Agent to the Stars Read online

  I looked out into the mass of Yherajk, and got the distinct impression that two thousand of them were waiting for me to say something. Anything. Tom, I got stage fright. But there was nowhere to go.

  I stalled for time. “I don’t know if you noticed this,” I said, “but I’m not a Yherajk. I don’t meld very well.”

  “With your permission, the ientcio says,” Gwedif said, “I will act as your conduit.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  Gwedif paused for a moment. “Aw, hell,” he said at last. “Uake has just sent some High Speech crap that I’m not even going to try to translate. Carl, what it means is that I’d stick tendrils into your brain, read your memories, and transmit them to the rest of the crew. Bluntly speaking, I’ll be rooting around your skull, looking for the good stuff.”

  “It sounds painful,” I said.

  “It won’t be, I promise,” Gwedif said. “But you’re going to feel stuffed-up like you wouldn’t believe. Carl, don’t misunderstand, I’ll be effectively downloading your brain to the group. In the melding union, there are no secrets—and the offspring of this melding will know what you know. We know we’re asking a lot of you, more than has been asked of any of us. If you don’t want to do this, then don’t.”

  “What will happen if I say no?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Gwedif said. “We would never try to compel you to a melding.”

  I looked out at the crew. “And every one of you is willing to do this?”

  “We are.”

  “What if one of you tries to take over the rest? Isn’t that possible? What would happen to me?”

  “You’ll be connecting to the group through me,” Gwedif said. “If one of us tried to overtake the entire crew, I’d disconnect before he could overtake you. I’d probably have time.” That qualifier disturbed me, but Gwedif went on. “But I’d say it’s highly unlikely that someone will do that. For one thing, it’d wipe out the entire crew; whoever did it would never get back home. For another thing—Carl, this is epic stuff. If this works, this is going down in our history as one of the defining moments of our people. We’ll be famous forever. Believe me, none of us wants to be the one that screws that up.”

  “Will I be able to read all your crew’s thoughts?” I asked.

  “No,” Gwedif said. “I’m going to be translating your thoughts—I won’t have time to translate the other way. You’ll experience all our thoughts, they just won’t make a lick of sense. It will be the weirdest trip you’ll ever take, my friend.”

  “Well,” I said. “When you put it that way, how can I refuse?”

  “Then you’ll do it?” Gwedif asked.

  “If you will be my conduit, Gwedif, I’ll be honored. Translate that exactly to your ientcio,” I said.

  Gwedif apparently did—the room became filled with the odor of distilled dumpster juice. I asked Gwedif what was going on.

  “The crew is applauding, Carl,” Gwedif said. “They’re relieved and happy. They didn’t just spend half of their lives traveling here for nothing. I lied a little to you, Carl—if you hadn’t accepted, it would have been a crushing disappointment for us all. But I didn’t want to burden you with that sort of guilt. Sorry to be sneaky.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I don’t mind. It’ll help me to recognize your thoughts during the melding—I’ll look for the sneaky ones.”

  “I won’t be able to meld myself,” Gwedif said. “I have to manage your thoughts. That requires me to remain fully alert during the whole thing. In fact, of all the crew, I’ll be the only one that won’t be melding.”

  I was dismayed. “I’m very sorry, Gwedif,” I said. “If I had known, I’d have asked for someone else to act as the conduit. I don’t want you not be part of it.”

  “My friend,” Gwedif said. “Please. I am honored that you have chosen me as your conduit, more than you know. In doing so, you have allowed me to be the only one truly conscious during the melding—the only one who will see the event as it happens. When this story becomes our memory epic, the eyes that it will be seen through are mine.”

  Gwedif sprouted a tendril and waved it at the crew. “This crew will be in the memory epic. But I will write it—and thus I will live forever through it, the Homer of this, my people’s greatest Odyssey. You have given me a great gift, Carl, and for it, I cannot thank you enough, you, my friend, my great and true friend.”

  “Well,” I said. “You’re welcome, then.”

