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

“The convoy will be moving now. You should sit for your safety.”

He clacks away before we can respond. He hooks his hind legs through the side rail opposite us and settles down, looking like nothing so much as a contented cat.

The armored tanks get into formation around us and then we lurch forward, rattling over the broken road. Tris makes it for half an hour before she pukes over the side.

For two days, Tris and I barely speak. The other man in our truck wakes up about once every ten hours, just in time for one of the two-legged glassmen from the armored tanks to clomp over and give us all some food and water. The man gets less than we do, though none of it is very good. He eats in such perfect silence that I wonder if the glassmen have cut out his tongue. As soon as he finishes, one of the tank glassmen presses a glowing metal bar to the back of his neck. The mark it leaves is a perfect triangle, raw and red like a fresh burn. The prisoner doesn’t struggle when the giant articulated metal hand grips his shoulders, he only stares, and soon after he slumps against the railing. I have lots of time to wonder about those marks; hour after slow hour with a rattling truck bruising my tailbone and regrets settling into my joints like dried tears. Sometimes Tris massages knots from my neck, and sometimes they come right back while I knead hers. I can’t see any way to escape, so I try not to think about it. But there’s no helping the sick, desperate knowledge that every hour we’re closer to locking Tris in a hospital for six months so the glassmen can force her to have a baby.

During the third wake-up and feeding of the bound man, our glassman shakes out his legs and clacks over to the edge of the truck bed. The robots who drive the tanks are at least eight feet tall, with oversized arms and legs equipped with artillery rifles. They would be terrifying even if we weren’t completely at their mercy. The two glassmen stare at each other, eerily silent and still.

The bound man, I’d guess Indian from his thick straight hair and dark skin, strains as far forward as he can. He nods at us.

“They’re talking,” he says. His words are slow and painstakingly formed. We crawl closer to hear him better. “In their real bodies.”

I look back up, wondering how he knows. They’re so still, but then glassmen are always uncanny.

Tris leans forward, so her lips are at my ear. “Their eyes,” she whispers.

Glassman robot eyes never blink. But their pupils dilate and contract just like ours do. Only now both robots’ eyes are pupil-blasted black despite the glaring noon sun. Talking in their real bodies? That must mean they’ve stopped paying us any attention.

“Could we leave?” I whisper. No one has tied us up. I think our glassman is under the impression he’s doing us a favor.

Tris buries her face in the back of my short nappy hair and wraps her arms around me. I know it’s a ploy, but it comforts me all the same. “The rest of the convoy.”

Even as I nod, the two glassmen step away from each other, and our convoy is soon enough on its way. This time, though, the prisoner gets to pass his time awake and silent. No one tells us to move away from him.

“I have convinced the field soldier to allow me to watch the operative,” our glassman says proudly.

“That’s very nice,” Tris says. She’s hardly touched her food.

“I am glad you appreciate my efforts! It is my job to assess mission parameter achievables. Would you mind if I asked you questions?”

I frown at him and quickly look away. Tris, unfortunately, has decided she’d rather play with fire than her food.

“Of course,” she says.

We spend the next few hours subjected to a tireless onslaught of questions. Things like, “How would you rate our society-building efforts in the Tidewater Region?” and “What issue would you most like to see addressed in the upcoming Societal Health Meeting?” and “Are you mostly satisfied or somewhat dissatisfied with the cleanliness of the estuary?”

“The fish are toxic,” I say to this last question. My first honest answer. It seems to startle him. At least, that’s how I interpret the way he clicks his front two legs together.

Tris pinches my arm, but I ignore her.

“Well,” says the glassman. “That is potentially true. We have been monitoring the unusually high levels of radiation and heavy metal toxicity. But you can rest assured that we are addressing the problem and its potential harmful side-effects on Beneficial Societal Development.”

“Like dying of mercury poisoning?” Tris pinches me again, but she smiles for the first time in days.

“I do not recommend it for the pregnant one! I have been serving you both nutritious foods well within the regulatory limits.”

I have no idea what those regulatory limits might be, but I don’t ask.

“In any case,” he says. “Aside from that issue, the estuary is very clean.”

“Thank you,” Tris says, before I can respond.

“You’re very welcome. We are here to help you.”

“How far away is the hospital?” she asks.

I feel like a giant broom has swept the air from the convoy, like our glassman has tossed me back into the bay to drown. I knew Tris was desperate; I didn’t realize how much.

“Oh,” he says, and his pupils go very wide. I could kiss the prisoner for telling us what that means: no one’s at home.

The man now leans toward us, noticing the same thing. “You pregnant?” he asks Tris.

She nods.

He whistles through a gap between his front teeth. “Some rotten luck,” he says. “I never seen a baby leave one of their clinics. Fuck knows what they do to them.”

“And the mothers?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer, just lowers his eyes and looks sidelong at our dormant glassman. “Depends,” he whispers, “on who they think you are.”

That’s all we have time for; the glassman’s eyes contract again and his head tilts like a bird’s. “There is a rehabilitative facility in the military installation to which we are bound. Twenty-three hours ETA.”

“A prison?” Tris asks.

“A hospital,” the glassman says firmly.

When we reach the pipeline, I know we’re close. The truck bounces over fewer potholes and cracks; we even meet a convoy heading in the other direction. The pipeline is a perfect clear tube about sixteen feet high. It looks empty to me, a giant hollow tube that distorts the landscape on the other side like warped glass. It doesn’t run near the bay, and no one from home knows enough to plot it on a map. Maybe this is the reason the glassmen are here. I wonder what could be so valuable in that hollow tube that Tris has to give birth in a cage, that little Georgia has to die, that a cluster bomb has to destroy half our wheat crop. What’s so valuable that looks like nothing at all?

The man spends long hours staring out the railing of the truck, as though he’s never seen anything more beautiful or more terrifying. Sometimes he talks to us, small nothings, pointing out a crane overhead or a derelict road with a speed limit sign— 55 miles per hour, it says, radar enforced.

At first our glassman noses around these conversations, but he decides they’re innocuous enough. He tells the man to “refrain from exerting a corrupting influence,” and resumes his perch on the other side of the truck bed. The prisoner’s name is Simon, he tells us, and he’s on watch. For what, I wonder, but know well enough not to ask.

“What’s in it?” I say instead, pointing to the towering pipeline.

“I heard it’s a wormhole.” He rests his chin on his hands, a gesture that draws careful, casual attention to the fact that his left hand has loosened the knots. He catches my eye for a blink and then looks away. My breath catches—Is he trying to escape? Do we dare?