Aliens Among Us

by Gardner Dozois

  "I have to," he said, still whispering. "It's almost gone. Did you get it?"

  Mostly, I said. Not all.

  "I meant for you to have it."

  I know.

  "I don't know that it will really do you any good." His breath kind of bubbled in his throat. I could see something wet and shiny on his mouth but it wasn't silver fireworks. "But it's yours. You can do as you like with it. Live on it the way I did. Get what you need when you need it. But you can live as a human, too. Eat. Work. However, whatever."

  I'm not human, I said. I'm not any more human than you, even if I do belong here.

  "Yes, you are, little friend. I haven't made you any less human," he said, and coughed more. "I'm not sorry I wouldn't mate. I couldn't mate with my own. It was too . . . I don't know, too little of me, too much of them, something. I couldn't bond, it would have been nothing but emptiness. The Great Sin, to be unable to give, because the universe knows only less or more and I insisted that it would be good or bad. So they sent me here. But in the end. you know, they got their way, little friend." I felt his hand on me for a moment before it fell away. "I did it after all even if it wasn't with my own."

  The bubbling in his throat stopped. I sat next to him for awhile in the dark. Finally I felt it, the Angel stuff. It was kind of fluttery-churny, like too much coffee on an empty stomach. I closed my eyes and lay down on the grass, shivering. Maybe some of it was shock but I don't think so. The silver fireworks started, in my head this time, and with them came a lot of pictures I couldn't understand. Stuff about the Angel and where he'd come from and the way they mated. It was a lot like how we'd been together, the Angel and me. They looked a lot like us but there were a lot of differences, too, things I couldn't make out. I couldn't make out how they'd sent him here, either—by light, in, like, little bundles or something. It didn't make any sense to me, but I guessed an Angel could be light. Silver fireworks.

  I must have passed out, because when I opened my eyes, it felt like I'd been laying there a long time. It was still dark, though. I sat up and reached for the Angel, thinking I ought to hide his body.

  He was gone. There was just a sort of wet sandy stuff where he'd been.

  I looked at the car and her. All that was still there. Somebody was going to see it soon. I didn't want to be around for that.

  Everything still hurt but I managed to get to the other road and start walking back toward the city. It was like I could feel it now, the way the Angel must have, as though it were vibrating like a drum or ringing like a bell with all kinds of stuff, people laughing and crying and loving and hating and being afraid and everything else that happens to people. The stuff that the Angel took in, energy, that I could take in now if I wanted.

  And I knew that taking it in that way, it would be bigger than anything all those people had, bigger than anything I could have had if things hadn't gone wrong with me all those years ago.

  I wasn't so sure I wanted it. Like the Angel, refusing to mate back where he'd come from. He wouldn't, there, and I couldn't, here. Except now I could do something else.

  I wasn't so sure I wanted it. But I didn't think I'd be able to stop it, either, any more than I could stop my heart from beating. Maybe it wasn't really such a good thing or a right thing. But it was like the Angel said: the universe doesn't know good or bad, only less or more.

  Yeah. I heard that.

  I thought about the waitress with no face. I could find them all now, all the ones from the other places, other worlds that sent them away for some kind of alien crimes nobody would have understood. I could find them all. They threw away their outcasts, I'd tell them, but here, we kept ours. And here's how. Here's how you live in a universe that only knows less or more.

  I kept walking toward the city.

  Among the Hairy Earthmen

  R. A Lafferty

  Ever since Chariots of the Gods galloped to the top of the bestseller list a few decades ago, we have been deluged by books and television shows purporting to reveal evidence that Earth at the dawn of history was visited by a race of highly advanced aliens, hailed as "gods" by our ignorant and credulous ancestors. Supposedly, these godlike aliens were then obliging enough to act as mentors to the infant civilizations of Earth—if indeed they weren't the founders of those civilizations in the first place—and the saucerfolk have subsequently been credited with every major human accomplishment from Stonehenge to Chichen Itza, not forgetting the Easter Island statues, and, of course, the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

  But there's more to civilization than earthworks and monuments and giant statues, and there are more types of cultural influence than just the ham-handed obvious kind. Here R. A. Lafferty—a writer possessed of one of SF's wildest and most quirky imaginations—depicts a variety of alien meddlings with human civilization more bizarre, more droll, more far-reaching, and, frighteningly, more plausible than anything in Von Daniken.

