Diane Duane - X-COM - UFO Defense

Jonelle shook her head. “I wouldn’t know,” she said slowly. “I’m a cat person myself.”

“But sooner or later,” Trenchard said, “if we last long enough, that’s a question we’re going to have to answer. How human are we going to insist on being? So human that we can’t survive what time has made of our world? Or will we relax ourselves to the inevitable?”

Jonelle smiled and got up, stretching. One of the transports would be heading down to Andermatt shortly, and if she got started now, she could be on it. “Inevitability,” she said, slightly amused, “is in the mind of the beholder.”

As she waved at Trenchard and stepped out, he grinned back, and said, “Tell that to entropy.”

Back in the mountain above Andermatt the next morning, Jonelle allowed herself the luxury of sleeping late, just for once, and didn’t get up until about nine. There had been no UFO sightings or interceptions the night before. Thank Heaven for small blessings, she thought as she stretched and yawned and set about getting herself ready to face the day.

She spent it, until about noontime, looking over the number-two hangar space, making phone calls and comms calls, and generally catching up on the paperwork end of business. When her desk was cleared—or rather, when everything she had started piling on her office floor had been dealt with, as far as possible—Jonelle changed into civvies and took the little “covert train” down into town.

The day was bright and sunny, and the whole town was full of skiers, chattering at one another in three or four different languages and generally making Jonelle’s eyes hurt at the violent way their ski clothes’ colors clashed. I can’t wait for a couple of years from now, she thought, when the styles will change and soft colors, or earth tones, or anything else, will be in fashion.

The PR office was having a quiet day, at least relatively so. “The skiers keep mistaking us for the tourist information center,” Callie complained to Jonelle when she came in. “I’ve had three different groups of people come in here and try to get me to make hotel reservations for them. I’m beginning to think we should go down there and get a bunch of brochures.”

Jonelle smiled a little. “Maybe you should. I don’t know if they’d like us horning in on their business, though.”

“As long as we don’t try to sell lift passes,” Callie said, “I suspect we’d be OK.”

Jonelle laughed and sat down to go through some of the paperwork that was piling up down here: mostly written complaints and protests at the “UN’s” presence, left by local people. X-COM required that its cover offices, when such were opened, function like the real thing, so Jonelle or someone she delegated had to write letters to the people who had complained, explaining— exactly as if she were a UN representative—what could or, most often, what couldn’t be done regarding the problems they were complaining about. She spent an hour or two dictating some of these letters to Callie and (when Callie’s lunch hour came around) tapping them out herself. It was not work that came particularly easily to Jonelle, especially the part where she had to tell people again and again that there was nothing she could do to help them. More than once, she wished she could simply take a laser cannon to the whole miserable pile.

Nonetheless, Jonelle finished the work and felt insufferably virtuous at the end of it. When Callie came back from her lunch break, Jonelle happily left the office to her and went out to get a sandwich of her own from the delicatessen just past the hotel.

She never made it quite that far. Having paused to look briefly in the window of the bookstore next to the hotel, she turned to cross the street to the deli and saw Ueli Trager coming along the street. His expression was furious, and at the same time somehow tragic.

“Herr Präsident—” she said.

He paused and looked at her. “Fräulein Barrett,” said Ueli, “how are you doing this morning?”

Jonelle thought that the exercise of “bedside manner” would help Ueli no more than it would have helped Molson the other day. “I’m doing well enough,” she said, “but Ueli, you look like you just lost your best friend! What’s the matter?”

The expression he gave her was grim enough, though there was a kind of surprise in it as well, like the look he had given her when she’d admitted to forgetting his cow’s name. “I’m very upset,” Ueli said, “and I’m going to have a drink. Perhaps you would like to drink with me?”

The naked appeal in that face, always so reserved and controlled, except for the other night, shocked her somewhat. “Not alcohol, this early in the day,” Jonelle said, “but yes, certainly Let me just have a word with my assistant.”

She went hurriedly back to the office, told Callie where she was going to be if she was needed, and then made her way back to Ueli. Together they walked to the Krone, and Ueli led the way into the bar. They sat down at one of the old, scarred wooden tables farthest back, underneath an ancient, rusty plow that some decor expert had thought would look picturesque hanging from the rafters. When Stefan the barman came back to them, Ueli said, “Kornschnaps, bitte—a double.”

“Just a cola for me.” Stefan went off to fetch the drinks, and Jonelle said, “Without any beer, Ueli?” Most of the people here, she had seen, preferred to drink the local firewater as a chaser.

“I would like to get drunk,” Ueli said with a bitter air, suggesting that he thought he might not be able to.

“Tell me what’s wrong!”

The schnapps and the cola came. Ueli picked up the slim, straight glass with the schnapps in it, stared at it, and knocked it straight back in one neat drink. He put the glass down and said to Jonelle, “My pugniera is gone.”

“Gone? You mean your cow? Rosselana? Where?”

“I don’t know. Someone has taken her.”

Jonelle took a long drink of her cola, hoping nothing of what she was thinking showed in her face. “Who would take your cow?”

“The same person, perhaps,” Ueli said heavily, “who left four of my other cows—” He shook his head. “Stefan? Another, please.”

“Left them where?”

“Not where—how. Left them in pieces, on the ground. Cut up. The hearts torn out of them.”

Stefan arrived with another glass. Ueli took it, glancing at him. “Keep them coming. Fräulein, you may not understand how it is—”

“Jonelle.”

“Jonelle. I thank you. We are simple people in our way, and probably city people would not understand very well how we feel about these things. Certainly our cows are our livelihood. Its either do dairy work, in this part of the world, or cater to the skiers. There’s nothing else, really, not enough land to farm, we’re too far off the beaten track for industry. But there’s little enough grazing so that we can only keep small numbers of cattle, and when you keep them in small groups, when one man has maybe ten or fifteen cows, they become not pets, but work associates. You get familiar with them, you come to know their ways and their habits. You are friends. With a pugniera, who’s smarter than the others, stronger, a creature that stands out a little from its crowd—even if the crowd is only cows—you become friendly indeed. It’s almost like a shepherd and a sheepdog: each of you is doing the same job, though in different ways, on different levels. You appreciate each other. Now a third of my own small herd are gone. It will have an impact on my income, yes, replacing them will require a big capital outlay, yes—but speaking of ‘replacing’ them is idle: they were associates of mine. And Rosselana, not butchered like the others, just gone—” He stared at the table. “Human beings did not do these things. No human was near the lower pastures. It’s those others, isn’t it? The aliens.”