  “Great,” Gwedif said. He sprouted another tendril, and wiggled both of them at me. “Now, you have to take out those plugs—I’ve got to stick these up your nose.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “Not at all,” he said. “This might sting a little.”

  I won’t try to describe the melding, Tom, except to say—try to remember the most vivid, wild, erotic dream you have ever had. Now try to imagine it entirely as a clutch of smells, colliding, sliding, fading into each other. Now imagine it going on for a lifetime. That’s what it felt like.

  I woke up, still on the dais, with three Yherajk around me. I asked for Gwedif. The one to my right waved a tentacle.

  “Did it work?” I asked.

  “It did,” Gwedif said, and motioned to the Yherajk near my feet. “Carl, please meet the progeny of two thousand Yherajk—and one human.”

  “Hello,” I said to the Yherajk.

  “Hi, Pop,” he said.

  “The ientcio”—Gwedif indicated the final Yherajk—“wishes to thank you once again for your great help and understanding, and assures you that you will undoubtedly become one of the great heroes of our race, something which I can tell you is already taken care of.”

  “Thank him, and thank you,” I said to Gwedif.

  “No problem,” Gwedif said. “The ientcio also wishes you to know that the honor of naming this newborn Yherajk belongs to you, as the Initiating Parent.”

  “Thanks, but it was Uake’s idea,” I said. “I can’t claim credit.”

  “Sure,” Gwedif said, “but your acceptance of the proposal in this case has been agreed by all the parents to be the initiating act. So it’s back to you. However, the ientcio, anticipating your reluctance, does indeed have a name picked out, which will be given to the newborn if you agree.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “We wanted a name that reflected the importance of this Yherajk to us, and hopefully his eventual importance to your own people, one that was immediately recognizable. What do you think of ‘Jesus’?”

  I laughed unintentionally.

  “See,” The Yherajk Who Would Be Jesus said. “I told them it wasn’t going to fly. But what do I know? I’m a newborn.” The sarcasm in his statement was unmistakable.

  “It would be a very bad idea,” I said. “About half the folks on the planet would get very touchy about it.”

  “Nuts,” Gwedif said. “Can you give us something else?”

  I could. “Jesus” is the Latinized version of “Joshua”—a name that’s still in use, of course, and without the same religious overtones. It was also the name of my father, and, incidentally, of the baby that Sarah was carrying when she died—we found out it was a boy the month before. Elise and I aren’t planning to have children, Tom. So this Yherajk, which was only the smallest fraction of me, and only of my thoughts at that, was nevertheless the only “child” I was likely to have. The name “Joshua” had long been with me, and I was happy to finally give it a new home. Joshua was happy with it, too. Of course he would be—he would know what it means to me.

  After I had named Joshua, Uake excused himself to attend to ship’s duties. As we shook “hands,” I managed a glance at my watch. It was 11:30 in the morning.

  “Uh-oh,” I said. “I have to go.”

  “You haven’t had a tour of the ship,” Gwedif said.

  “Don’t bother,” Joshua said. “These people just do not know how to decorate.”

  “I’d love to, but I’m late,” I s
aid. “I already missed a day yesterday. By now my assistant Marcella has called my house looking for me. If I don’t show up at the office today, she’s going to file a missing persons report.”

  “Well, there’s a problem,” Gwedif said. “It’s daytime now. We can’t really risk being seen doing a drop.”

  “So don’t do a drop,” Joshua said. “Make it a one-way trip.”

  “We could do that,” Gwedif said. “But there’s a problem with that, too.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It depends,” Joshua said. “How well can you control your sphincter muscles?”

  Gwedif explained it as we headed to the hangar. They could build an unmanned cube the size of the pickup, launch it, and have it land near where we had departed. But, as with the “meteor” and the black cube, it would have to arrive full-speed to avoid being picked up on radar for any length of time. Another thing: the cube would have to be transparent.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Black cubes in the daytime sky are suspicious,” Gwedif said. “Red pickups in the daytime sky are merely unbelievable. Even if someone saw it, no one would know what to think of it. And that’s not a bad thing.”

