V 07 - The Alien Swordmaster Read online

  “You are Fieh Chan,” she said, trembling inwardly. “Once I saw on the news you commanded that an entire town be put to death.”

  “Yet I too am a creature of two worlds. I too am tormented. Can you believe that?”

  “I know better than to think of anyone, human or alien, as one dimensional. Professor Schwabauer’s training—” “Let me show you something about power,” Fieh Chan said, rising abruptly. He clapped his hands.

  Suddenly the shoji walls were flung aside, and the bamboo screens were pulled up into the ceiling. They were now looking out on to a panoramic view of a great city.

  Skyscrapers sprouted in wild confusion, neon signs glittered, skywalks stitched the buildings. In the distance stood an exact copy of the Eiffel Tower, except that it was red instead of green. Cars crowded the streets and people thronged the sidewalks. It was the bustling metropolis of Tokyo.

  “Look closer, Tomoko,” said Fieh Chan, drawing her up from the futon and making her stand with her nose almost touching the viewscreen. “The screens give a perfect illusion, don’t they? Look. Do you see that circlet of shadow that has engulfed the center of the city, the Ginza area?” She saw it then: a patch of darkness too regular in shape to be the shadow of a cloud. It had swallowed up the Takashimaya department store, the Tokyu Building, even . . . “Yes, that little piece of Americana too, the McDonald’s at the comer of the Ginza. And do you know what is casting the shadow?”

  She nodded numbly.

  “Yes. Our Mother Ship! That is what power is all about, Tomoko! Do you wonder that I am troubled? But I must obey.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Why not? They tell me I have a habit of rambling, of trying to justify myself, before I indulge my ... ah . . . Anyway, there’s no danger in it. ”

  “You can always have me killed,” Tomoko said bitterly.

  “Or converted. Doubtless you’ve heard of our conversion chambers. Yes, we can take away your mind and substitute something fanatically subservient, soulless, utterly loyal.” She shuddered and gazed out at the city. When she looked more closely, she could see that some buildings had been blasted down to rubble, that large segments of the city had been reduced to fields of broken concrete.

  “It has not been easy to hold on to this part of the world,” Fieh Chan said sadly. “The Japanese in particular seem not to fear death, and there have been constant kamikaze attacks on our mission in the Ginza.”

  “What did you expect? Slavish devotion?” They’re going to kill me anyway, she thought. I'll say anything I want.

  “I did not expect to have to reduce this city to ruins. Oh, I need to forget,” Fieh Chan said. His eyes shone, but their luster was an alien lustei; hinting of a cold citrine fire. “And you are a beautiful woman. My lieutenant chose well.” “Beautiful! How could you know? We are aliens. Oh, I overheard them discussing me like a piece of steak. ‘Ugly, hairy things,’ one of them said of us. What do you see in us anyway?”

  “There is a myth among us, Tomoko,” he said, his eyes far away. “It is said that once the apelike creatures ruled our world, much as the dinosaurs once ruled yours. The myth says that before the dawn of civilization there was a great war and the race of apes was cast down and became dumb. Of course, it’s just a story. But you can see why your race is so fascinating to us. On the one hand, you’re a ludicrous obscenity—talking apes, how could such a thing be possible? —and on the other, your existence makes us yearn for a world that is no more, the golden age before we became warlike. But what I speak is heresy. You will not repeat it.” “No. I will not,” Tomoko said, becoming more and more drawn to him, though she knew that his artificial skin hid serpent scales and an alien mind. There was something attractive about him; his very vulnerability. Matt had always been so unyielding, so full of that endless male ego.

  “Are you thinking, perhaps you should be faithful to your husband? He is a karate teacher, you told me?” “More than that. He’s an expert at a dozen kinds of martial arts. He’s one of the best in the country, actually. He was in People magazine once.”

  “You are proud of him.”

  “I guess so.” She thought of the endless round of dull tournaments and the walls and walls of glittering trophies, and the number of times she’d screamed at him about it.

  What was he doing now? Was he stuck in some meat locker in Los Angeles?

  “But you see, you are attracted to me also,” he said. “It is mutual.”