  R. A. Lafferty started writing in 1960, at the relatively advanced age (for a New Writer, anyway) of 48, and in the years before his retirement in 1987, he published some of the freshest and funniest short stories ever written in the genre, as well as a string of vivid and unforgettable books such as the novels Past Master, The Devil Is Dead, The Reefs of Earth, Okla Hannali, The Fall of Rome, Arrive At Easterwine, and The Flame is Green, and landmark collections such as Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Strange Doings, Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?, Golden Gate and Other Stories, and Ringing the Changes. Lafferty won the Hugo Award in 1973 for his story "Eurema's Dam," and in 1990 received the World Fantasy Award, the prestigious Life Achievement Award. His most recent books are the collections Lafferty in Orbit and Iron Star. He lives in Oklahoma.

  There is one period of our World History that has aspects so different from anything that went before and after that we can only gaze back on those several hundred years and ask:

  "Was that ourselves who behaved so?"

  Well, no, as a matter of fact, it wasn't. It was beings of another sort who visited us briefly and who acted so gloriously and abominably.

  This is the way it was:

  The Children had a Long Afternoon free. They could go to any of a dozen wonderful places, but they were already in one.

  Seven of them—full to the craw of wonderful places—decided to go to Eretz.

  "Children are attracted to the oddest and most shambling things," said the Mothers. "Why should they want to go to Eretz?"

  "Let them go," said the Fathers. "Let them see—before they be gone—one of the few simple peoples left. We ourselves have become a contrived and compromised people. Let the Children be children for half a day."

  Eretz was the Planet of the Offense, and therefore it was to be (perhaps it recently had been) the Planet of the Restitution also. But in no other way was it distinguished. The Children had received the tradition of Eretz as children receive all traditions—like lightning.

  Hobble, Michael Goodgrind, Ralpha, Lonnie, Laurie, Bea and Joan they called themselves as they came down on Eretz—for these were their idea of Eretz names. But they could have as many names as they wished in their games.

  An anomalous intrusion of great heat and force! The rocks ran like water where they came down, and there was formed a scarp-pebble enclave.

  It was all shanty country and shanty towns on Eretz—clumsy hills, badly done plains and piedmonts, ragged fields, uncleansed rivers, whole weedpatches of provinces—not at all like Home. And the Towns! Firenze, Praha, Venezia, Londra, Colonia, Gant, Roma—why, they were nothing but towns made out of stone and wood! And these were the greatest of the towns of Eretz, not the meanest.

  The Children exploded into action. Like children of the less transcendent races running wild on an ocean beach for an afternoon, they ran wild over continents. They scattered. And they took whatever forms first came into their minds.

  Hobble—dark and smoldering like crippled Vulcan.

  Michael Goodgrind—a broken-nosed bull of a man. How they all howled whe
n he invented that first form!

  Ralpha—like young Mercury.

  And Lonnie—a tall giant with a golden beard.

  Laurie was fire, Bea was light, Joan was moon-darkness.

  But in these, or in any other forms they took, you'd always know that they were cousins or brethren.

  Lonnie went pure Gothic. He had come onto it at the tail end of the thing and he fell in love with it.

  "I am the Emperor!" he told the people like giant thunder. He pushed the Emperor Wenceslas off the throne and became Emperor.

  "I am the true son of Charles, and you had thought me dead," he told the people. "I am Sigismund." Sigismund was really dead, but Lonnie became Sigismund and reigned, taking the wife and all the castles of Wenceslas. He grabbed off gangling old forts and mountain-rooks and raised howling Eretzi armies to make war. He made new castles. He loved the tall sweeping things and raised them to a new height. Have you never wondered that the last of those castles—in the late afternoon of the Gothic—were the tallest and oddest?

