself in a mirror. I’m in my dermoplast suit and the alien sunlight falls on these imitated features and I think, not bad you know, not bad. So what if I look like an ape? They’re very streamlined. Have you ever seen them

  swimming? The light just glances off their slippery backs. Then the water cascades down their scaleless skin and trickles, shining, down their smooth limbs. You can see their muscles ripple under that strange translucent skin. If you ask me, it’s pretty attractive in a bizarre sort of way.” “Shut up. You’re making me hungry.”

  Suddenly a flash of memory.

  The Ainu village. The shuttlecraft falling from the sky. The screaming villagers banging down the door of the institute headquarters . . .

  “Food! Is that all you ever think of?”

  “What about you and your insatiable lusts? If we stopped to couple with every alien life form we conquered, do you think we’d be ruling this quadrant of the galaxy? No. These apes’d probably be in charge and then where would you be? I was down at one of the Indonesian headquarters, and you know what 1 saw? One of these aliens spitting and roasting a big lizard of some kind, a Komodo dragon they call it. It looked so much like one of my own children back on the home world. I felt like lasering him to death right then and there, but oh, no, we’re supposed to—”

  “Keep up the illusions. Yes.” They relapsed into more gibberish for a moment, and she remembered. . . .

  Herding the humans into a great big pen, the infants squalling, the old women clasping and unclasping their hands, the men dull-eyed, defeated, falling in like cattle, and she was coming out of the institute with Professor Schwabauer to see what all the fuss was about when one of the red-uniformed Visitors barked at them and told them, “Get in line, human scum!” and they were caught up in the crowd and propelled forward, unable to resist, and Schwabauer muttering all the time, “I want to see the verdammte German consul. We’re part of an international anthropological team. I want you to call Zimmerman. You know Zimmerman, the German consul in Sapporo, or call the Embassy in Tokyo. I protest, I protest—Only to be shoved roughly into the crowd.

  “What about this one?”

  “Too narrow in the hips. The leader is very particular tonight.”

  “Well, you know best, I suppose. You’re the one that’s always having fantasies about the food. Bestiality, I call it.”

  “Well, they are sentient.”

  “Sentient! What kind of an attitude is that? I’ve half a mind to report you to the attitude-adjustment committee. I mean it’s all very well for those softhearted underground religions to nurture such thoughts, but this is a military operation.”

  “Oh? I had imagined it was more like a trip to the gourmet supermarket.”

  “Oh, be quiet and let’s get on with the job. What about that one?”

  A tearing sound. Something was being ripped open right near her skin. She felt a gust of wind, even chillier than the cold that had cocooned her before, then more sounds, like ripping Velcro.

  “Not bad. Let’s take a good look. Yes, it’s the right sex.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “They have very pronounced secondary sex characteristics. Surely you’ve noticed the protuberances on your disguise? You’re supposed to be a female. Look, see? They match.” Someone was yanking the tubes off her now. “Listen, kid. You been off-world as long as me, you won’t stand around lecturing people on correct military procedure and proper attitudes and rules about not coupling with the aliens. It’s a wide, wide galaxy. Just be glad we’re the conquerors and have all the privileges. And learn to appreciate the aliens.”

  “I do! Extremely rare, with just a hint of kranjosh seasoning.”

  “Insufferable cadet arrogance. Yes, I think she’ll do very nicely. She’s young—”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Their skin gets wrinkled as they grow older. Good

  The Alien Swordmaster

  muscle tone; she’ll give our leader a good time, I’m sure, and perhaps he won’t drive his poor crew so hard. And . . Rough fingers touched her eyelids, forcing them open. She saw at last, the light hurting her eyes. She couldn’t focus. “Attractive eyes: greenish-gray. Good. High cheekbones. Long hair, jet-black. Very pale skin. Part Caucasian, I would imagine. She’ll do very nicely. Revive and prepare her. He wants to be entertained right after dinner.”

  7

  “Not during?” A disappointed tone. At last she could see them: first the red uniforms, the not-quite-swastika insignia. A stab in her arm—some kind of injection. She saw she was naked; her arms flew up to cover herself. Two Visitors, a man and a woman. Solemn Asian faces. The woman’s was cruel, the mouth twisted in a sardonic smile. The man’s seemed a bit more mellow, maybe; she couldn’t tell.

  She turned.

  The room—metal walls, tubes and piping everywhere, and spongy sacks hanging
from the walls and suspended from the ceilings, stacked up on shelves. And in the sacks . . .

