Aliena (9 page)

This was a startling new perspective. The starfish, too, had their uncertainties. “I can appreciation their caution.” He did not say more lest he run afoul of a sensitivity.

They arrived at the spaceport, entered the shuttle, passed imperceptibly through stasis, and were at the Wheel. This time the Machine Doctor did not argue with Aliena; it merely verified that her pregnancy was normal for her species and she was in good health.

There was a second machine. “This is important,” she confided. “I alone have the key to activate immediate communication, and they will know I am authentic. But the folk of the home world have not directly encountered me or any earthly person. We can not be quite sure how they will react. They may choose not to release the codes we need to progress further.”

Brom hugged her and kissed her. “How can they not love you?”

She laughed. “I love your foolishness. My natural form would be esthetic to them, not this one.” Then she disengaged and stepped into the machine.

There followed a singing and whistling dialogue. Contact had been established!

Then Aliena stepped out. “They are somewhat paranoid,” she said with a wry smile. “They fear that if they give away their secrets, Earth will use that information against them. They trust me, but not the human species.” Her mouth quirked. “I am not pleased.”

“Don’t give them the silent treatment!” Brom said.

She did not laugh. “They require reassurance of a nature I prefer not to give. But I agreed to ask.”

“What is that?”

“They want you to tell them.”

“Me?” Brom asked, startled. “I’ll be glad to. I’ll remind them that trade is more profitable than war.”

Sam and Martha kept straight faces.

Aliena remained serious. “That is not enough.”

“I don’t get it,” Brom said. “Do they want my input or don’t they?”

“They want to scan your mind.”

“Uh-oh,” Sam murmured.

“You mean, to read my thoughts? They’re welcome to them. If I look at you, they’ll get a mindful of hot passion.”

“They will get your entire life. You will have no secrets, no privacy. You will be undressed in a public place.”

“Naked on stage,” Martha murmured, translating.

That gave Brom pause. What would starfish think of his life history? Of Lucy’s suicide and his reaction? Of his private fury with the sects that had stolen his parents’ lives? His boyhood naughtiness? There was some ugly stuff there. “Is there physical pain? Danger to my well being?”

“No. They merely read your complete mindset. You will feel nothing physically. But mentally you will know that they have fathomed all. It may change you.”

That did make him uncomfortable. And yet this was important. The aliens wanted to be reassured that he bore them no ill will, and had no intention of doing them harm. After all, he loved Aliena, and they were her kin. If they read his mind, they would know.

What was appropriate? He could not make up his mind.

“Do not do it,” Aliena said tightly. “It will be the ultimate violation of your privacy.”

“But if I do not, will they release the information we want?”

“They will not. But I will reason with them. There must be compromise.”

His decision came in a flash. “Fornicate distantly,” he said with a smile, and stepped into the machine.

He felt the alien environment take hold. It was like the stasis field, except that this was a thoughts field. It was not passive; it poked into long forgotten crannies of his mind, like turning over rocks and studying the bugs beneath them.

He stood at a street corner as a child, observing a land crab walking there. It raised a claw to him, whether of welcome or warning he was unsure. Then a truck passed by, and its massive wheel flattened the crab, and it was no more. Brom was appalled that such an animated creature could so suddenly and thoughtlessly be destroyed by a power that took no note of its existence. It had simply been in the wrong plane and time. Could he have rescued it, had he anticipated its fate? He wasn’t sure, because it would have been hard to pick up bare-handed. How could he have helped a creature that might have pinched off a digit? Yet he was sorry for its passing.

There was a small pine tree in a patch of forest, longleaf, with leaves (needles) as long as fifteen inches. He had noticed it only in passing. Then one day he discovered it crushed by the big falling branch of a dead oak tree. The oak had not intended to kill it, and had gained nothing by the act; it was already dead. Sheer blind mischance had caused the branch to fall directly on the little pine. Thus was its life snuffed out by a heedless universe. He mourned that little tree, though he had never joyed in it alive. It was the cosmic unfairness of its extinction that bothered him.