  One day the deposed Wenceslas came back, and he was possessed of a new power.

  "Now we will see who is the real Emperor!" the new Wenceslas cried like a rising storm.

  They clashed their two forces and broke down each other's bridges and towns and stole the high ladies from each other's strongholds. They wrestled like boys. But they wrestled with a continent.

  Lonnie (who was Sigismund) learned that the Wenceslas he battled was Michael Goodgrind wearing a contrived Emperor body. So they fought harder.

  There came a new man out of an old royal line.

  "I am Jobst," the new man cried. "I will show you two princelings who is the real Emperor!"

  He fought the two of them with overwhelming verve, He raised fast-striking Eretzi armies, and used tricks that only a young Mercury would know. He was Ralpha, entering the game as the third Emperor. But the two combined against him and broke him at Constance.

  They smashed Germany and France and Italy like a clutch of eggs. Never had there been such spirited conflict. The Eretzi were amazed by it all, but they were swept into It. it was the Eretzi who made up the armies.

  Even today the Eretzi or Earthers haven't the details of it right in their histories. When the King of Aragon, for an example, mixed into it, they treated him as a separate person. They did not know that Michael Goodgrind was often the King of Aragon, just as Lonnie was often the Duke of Flanders. But, played for itself, the Emperor game would be quite a limited one. Too limited for the children.

  The girls played their own roles. Laurie claimed to be thirteen different queens. She was consort of all three Emperors in every one of their guises, and she also dabbled with the Eretzi. She was the wanton of the group.

  Bea like the Grande Dame part and the Lady Bountiful bit. She was very good on Great Renunciations. In her different characters she beat paths from thrones to nunneries and back again; and she is now known as five different saints. Every time you turn to the Common of the Mass of Holy Women who are Neither Virgins nor Martyrs, you are likely to meet her.

  And Joan was the dreamer who may have enjoyed the Afternoon more than any of them.

  Laurie made up a melodrama—Lucrezia Borgia and the Poison Ring. There is an advantage in doing these little melodramas on Eretz. You can have as many characters as you wish—they come free. You can have them as extravagantly as you desire—who is there to object to it? Lucrezia was very well done, as children's burlesques go, and the bodies were strewn from Napoli to Vienne. The Eretzi play with great eagerness any convincing part offered them, and they go to their deaths quite willingly if the part calls for it.

  Lonnie made one up called The Pawnbroker and the Pope. It was in the grand manner, all about the Medici family, and had some very funny episodes in the fourth act. Lonnie, who was vain of his acting ability, played Medici parts in five succeeding generations. The drama left more corpses than did the Lucrezia piece, but the killings weren't so sudden or showy; the girls had a better touch at the bloody stuff.

  Ralpha did a Think Piece called One, Two, Three—Infinity. In its presentation he put all the rest of the Children to roast grandly in Hell; he filled up Purgatory with Eretzi-type people—the dullards; and for the Paradise he did a burlesque of Home. The Eretzi use a cropped version of Ralpha's piece and call it the Divine Comedy, leaving out a lot of fun.

  Bea did a poetic one named the Witches' Bonfire. All the Children spent many a happy evening with that one, and they burnt twenty thousand witches. There was something satisfying about those Eretzi autumnal twilights with the scarlet sky and the frosty fields and the kine lowing in the meadows and the evening smell of witches burning. Bea's was really a pastoral piece.

  All the Children ranged far except Hobble. Hobble (who was Vulcan) played with his sick toys. He played at Ateliers and Smithies, at Furnaces and Carousels. And often the other Children came and watched his work, and joined in for a while.

  They played with the glass from the furnaces. They made gold-toned goblets, iridescent glass poems, figured spheres, goblin pitchers, glass music boxes, gargoyle heads, dragon chargers, princess salieras, figurines of lovers. So many things to make of glass! To make, and to smash when made!

  But some of the things they exchanged as gifts instead of smashing them—glass birds and horses, fortune-telling globes that showed changing people and scenes within, tuned chiming balls that rang like bells, glass cats that sparked when stroked, wolves and bears, witches that flew.