  People. Naked, eyes closed . . . not dead! The feeding tubes wound around the sacks and snaked into the comers. The sacks were like membranes, like . . . placentas. The people drew their slow, collective breath in a steady rhythm as though controlled by some machine.

  It came to her suddenly what this was. The rumors she’d heard were true, then. Even worse than true. And why were they reviving her? She looked at her captors. She screamed suddenly, screamed until her throat was raw. Her screaming echoed along the cavernous walls of the metal chamber And then, abruptly, the scream died. She couldn’t go on. Her throat was parched and raspy, and she was so weak. . . .

  “Namae wa nan da?” said the man.

  Something in her snapped. Goddamn it, if I’m going to be eaten, I’m not going to be forced to speak Japanese.

  Memories of being teased in school surfaced suddenly from long ago. “Amerikajin dayo!” she said angrily. “Nihongo ga dekinai!”

  The two looked at each other strangely. One said something in the hissing tongue. She couldn’t understand it, but it sounded terribly obscene, the way everything in their language did. Then the man said, “So you are American?” “Yes. I’m with the international anthropological team. We’re studying the Ainu, the Caucasiform aboriginal population of the north of Japan. We’ve been stationed in Hokkaido since . . . since before . . .”

  “The invasion,” the male Visitor finished for her. “No need to mince words, I suppose.” The female stared at them both; clearly she had not been taught English. “Well, you may count yourself lucky, uh . . .”

  “Jones. Tomoko Jones.”

  “Tomoko? You are half Japanese?”

  “I’m an American.”

  “Be that as it may, you have at least temporarily escaped the fate that awaits these others. ” She shuddered. He went on, “You are about to be taken into the presence of Fiefa Chan, the supreme commander of the Mother Ships in the Tokyo-Seoul-Hong Kong sector. I trust you will conduct yourself equitably and perhaps earn your freedom.” “What if I don’t?” she said defiantly.

  “Then, alas. ...” The man gestured at the others, hanging in their womblike sacks.

  Chapter 2

  She felt numb as they led her down the corridors of what she now realized must be a Visitor Mother Ship. They walked past massive steel doors, some of them with windows through which she caught glimpses of the aliens. Once or twice she saw one of the unmasked reptile faces; quickly she looked away. Once she saw into a storage chamber such as the one she had come from. She shuddered.

  At last they reached a large chamber smelling of sandalwood. The floor was lined with tatami matting. A futon bed had been made up on the floor; cushions rested against the wall. No harsh mirror metal here, but bamboo screens and silken tapestries. A yukata, or Japanese sleeping robe, was laid out by the bed. Since they had not allowed her the dignity of any kind of garment since reviving her from cold storage, she immediately put it on. As always, she felt a momentary embarrassment because she was too tall and the robe fell awkwardly down to her midcalf.

  “Wait here,” one said, and they left her alone to meditate her coming fate.

  She thought about Matt. She hadn’t thought of him in years, but something made her remember the last time she had been face to face with her husband. The memory was stridently clear suddenly.

  Standing outside the martial arts studio in Orange County, California, in the burning haze of a terrible heat wave ... he had been shouting at her. “So get out! Go and look for your roots or whatever. I’m tired of listening to you, it sounds like a damn soap opera. Go to Japan. It’s not going to make you happiei; but at least I won’t have to take your bitching anymore.”

  “You’re not being faii; Matt,” she had said. She knew she was hurting him, but something impelled her. She had to leave it all behind: the shiny new car, the house, the pool, that coffeemaker with the microprocessor chip that knew what time you were going to wake up, the glamorous but dull job, the handsome, virile husband. “Professor Schwa-bauer needs an assistant, and I do have an anthropology degree.”

  “So what? You’ve never shown any interest in it since I’ve known you.”

  “All of six months.” He was such a baby sometimes. “Well, I can more or less speak Japanese.” Although, she reminded herself, she could hardly remember her own mother. “It’s not forever anyways. Just . . . well, nine or ten months.”

  She remembered him standing there, not quite believing she was actually going to do it. God, he's good-looking, she remembered thinking, and so considerate. Until now. “I’m doing it, Matt,” she said, feeling empty and brutal suddenly. Even though she’d already talked the whole thing through with her analyst. “Just nine months.”

  Nine months. . . .

  But then the Visitors had come.

  She remembered it vividly; Schwabauer had come to fetch her They were going to catch the bullet train. From Tokyo they would go north to Hokkaido island where the primitive Ainu, blue-eyed and white-skinned, lived. A veritable gold mine for anthropologists, Schwabauer had told her.