He stood silently, observing a wild rabbit. It was cautious, but when he made no hostile move it came closer, nibbling blades of grass. It was such a tremulous little thing, its pink nose and whiskers quivering continuously. It ate its way almost to his feet. Could he pet it? Surely not. Then, alerted by something he couldn’t sense, it scampered away, not hopping but running, its tail flashing white. He was sorry to see it go, but also glad to have had it come so close. There was something precious about interacting with a wild creature rather than a tame on.

And Lucy. After Brom’s parents got religion and died, he was wary of religion. He could take it or leave it himself, but hated any overcommitment. When a girl tried to bring him into her religion, he backed off. When he foraged for company in a local social group he shied away from religious types. He tried a secular online dating service, and the computer paired him with Lucy. She was pretty, smart, and motivated. What was the catch? Why was she fishing in these waters, instead of being already married and pregnant? When they met physically her appeal was confirmed; she practically radiated sociability. So he asked her: “Why haven’t you been long-since snapped up by someone else?” She answered him directly: “I’m a militant atheist. I don’t put that in my description because it greatly limits the field when it may not even matter, but I’m not shy about it. If you start preaching at me, I’ll tell you what I think of subverting your otherwise decent mind to an imaginary higher power. I will ask you if you believe in fairies too. In ghosts. In Heaven and Hell—many people believe in the first but not the second. They are hypocrites. Religion is a farce. I will ask why you want to cop out morally, depending on an ancient text, instead of making your own ethical decisions. Why--” She was cut off by his kiss. She would never get religion. Six months later she moved in with him, and they were happy together. Until his doubts surfaced. Was she really right for him? How he cursed his doubt, when it was too late.

And Aliena. He had not yet understood her full nature when they went to the beach; he simply knew that she loved the water and he wanted to please her. Then she had sung and drawn him in, and they had made love in the washing waves. He loved her absolutely from that moment. When he learned that she was literally alien, well, that was what he loved in her, and it made no difference. She was truly a wild creature. She had become his desire, his future, his universe. She was simply Aliena. But now he had to ask himself: was she really right for him? She was far beyond atheism, being literally an alien creature. Could he make a life with her? This time he had not allowed his doubt to take over; he had crushed it like the crab.

There were other memories and impressions, crowded together, overlapping, interacting, some pleasant, some painful, some neutral. These were just samples in a throng. He realized as it happened that this survey was more of feeling than of information; they wanted to know how he felt about everything, especially living things. Including Aliena, for she was one of them. Again he wondered: did he belong with her? Then he had a surge of reaction. Don’t let the doubt return from the dead like a zombie. He had been through this before, and lost Lucy because of it. Damned if he would make the same mistake again.

Then it was over. Aware that he was dismissed, he stepped out of the machine.

There was Aliena, hesitant as she had been when he had first learned her true nature from Sam. Now he knew why she had opposed the memory survey. Memories were not passive things; they were called up, assimilated, and re-filed changed, if only by perspective. His mind had been taken apart and put together again, theoretically the same, but not quite identical. He had a new awareness, a slight change of outlook. She feared he would no longer love her.

“Ali ali ena,” he sang.

She sounded her love note and flung herself at him.

Sam and Martha bumped hands. They too were relieved.

Now Aliena stepped back into the machine. And emerged almost immediately.

“Retreating tornado!” she said.

Sam caught on. “You mean it blew them away.”

“Yes. They have never before experienced such variety and intensity of emotions. They are reassured, and have approved the release of the codes.”

“They like me,” Brom said, surprised.

“They trust you. That is not the same.”

“But it will do.”

“It will do,” she agreed, and kissed him.

A brief note sounded from the machine. Aliena stepped back into it, then out again. “They appreciate your cooperation, which they realize was a gift to them. They have learned an enormous amount. They wish to return the favor. What do you want?”

“Oh, I don’t need anything. I’m just glad the released the codes, as you wanted.”

