Aliens - The Truth is Coming (Book of Aliens 1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  My heart started pounding and I heard a ringing in my ears. I wanted off the table, now! A doctor leaned in and placed a metal ring like a halo on my head and then faded back into the darkness. I felt a calmness spread over my body, melting away my apprehension.

  Four doctors conferred in front of the large monitors. Two of the doctors were more than a foot taller than the other two. Their shoulders were very square and broad. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but everyone seemed pleased by what they saw, their heads bobbing up and down.

  The instrumented arms drew back into the darkness and a doctor retrieved the halo. The doctors began removing their surgical gear. I noticed the tall doctor had pale skin and really bright blue eyes. Two doctors leaned over me and pressed a tube against my arm and the room faded.

  ***

  I woke up in a narrow room with a glowing ceiling. The long cot I laid on was the only object in the room. I was naked under a sheet made of the slick jumpsuit material. My arm was sore where the doctor had pressed the tube. Was that an injection? Maybe they took more blood, too. Small points where the halo had rested on my head were sensitive to the touch. And my crotch was sore. What business did they have down there?

  "Mister Scott? Are you awake?"

  I looked around to see where the sound was coming from.

  "Yes, I am. Can I get some water?" I said.

  "Nice to have you decide to join us. We hoped you would. Please put on your clothes. Water will be available at lunch."

  Fresh clothes had been placed on the end of the cot. I put on my jumpsuit ensemble and sat on the cot and waited. Lunch, he had said. Not breakfast or dinner, lunch. I had no idea what time it was or even if the time of day mattered any more. Maybe they refer to every meal as lunch. The door slid open.

  My alien escort was at least seven feet tall, with straight shoulder length white hair, paper-white skin and large, round eyes. Against the white decor, the blue of his eyes was shockingly vivid. His mouth was a two cm slit with almost no lips and I didn't see any ears. His forehead was at least ten cm tall and his nose a narrow ridge with one opening. His jaw was vertical and square. Was he one of the tall doctors from before? He motioned for me to follow him. I noticed his four-digit fingers had no nails.

  The lunch room looked like a conference room done in white melamine. Seven unpadded white bucket chairs were arranged on one side of a long oval table. The plastic chairs were high off the ground and narrow for the average human. Two red chairs were arranged on the other side. Six volunteers, three men and three women, were ushered in after me; we all sat at the seven-chair side. Just seven of us made the grade out of the original six thousand? The jumpsuit material was slick against the plastic chairs. One of the woman's feet didn't reach the floor.

  Our alien escorts lined up, each standing against the wall behind us. They didn't look like clones, but more like brothers with a strong family resemblance. They looked very fit.

  The door opened again and two doctors walked in and sat at the red chairs. One was a human female, but not the oriental woman we'd met before.

  An alien came in with a cart and the escorts helped to serve lunch. The menu wasn't salty liquids and yogurt again, thankfully. It looked like prepared food; I just couldn't recognize it. Fruit and veggies and, thank God, a glass of water. The water was tasteless, like it was manufactured or distilled.

  "Hello, all," said the human doctor. "We apologize for the testing and probing. Cosmic Journey has critical requirements and you seven have met them all, from your personal histories to your perfect genes. Our allies will soon transport you to another base where you will begin your mission. I wish you luck." To the point and as uninformative as ever.

  "I have a question. Why are we here and what are we supposed to do?" I said.

  "You are part of the vanguard to open new worlds for all mankind. You are in a very enviable position," said the human doctor. "You will be evaluating new technology for all of Earth to use."

  "Why is my name tag blue while his is red?" said one of the other men pointing at me. "And what does the writing underneath mean?"

  She looked at the alien next to her in the other red seat. "Those are alien words, difficult to translate. One means, roughly, specimen; the other means candidate." She got up and walked out the door. It closed behind her.

  The meal finished, our escorts came forward. A much wider door opened at the far end of the room. Another smooth white tunnel to another interior. I had no reference to know what kind of vehicle it was. This one was more...well, it was different. No shell chairs this time, but horizontal couches with short monopod stools next to each one and the slightly worn, utility feel of a vehicle in constant use. We again were held to the cushion by an invisible force. Our escorts sat next to each of us. This time the front door was open, leading to what I couldn't tell. A heavier set alien stood in the doorway. Was he a mature alien, the boss or supervisor?

  "Where are we going?" I asked my escort.

  "To the base, of course." I heard him, but his lips never moved. He looked at me benevolently and patted my shoulder. The other escorts did the same to their humans.

  "I'm just a Community College instructor. What can I add to a technical project of this magnitude?"

  He looked towards the alien standing in the front door.

  "You are not here for your technical skills," said the older alien. "You are here for your genes."

  "What?" I tried to get up, but the force field held me firmly on the couch.

  "You are trade goods. The Earth gets advanced technology; we get you. Please try to rest. It will be a long trip."

