In Her Name

nagged at him for still having it. He consoled himself that it would be well taken care of until it could be returned. His own he had given to young Jodi, in what he knew were vain hopes that she would come to her senses and realize that there were greater things in the Universe even than the alien hordes that sought to destroy God’s work. He was fond of the young woman, and hated terribly to see her go. But he knew that her work was important to defend Creation against the monsters that had raised Reza.

And now, the more he thought of it, the more he became convinced that Reza was genuine, that some spark of goodness, of godliness, had led him home, to stay raising his hand against those of his own kind. Perhaps, he thought wonderingly, Jodi was right when she said that different was not always evil, not always bad. To judge by outward appearances had led them to the brink of disaster before Reza had literally beaten sense into Hernandez, and the old priest vowed to change his ways, to never repeat that most human of mistakes.

* * *

Deliha Rabat watched silently as the young petty officer struggled to get back into his uniform, nearly laughing as he fell over backwards onto the bed while pulling his pants back on. He was fifteen minutes late for his duty station on the bridge.

“You’d better slow down, dear,” she chided, thinking that he had been even more comical in bed. And just as hurried. Deliha was still well within her prime and attractive to both sexes, and when the fancy took her, she allowed her body the occasional pleasurable tryst. Unfortunately, it always seemed that her taste in bed partners was even worse than her choice in professional associates. None of them ever seemed to measure up. It was a paradox whose solution consistently eluded her.

“I’ll, uh, I’ll see you later?” the man stuttered as he finished dressing and hurried for the door.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Deliha said absently, already having dismissed him from her mind. He had rated very low on her bedroom scale; masturbation would have provided a lot more enjoyment than his frenzied thrusts, and without the resultant mess. That he was now conveniently leaving behind.

With an unsure wave, he disappeared into the corridor, and the door swished closed behind him.

“Imbecile,” she muttered.

As she rose to go to the bathroom and clean herself up, she contemplated her situation with a sense of frustration. Their voyage was almost over, with Earth only a few days away, and she felt she had very little to show for it. Oh, yes, the dietary team was ecstatic: they now knew what Reza liked to eat (nearly raw meat and a particular lager originally brewed in Earth’s Australia), had studied his body’s fantastic metabolism (but did not know how he achieved it), etc., etc. The linguistic team, led by Dr. Chuen, had made what even Rabat had to admit was phenomenal progress in teaching Reza Standard, although it was clearly due to Reza’s learning skills, not Chuen’s teaching.

But there had been no reciprocation on Reza’s part. No matter how hard any of them tried, he refused to utter a single Kreelan word or discuss anything dealing with the Empire. Of greater annoyance, even granting his limited vocabulary in Standard, was that he refused to divulge the reason for his returning to humanity. It was as if he had simply been born again right out of his mother’s womb and had no idea what they were talking about.

But that, Deliha was sure, was rubbish. Reza understood precisely what they were after, but was simply refusing to part with any information any more than he would part with his clothes: no one could convince him to stop wearing his Kreelan garb and dress in something a little more… fashionable. That and his habit of staring at people with the strange alien expression he always seemed to wear became unsettling after a while.

No, she thought, the bastard is hiding something. No, she corrected herself, he’s hiding everything. And that was where most of her anxiety was focused, because that was her field, and thus her responsibility: psychoanalysis. It was her job to find out what made Reza tick, how he thought, what he thought, and why. She was fascinated at the prospect of his having psychological aberrations – and possibly superior abilities – that mirrored his physical ones, but he refused to cooperate with her at all. He would not let anyone get near him with any kind of physical probe (they still had been unable to draw a basic blood sample), and he became silent as a stone when she entered the room. It was as if he hated her personally, or at least despised her, and she could not understand why. It was small consolation that there were others on the team with whom he acted the same.

At least Dr. Chuen was able to deal with him, she thought sourly. Fool that the man was, his talent with languages was as unequaled as it was genuine, and she had to admit that it was good fortune that he was in the pool of lucky people Reza had chosen to open up to. But even Chuen was not immune to Reza’s stubbornness, she thought, smiling to herself. His “human Rosetta stone” remained silent about the Kreelan language that Chuen had been so hoping to understand.

“What am I doing wrong?” she asked herself aloud. While she was at the top of her field in several esoteric areas of psychological research, her bedside manner left much to be desired, not that she particularly cared. She was more at home dealing with drugged criminal patients strapped into deep-core machines than she was with a highly intelligent and alert individual. Mentally, she went over every step and action she had taken with him, looking for some clue as to why he was holding out against her, but she could come up with nothing. Except spite, perhaps.

She finished her business in the bathroom and returned to the bedroom, this time sitting behind the desk monitor. It showed Dr. Juanita Feron, one of her team, sitting with Reza and giving him what Deliha recognized as one of the simplified versions of the Baumgartner-Rollmann intelligence tests that didn’t depend on language.

“Good luck, you idiot,” Deliha sneered as she called up a cup of hot tea from the food processor, recalling her own miserable luck while attempting to administer a similar test, several times. When she had laid out all the test pieces, of which there were nearly two hundred, each of which had to be arranged precisely within a defined work area, he had simply turned his attention to the room’s viewport and ignored her. She had done everything short of physically touching him (she had wanted to throttle him, she thought angrily) to get him to pay attention, all to no avail. Now, she decided she was going to sit back and watch Feron’s humiliation at the hands of this beast. “Go ahead, Juanita, lay it all out for him so he can spit in your eye.” It occurred to her that this was Feron’s first chance at him. She was not one of Deliha’s proteges, and had been near the bottom of the access list. So much the better, Deliha thought savagely. This should be a good introduction for her to Kreelan manners.

Deliha leaned forward, watching Feron’s lips move as she explained what she wanted Reza to do in a way she hoped he could grasp with his limited – albeit rapidly expanding – understanding of Standard. Rabat had turned down the sound during her little interlude with the awkward petty officer, and she had no interest to hear the test explained again. She had already heard it a thousand times. And so had Reza.

She took another sip of her tea, closing her eyes and pondering why Fate had cast her such a difficult nut to crack. Things would have been a lot smoother and more effective if the Council had just authorized a deep-core scan. Such a pity.

When she looked at the screen again, she was so surprised at what she saw that she spilled the tea in her lap.

“Dammit!” she snarled as the hot liquid burned her upper thighs. “You bastard!” The puzzle, which normally took someone with a genius-level IQ almost five minutes to complete, was half done in little over sixty seconds. Deliha wanted to vomit at the sight of Feron’s overjoyed expression, completely overlooking the enormous significance of what Reza was doing.

Cursing every god and person that came to mind – Reza most of all – Rabat threw on some clothes and headed for the conference center, leaving the mute screen and Reza’s contemplative face behind.

Twenty-One