Aliens Among Us

by Gardner Dozois

A small girl followed and called, "Love me when I'm young."

  "Forever, for always," sang Ralpha.

  The weirdest witch in the world followed him and called, "Love me when I'm ugly."

  "For always, forever," sang Ralpha, and pulled her down on the grass. He knew that all the creatures had been Laurie playing Bodies,

  But a peculiar thing happened: the prelude became more Important than the play. Ralpha fell in love with his own song, and forgot Laurie who had inspired it. He made all manner of music and poem—aubade, madrigal, chanson; and he topped it off with one hundred sonnets. He made them in Eretzi words, Italian words, Languedoc words, and they were excellent. And the Eretzi still copy them.

  Ralpha discovered there that poetry and song are Passion Deferred. But Laurie would rather have deferred the song. She was long gone away and taking up with others before Ralpha had finished singing his love for her, but he never noticed that she had left him. After Hobble, Ralpha was the most peculiar of them all.

  In the meanwhile, Michael Goodgrind invented another game of Bodies. He made them of marble—an Eretzi limestone that cuts easily without faulting. And he painted them on canvas. He made the People of Home, and the Eretzi. He said that he would make angels.

  "But you cannot make angels," said Joan.

  "We know that," said Michael, "but do the Eretzi know that I cannot? I will make angels for the Eretzi."

  He made them grotesque, like chicken men, like bird men, with an impossible duplication of humeral function. And the Children laughed at the carven jokes.

  But Michael had sudden inspiration. He touched his creations up and added an element of nobility. So an iconography was born.

  All the Children did it then, and they carried it into other mediums. They made the Eretzi, and they made themselves. You can still see their deep features on some of those statues, that family look that was on them no matter what faces they wore or copied.

  Bronze is fun! Bronze horses are the best. Big bronze doors can be an orgy of delight, or bronze bells whose shape is their tone.

  The Children went to larger things. They played at Realms and Constitutions, and Banks and Ships and Provinces. Then they came down to smaller things again and played at Books, for Hobble had just invented the printing thing.

  Of them all, Hobble had the least imagination. He didn't range wide like the others. He didn't outrage the Eretzi. He spent all his time with his sick toys as though he were a child of much younger years.

  The only new body he acquired was another one just like his own. Even this he didn't acquire as did the other Children theirs. He made it laboriously in his shop, and animated it. Hobble and the Hobble Creature worked together thereafter, and you could not tell them apart. One was as dull and laboring as the other.

  The Eretzi had no effect whatsoever on the Children, but the Children had great effect on the Eretzi. The Children had the faculty of making whatever little things they needed or wanted, and the Eretzi began to copy them. In this manner the Eretzi came onto many tools, processes, devices and arts that they had never known before. Out of ten thousand, there were these:

  The Astrolabe, Equatorium, Quadrant, Lathes and Traversing Tools, Ball Bearings, Gudgeons, Gig Mills, Barometers, Range Finders, Cantilever Construction, Machine Saws, Screw Jacks, Hammer Forges and Drop Forges, Printing, Steel that was more than puddled Iron, Logarithms, Hydraulic Rams, Screw Dies, Spanner Wrenches, Flux Solder, Telescopes, Microscopes, Mortising Machines, Wire Drawing, Stanches (Navigation Locks), Gear Trains, Paper-Making, Magnetic Compass and Wind-Rhumb, Portulan Charts and Projection Maps, Pinnule-Sights, Spirit-Levels, Fine Micrometers, Porcelain, Firelock Guns, Music Notation and Music Printing, Complex Pulleys and Snatch-blocks, the Seed-Drill, Playing Cards (the Children's masquerade faces may still be seen on them), Tobacco, the Violin, Whiskey, the Mechanical Clock.

  They were forbidden, of course, to display any second-aspect powers or machines, as these would disrupt things. But they disrupted accidentally in building, in tooling, in armies and navies, in harbors and canals, in towns and bridges, in ways of thinking and recording. They started a thing that couldn't be reversed. It was only the One Afternoon they were here, only two or three Eretzi Centuries, but they set a trend. They overwhelmed by the very number of their new devices, and it could never be simple on Eretz again.

