by Alan Black
Both horses and cows were like this creature; having only flat, grinding teeth. They didn’t have the cutting, tearing teeth of a carnivore. Still, the thing was alien, so Larry was only willing to go so far with his analogy. He didn’t intend to stick his hand in the mouth of a cow — again, and he didn’t intend to try that with this alien. A lesson learned is a lesson applied.
Larry smiled back at the creature, He wondered if his smile looked as unnatural to the creature as it felt to him. Lately Larry’s smiles had become as scarce as a good probing. He wondered briefly if there was some slight connection between smiling and probing, but he let the thought go. The thought was curiously connective and would’ve interested a steer in the next pasture over, but having been castrated before ever being allowed to probe a cow, the steer was completely without reference to the thought. So, the steer ignored it.
Larry continued smiling. The farm was his, so according to standard earth protocols, he should have invited the alien into his house for ice tea, lemonade, or a cold beer. However, his refrigerator was a lot like a funny clown. The funny part was wrapped in a surprise. It would be a surprise to find anything in Larry’s fridge. He didn’t get to the store as often as he used to when Nancy lived with him. Besides, Earth rules might not apply in any kind of galactic invasion.
He settled for continuing to smile.
He was only slightly surprised the alien didn’t have one of those Star Trek comm-badges automatically translating different languages. Maybe this group of aliens expected everyone to speak their language. It would be much like many American travelers abroad expecting everyone to speak English. Or so Larry thought since he watched many TV shows where American’s were shown to be that way. In his extensive travels to such far away and exotic places like Topeka and Dodge City, everyone spoke English at least as well as he did.
He watched as another alien maneuvered a machine into the doorway. The machine hovered in place without any apparent wheels. It looked so familiar, so much like a little droid that Larry almost looked behind it for a large gold colored protocol droid. The little machine was different in one respect from the one in the movie series—it didn’t do anything except hover. The second alien poked a few buttons and pushed a few switches but nothing happened.
Larry was used to nothing happening. He had so many things around the farm that didn’t work he was always pleasantly pleased when something did work. In that regard, his farm was a lot like the government.
He looked at the other alien. It was a lighter color than the first one, not quite blonde, but red, almost the strawberry blonde color. This one did have a big bushy tail where the first one had a small stub. Its tail swished about at the tip like a cat watching a mouse, the tip flicking back and forth. It — she — had breasts. They were small and mostly covered by a fine fur, but it hadn’t been so long since Nancy left that Larry couldn’t recognize a pair of breasts, especially since she had two pair. The alien had two pair, not Nancy.
The little machine continued to work hard at doing nothing. It didn’t blink any lights; it didn’t sing a song, or even produce a minor little hum. The female alien looked frustrated. The slightly larger male continued smiling at Larry. The smile was beginning to look a little like a baby food jar of peas … strained.
Larry sighed and slid down off the tractor. The spacecraft hatchway wasn’t too far away. The distance was far enough for the female to scamper out of the way before he got too close. The male in the doorway looked nervous, moved one hand out of sight behind the doorframe, but he held his ground. Larry hoped the alien’s ground was all he was holding and not holding a phaser, taser, or a laser death ray.
Larry kept both of his hands in sight. On earth that would show a man was unarmed. On the aliens home world it might mean anything from “Daddy, can I have a glass of water?” to “Prepare to die, alien scum.” Larry was as conversant in alien sign language as he was in microbiology. He couldn’t tell an oligosaccharide from a polyhydroxyalkanoate.
As he drew near the pair of aliens, the alien who’d maneuvered the machine into the doorway looked up at Larry. It yipped, looked startled, and darted back farther into the spaceship. Larry wasn’t actually sure of the order of events, since it appeared the looking, darting, and yipping occurred as a simultaneous action.
He looked up at the droid unit. Up close, it looked more like a thing he made when he was thirteen, combining an old vacuum with pieces of a milking machine for — well for purposes he purposely decided not to remember. He couldn’t forget, but he definitely refused to remember.