  “I do not see your true face,” she said.

  “But you know it. You sense it. I am the serpent in your garden. Yes, we too have such legends. The temptress ape that embodies all that would drag us down from our pinnacle of civilization. Yes!” he whispered harshly, a tinge of echoing metal in his voice. “That is why we must crush you, devour your kind, rape you, commit acts of savagery upon you! For we must never face the fact that you may be as intelligent as ourselves. It would destroy the very fabric of our beliefs and the archetypal mysteries of our minds!”

  “Yes,” she said. She had always known from her anthropological studies that the images of man and serpent were inextricably linked in the human consciousness, all through history, perhaps even before men evolved. Chimpanzees, she recalled from her lab work, will recoil in revulsion from a snake in a manner way out of proportion to the possible danger But in that racial horror—mutual, she had now learned—there was also fascination, also mutual. Each race seemed to represent for the other all that was base about the human or reptilian condition. But how can I be thinking of such things now? she thought. Jesus, I’m standing here in the lizard’s lair writing a doctoral thesis in my head when I should be screaming in terror! Wildly she looked around for an avenue of escape, knowing it was hopeless—

  He seized her in his arms. She was taller than he was. Those eyes again, transfixing her, hypnotizing her. Oh God, she thought, I’m going to kiss him, and I think I may even like it.

  Suddenly an alarm sounded.

  The screens that had been showing the panorama of Tokyo suddenly blanked out. Fieh Chan barked something in his metallic alien voice. “What’s going on?” she cried.

  Screams came from outside, shouts, reptilian shrieks, sounds of panic.

  “What’s the matter?” she screamed again.

  “What’s the matter?” Fieh Chan grated. “Behold!” She stared at the viewscreens; now they were cutting rapidly from scene to scene.

  She saw balloons flying through the air; trailing clouds of red dust.

  In the interior of another spacecraft, Visitors were collapsing, tearing off their human faces and showing the slitty-eyed, green-scaled horrors beneath. A close-up of a screaming reptile showed his flesh melting hideously. “Diana’s ship!” Fieh Chan said. “They’ve managed to infiltrate the high command itself!”

  A voice rang out over the hubbub: “Fieh Chan, we estimate that the toxic dust will reach Japan in approximately two hours—perhaps even sooner! Trace amounts are in the air already. Many of our crew members are succumbing. ”

  On the screen now, shots of Mother Ships bucking against Earth’s atmosphere, bursting into the stratosphere.

  “Quick! We must escape!” Fieh Chan said urgently. “Follow me or I’ll be dead. And then I won’t be able to answer for your safety!”

  He grabbed her by the hand and went to the shrine in the wall niche. He lifted the Buddha image she had been admiring earlier. Suddenly the wall gave way and— They were standing in a loading dock. A sleek shuttle-craft gleamed. “We’ve no time! Climb in!” Fieh Chan said.

  A wild thought—I'm still in my sleeping robe!—and then she clambered into the cramped little craft. Fieh Chan followed her and pressed some controls on a console. “Have to seal off every possible vent or the toxin will get in.” She marveled at how logically he was acting under the stress. “Strap yourself in! Get a grip on yourself!” “What does this mean, this toxin? What’s happening?” “What does it mean?” The purr of the shuttlecraft revving up for
takeoif. “It means we’re finished—that our reign on Earth is over! Your resistance has cooked up something that can kill us, can’t you see? Now be quiet or I’ll never be able to get this thing out of here.”

  She clutched her yukata robe hard to herself. “Freedom?” she said softly.

  “Yes, freedom!” Fieh Chan said, his voice sounding infinitely weary. “But for me . . .”

  Then a steel portal gave way and with a roar they burst into the sky high over Tokyo.

  Chapter 4

  They were plummeting into the shadow circle in the center of Tokyo. “Don’t just sit there screaming!” Fieh Chan said. “This is a two-pilot machine. I’m not in a fit state to handle it by myself.”

  “I’m not screaming!” she screamed, and then sullenly took hold of the lever he indicated. “We’re going to crash into ...”

