Diane Duane - X-COM - UFO Defense

Ueli paused there and shouted, “Duonna Mati, bien di”

There was no answer for a few seconds. Then the brown front door opened, and a woman came out. She was fairly thin, and very tall, with startlingly silver hair pulled back in a tight bun. She was wearing jeans and a plain red sweatshirt, and almost new running shoes. From inside came a faint glow, as if from a fire. She shouted back, “Bien onn, Ueli,” and then added something else that Jonelle couldn’t catch.

Ueli saw the look on Jonelle’s face. “Romansh,” he said. “She uses the old local language sometimes, but then so do a lot of us here in the southeast. She says we should come in and get warm.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Jonelle said softly.

They went in. Shortly Jonelle found herself ensconced by an open fire with the others, in a one-room house that, though completely made of wood that looked much older than three hundred years, was nevertheless perfectly tidy. This was something Jonelle had noticed in every building she’d been in since she came to Switzerland: the astonishing cleanliness of them, apparently another of the national traits. As for drinking, shortly she found she had to do that too, for as soon as she and Matt and Ueli were seated by the fire, Duonna Mati presented them all with small, thick, green-clear glasses of some clear liquid. Jonelle sniffed it, and smelled plums, and alcohol.

“She makes it herself,” Ueli said encouragingly.

Oh wonderful, Jonelle thought: a moonshiner. Nonetheless she lifted the glass, toasted her hostess, and said “Viva” as they had taught her the other night in the bar. Then she knocked the glass back in one swoop.

The old woman looked at Jonelle and nodded an approving expression. Seen more closely, it was plain she had been beautiful when she was younger. Now her face was a mask of fine lines, out of which brilliant, vivid green eyes looked, examining Jonelle minutely, then glancing at Matt. Her hands were very gnarled, so much so that Jonelle wondered if she was in pain. After a moment the woman spoke to Ueli, and he spluttered slightly in mid-drink.

“What does she say?” Jonelle said.

“She says,” Ueli said, “that she knows you’re from the people who’re working with the government. She wants to know what you’re going to do about her old age benefit, which they keep trying to cut.”

Amused, Jonelle smiled the smile she had become good at this past week. “Please tell her,” she said, “that I’ll look into it, and if there’s anything I can do, I’ll try to help. But I’m not sure there’s much I can do.”

The old woman eyed Jonelle with an expression that suggested she recognized bureaucratic bull when she heard it, but she smiled slightly. Then she spoke again. Ueli listened attentively, then said, “Duonna Mati says, if you can’t do anything about that, what do you think you’re going to be able to do about the spaceship that’s stealing people’s cows? My cow, she says.”

Jonelle opened her mouth, closed it again. “Well,” she said, “please ask her if she could possibly describe this spaceship to me.”

Ueli translated the request. The old lady spoke briefly, measuring out distances with her hands, and Ueli said, “She’s describing something that would be—oh, I’d say the size of two tractor-trailer trucks laid end to end. Octagonal and three stories tall, she says. She saw it quite clearly, though by moonlight. She was up late.”

The old lady held her hands up to Jonelle and made a motion as if trying to flex them. Jonelle nodded. “I see. What did the ship do?”

Ueli translated this. Duonna Mati spoke in a low voice, then glanced out the window for a moment, into the dusk. “She says it came low from over the mountains, from southward. It came down to the field and landed, and people—creatures, rather, creatures in shells of some kind, she says—came out of it and took the cows. Some were small, like ‘nanin, like dwarves or children. They came out, and some took the cows into the ship. Then after awhile”—and here Ueli’s face worked, while Duonna Mati spoke again—“they threw pieces of these cows out of the ship, onto the ground. The ship rose up and took off again.”

“Forgive me,” Jonelle said, “but I have to ask. Your alp is nearly two miles away. How could she have seen anything so clearly, at night, at this distance?”

Ueli translated the question.

The old lady smiled, got up with a creak of joints, and went over to beside the head of the carved wood bed.

There was a tripod standing there, with something fixed to the top of it. She brought the tripod back, standing it beside Jonelle.

Jonelle looked at the top of the tripod. Fastened to it was a pair of battleship-bridge binoculars: army surplus, and over fifty years old, but well taken care of—25 x 100s, with built-in filters. “My lord,” she said, “that answers that question. If there were cows on that alp, she could have read the names written on the cowbells with these.” She nodded at Duonna Mati to go on. Plainly she saw the Harvester that they lost the other night. “Where did it go? Did she see?”

The old woman nodded, understanding, and spoke. Ueli said, “It rose and flew after a while. But it didn’t go far. She says—” He paused, like a man who thinks he’s about to translate something quite mad. “She says she saw it go into the mountain.”

Jonelle opened her mouth and shut it again, confused. Could Duonna Mati have seen one of her ships going into Andermatt Base? But how could she possibly confuse that with the Harvester, which she had correctly described?

Duonna Mati spoke again and got up. “She says to come, and she’ll show us where it went in,” said Ueli.

Jonelle followed the others out into the deepening dusk. It had been clear that day, but now clouds were riding up out of the west, catching the last light of the sun, which was already below the horizon. The sunset was spectacular even in its fading stages, and on the mountains to the east, Jonelle could see an effect that she had heard described, but never seen—the reflected light from those sunset clouds on the snow-covered mountains, which seemed to burn a deep, incandescent rose against the purple-blue of the oncoming night.

Duonna Mati led them over to one side of her property, where there was a better view of the Urseren Valley. All of Andermatt lay below them, its lights sparkling through the windy air. The old lady paused a moment, as if making very sure of her directions, and she pointed. “Cheuora,” she said. “Cheuora muntogna.”

“There—that mountain,” Ueli said. Duonna Mati pointed a little south of due east, not at the Chastelhorn under which Andermatt Base lay, but at a mountain that reared up high above a number of others, chief of a group that rose to it in a long south-pointing ridge.

“Scopi,” Duonna Mati said, and Ueli nodded. “She’s right. The mountain is called Scopi. It’s a ten-thousand-footer down south of the Urseren Valley proper, just above the Lucomagno Pass. There’s a lake there, an artificial one produced by damming the valley—produces much of the hydroelectric power for the area.”

Jonelle shook her head, astonished. She turned to the old woman and said, “Please ask her to forgive me, but I must be very sure about this. Are you telling me that you saw the ship go in that mountain? Not just behind it?”

Duonna Mati looked at Jonelle with a serious expression, spoke to her slowly in her old language, as if to a child. Ueli blinked and said to Jonelle, “She says, ‘I know you think perhaps I am mad. But I saw the mountain open, and the ship go inside. I saw lights inside, and then the vanishing of the lights. It was bright moonlight between the clouds, and there was no mistaking it. Not with those.’” She gestured back at her house and, indirectly, at the battleship-bridge binoculars.