Thirteen is an awkward age for farm boys. Larry imagined city boys felt the same awkwardness, but they didn’t have access to old milking machines that could suck ninety pounds of milk out of a cow’s mammary glands. The thought of what happened that day made Larry feel so awkward that over the years he raised cows for beef, never dairy.
Larry felt as awkward now as he did all those years ago. He didn’t know the purpose of the machine. If he could help the aliens turn it on and it turned out to be the catalyst for human Armageddon, he would feel sillier than he had when Grandma found him with his old milking machine. Grandma actually helped him re-wire the electricity on the machine to get a variable speed action. Grandma was a strange old woman. She was as strange as seeing sheep in shoes, but she did have a sense of humor.
He felt sure if he turned on the machine and the machine, in turn, turned off human life, then no one would have any sense of humor about that — no human anyway. He was sure the story would be good for a few laughs at whatever the aliens used as a bar or nightclub.
The front of the little machine had a barbwire tangle of letters in some fancy script. Of course, Larry couldn’t read it. He was an above average reader, but reading an alien language was like licking the back of your own knee. It might not be impossible, but it was sure something Larry couldn’t do. He had never tried to lick the back of his own knee, but decided it wasn’t something he needed to try anyway.
A cow across the pasture wondered why anyone would want to lick the back of their own knee, but the thought was fleeting as a patch of greener grass on the other side of the fence distracted her.
Larry noticed a tiny hatch, hidden on the little machine just below the alien scribble. He tried to flip it open or slide it out of the way, but he couldn’t get it to budge. He managed to poke his little finger in a small hole on the side and the hatch melted out of the way. There was a small switch, and two small dials behind the door.
He wasn’t a superstitious sort of man, but he spit — downwind — and held his breath. He tried to flip the switch into the up position, but it didn’t move. He tried to flip it down and it didn’t move. To the right didn’t work either. In that regard the switch was a lot like Larry’s cousin Melvin; it didn’t move much and didn’t seem to work.
The alien started jabbering away at Larry. Since Larry couldn’t understand the creature he decided the best thing was to just smile and wait to see what would happen next. His curiosity was up and he knew he would follow through even if it meant that he ended up as a part in an off-world battery factory. He pushed the switch to the left and a blast of alien gibberish blared out from the top of the machine.
Only this wasn’t inter-galactic alien gibberish, or even intra-galactic alien gibberish. The gibberish was from a good old-fashioned Earth-style alien. Well … alien for Kansas anyway. It sounded sort of like a human trying to mimic a horny mockingbird on steroids, sort of an Asian, singsong-kind of language. The first knob was a volume control. Larry dialed the gibberish down to a manageable level.
The alien gestured from the machine to Larry and back again.
“Give me a second there, Scooter,” Larry said. “We got the right planet, but wrong region.” He was sure the alien didn’t understand him, but it seemed impolite not to say anything. Besides, for all he knew, Scooter was the creature’s real name. Maybe that wasn’t as probable as Larry becoming the next star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fam
e, but it did fall into the realm of what could happen.
Of course, it was far more likely that Larry was about to turn on the machine that would begin dumping a biotoxin into the air and turn all of humanity into component parts for easy storage and transportation to the extra-galactic food court.
He continued to twist the dial slowly, rotating through a long string of languages that wouldn’t sound too out of place in the United Nations building, but they didn’t help his understanding. It made him appreciate his cows’ point of view. He was sure they heard him when he talked to them, but somehow the words didn’t quite sink in.
At least, he didn’t think his cows understood him. He wondered if he was as wrong about that as he had been about getting married to Nancy, for not asking Sally Killian to the prom, and more recently, for believing that UFOs did not exist.
