It spoke to me: Don’t cry out. I will let you breathe, but you must be quiet. The order was clear and specific, though it was not in English, not in words. I nodded, and a hole opened in front of my mouth. When I had taken a couple of breaths without calling for help, the membrane that clasped me from head to knees slowly relaxed its grip.
Carry me down the ladder. The membrane parted in front of my eyes. I walked toward the ladder like a person wearing an elaborate top-heavy costume. I knew the thing was in my brain, but that didn’t bother me. I’m not sure whether it was controlling the chemistry of my brain in order to subvert panic, or it was communicating “trust me”—or I was in such a state of shock that I would do whatever I was told, no matter who or what requested it.
It felt like a kind of VR. But it was not a dream. It was happening.
I slid the ladder to the ground and carefully backed down it. Now walk into this hole.
I knew the hole wasn’t real. Between the road and our house there had appeared an artifact sort of like the antique “postmodern” subway entrances in Atlanta: an unornamented and well-lit plain ramp descending into the ground at a comfortable fifteen-degree angle. This was metal, though, not cement. It went about twenty meters and turned right, still descending. As I walked down, I could feel it closing up behind me.
Forming each word carefully in my mind, I asked Where are you taking me? It didn’t answer, but communicated a desire for me to be patient.
We passed through a sort of invisible wall, a soap bubble of resistance, and we were suddenly in an arctic waste. My bare feet burned and curled on the ice; my skin raised up in gooseflesh. An instant later I was warm again.
The creature slid off me with a slurping noise like a silly sex joke, taking my robe along with it, inside out over my head. It floated in front of me and dropped the sodden robe, which froze solid before it hit the ice. Are you comfortable?
I said I was and looked around. Epsilon squatted low on the horizon, a red ball that looked too large, the sky blue-violet, cloudless, three dim stars showing. There were fantastic ice mountains with ragged razor edges like primitive chipped flint tools. A constant wind keened at the upper limit of audibility and granules of hardened snow rattled along the ice. It smelled like metal.
Behind me, the collapsed remains of a small hut. A corroded machine stood next to it; atop a five-meter pole, a thing with eccentric vanes spun madly, clicking, squeaking. On the door to the hut was a faded stencil:
U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY
WEDDELL SEA METEOROLOGICAL MONITOR #3
PLEASE REPORT DAMAGE
L. AMERICA
3924477 COLLECT
This is Earth? I asked.
Yes. I wanted someplace on Earth where you had never been, so you would know it was not taken from your memory; and a place where there were no people around to be confused by our sudden appearance.
You can travel to Earth? Anyplace on Earth?
Many planets. Step forward.
I took one step forward and popped through the bubble again, onto the metal ramp, and then another step into warmth and darkness. The creature was still in front of me, slightly luminescent. The darkness was silent. It smelled like we were in a forest. I asked whether this was Earth.
No, we are back home. Not far from where you live. Sit down.
I patted the spongy moss and nothing crawled. I sat down carefully, feeling helpless, anus clenching. I asked if this were telepathy.
There is no such thing, to my knowledge. We are physically joined. I reached up and touched a silken thread. Don’t pull on it. That would damage you.
I asked What’s going on? Are you going to hurt me?
Not yet. Then there was an overwhelmingly complex montage of thoughts, indecipherable, chilling. Sorry. There are many others listening. I will keep them from intruding.
I said that they didn’t sound friendly.
Why should they? You represent the alien species that has invaded this planet. They are tired of your actions and angry at having to deal with the moral complexity of the problem you have caused.
I said that we wouldn’t have killed his people—people?—if we had known them to be sentient.
Maybe you would not have. That was our decision; we assumed from first contact that some would die if we kept our nature secret. That’s not the problem.
The problem is whether to allow you to continue existing.
I felt the dimension of that “you.” I asked whether they would kill everybody.
On this planet and in the starship and on Earth and in orbit about the Earth, every person and every cell of preserved genetic material.
I said that that was genocide. Why kill the people on Earth?
Genocide, pest control, it depends on your point of view. If we didn’t destroy them, they would come again in time.
I was glad to know that there are people still alive in orbit about the Earth. I said that we thought they might have been destroyed.
More alive in orbit than on Earth or here. Whether they continue to live will be decided by us and by you.
I asked whether I had been chosen, or was it just chance?
We interrogated three people. All three identified you as best for our purposes.
I asked why.
It can’t be expressed exactly in ways that a human would understand. An obvious part of it is having been many places, known many people, done many things, compared to the others; giving what you would call a large database. Part of it is trust, or reliability, combined with egotism. This makes it easier for us to communicate with you.
I also sense that the stress of our liaison is not going to motivate you to destroy yourself as happened with one of the others, and may happen with the second male. Although it cannot be pleasant for you, knowing that I am inside you.
I said that it was very unpleasant. I supposed that it was equally unpleasant to be inside an alien’s brain.
Unspeakable. This union is normally used for times a human would call sacred. The specific word came through, echoing. You yourself would not employ that word.