  The Zoo of Dark Creatures

  by Leslie J. Anderson

  Human beings don’t produce any light at all. Not a spark. Most children haven’t seen a completely dark creature like a human, and they like giving each other the squiggles at the zoo, talking about how a human could just walk right up to you in the dark and you’d never see them, unless you happened to be looking around in infrared. Nothing else they saw in the zoo, or on the planet for that matter, gave off so much heat. They were like tiny suns, wobbling around in there. When you communicate with light, when most of the living creatures on your planet illumed at least a little, a creature with no phosphorescence to speak of is a little creepy, to say the least.

  When I was small I used to press my face up to the glass and watch them move around like great globs of red heat in their little habitat. There were only two then, Mengo and Jojo, whose ship landed around the northern town of Khaele about thirty years ago. There was a great debate about what to do with them or why they’d been sent into space at all. Most scientists agreed they were experimental animals; test subjects used to determine if the dominant species of their planet could survive in space.

  Many scientists suggested that we simply let them be, free in the wild, but most thought that was too cruel. The decision was finally made that we would keep them until their owners were technologically advanced or secure enough to travel here themselves. Then we could return the two humans, whole and healthy, as a sign of goodwill. Of course Mengo and Jojo are long dead, but there were three crashes since then. Those humans went to the two capital zoos and a private zoo, respectively. We got to keep one of their ships though. The tour guides loved to tell people that we could sometimes get the instruments to light up.

  We didn’t hold out much hope for getting our very own human, which is why I was so excited when that finally happened.

  I was in my lab when the Assistant Director, Kel, came in, flashing at me before he was even in the door. He was a very bright creature and tended towards the red end of the spectrum. He was excited and upset and worried all at the same time. I wanted to pulse at him to calm down, but he’s my boss so I just undulated politely. It took me a moment to figure out what he was saying.

  There was another crash and they wanted an expert to join them in case there were survivors. The governor pushed for a local,
not wanting a big-city academic parading all over his scenic little borough, no sir. So, that left me, Alegh, Head Curator and Research Lead at Buchbrick Zoo and Beastiary. It was an enormous opportunity, for both me and the zoo. I was ready to leave before he finished blinking at me.

  The ship was almost completely shredded.

  It had landed amongst the Claw Stones, a plain covered in jagged outcroppings of red rock. Some liked to hike there, but that seemed like too much effort to me. The nose was more or less intact, but the body of the craft looked like it had collapsed inward, then shattered around that central point. It lay in small, white pieces across the rocky floor of the valley. It was hard to believe there could be any survivors, so instead of looking at the mess of whatever was left, I wandered around and chatted with the clean-up crew, nervous about my responsibilities should they find a human alive.

  “It’s fascinating, isn’t it?” I prompted. “They keep sending the probes out here. Who knows why, exactly. Maybe they hope one will return. They must be astonishingly intelligent – genius beyond our understanding.”

  They flashed green at me, polite but uninterested. They weren’t scientists. They were a biohazard crew. This was probably just one of six jobs they had today and these kinds of crashes occurred often enough that they were becoming uninteresting. Just as I was losing my own enthusiasm, someone at the edge of my vision flashed my name excitedly.

  “We’ve found something!” She said, hard to understand in her prismatic excitement.

  I felt an immediate, almost overwhelming panic. I instantly wanted to be anywhere but there; I suddenly felt completely inadequate to the task. There had to be someone more experienced, more intelligent, more capable of saving a dying human. But here I was. I was stuck. I would simply have to do the best I could.

  “Good. Good! Let’s see it.”

  It was hard to tell how many humans were on the ship because of the level of destruction, but one survived.

  The remains of the dead humans were difficult to look at.

  The cleaning crew had cleared a section of the debris revealing a pod of some sort, which seemed relatively undamaged. Perhaps one of the humans had been secluded? Perhaps it had been selected for special protection? I had no way of knowing. As I approached I was struck again how strange it was to see a body, solid and living, but light-less, a female – the lone survivor. Not even a spark jumped from her skin. I tried to sense her heat, by focusing an organ behind my eyes (rather like sniffing your nose), but it was almost gone. I stuttered a little, flashing a few colors I didn’t mean to.

  “Um…I can’t tell what’s wrong with her here. We need to move her – but gently! Humans have…they’re very fragile. They have internal skeletons that can be damaged or broken.”

  The crew flickered, confused by the sudden excitement, but impressed with my knowledge. Very few of us ever worked with humans. We moved her slowly, and she stirred a couple of times. One of the crew members asked if we should sedate her, but I refused. There was no telling how much the human female could take in her fragile state, and if I lost her it would be all over the news.

  “Besides,” I said, “with the exception of the incident in Bleck, there has never been an attack by a human. She’s barely alive. We’ll be fine.”

  She woke once, when we set her on the table back at the lab, and looked at us with wide eyes; we knew, at least, that humans were visual, despite their complete lack of light production. She tried to move, opening and closing her mouth frantically, then fell back to the table and closed her eyes again. She had massive internal bleeding and two broken bones. Vets came from the Khaele and together we completed three surgeries. They had more experience than I did, and didn’t panic at the red liquid dripping all over the floor or the twitching of her eyelids when she woke.