More than one of his cows appreciated his sudden flash of understanding, but the appreciation died as quickly as it began. Cows being what they were, one of the cows on the upwind side of the pasture just went into heat. An old bull farther downwind snorted, knowing it was the wrong time of the year for such nonsense, but her condition was seriously distracting nonetheless.
Larry twisted the knob on what he now knew was a translator unit, turning slowly past what sounded like German or Dutch. He dialed in English, of a sort. He recognized the words, but the Jamaican accent was more than his Kansas twang could bear.
Scooter said, “Irie, Mon. Peace be.” The alien voice coming from the translator unit sounded more like Bob Marley than that gold colored protocol droid.
Minor twists of the knob turned Scooter’s voice past an Australian accent, Cockney English, Brooklynese, and finally Larry settled on something that sounded much like a weatherman from the cable channel coming out of Chicago.
“There we go, Scooter.” Larry said. The translator unit squawked out some yipping and yapping gibberish that Scooter seemed to appreciate. “This thing is kind of bulky compared to a Star Trek comm-badge, but I guess she’ll do’er.”
Scooter’s eyes lit up and he laughed. The sound didn’t need translating through a machine. His laugh wasn’t the machine gun staccato laugh of a movie starlet trying too hard, and a long way from a deep belly laugh that can only come from watching Grandma and her three older sisters fall backward like dominoes while going up a moving escalator with their flowered old lady dresses flying every which way. Scooter’s laugh sounded half nervous and half relief, but genuinely pleased.
Scooter said, “We come in peace. Please, do not eat us.”
A friend loves you for your intelligence, a mistress for your charm, but your family’s love is unreasoning; you were born into it and are of its flesh and blood. Nevertheless, it can irritate you more than any group of people in the world. (Andre Maurois)
CHAPTER TWO
LARRY continued showing Scooter around his farm, even though the little creature turned positively green at the smells inside the barn. Larry sometimes felt the same way himself, but mucking out the barn was really near the bottom of his to-do list.
Mucking out the barn was somewhat like visiting his Aunt Nola, not much fun, but something he had to do on a fairly regular basis. Visiting Dad’s youngest sister had gotten much more odious as of late, since it came out that Uncle Gary had a second wife and another passel of kids. But as emotionally draining as it was to visit his aunt, those visits were not exactly like mucking out the barn on a regular basis, but similarities did exist. Aunt Nola’s complaints piled up like — well, like what had to be mucked out of the barn.
Larry’s horse, Dollar, lived in the barn most of the time. His horse was a lot like his relatives, neither was really housebroken. Larry’s horse was different in that it really didn’t want to live in and continually revisit its own filth, but being a horse, it was incapable of mucking out its own stall. Fortunately, for both man and horse, Larry had adopted a Mad Hatter tea party kind of plan. When one stall became messy enough to require a good mucking, he moved Dollar to the next clean stall. The mucking happened when Larry and Dollar ran out of stalls to move to.
Everywhere they went on the farm, Scooter pulled the translator unit along behind him. The small alien had various pieces of equipment taped, glued, and stuck on translator’s sides. It hovered silently about a foot off the ground following along behind Scooter, like Larry’s little cousin Rupert toddling after Aunt Nola.
Cousin Rupert seemed to be angry most of the time. Larry wasn’t sure what the young boy was angry about. Maybe the two-year-old was still angry with Aunt Nola cutting him off from the teat. Maybe he was angry because he found out his name came about because of a character in an English novel about teenage witches. He wasn’t named after the character from the book, but in Aunt Nola’s usual downstream sense of logic, he was named after the actor who played the character in the movie version of the book. Rupert would really be angry when he got old enough to learn his middle name was Grint. One sister already called him RG, while another steadfastly called him Weasley.
The little translator unit didn’t seem to be angry about anything, not even when Scooter spun the knobs and tried to speak to every living creature on the farm. None of the animals seemed to care one-way or the other, but Scooter got a bit snarky when he didn’t get a response from the cows.