  The skyscraper loomed up alongside the Takashimaya department store, with its gaudy pennant logo streaming in the wind. Instinctively she ducked. Overhead, the curve of the Mother Ship dominated the skyline, brooding. They were going to smash right into the building. She could see the skywalk and the mannequins in the window dressed in the latest Kenzo fashions, when suddenly—

  They soared skyward! And careened sideways, flip-flopping around one of the skywalks, they were upside down for a moment—

  Then abruptly they righted themselves.

  Tomoko looked down.

  Crowds: angry, jubilant, rioting. People crammed into the streets, streaming between the cars, knocking the robot traffic police from their pedestals (she’d always loved those robot police; they were just like things in a science fiction story), brakes slamming, cars caroming into one another people jostling, bustling, pointing skyward, and as the

  shuttlecraft threaded the narrow canyon between two glass-fronted skyscrapers, she followed the direction of their pointing and saw—

  The sky blanketed with red! And she saw the Mother Ship that had cast its grim, awesome shadow over the streets of the metropolis slowly, slowly easing out of its resting place, turning, aiming itself at the crimson-stained clouds.

  “It’s happening at last,” she said. “We’re free, we’re free of you at last!”

  “Take the controls.” Fieh Chan was coughing and his eyes seemed bloodshot. “I think . . . I think there’s a leak in the ventilation system, I think the red dust might have ...”

  They were diving. They were going to crash! Squeezing her eyes shut, she rammed her fists down on the console, hoping, praying. They zoomed upward. “That’s it. Steer us far above the toxin layei;” he said, breathing uneasily.

  They were way up now. She saw the dust spreading beneath them like a coiling pool of blood. Fieh Chan was breathing in slow, uneven gasps. “I’ll die unless ... I seal myself into the pressure skin. . . . Back of the shuttlecraft. . . .’’He crawled to the rear of the vehicle, drew a plastic packet out of a bin. “Just don’t let us lose any more altitude!” he rasped in his reptile voice, and she held the controls steady, one eye firmly on what she thought was an altimeter though its markings were in a script—or some kind of hieroglyphics—that she couldn’t understand. Fieh Chan squirmed his way forward to the front of the craft.

  Tomoko Jones would never forget what she saw next.

  Starting at the edges of his face, he slid his fingers under the skin and began carefully to peel down his human mask. Glistening, slimy reptile scales appeared beneath the skin. They were mottled, a dozen shades of green. He started to rend away the mask now. She’d never forget the crack of ripping dermoplast, the mucuslike effluvium that welled up between the scales. He continued, shedding his human clothes and casting them to the floor of the shuttlecraft. The skin of his neck, his chest, the curved claws peering through ridged flesh; they were as sharp as the throwing stars Matt used to scare her with around the house. The strangely abrupt joints of his alien musculature—he was bony and soft in all the wrong places, she thought. A monster out of her childhood nightmares, yet, in some terrible fashion, beautiful too.

  Quickly he threw the contents of the plastic packet over himself. It seethed as it bonded to his skin. “Nothing as big as a bacterium can get through this molecular shielding device,” he said, “but it will still admit oxygen. It’s my own invention, a prototype. Not that many exist. Now is the time to test it on myself. Now, quick. Take us out past Tokyo, past Yokohama bay, out into open country. It’ll be easier there. I’m sealed in now.”

  “But the altimetei;” she protested as the gauge she had been watching began to dip dangerously, though she didn’t think they had changed altitude.

  “That’s no altimeter! That’s the fuel gauge!” Fieh Chan shouted in alarm. “Ten more minutes and we’re gone!” “What do you want me to do?”

  “On my signal, press that button!”

  He positioned himself for something, his tongue flicking back and forth in feverish excitement.

  “Now!”

  “But what about me?”

  “There’s a parachute in the back!”

  “But I’ve never—”

  “Push the button!”

  Now!

  She banged down with all her might. Suddenly the floor beneath them trembled and the seat Fieh Chan had been occupying buckled under and she heard and felt a turbulent rush of air—

  He was gone!

  Where was he?