I said that I would not use it in a religious sense; that gods were the inventions of men, sometimes women. I tried to communicate that I was nevertheless capable of appreciating transcendence, numinism.
Let me show you something godlike. Rise and follow.
I stood up and stepped into blinding light. Orange with ripples of yellow and red. We seemed suspended, no gravity.
You are seeing heat, not light. We are in the center of your planet Earth. If it were desirable, or necessary; I could open a passage from here to the surface. Within hours, the planet would be a dead ruin.
I asked What could cause you to do that?
You.
Though I personally wouldn’t have to do it. We were suddenly back in the forest’s humid darkness. Any of us could do it, as an expression of will, if you cause it to be necessary.
I told it that I did not want the responsibility.
It must be an individual. You may suggest another.
I thought about that and said No, as well me as anyone. If this is a test, I have some talent for that.
The first thing we want you to do is simple. Stop them from killing us. You have one day.
The tendril slid out of my head, trailing wetly on my brow for a moment. The creature disappeared, then reappeared with my robe and dropped it at my feet. It was stiff as cardstock, so cold it stuck to the skin of my fingers.
I would wait for it to thaw. There was a faint yellow light, three or four kilometers away, that I assumed was Hilltop, but I didn’t want to go crashing through the woods in the dark. Sunrise in an hour or so, and I had some thinking to do. Some feelings to get under control. I touched the icy fabric again, to reassure myself that this had really happened.
When the gown was as warm as it was going to get, I put it on, despite the clamminess, for protection against thorny twigs and vines. I started walking as soon as I could see individual t
rees, while I could still barely follow the yellow light. It did turn out to be Hilltop—not some floating spider shopping mall—but I bypassed it and went straight to my house. On the way, I shucked the damp gown and rinsed off in the swimming pool. Alien mucus, how picturesque.
After living with him for thirty-four long years and two short ones, I knew better than to wake Dan immediately. I heated some water and put a cup of coffee on the table next to him. I sipped on mine while waiting for the smell of it to work through to his subconscious and ring a quiet bell.
He grunted, rose on one elbow, nibbed his eyes. “What the hell time is it?”
“Later than you think, dear.” I laughed. “I just came from a meeting.”
Raleigh Dennison was infuriating. He didn’t deny that I had been “attacked” by one of the creatures, not out loud, though he did wonder why, this time, it didn’t pull any hair out. Doc Bishop went over my scalp with a magnifying glass and did find a tiny dot, but he couldn’t be sure that’s what it was without using the axial tomography equipment in orbit. He pointed out that I was due to go on the next shuttle, two days hence, as part of my regular schedule. I could come back with real proof.
“That will be too late. I’m not going anywhere, anyhow, until we change our policy toward the natives.”
That amused Dennison. “Natives! Like your American Indians.”
“Sure. It would be just like the Europeans and the socalled Indians all over again—if the Indians had nova bombs and short tempers.”
“Really.”
“Worse than that. As I said… any one of them can kill every one of us with very little effort. You don’t have any choice.”
“Ah, but I do. I do.” He looked around his office, with its sheet-metal walls, metal and plastic furniture, monitors instead of windows. The air was cooled and filtered and a ficus tree grew under an artificial light. It was a crude handmade caricature of his office in ’Home, and it spoke volumes. “I have three choices. Inaction comes to mind first. Second, hold off action until you have been properly examined.”
He swiveled to stare at me, seated slightly below his level, how subtle. “Actually, there are two more choices, even if I take what you have said at face value. I could tell everybody to put away their weapons and start treating the brain-eaters as the sentient, omnipotent creatures they are. Or I could see that you’ve been through a terrible experience that resulted in completely convincing hallucinations—”
“You can’t—”
“—and suggest that you seek help from the specialists in ’Home. Strongly suggest it.”
Dan spoke up from the corner where he was leaning, watching. “That’s ridiculous. She’s the sanest person in this room.”
“You’re not the best judge of that,” Dennison said.
I appealed to Bishop. “What do you think, Doctor? Can a person respond to physical trauma with a sequence of ‘completely convincing hallucinations’?”
Bishop started to speak, but Dennison interrupted. “Maybe not a normal person, but Dr. O’Hara is not normal! Her alien torturer supposedly made a big deal of that!”
“Alien torturer, come on—”
“And one very significant way she is not normal is a half-century of dependence on virtual reality machines. A dream world is natural to her.”
“That’s a stupid libel. I’m not dependent on VR or anything else.”
He leaned back with a smug smile. “I have access to ’Home’s dream room logs. You essentially had your own private machine for most of the time you were Entertainment Director. No one alive has logged even half the VR time you have. Can you deny that?”
“I have no reason to. Most of that use was job related. If I were addicted to the damned thing, why would I have worked so hard to be assigned down here, where there aren’t any of them? If I’m addicted, why haven’t I been bouncing off the walls for two years?”
“You go back to ’Home all the time,” he said. “I assume that you—”
“Assume away. Try to find one time I used the dream room in the past two years. You won’t.” I stood up and turned my back to him. “This isn’t productive. Dan, how long will it take to cook off the shuttle?”