  “Good thing you haven’t had anything to eat in a while,” Joshua said.

  A few minutes later, as I prepared to get behind the wheel of my pickup, I said my good-byes to Gwedif and Joshua. I asked Gwedif when or if I would see him again.

  “Probably not for a while,” Gwedif said. “When we send someone again, it will be Joshua. But even he will stay here for a few months, to benefit us with your knowledge—now his—as to how to approach humanity. We probably won’t see each other until the day our race makes its debut. But I look forward to that day, Carl. I will be happy when it arrives. We’ll finally take that stroll through the tivis gallery.”

  “I can’t wait,” I said, and then turned to Joshua. “I look forward to seeing you again, then.”

  “Thanks, Pop,” Joshua said. “It’ll be soon. Get a better car by then.”

  I got into the pickup; immediately a cube began to grow around the truck. It indeed took longer to make a cube than to break it down, but not by much; within five minutes I was entirely enclosed. Then the cube became totally transparent, and it was as if it wasn’t there at all. I looked at Gwedif and Joshua and waved. They waved back.

  Suddenly I was flung into space, the Ionar receding behind me like a fastball thrown by a titan. The large blue plate that was the planet Earth began to grow at a distressing rate.

  It didn’t get bad until the last minute, as the pickup showed no signs of slowing down and the surface of the planet became ever more sharply defined. The last five seconds I couldn’t even watch—I covered my eyes and sobbed out the Lord’s Prayer.

  And then I was just off the unmarked road I and Gwedif were picked up from. I didn’t feel the landing, but when I opened my eyes, dust was swirling around and there was cracked earth underneath my pickup that matched the cracked earth on the other side of the road.

  I started the pickup and went home. Then I went to work. Marcella said that if I hadn’t arrived in those last ten minutes, she had been planning to call the FBI.

  CHAPTER Eleven

  Carl looked at his watch. “Damn,” he said. “I’ve missed my 4:00.”

  “The Call of the Damned premiere was four months ago, Carl,” I said. “What have they been doing between now and then?”

  “Grilling Joshua, I’d imagine,” Carl said. “Remember, he’s got my memories—it’s better than having me there, really, since I don’t know that I’d be up for a daily brain-sucking. It’s with Joshua that the Yherajk came up with the idea of using us to be their agents.”

  “I don’t get that,” I said. “If they have all your knowledge, I don’t see why they would need you or me to do anything for them.”

  “Well, they are still gelatinous cubes,” Carl said, “which does limit their ability to blend in. But I think there’s something else to it. I think they have a plan already, but they wanted to see what I, and now you, would come up with. For them, it’s not simply a matter of the most efficient way of doing something, otherwise Joshua would be addressing the UN right now. But there’s that notion the Yherajk have of surrendering to the crucial moment, burned right down into their reproductive strategies. I think that once again, they’re surrendering the moment to us—they’re saying, here, we trust you to take this, the most important moment in the history of both our races, and make it work.”

  “That’s a lot of trust,” I said.

  “Yes, well, frankly it’s also annoying,” Carl said. “I’m not saying that we should refuse the responsibility, not at all. But we’re carrying the entire load—if it gets messed up, the failure is entirely on our shoulders. All the pressure is on us. On you, actually, Tom, since I foisted it on you. Have you, since we started this, really thought on what we’re doing here?”

  “I’ve tried to avoid doing that,” I said. “It just makes me sort of dizzy. I try to concentrate on the smaller things, like hoping that Joshua will turn up sometime today.”

  “That’s probably the right attitude to have,” Carl said. “Now, I think about it quite a bit. It’s monumental and exhilarating—and I wish it were already done with.”

  “It’s going to work out fine, Carl. Don’t worry about it,” I said. I was taken aback by Carl’s comment—it didn’t sound like the Carl Lupo we all knew and feared.