  On the other hand, I panicked at every little thing she did – moving too much, moving too little, fast heart rate, slower heart rate. I wasn’t convinced she was healed until we finally moved her to the enclosure and observed her, a short time later, walking on her own. When she was able to feed herself she stared at the green pellets we had supplied for almost an hour, poking at them nervously, and I was convinced she wouldn’t eat at all. But finally she did, and I felt some tentative relief. Most scientists believed that humans were warm blooded and required some kind of covering, and the covering we provided, a square-shaped gray thing that allowed unhindered movement of her limbs, seemed to suit my human just fine.

  The zoo held a contest to name the new human, and on the day her enclosure opened to the public it was revealed that we would call her Summer.

  Summer was an ideal specimen.

  She was very laid back, even when visiting children tapped on the glass. Although they weren’t known for their violence, some humans had a period of time just after introduction to the public that included some acting out; perhaps they testing their boundaries. Summer just watched, curled under her tree.

  Sometimes she took a walk around the enclosure, still limping a little, but alert and curious. A few of the visiting scientists urged Kel to include her in a breeding program immediately. Humans hadn’t been successfully bred in captivity, though there had been attempts.

  I wasn’t sure about the entire idea, though. I was already having trouble sleeping at night, worrying about her. Sometimes I would wake in the middle of the night and wander around my home, trying to convince myself that she was fine. Then I would drive to the zoo and let myself into the back to watch her sleep. But Kel was convinced we needed more of them. I suppose he could see the money in it.

  “Well, I’ll have to look into artificial insemination.” I said. It seemed like a dangerous risk to take with such an important specimen, but Kel was adamant.

  We were standing in my personal lab. The window, fitted with one-way glass, looked into Summer’s circular enclosure, A vast network of tunnels and labs connected to the zoo, allowing us to complete our research without having to interact with the guests or disturb the specimens.

  “That or we could get a male,” Kel blinked.

  Kel talked about his obsession with breeding as if I should be thrilled, but the concept terrified me. Still, I had faked my way through it so far, and it looked like I could still pull it off. I contacted the Delling zoo -which everyone knew was slowly failing, but no one really spoke of- and arranged to visit.

  “We don’t really have the funding anymore to keep him.” The researcher explained. “The breeding program was really a last-ditch attempt of making a little money. You know how these things are. We didn’t want the male and female to cohabitate. We weren’t sure what they would do to each other, being from two separate crashes.”

  “And what happened, after the artificial insemination?” I asked.

  “She died.” He said, with a shrug. “She seemed alright for a few weeks, and then she became extremely distressed, just about the time we started recording her body’s physical changes. She just hid in the corner, there under the rock shelter, rocking back and forth. Then one morning we found her by the tree. She’d climbed and jumped.”

  “Oh my,” was all I could think to say.

  “Yes. Never a problem we’ve had with another specimen. There might be a physiological cue we missed. If I had to do it again, I would bring the male and female together naturally, to see what happened – let them live in the same enclosure.”

  We wandered through the zoo, past many empty exhibits. They were slowly emptying it, selling off their creatures, all native to this planet except the humans. It was a dream of ours to travel to other worlds, but we weren’t the geniuses from the human planet. Life support was tricky and communication across a vast distance was impossible. The human ships were confusing, and no one could do more than make them blink and light up in a meaningless babble of colors.

  It would take time to make the journey to their planet. Some worried that we should accelerate the program, in case the creatures finally came and des
troyed us, as any sentient species significantly more advanced than us obviously would.

  When we finally arrived at the human enclosure I could see the male; he was lying next to his pond. He wasn’t moving and it was strange to see him so still. That was usually a bad sign, at least from what I’d read. Summer had her moments of rest, but even then she picked at the floor or glanced around. She was very rarely lifeless.

  “How much do you want for him?” I asked.

  He didn’t bother to hide his sparkle of joy. “Well, I hadn’t really thought about it, but I’m sure we could discuss his price.”

  “The ship, too,” I added.

  I arranged to have him delivered in a week. Kel didn’t tell me how much we’d paid for him and was glossing it over with the public. It must have been a huge amount, considering his secrecy. We would have to report it eventually, but I suppose he was hoping we would have some exciting discovery to distract everyone.

  I named him Silver on the way home and flickered happily at Summer when I got back to the lab. She looked at me intently, and opened her mouth a few times, but she couldn’t have been hungry; I’d already fed her.

  Over the next week, I prepared the enclosure for Silver, filling the tiny space with every sensor I could think of, to examine different wavelengths, detect vibrations, and measure heat. The ships were built for groups of humans, you see, and so I hypothesized that they were social. If they were, they must have some way to communicate, and I wanted to find out how.

  I had no idea how to introduce them, though. I decided to simply let it happen, and intervene if needed. I fed them in their own enclosures and then opened the door between them. Silver didn’t move. He glanced out the door at the larger area and then laid back down. I glanced nervously at Kel, who flickered orangely.

  He wanted this to be dramatic.