  There were many thousands of Eretz days and nights in that Long Afternoon. The Children had begun to tire of it, and the hour was growing late. For the last time they wandered off, this time all Seven of them together.

  In the bodies of Kings and their Ladies, they strode down a High Road in the Levant. They were wondering what last thing they could contrive, when they found their way blocked by a Pilgrim with a staff.

  "Let's tumble the hairy Eretzi," shouted Ralpha. "Let him not stand in the way of Kings!" For Ralpha was King of Bulgaria that day.

  But they did not tumble the Pilgrim. That man knew how to handle his staff, and he laid the bunch of them low. It was nothing to him that they were the high people of the World who ordered Nations. He flogged them flat.

  "Bleak Children!" the Pilgrim cried out as he beat them into the ground. "Unfledged little oafs! Is it so that you waste your Afternoon on Earth? I'll give you what your Fathers forgot."

  Seven-colored thunder, how he could use that staff! He smashed the gaudy bodies of the Children and broke many of their damnable bones. Did he know that it didn't matter? Did he understand that the bodies they wore were only for an antic?

  "Lay off, old Father!" begged Michael Goodgrind, bleeding and half beaten into the earth. "Stay your bloody bludgeon. You do not know who we are."

  "I know you," maintained the Pilgrim mountainously. "You are ignorant Children who have abused the Afternoon given you on Earth. You have marred and ruined and warped everything you have touched."

  "No, no," Ralpha protested—as he set in new bones for his old damaged ones—"you do not understand. We have advanced you a thousand of your years in one of our afternoons. Consider the Centuries we have saved you! It's as though we had increased your life by that thousand years."

  "We have all the time there is," said the Pilgrim solidly. "We were well and seriously along our road, and it was not so crooked as the one you have brought us over. You have broken our sequence with your meddling. You've set us back more ways than you've advanced us. You've shattered our Unity."

  "Pigs have unity!" Joan shouted. "We've brought you diversity. Think deep. Consider all the machines we have showed you, the building and the technique. I can name you a thousand things we've given you. You will never be the same again."

  "True. We will never be the same," said the Pilgrim. "You may not be an unmixed curse. I'm a plain man and I don't know. Surety is one of the things you've lost us. But you befouled us. You played the game of Immoralities and taught it to us Earthlings."

  "You had it already," Laurie insisted. "We only brought elegance instead of piggishness to its practice." Immoralities was Laurie's own game, and she didn't like to hear it slighted.

  "You have killed many thousands of us in your battles," said the Pilgrim. "You're a bitter fruit—sweet at the first taste only."

  "You would yourselves have killed the same numbers in battles, and the battles wouldn't have been so good," said Michael. "Do you not realize that we are the higher race? We have roots of great antiquity."

  "We have roots older than antiquity," averred the Pilgrim. "You are wicked Children without compassion."

  "Compassion? For the Eretzi?" shouted Lonnie in disbelief.

  "Do you have compassion for mice?" demanded Ralpha.

  "Yes. I have compassion for mice," the Pilgrim said softly.

  "I make a guess," Ralpha shot in shrewdly after they had all repaired their damaged bodies. "You travel as a Pilgrim, and Pilgrims sometimes come from very far away. You are not Eretzi. You are one of the Fathers from Home going in the guise of an Eretzi Pilgrim. You have this routine so that sometimes one of you comes
to this world—and to every world—to see how it goes. You may have come to investigate an event said to have happened on Eretz a day ago."

  Ralpha did not mean an Eretzi day ago, but a day ago at Home. The High Road they were on was in Coele-Syria, not far from where the Event was thought to have happened, and Ralpha pursued his point:

  "You are no Eretzi, or you would not dare to confront us, knowing what we are."

  "You guess wrong in this and in everything," said the Pilgrim. "I am of this Earth, earthy. And I will not be intimidated by a gangle of children of whatever species! You're a weaker flesh than ourselves. You hide in other bodies, and you get Earthlings to do your slaughter. And you cannot stand up to my staff!

  "Go home, you witless weanlings!" and he raised his terrible staff again.

