Robert Silverberg - The Silent Invaders

While I find myself on a strange planet, wearing a strange skin, and caught up in the toils of the devil Medlins , he thought.

He scowled darkly, and took another sip of wine to ease the ache his heart felt.

A day of nerve-twisting inactivity passed, moment by endless moment.

Harris did not hear from Carver, though he waited all morning for a message. Nor did any of the Medlins contact him. Toward midday, Harris went down the hall to Beth Baldwin’s room, but when he signalled no one answered the door.

In the lobby, he checked at the desk. “I’d like to leave a message for Miss Baldwin,” he said.

“What room is that, sir?”

“5820.”

The clerk checked the board. “I’m sorry, sir. That room was vacated earlier this day.”

Harris drummed on the desktops with his fingertips, and noted in grim amusement that he was even acquiring the Terran gestures of irritation and impatience. “Did she leave a forwarding address?”

Another check of the board.

“No, sir, I’m sorry but she didn’t.”

Harris sighed. “All right. Thanks anyway, I guess.”

He walked away. It figured, he thought, that she would have severed all links this way. She had established quarters in the hotel only long enough to come into contact with him. Her mission accomplished, she had left without leaving a trace.

Regretfully, Harris wished he had had a chance to try that biological experiment with her, after all. The thought struck him as faintly perverse, since she was a Medlin under the curving flesh. But, Medlin though she might be, his body was now Terran-oriented, his entire glandular system rearranged and modified, and it might have been an interesting experience.

Well, there was no chance for that now. And just as well, he decided. Consorting with the enemy was a crime and a sin against the Spirit no matter what sort of bodies were being worn by whom.

Wearily, he left the hotel, feeling the need for some fresh air and exercise. On Darruu it had been his custom to swim eight lengths every morning, winter or summer, red-mist or pinkmist. Here, in this concrete monster of a city, there was no chance for that, and his atrophying muscles ached from neglect.

He walked instead.

He walked down narrow streets two thousand years old, through winding alleyways that led down to the river, stinking and polluted, that wound through the core of the giant city. He stood at the river’s edge, on the paved embankment, looking out at the sluggishly flowing water rolling toward the sea. The sky was thick with helitaxis, not with sea-birds. The bustle of commerce was everywhere.

This Earth was a rich world, he thought. A world of shopkeepers, of merchants, of financiers and thieves. There were no spiritual values here, not even a decent sense of military discipline. Earth was a curious mixture of the ruthless and the spineless, and Harris was at a loss to understand the culture.

The river’s stink oppressed him. He turned away, gagging, and made his way back into the interior. Jostling robocarts thrummed by him on all sides. He was troubled by the swarming omnipresence of people, busy people. Nine billion people on a single world, and a small world at that—it was a numbing thought. And yet, he understood that there were still vast tracts of Earth where no one lived at all—open wastelands and jungle lands that still had not been developed, though settlements were beginning to nibble at their edges.

The Earthers preferred to lump themselves together in huge cities, and to let the outlands rot. Why? Why these mind-blasting conurbations?

Were they afraid to be alone?

Harris shrugged. This world gave him a choking feeling. He would be well glad to be rid of it, to be back on Darruu again, to see an open field and to smell clean air, to revel in the tang of cold water against his naked skin in the hours after dawn.

He passed a building so sleek its sides were mirrors of stone. His face, hardly distorted, peered back at him. Not his face, not Aar Khülom’s face, but Abner Harris’. He was starting to forget what he had looked like. Aar Khülom of the city of Helasz was a stranger to him now. He closed his eyes for a moment, saw his old face, red-eyed, golden-hued, hairless, with angular cheekbones jutting up harshly to cast his eyes into shadow.

Someday he would have that face back, he told himself hopefully. They would strip away the pink overlay, remove the obscene mat of bestial hair that sprouted on it, rip out the cheek-padding that hid the knifelike blades of his cheekbones. The surgeons would restore his tendrils. They would no longer be functional ones, no longer would give him advance warning of changes in barometric pressure, but that had been a small enough sacrifice. A Servant of the Spirit must be prepared to yield up not merely his tendrils but his eyes, his heart, his life, even, if Darruu requests it of him. With the privileges of nobility come the obligations as well, and he had never questioned that.

But he longed for Darruu.

He longed for his own face.

Carver is right , he thought. We must strike fast, wipe out the scheming Medlins. And then home! Home to Darruu !

As the afternoon shadows began to gather, Harris returned to the hotel, and ate alone in the hotel restaurant. He found he had little appetite, and he ate simply, avoiding the more exotic aspects of the hotel’s menu. As a place that catered to a largely interstellar clientele, they featured delicacies from all corners of the universe—at least, all corners of the universe whre Terran tradesmen were active. There was nothing Darruui on the menu, nothing even from, a planet near Darruu, and Harris had no taste at the moment for dishes of other alien worlds.

After eating, he returned to the room and lay down on his bed. Automatically, he assumed a Darruui position of comfort—on his back, legs in the air, knees flexed—but realizing that he might be under a spybeam, he caught himself and stretched out into a conventional Terran repose-position. He tried to relax.

Toward evening, his signal-amplifier buzzed. Reaching across, he activated the communicator.

“Harris here.”

“Carver. Rendezvous time in one hour.”

“Where?”

“8963 Aragon Boulevard,” Carver said. “We meet on the eighth floor.”

Harris repeated the address. Carver signalled off. Feeling a rising sense of exictement now that the long day of boredom had ended, Harris rose, dressed, armed himself, and went out.

He hired a helitaxi, gave the driver the address. The driver squirmed around in his seat and said, “What’s that address again?”

“Aragon Boulevard. 8963.”

“Damned if I know where that is. Hold on and let me get computer direction.”

Harris waited. It was an impossible city, he thought angrily. Imagine cab drivers unable to find their way around! The city was too big, of course, but that had nothing to do with the immediate problem. Why couldn’t they have a systematic arrangement of the streets? Hadn’t they heard of city planning on Earth? Didn’t they know what a street grid was? Why did they have to name their streets, instead of numbering them?

An absurd planet, he thought.

But, he realized, with all their inefficiencies and irrationalities, these Earthers had managed to forge outward into the galaxy at a faster pace than any other species in the history of sentience. That was a chilling thought. What, he wondered, would these people be capable of if they were actually funtioning at full efficiency?

What would they be like when the new super-Earthmen evolved into domination?

He began to shiver apprehensively. He cursed the Medlins anew. Had they no sense? Couldn’t they see what a menace they were spawning?