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

I pause. I can’t imagine he noticed the black dot on my badge in such a quick look. Then I realize that it was because I had turned my back to him. He could see the outline of the Tawnin port through my shirt. He knew I had been Reborn, and it was a lucky—but reasonable—guess that someone whose port was kept open was bonded to a Tawnin.

I don’t take the bait. I’m used to the kind of xenophobia that drives men like him to kill.

“You’ll be probed after the surgery. But if you confess now and give useful information about your co-conspirators, after your Rebirth you’ll be given a good job and a good life, and you’ll get to keep the memories of most of your friends and family. But if you lie or say nothing, we’ll learn everything we need anyway and you’ll be sent to California for fallout clean-up duty with a blank slate of a mind. And anyone who cared about you will forget you, completely. Your choice.”

“How do you know I have any co-conspirators?”

“I saw you when the explosion happened. You were expecting it. I believe your role was to try to kill more Tawnin in the chaos after the explosion.”

He continues to stare at me, his hatred unrelenting. Then, abruptly, he seems to think of something. “You’ve been Reborn more than once, haven’t you?”

I stiffen. “How did you know?”

He smiles. “Just a hunch. You stand and sit too straight. What did you do the last time?”

I should be prepared for the question, but I’m not. Two months after my Rebirth, I’m still raw, off my game. “You know I can’t answer that.”

“You remember nothing?”

“That was a rotten part of me that was cut out,” I tell him. “Just like it will be cut out of you. The Josh Rennon who committed whatever crime he did no longer exists, and it is only right that the crime be forgotten. The Tawnin are a compassionate and merciful people. They only remove those parts of me and you that are truly responsible for the crime—the mens rea, the evil will.”

“A compassionate and merciful people,” he repeats. And I see something new in his eyes: pity.

A sudden rage seizes me. He is the one to be pitied, not me . Before he has a chance to put up his hands I lunge at him and punch him in the face, once, twice, three times, hard.

Blood flows from his nose as his hands waver before him. He doesn’t make any noise, but continues to look at me with his calm, pity-filled eyes.

“They killed my father in front of me,” he says. He wipes the blood from his lips and shakes his hand to get rid of it. Droplets of blood hit my shirt, the scarlet beads bright against its white fabric. “I was thirteen, and hiding in the backyard shed. Through a slit in the doors I saw him take a swing at one of them with a baseball bat. The thing blocked it with one arm and seized his head with another pair of arms and just ripped it off. Then they burned my mother. I’ll never forget the smell of cooked flesh.”

I try to bring my breathing under control. I try to see the man before me as the Tawnin do: divided. There’s a frightened child who can still be rescued, and an angry, bitter man who cannot.

“That was more than twenty years ago,” I say. “It was a darker time, a terrible, twisted time. The world has moved on. The Tawnin have apologized and tried to make amends. You should have gone to counseling. They should have ported you and excised those memories. You could have had a life free of these ghosts.”

“I don’t want to be free of these ghosts. Did you ever consider that? I don’t want to forget. I lied and told them that I saw nothing. I didn’t want them to reach into my mind and steal my memories. I want revenge.”

“You can’t have revenge. The Tawnin who did those things are all gone. They’ve been punished, consigned to oblivion.”

He laughs. “‘Punished,’ you say. The Tawnin who did those things are the exact same Tawnin who parade around today, preaching universal love and a future in which the Tawnin and humans live in harmony. Just because they can conveniently forget what they did doesn’t mean we should.”

“The Tawnin do not have a unified consciousness—”

“You speak like you lost no one in the Conquest.” His voice rises as pity turns into something darker. “You speak like a collaborator.” He spits at me, and I feel the blood on my face, between my lips—warm, sweet, the taste of rust. “You don’t even know what they’ve taken from you.”

I leave the room and close the door behind me, shutting off his stream of curses.

Outside the courthouse, Claire from Tech Investigations meets me. Her people had already scanned and recorded the crime scene last night, but we walk around the crater doing an old-fashioned visual inspection anyway, in the unlikely event that her machines missed something.

Missed something. Something was missing.

“One of the injured Reborn died at Mass General this morning around 4 o’clock,” Claire says. “So that brings the total death toll to ten: six Tawnin and four Reborn. Not as bad as what happened in New York two years ago, but definitely the worst massacre in New England.”

Claire is slight, with a sharp face and quick, jerky movements that put me in mind of a sparrow. As the only two TPB agents married to Tawnins in the Boston Field Office, we have grown close. People joke that we’re work spouses.

I didn’t lose anyone in the Conquest.

Kai stands with me at my mother’s funeral. Her face in the casket is serene, free of pain.

Kai’s touch on my back is gentle and supportive. I want to tell thim not to feel too bad. Thie had tried so hard to save her, as thie had tried to save my father before her, but the human body is fragile, and we don’t yet know how to effectively use the advances taught to us by the Tawnin.

We pick our way around a pile of rubble that has been cemented in place by melted asphalt. I try to bring my thoughts under control. Woods unsettled me. “Any leads on the detonator?” I ask.

“It’s pretty sophisticated,” Claire says. “Based on the surviving pieces, there was a magnetometer connected to a timer circuit. My best guess is the magnetometer was triggered by the presence of large quantities of metal nearby, like the Judgment Ship. And that started a timer that was set to detonate just as the Reborn reached the ground.

“The setup requires fairly detailed knowledge of the mass of the Judgment Ship; otherwise the yachts and cargo ships sailing through the Harbor could have set it off.”

“Also knowledge of the operation of the Judgment Ship,” I add. “They had to know how many Reborn were going to be here yesterday, and calculate how long it would take to complete the ceremony and lower them to the ground.”

“It definitely took a lot of meticulous planning,” Claire said. “This is not the work of a loner. We’re dealing with a sophisticated terrorist organization.”

Claire pulls me to a stop. We’re at a good vantage point to see the bottom of the explosion crater. It’s thinner than I would have expected. Whoever had done this had used directed explosives that focused the energy upwards, presumably to minimize the damage to the crowd on the sides.

The crowd.

A memory of myself as a child comes to me unbidden.

Autumn, cool air, the smell of the sea and something burning. A large, milling crowd, but no one is making any noise. Those at the edge of the crowd, like me, push to move closer to the center, while those near the center push to get out, like a colony of ants swarming over a bird corpse. Finally, I make my way to the center, where bright bonfires burn in dozens of oil drums.