  Suddenly she caught sight of him sailing earthward, the red and blue silk of a parachute streaming from his back, his eyes closed in some inscrutable emotion. The parachute opened now. He plunged down into the scarlet cloud layer below. Would the pressure skin be enough to prevent him from dying horribly, being eaten alive from within? As she watched him, she wondered why she was feeling such sympathy for him, a creature who had probably eaten human flesh, who had come to this planet for the express purpose of subjugating and enslaving its people. For ever and ever he seemed to fall, and at last the dust cloud swallowed him. She couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive. But somehow she knew she hadn’t seen the last of him. Only minutes left. The craft was veering back toward the city, out of control. The fuel gauge read zero—that much at least she could tell! The shuttle was rocking in the turbulent air. She crawled into the back, fumbled for what might be the parachute—

  There, was that it? She’d never seen one up close; she’d only watched people put them on in newsreels and in adventure movies. No time to think now! She strapped herself in and went back to the front. She knotted her yukata firmly about her waist, worrying suddenly about modesty, and stood in the position she’d seen Fieh Chan in . . . then she slammed her hand down on the button he’d told her to push, and—

  Panic! She was in the air! The wind battering her! And the shuttlecraft, pilotless, sailing on. She watched it plummet out of sight, saw a flash of light, far off, through the red mist of the dust cloud.

  Then she pulled the cord.

  For a moment nothing happened, and she thought, Jesus God, this isn’t even a parachute, it’s some alien device that has nothing to do with parachuting, for all 1 know it’s an article of lizard clothing or—

  And it opened!

  Slowly, so slowly, she began her descent . . .

  Brilliant blue of the tiled roofs, eaves upturned . . . dayglo-lime-colored paddy fields full of young rice, and the wind wafting her toward the jagged skyline of Tokyo in the distance.

  My life! she thought.

  Scenes flashed through her head:

  She was a little girl and her parents were fighting and her mother was saying, “We have to teach her some of the old ways; she has to grow up knowing who she is,” and her father furiously saying, “This is America, Sachiko, and 1 don’t want you speaking that heathen language in my house,” and Mom said, “Then why did you marry me?” and so on and so on into the night while little Tomoko cried herself to sleep clutching a brown-furred girl teddy bear in a kimono—

  Watching Matt, admiring his sweat-beaded torso as he ran in the park, she a college girl buried in he
r anthropology books, picking the same bench day in and day out to watch him running by, not having the courage to stop him to ask his name until one day he skidded to a halt like a well-oiled machine and smiled at her and he said, “No, I don’t even go to school here; I’m just working out for the tournament three months from now,” and eventually they’d made love and were married and she’d clung to him desperately, needing to escape her old home and find her true identity, but somehow it had all gone sour—

  The ground beneath! It was too near; she was going too fast. I’m going to die! she thought, and felt herself slipping into unconsciousness.

  Someone was prodding her. . . . She stirred. Opened her eyes. A kid and an old man recoiled.

  ‘‘Ee! Bijitaa daroo!” the old man said, covering the boy’s eyes and making him scramble out of the way. Mud on her face, her arms; bruises everywhere. Thank God I didn’t land on the road! she thought, looking up and seeing the pavement only a few yards away. A paddy field had broken her fall; six inches of muddy water, a sheet of soft young rice.

  But what was the man saying?

  “Bijitaa da! Bijitaa!” the child was shrieking, pointing at her, obviously in a wild panic.

  What was this word bijitaa, bijitaa? Oh, she remembered now. That was how they pronounced the word visitor in the Japanese language. They thought she was one of theml She looked about wildly. The parachute was spread out over the rice. Over the bright orange silk was the unmistakable insignia of the Visitors. Quickly she unstrapped herself, struggled to get up.

  In her halting Japanese, trying to use the most polite level possible, she said, " Bijitaa ja nai desu. . . . Hito,hitode gozaimasu.” Please, I’m not a Visitor. I’m human, human. Oh, please. Her throat felt so terribly parched. “Do you have water? Water? O-mizu o o-negai shimasu?" Damn, she couldn’t tell if she’d gotten it right. The old man and the boy stared curiously at her and at each other