  The train had just begun to pull out. Tokyo underground was as labyrinthine and vast as Tokyo aboveground. The train was slowly chugging through the tunnels, and they were settling down to a bento packaged lunch of raw fish on sesame rice when suddenly (almost like being born, she remembered thinking) they shot out into the sunlight somewhere in the suburbs. Only, it wasn’t sunlight, because this tremendous thing was blotting out the sun.

  Later she remembered watching it all on TV: the arrival, the UN address, the whole thing. Then came the restrictions. Necessary, they said. You couldn’t get clearance to leave the country. She called Matt once a month for a while, but it always seemed to deteriorate into an argument.

  She threw herself into her work. After all, what difference did all this interplanetary politics make? So what if there were alien advisers in the Japanese cabinet?

  Then there were the rumors about the Visitors being reptiles, followed by that dramatic TV exposure. They’d managed to catch that broadcast from America for a few moments before it was squelched by a blackout from Tokyo. Even then, Tomoko thought, People or lizards, what does it matter? An anthropologist knows better than to judge by appearances. She found herself curiously unmoved at the thought that the aliens were reptiles. After all, she’d read science fiction when she was a kid. She knew that the possibilities of a hundred percent humanoid race evolving on another world were pretty remote, not to mention the possibility that they would happen to be the first extraterrestrial civilization humans would encounter Live and let live, she’d thought. After all, they weren’t doing any harm, and they were giving the human race quite a bit of their technology. As for the rumor that they were capturing people and salting them away for planetside consumption, she thought that was just typical human chauvinism. Just another sci-fi cliche. She’d seen it on The Twilight Zone, for God’s sake! “To Serve Man,” that was the name of the episode.

  Then they raided the village, and she woke up trussed and hanging on a meat rack in a gelatinous basket being bathed in bizarre juices—for all she knew being marinated or something!—and she knew this wasn’t a TV series or a bad dream. It was for real . . . they ate people.

  How long had she been in the cold sleep? Years? And what would happen now? They had mentioned the name of Fieh Chan, spoken of him in hushed, mantralike tones. She’d heard of him before, even seen him on TV. He was the wise and glorious leader of the Visitors in this particular sector of the earth. But if he was the leader of the creatures who’d raided her village, he wasn’t so wise and glorious, was he? If he was one of them, he must eat people too.

  And here 1 am, waiting for him, like an enticing tidbit. . . .

  A hand on her shoulder.

  She jumped. A scream died on her lips. She saw his face only a few inches from her own. She recognized him at once; who wouldn’t? His wa
s the most famous face in this part of the world.

  He looked at her very seriously. His mask was that of a vigorous older man with graying hair, fastidiously combed. He watched her for a long time, until she felt as though his eyes were boring right through her. She winced as he reached out to toy with a strand of her hair.

  “They were right,” he said in English. “An exceptionally beautiful specimen.” He had a slight trace of a British accent, and even though she knew it was stupid, she couldn’t help feeling a bit inferior because of it.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “You resist me?” He seemed amused.

  “Do I have a choice?” she said bitterly.

  “No.” He studied her for a moment, his lips twitching.

  A horrible fascination seized her as she felt his hand move slowly down her cheek to caress her neck, her shoulders, her arms. “Tell me, what is a woman like you doing in a remote part of Japan, one that was raided precisely because no one thought it would contain anyone from outside, a village that my strategists convinced me could be made to disappear unnoticed?”

  Something about the way he stared at her . . . Suddenly it hit her: a lizard is going to make love to me, she thought, and then I’m going to be killed! Conflicting feelings whirled through her mind. She couldn’t control herself anymore. It all started to gush from her lips, all of it: her childhood identity crisis, her marriage to the handsome, macho martial arts expert with the overpriced karate school in the suburbs, her recent obsession with roots. What’s the matter with me? she thought angrily. What’s come over me to make me bare my soul to an alien from another planet? She was thinking, castigating herself even as she poured out all her inner turmoil.

  Chapter 3

  At last she was through. Exhausted from her warring emotions, she sank down onto the futon bed. There was a low bedside table with a lacquered surface; a couple of tea bowls, all the utensils for the traditional tea ceremony. Against one wall was a Japanese-style shrine with an image of Buddha; it was clearly a costly antique. Her trained mind identified it as a seventeeth century object. To her surprise, Fieh Chan squatted down at the table and began to pour tea, his wrist crooked at the elegantly correct angle. After a moment’s meditation he handed her a bowl of fragrant green tea. “This will make you feel better.” He did not look at her “You are surprised by my gentleness? I, the ruthless conqueror?”