“Do not reject their offer. That would be offensive. Name something.”

Was there more here than he fathomed? Certainly he did not want to give offense, especially after getting them to release the codes. He remembered that Aliena had said that her people believed in fair exchanges. “Well, I’d sort of like to know more about them. I mean, they’re starfish, right? Underwater creatures. How did they come to travel between stars?”

“Get in. Ask.”

Brom got back into the machine. He didn’t even need to formulate the question; they were already answering.

He found himself in the body of a starfish. Not the kind he knew on Earth; the resemblance was superficial, consisting mostly of his shape, with five rays and a central body. He was in shallow sea water, feeding off the local lichen. Then something like a squid approached, thinking to consume him. It assumed that because it was a larger creature, it was the predator. It was mistaken. He put a ray on it, injected a pacifier fluid, held it down, and moved over it, enclosing it in a five limbed hug. He oriented his aperture on its head part and issued a thick paste that dissolved the skin and muscle and made a hole in the sac, while its tentacles writhed helplessly. Then he thinned the paste, and dissolved the creature’s brain without harming the surrounding tissue. He sucked in the slurry, feeding his body.

Then he opened his own central sac and squeezed out his own brain. It remained connected by trailing neural cords, but entered the empty hole of the squid’s chamber. The brain filled the space and oriented on the paste-covered neural cords of the squid. Nerves emerging from his brain located the equivalent nerves of the squid, and connected. In time he was able to control the body of the squid. Then he disconnected from his own body, which he left in a kind of sleep in a concealed crevice; it would survive for some time, but would not be active. He had a new body.

The Starfish were old hands at brain transplanting. Very old.

It took a while to become proficient in handling the squid’s body, as it had capacities that his original body lacked, such as the ability to gulp in and jet out water with force sufficient to propel him backward. This was velocity of a different magnitude. The squid’s feeding mechanism differed too. But he was adaptable, and in due course was a competent squid.

He encountered a shark. The original squid would have been prey to the shark, but there were two reasons he was not: he had the starfish smell, which was adequate warning to the shark. If the fish tried to bite him, it would receive a jet of anesthetic that would put it out of commission for a while, and this could be lethal, depending on the starfish’s hunger at the moment. But more important, the shark was no longer a shark, but another starfish. The shark had already made the mistake of attacking a starfish, and paid the price. Starfish did not prey on each other; they cooperated. They recognized each other by that same starfish smell, and behaved accordingly.

When there were no longer many new hosts to take over in the sea, he moved to the shore, in this condensed paleontological narrative, where a catlike predator sought to scoop him from the water for food. It was the cat’s last scoop. In due course it had the brain of a starfish. The conquest of land had commenced.

At one point a large land-bound bird sought to contest a hunting territory with the starfish. Thus commenced the conquest of the air, as flying birds were next. There was no longer sufficient challenge among planetary life forms. There was a species of ape that possessed a new potential: intelligence. Thus there came to be intelligent starfish in the forest. They learned to farm, growing plants to feed them more readily than hunting and gathering could. They constructed domiciles that protected them from the extremes of climate and made their lives far more comfortable. They observed the heavens, and concluded that they represented a new and novel challenge. It took some time, but finally they managed to build a vessel that could reach the planet’s moons. It was not feasible for starfish to venture into space themselves, so they developed machines to do it for them. They also developed the stasis field, which enabled them to put living tissue in orbit without damage.

The starfish were the planet’s top predator, but there was no longer any benefit in predation. Trade was more efficient.

One thing concerned them increasingly: was the life on this planet alone in the universe, or did other planets also sustain life? They built massive telescopes to study other stars and other worlds, and concluded that there was indeed other life. But was there other
intelligent
life? It became the obsessive question of the day. They surveyed far planets with increasing acuity, and found a few that had at least the potential to develop intelligent life. They formulated a program to contact those worlds. To make actual contact. To offer the trade of information. More important, to offer companionship.