Still, Larry figured it was a good thing not having Ol’ Bucky around to be interrogated by Scooter and his translator. Larry’s dog was a lot like his cousin Melvin. Mel never seemed to be around — whether you needed him or not. He showed up when, or if, he needed something, not the other way around. Just like Ol’ Bucky, he was quite prickly when asked questions, singularly or in a series.
Larry remembered having read somewhere that some philosopher said some time ago. “A family without a black sheep is not a typical family.” That made Larry laugh so much he wanted to stitch it on a pillow for the sofa, as his family comprised a whole field full of black sheep, brown sheep, slightly off white sheep, and even a few multicolored, rainbow hued sheep. Cousin Mel seemed to be the type of sheep who would change color when you weren’t looking. Most of the family would have turned Cousin Mel into the Feds as the Unabomber if ol’ Ted Kaczynski hadn’t already been caught and locked away.
Scooter said in frustration, jabbing some instrument in Dollar’s direction, “This horse shows evidence of some intelligence.” He waved the small handheld box with a wand attachment over the horse’s head. “He does not reach the level of true sentience, but surely he has a rudimentary vocabulary.”
Larry said, “Well, Scooter, I’ve had Dollar since he was a colt, going on about eight years. He hasn’t said word one to me yet.”
Scooter shook his head in a peculiarly human fashion as if trying to shake something quite unpleasant off the end of his nose. “You must get frustrated, especially with your creatures in the field. You called them cows, yes? They have an amazing telepathic ability. It’s receptive only, so they cannot broadcast their thoughts. Yet, their attention span is almost non-existent.”
“Telepathic, huh? With a short attention span?” Larry mused. “I got a cousin like that. She always seems to know what you’re thinking, but she’s a lot like my cattle: fat ass, dull eyes, and distracted by the wind, whether it’s blowing or not.”
“You kill and eat them, yes?”
Larry nodded, “Not the cousin, but the cows, yes I do, but not very often. I live alone, so it takes me a while to go through a whole beef. Actually, I raise cattle and sell them to someone else to kill and eat.”
Now that he said that aloud, it sounded a lot like being sexually propositioned by a cousin; disturbing and thought provoking at the same time. Sex was fun, after all. Sex with a cousin was more than a little wrong, female or otherwise. Still, he liked steak way, way too much to give up eating cows. He didn’t like any of his cousins well enough for the other.
“You kill them because they have telepathic abilities, where as you do not, yes?” Scooter almost fainted as he asked the q
uestion. The whole idea of eating any creature was as repellant to the little alien as not eating meat was to Larry.
“No. I didn’t know they were telepathic until you just told me,” Larry said. “How telepathic are they?”
Scooter checked a few dials on his hand held box. “They barely register on the %#&%)* scale. They can only register a few random thoughts, but their cognitive ability to process those thoughts is almost non-existent. They do not seem to communicate with other species or each other. You kill them because they do not talk to you, yes?”
Larry shook his head. “No. I kill them for food because they taste good. Mostly I sell them to others who process them for food because they taste good.”
Scooter pointed at Dollar. “You kill and eat horses, yes?” Larry was as repelled by the question as Scooter was.
“Hell, no. Eating Dollar would be like having sex with Grandma.” Larry shivered at the mind picture. “I suppose there are people in the world who would eat a horse, just like there are some people who would have sex with my grandmother, but no one I know.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “Well, I guess Grandpa would.”
Scooter almost choked on the question. “This Grandpa you speak of would kill and eat your horse if you gave him the chance?”
Larry laughed. “No. Grandpa — my father’s father — would have sex with my father’s mother. But, we don’t go into eating horsemeat around here.”
“But, you do kill and eat the other creatures you hold captive?”
Larry thought for a moment. “Yep. Except for Dollar and my dog, Ol’ Bucky, everything else is available for lunch, supper, or a late night snack.”
“This distinction of creature groupings is consistent in a planet-wide doctrine, yes?”