  Carl must have realized it, because he suddenly gave a wolflike grin, true to his name. “I can tell you these things, Tom, because we’re both in on the biggest secret anyone’s ever had—no one else would believe me. Or you. Who else are we going to tell these things to?”

  “That’s funny,” I said. “Joshua once said the very same thing.”

  “Like father, like son,” Carl said, and stood up. “Now, come on, Tom. We have to head back. I can’t keep Rupert waiting much longer. He gets testy when he’s stood up.”

  “Three and a half hours for lunch?” Miranda said, as she followed me into the office. “Even by Hollywood standards, that’s a little extravagant. Your boss would kill you, if it weren’t for the fact you had lunch with him.”

  “Sorry, Mom,” I said. “I’ll do all of my homework before I go out tonight.”

  “Don’t get fresh,” Miranda said, “or you’ll get no dessert. Would you like to hear your messages, or do you want to give me more lip?”

  “Oh, I’d like messages, pretty please,” I said, sitting.

  “That’s better,” Miranda said. “You have six, count them, six messages from Jim Van Doren. In one two hour-period before your lunch. I think that qualifies as stalking by California law.”

  “I should be so lucky,” I said. “What does he want?”

  “Didn’t say. Didn’t sound particularly happy, however. I suspect if he hasn’t been raked over the coals by his editors at The Biz, he may be in the process of being torched right now. Carl called me this morning to get some information on the mentor program of yours. He mentioned that he was planning to rip Van Doren and The Biz new assholes in the Times. Not promising for either of them, if you ask me.”

  “God,” I said. “That’s just going to make them both more annoying. Anyone else?”

  “Michelle called. She’s apparently having some sort of difficulty with the Earth Resurrected folks. She said something about a latex mask. It didn’t make much sense to me. She also said that Ellen Merlow is definitely out of Hard Memories, and that she now felt she was up to the role, because she read ‘Iceman in Jerusalem.’” Miranda looked up at me, confused. “She can’t possibly mean Eichmann in Jerusalem.”

  “Give her a break, Miranda,” I said. “She got two-thirds of the title.”

  Miranda snorted. “Yeah, well, and I bet she’s averaging that for the rest of the words, too. Anyway, she’ll be calling back later. Last message, from your mysterious friend Joshua. He says he’s fine now, and not to call, he’s busy at the moment
but he’ll be there when you get there, whatever that means. Dealing with shady characters again, Tom?”

  “You have no idea,” I said. Why wasn’t I supposed to call? Despite Joshua’s reassurance, I was worried. I fought the urge to grab the phone right off. I decided to think about another entirely futile task instead. “Miranda, could you get Roland Lanois on the horn for me?”

  “Absolutely. Who is he?”

  “Miranda,” I said, pretending shock. “You’re so low-class. He’s the director and producer of the Academy Award–nominated motion picture The Green Fields, and also of the upcoming Hard Memories. His production company is on the Paramount lot, I believe.”

  “What?” Miranda said. “Tom, you can’t be serious. You’re not really going to try to get Michelle that part.”

  “Why not?” I said. “It’s not totally outside the realm of possibility that she could get the role, you know.”

  Miranda rolled her eyes and looked up, with upturned palms. “Take me now, Jesus. I don’t want to live here no more.”

  “Oh, stop it, and get Roland for me.”

  “Tom, the gods of common decency implore me to stop you from making this call.”

  “There’s a ten percent raise in it for you if you get Roland on the phone for me, right now.”

  Miranda blinked. “Really?”

  “Got it approved by Carl at lunch. So you have a choice. Common decency or a raise. Your call.”

  “Well, I’ve done my part for humanity for today,” Miranda said. “Time to cash in.”

  “That’s what I love about you, Miranda,” I said. “Your firm bedrock of moral values.”

  Miranda did a little step as she exited the office. I smiled. Then I grabbed the phone and made a quick call to Joshua’s cell phone.