  "Our time is nearly up. We will be gone soon," said Joan softly.

  The last game they played? They played Saints—for the Evil they had done in playing Bodies wrongly, and in playing Warfare with live soldiers. But they repented of the things only after they had enjoyed them for the Long Afternoon. They played Saints in hairshirt and ashes, and revived that affair among the Eretzi.

  And finally they all assembled and took off from the high hill between Prato and Firenze in Italy. The rocks flowed like water where they left, and now there would be a double scarp formation.

  They were gone, and that was the end of them here.

  There is a theory, however, that one of the Hobbles remained and is with us yet. Hobble and his creature could not be told apart and could not finally tell themselves apart. They flipped an Eretzi coin, Emperors or Shields, to see which one would go and which one would stay. One went and one stayed. One is still here.

  But, after all, Hobble was only concerned with the sick toys, the mechanical things, the material inventions. Would it have been better if Ralpha or Joan stayed with us? They'd have burned us crisp by now! They were damnable and irresponsible children.

  This short Historical Monograph was not assembled for a distraction or an amusement. We consider the evidence that Children have spent their short vacations here more than once and in both hemispheres. We set out the theses in ordered parallels and we discover that we have begun to tremble unaccountably.

  When last came such visitors here? What thing has beset us during the last long Eretzi lifetime?

  We consider a new period—and it impinges on the Present—with aspects so different from anything that went before that we can only gasp aghast and gasp in sick wonder:

  "Is it ourselves who behave so?"

  "Is it beings of another sort, or have we become those beings?"

  "Are we ourselves? Are these our deeds?"

  There are great deep faces looking over our shoulder, there are cold voices of ancient Children jeering "Compassion? For Earthlings?" there is frozen vasty laughter that does not belong to our species.

  I'm Too Big But I Love to Play

  James Tiptree Jr.

  As most of you probably know by now, multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author James Tiptree, Jr. was actually the pseudonym of the late Dr. Alice Sheldon, a semi-retired experimental psychologist and former member of the American intelligence community who also wrote occasionally under the name of Raccoona Sheldon. Dr. Sheldon's tragic death in 1987 put an end to "both" careers, but not before she had won two Nebula and two Hugo Awards as Tiptree, won another Nebula Award as Raccoona Sheldon, and established herself under whatever name, as one of the very best science fiction writers of our times. As Tiptree, Dr. Sheldon published two novels, Up the Walls of the World and Brightness Falls From the Air, and nine short-story collections: Ten Thousand Light Years From Home, Warm Worlds and Otherwise, Starsongs of an Old Primate, Out of the Everywhere, Tales of the Quintana Roo, Byte Beautiful, The Starry Rift, the posthumously published Crown of Stars, and the recent posthumous retrospective collection, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.

  Here she tells us the bittersweet story of an alien who tries his best to fit into human society, tries hard to be just one of the boys—but who, in the final analysis, is just too damn big.

  Sorry, Jack. You're right. Yes, I'm upset. No, it's not the campaign, for God's sake the campaign is perfect. It's not the crowds, either, I love them, Jack, you know that. Strain? Sure it's a strain, but—

  Jack. Listen. Frightened. That's what happened to Manahasset. Scared out of my mind. Because of because of this feeling I get, this sensation. Too big! Every time now when things are going well, when I'm getting to them—the rapport, it's working—all of a sudden this awful buildup starts, this sensation I'm swelling up too big. Terribly, ghastly too big! Listen, Jack: brain tumor.

  Brain tumor.

  I can't go to a goddamn doctor now, there's no way, they'd find out. I can't tell Ellen. I can't—Started? Oh, Christ, I know exactly when it started, it started after the Tobago weekend. At Tobago. That night. I know, you told me. But all I did was swim out and loaf around. Unwind, by myself. I had to, Jack. That's when it started. The Monday after, at the Biloxi airport. You remember, I cut it off fast?