  The Eretzi found some of these things that the Children discarded. They studied them and imitated them.

  And again, in the interludes of their other games, the Children came back to Hobble's shops where he sometimes worked with looms. They made costumes of wool and linen and silk. They made trains and cloaks and mantles, all the things for their grand masquerades. They fabricated tapestries and rugs and wove in all sorts of scenes: vistas of Home and of Eretz, people and peacocks, fish and cranes, dingles and dromedaries, larks and lovers. They set their creations in the strange ragged scenery of Eretz and in the rich contrived gardens of Home. A spark went from the Children to their weaving so that none could tell where they left off and their creations began.

  Then they left poor Hobble and went on to their more vital games.

  There were seven of them (six, not counting the backwar Hobble), but they seemed a thousand. They built themselves Castles in Spain and Gardes in Languedoc. The girls played always at Intrigue, for the high pleasure of it, and to give a cause for the wars. And the wars were the things that the boys seldom tired of. It is fun to play at armies with live warriors; and the Eretzi were live . . . in a sense.

  The Eretzi had had wars and armies and sieges long before this, but they had been aimless things. Oh, this was one field where the Eretzi needed the Children. Consider the battles that the Children engineered that afternoon:

  Gallipoli—how they managed the ships in that one! The Fathers could not have maneuvered more intricately in their four-dimension chess at Home.

  Adrianople, Kunovitza, Dibra, Varna, Hexamilion! It's fun just to call out the bloody names of battles.

  Constantinople! That was the one where they first used the big cannon. But who cast the big cannon for the Turks there? In their histories the Eretzi say that it was a man named Orban or Urban, and that he was Dacian, or he was Hungarian, or he was Danish. How many places did you tell them that you came from, Michael Goodgrind?

  Belgrad, Trebizond, Morat, Blackheath, Napoli, Dornach!

  Cupua and Taranto—Ralpha's armies beat Michael's at both of those.

  Carignola—Lonnie foxed both Michael and Ralpha there, and nearly foxed himself. (You didn't intend it all that way, Lonnie. It was seven-cornered luck and you know it!)

  Garigliano where the sea was red with blood and the ships were like broken twigs on the water!

  Brescia! Ravenna! Who would have believed that such things could be done with a device known as Spanish infantry?

 
Villalar, Milan, Pavia! Best of all, the sack of Rome! There were a dozen different games blended into that one. The Eretzi discovered new emotions in themselves there—a deeper depravity and a higher heroism.

  Siege of Florence! That one called out the Children's every trick. A wonderfully well-played game!

  Turin, San Quentin, Moncontour, Mookerhide!

  Lepanto! The great sea siege where the castled ships broke asunder and the tall Turk Ochiali Pasha perished with all his fleet and was drowned forever. But it wasn't so forever as you might suppose, for he was Michael Goodgrind, who had more bodies than one. The fish still remember Lepanto. Never had there been such feastings.

  Alcazar-Quivar! That was the last of the excellent ones—the end of the litany. The Children left off the game. They remembered (but conveniently, and after they had worn out the fun of it) that they were forbidden to play Warfare with live soldiers. The Eretzi, left to themselves again, once more conducted their battles as dull and uninspired affairs.

  You can put it to a test, now, tonight. Study the conflicts of the earlier times, of this high period, and of the lime that followed. You will see the difference. For a short two or three centuries you will find really well-contrived battles. And before and after there is only ineptitude.

  Often the Children played at Jealousies and raised up all the black passions in themselves. They played at Immoralities, for there is an abiding evil in all children.

  Masking and water-carnivals and balls, and forever the emotional intrigue!

  Ralpha walked down a valley, playing a lute and wearing the body of somebody else. He luted the birds out of the trees and worked a charm on the whole countryside.

  An old crone followed him and called, "Love me when I'm old."

  "Sempremai, tuttavia," sang Ralpha in Eretzi or Earthian "For Ever, For Always."