“Thirty-four minutes.” He checked his watch and pushed a button. “We can rendezvous with ’Home in seventy-two minutes.”
“Let’s go.”
“I can’t authorize that,” Dennison said.
I turned around and planted both hands on his desk and leaned down. “Read the fine print, Raleigh. You’re temporarily in charge of this settlement, but you don’t outrank me. That shuttle belongs to ’Home, and on ’Home’s table of organization I’m a twelve, and you’re a ten. I’ll let you come along, if you want. You might want to talk to some people about a new job.”
He leaned away, almost comically. “Hold on, now. Let’s not be hasty.”
“We have eight hours to save the lives of everybody here and on Earth, and you don’t want to be hasty. We don’t have time for you.”
“All right, all right!” He put on a headset and asked it for Channel 12. “This is Dennison, anybody there?” He pushed a button and we heard the response through a desk speaker.
“Niels here. What’s up?”
“There’s been a… well, quite a complication. I want you to bring all units back immediately. Stop killing the creatures.”
“Easy enough. We haven’t even seen one since yesterday afternoon. I think they’re pretty smart.”
“Yes. They probably are.”
“We can be back before noon. Endit?”
“Endit.” He took off the headset. “Will that satisfy you?”
“For now, yes. Of course you’ll want to get the message to the other outposts, and put it on the day’s announcements here.”
“Of course. If you want, you can go tell Red Heliven how you want it worded. He should be in his office by now.”
“Okay.”
“Look. I’m sorry I was so short with you. But you know I’m… close to Katy Paz, and one of your damned things almost killed her last night.”
“The specimens she was guarding?”
He nodded. “One of them got out and started to choke her. She blacked out and woke up inside the damned cage. It was hours before somebody came by and released her.”
“How did she get in the cage? The thing didn’t carry her.”
“She didn’t say. She’s under sedation. The other one was in the cage with her all that time.”
“Did it try to attack her?”
“No, it never moved. The recording shows that it stayed in the, what you call it, vegetative state.”
“I hope nobody harmed it.”
“It’s under guard, armed guard. They won’t shoot unless it tries something.”
“I’ll talk to her when she wakes up. Maybe I could make her feel better about it. I don’t think it wanted to hurt anybody.”
“It hurt her.” He suddenly flinched. “Jesus!”
One of them had materialized behind me, floating at eye level. I wondered whether it was the one that had taken me to Earth. Or whether it made any difference which one it was. “Don’t do anything,” I said softly.
It spoke. Actually, it made a sound that can’t be described politely, like a modulated belch or fart. “O’Hara. Thank you for this thing. Dennison. Thank you for this thing.” It was forcing air through a slit between two tentacles. It slowly descended as it spoke, losing helium. It spilled swamp water onto Dennison’s floor and rose again.
“What do I do next?” I asked.
“This way is not enough. Let me into your head.” A pink tendril uncoiled toward me.
Daniel stepped forward. “Use me instead.” It didn’t surprise me that he would do that, but it made me proud. He would be a lot more afraid of it than I was.
“No,” the thing buzzed. “It has to be her.”
“It’s okay, Dan.” But it was worse when you could watch it happening. The wet thing felt its way through my h
air, and there was a little pain as it removed the scab and a kind of pressure, like the onset of a sinus headache, as it slipped down into my brain. The room got blurry, but I realized it was just that I was looking through the creature’s skirt as it enveloped me. Tell them we are going somewhere and will be back soon. I did that and we fell through the floor, to the sloping metal ramp. Without being told, I walked forward until we passed through the resistance—
And stepped into a hall of monsters. Bipedal lizards with huge tyrannosaur heads, barracuda snouts with needlesharp fangs, black globes for eyes; three meters tall and slab muscle under gray wrinkled skin. They wore elaborate vests of metal links, some short, some reaching the ground, rattling as they moved, and they moved constantly, tails flowing in counterpoise, almost human hands gesturing as they growled. The near ones also made a noise like leather folding, creaking, and they smelled good, sweet and fresh like a baby’s hair. There were about thirty of them, and they all turned to look at me. Feel like a snack, O’Hara? Oh yes.
We were in a cave where dripping limestone had calcified into fantastic shapes, pink like melting flesh or the grayish white of exposed bone. Yellow flames flickered from a hundred oil lamps.
This is a sort of tribunal. When a case is morally peculiar, they enlist our help to bring in foreign advisors, to give them a different perspective. What you decide will not be binding, but will add to the sum of their deliberations.
I asked what the moral problem was.
It has to do with familial responsibility. The female lays eggs in clusters, typically fifty to sixty at once, in pools of warm water. They do this only three times in their life. A male of their choice sprays the eggs with milt and then guards them until they hatch.
It takes about thirty days for them to hatch. The male never leaves, never sleeps. It is physically difficult for him, but an honor that happens only a few times in his life.
He eats about half of the eggs in order to stay alive, one per day. It is his responsibility to study the egg cluster, and cull the least active ones, so as to increase the probability that the ones that hatch will be strong, and survive.