  That was the first. The mayor, and that clot from Memphis, Dick Thing, you know, they were shouting questions, and the crowd started singing, and all of a sudden, Jack, I looked over at the mayor and you. And you were about two feet high, both of you. And the plane. Tiny! I couldn't get into it! And this feeling, this churning—

  Jack. Don't. I know about infantile omnipotence. You don't suddenly get delusions of infantile omnipotence at eleven-fifty on a Monday in Biloxi airport. Not unless there's something physical. It's physical, Jack. The bigness, the swelling, the vortex—like I'm starting to explode, Jack. It's got to he brain—

  Alone of his kind, perhaps, he did not outgrow joy. Play-joy in the crowded galaxies, the nursery of his race. Others matured soon away from the pleasures of time and space and were to be found immensely solitary, sailing the dimensionless meadows beyond return. They did not know each other, nor he them. How could they? For him, still the star-tangles. To ride—how rich—riding the swirling currents between the stars! How various, the wild-swarm photons upon his sensors! And games could be invented:

  For example—delicious!—to find some solitary little sizzler and breast close against its radiance, now tacking artfully, now close-hauled in the shadow of its planet, now out again to strive closer and closer to the furious little body, to gain the corona itself, to poise, gather—and then let go! Let all go! All sailing nucleus over ganglia out and out in a glory-rush—until that sun's energy met another's, and he was swept whirling down the star-streams to flounder roiled in some sidereal Sargasso.

  Here he would preen and sort his nearly immaterial vastness, amusing himself with bizarre energic restructurings, waiting for a new photon-eddy to catch his vectors and billow him off again.

  Sometimes what served him for perception gave him news that a young one of his kind was—or had been—following him. This lasted but briefly. They could not match his skill and would soon veer off. Of his equals he saw none. Was he alone of his age in his preoccupations? It did not occur to him to wonder. No member of his race had ever exchanged information. That he might be alone in his games of exostructure he did not know nor care, but played.

  New games: resting behind a ball of matter on his approach to a red sun, his temporary nucleus snug in the shadow, his perimeter feathering out past the system turbulence—it occurred to him to invest his receptors more closely round the little ball's surface. What he sensed there diverted him. Energy distributions—but tiny! And how complex!

  He curled more closely around it, concentrating himself to the density of a noisy vacuum. Here was an oddity indeed: pockets of negative entrophy!

  To him, as to all his race, the elaboration and permutation of field-energies was life. But he had never before conceived of energy-interaction of this density. And to conceive, with him, was not a passivity but a modeling. A restructurement into knowing. He hauled in a half-parsec of immaterial relatedness and began ine
ptly to experiment. Scarcely had he begun to concentrate when an incautious unbalancement exposed him to the red sun's wind and sent him sweeping out of the system with his ganglia in disarray.

  But what passed for memory among his kind persisted, and now and again he would hover to inspect a likely lump. And he found, oh, attractive, the patterns! A vast gamesomeness grew in him; he played Maxwell's demon with himself, concentrating, differentiating, substreaming complex energy interchanges. Skill mounted, fed back to structure. He tackled subtle challenges. And on planetary surfaces where scaled, skinned or furry creatures focused dim sense-organs on the skies, one and another across the galaxy would be shaken by the sight of incorporealities vastwavering among the stars.

  Shaken more especially, when they could recognize monstrous auroral versions of themselves. For technique was coming to obsess him. What had been play was becoming art. This phase culminated in the moment when he was fashioning—without in the least knowing it—a Sirian monitor shrimp family. His tension was great, and at its peak a resonance somehow ignited and held through the glorious backlash of release!

  Greater feats! Were they possible? A new era of experimentation opened and claimed him.

  High on the dunes of Lake Balkhash Natalia Brezhnovna Suitlov surveyed the beach, which was unfortunately deserted. Natalia cocked her white-blonde Baltic head. From the far side of the dune, faint but throbbing: music. Not the most advanced, but promising.

  Natalia strolled a bit higher, studying the lake. She paused. Face sun-rapt, she stretched prolongedly. Then one hand dropped absently to the knot of her diaper. With fluent ease, first the diaper and then Natalia slowly sank from sight into a hollow.

  Here she disposed her bronze body for maximum sun. The music ceased. Natalia hummed a few beats, husky but true.