Грегори Бенфорд - Not One of Us - Stories of Aliens on Earth

“Easy, Mr. Giddens. We’ve been running some tests on Ms. Bi, and we’ve discovered the presence in her bloodstream of fullerene nanoprocessors.”

“Nanowhat?”

“What are commonly know as Chaga spores.”

Ten, Dust Girl, firing and firing and firing at the glider, the gun blossoming in her hand, the shanty town melting behind her as her clothes fell apart, her arm sticking through the shield wall as she shouted, I’m chipped, I’m chipped! The soldiers shaving her head, hosing her down. Those things she had carried inside her. All those runs for the Americans.

“Oh my God.”

There was a window in the little room. Through it I saw Ten sitting on a plastic chair by the bed, hands on her thighs, head bowed.

“Mr. Giddens.” The man in the suit flashed a little plastic wallet. “Robert McGlennon, Home Office Immigration. Your, ah…” He nodded at the window.

“Partner.”

“Partner. Mr. Giddens, I have to tell you, we cannot be certain that Ms. Bi’s continued presence is not a public health risk. Her refugee status is dependent on a number of conditions, one of which is that…”

“You’re fucking deporting her…”

The two policemen stirred. I realized then that they were not there for Ten. There were there for me.

“It’s a public health issue, Mr. Giddens. She should never have been allowed in in the first place. We have no idea of the possible environmental impact. You, of all people, should be aware what these things can do. Have done. Are still doing. I have to think of public safety.”

“Public safety, fuck!”

“Mr. Giddens…”

I went to the window. I beat my fists on the wired glass.

“Ten! Ten! They’re trying to deport you! They want to send you back!”

The policemen prised me away from the window. On the far side, Ten yelled silently.

“Look, I don’t like having to do this,” the man in the suit said.

“When?”

“Mr. Giddens.”

“When? Tell me, how long has she got?”

“Usually there’d be a detention period, with limited rights of appeal. But as this is a public health issue…”

“You’re going to do it right now.”

“The order is effective immediately, Mr. Giddens. I’m sorry. These officers will go with you back to your home. If you could gather up the rest of her things…”

“At least let me say goodbye, Jesus, you owe me that!”

“I can’t allow that, Mr. Giddens. There’s a contamination risk.”

“Contamination? I’ve only been fucking her for the past six months.”

As the cops marched me out, the doctor came up for a word.

“Mr. Giddens, these nanoprocessors in her bloodstream…”

“That are fucking getting her thrown out of the country.”

“The fullerenes…”

“She heals quick. I saw it.”

“They do much more than that, Mr. Giddens. She’ll probably never get sick again. And there’s some evidence that they prevent telomere depletion in cell division.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means, she ages very much more slowly than we do. Her life expectancy may be, I don’t know, two, three hundred years.”

I stared. The policemen stared.

“There’s more. We observed unfamiliar structures in her brain; the best I can describe them is, the nanoprocessors seem to be reengineering dead neurons into a complementary neural network.”

“A spare brain?”

“An auxiliary brain.”

“What would you do with that?”

“What wouldn’t you do with that, Mr. Giddens.” He wiped his hand across his mouth. “This bit is pure speculation, but…”

“But.”

“But in some way, she’s in control of it all. I think—this is just a theory—that through this auxiliary brain she’s able to interact with the nanoprocessors. She might be able to make them do what she wants. Program them.”

“Thank you for telling me that,” I said bitterly. “That makes it all so much easier.”

I took the policemen back to my house. I told them to make themselves tea. I took Ten’s neatly arranged books and CDs off my shelves and her neatly folded clothes out of my drawers and her toilet things out of my bathroom and put them back in the two bags in which she had brought them. I gave the bags to the policemen; they took them away in their car. I never got to say goodbye. I never learned what flight she was on, where she flew from, when she left this country. A face behind glass. That was my last memory. The thing I feared—insane, out of nowhere—had taken her away.

After Ten went, I was sick for a long time. There was no sunshine, no rain, no wind. No days or time, just a constant, high-pitched, quiet whine in my head. People at work played out a slightly amplified normality for my benefit. Alone, they would ask, very gently, How do you feel?

“How do I feel?” I told them. “Like I’ve been shot with a single, high-velocity round, and I’m dead, and I don’t know it.”

I asked for someone else to take over the I-Nation account. Wynton called me but I could not speak with him. He sent around a bottle of that good Jamaican import liqueur, and a note, “Come and see us, any time.” Willy arranged me a career break and a therapist.

His name was Greg, he was a client-centered therapist, which meant I could talk for as long as I liked about whatever I liked and he had to listen. I talked very little, those first few sessions. Partly I felt stupid, partly I didn’t want to talk, even to a stranger. But it worked, little by little, without my knowing. I think I only began to be aware of that the day I realized that Ten was gone, but not dead. Her last photo of Africa was still on the fridge and I looked at it and saw something new: down there, in there, somewhere, was Ten. The realization was vast and subtle at the same time. I think of it like a man who finds himself in darkness. He imagines he’s in a room, no doors, no windows, and that he’ll never find the way out. But then he hears noises, feels a touch on his face, smells a subtle smell, and he realizes that he is not in a room at all—he is outside: the touch on his face is the wind, the noises are night birds, the smell is from night-blooming flowers, and above him, somewhere, are stars.

Greg said nothing when I told him this—they never do, these client-centered boys, but after that session I went to the net and started the hunt for Tendeléo Bi. The Freedom of Information Act got me into the Immigration Service’s databases. Ten had been flown out on a secure military transport to Mombasa. UNHCR in Mombasa had assigned her to Likoni Twelve, a new camp to the south of the city. She was transferred out on November Twelfth. It took two days’ searching to pick up a Tendeléo Bi logged into a place called Samburu North three months later. Medical records said she was suffering from exhaustion and dehydration, but responding to sugar and salt treatment. She was alive.

On the first Monday of winter, I went back to work. I had lost a whole season. On the first Friday, Willy gave me print-out from an on-line recruitment agency.

“I think you need a change of scene,” he said. “These people are looking for a stock accountant.”

These people were Medecins Sans Frontiers. Where they needed a stock accountant was their East African theater.

Eight months after the night the two policemen took away Ten’s things, I stepped off the plane in Mombasa. I think hell must be like Mombasa in its final days as capital of the Republic of Kenya, infrastructure unravelling, economy disintegrating, the harbor a solid mass of boat people and a million more in the camps in Likoni and Shimba Hills, Islam and Christianity fighting a new Crusade for control of this chaos and the Chaga advancing from the west and now the south, after the new impact at Tanga. And in the middle of it all, Sean Giddens, accounting for stock. It was good, hard, solid work in MSF Sector Headquarters, buying drugs where, when, and how we could; haggling down truck drivers and Sibirsk jet-jockeys; negotiating service contracts as spare parts for the Landcruisers gradually ran out, every day juggling budgets always too small against needs too big. I loved it more than any work I’ve ever done. I was so busy I sometimes forgot why I was there. Then I would go in the safe bus back to the compound and see the smoke going up from the other side of the harbor, hear the gunfire echo off the old Arab houses, and the memory of her behind that green wired glass would gut me.