Aliens Among Us

by Gardner Dozois

  That was Pfaffman. He was looking at his hands.

  "When we link up with Cal Tech North," Mitchell went on, "when and if we link up with Cal Tech North, this imbalance will be intensified. I am not familiar with their entire panel, since so much of it is classified. But they are entirely funded by D.O.D."

  The silence was absolute. Colonel Morelake's eyes were on the table, his expression attentive. Even sympathetic.

  Mitchell took a breath. Up to now his voice had been light and controlled, as if reciting a long-prepared speech. He went on, still quietly.

  "I would like to have your comments."

  One or two heads moved. Feet shifted. One of the younger men—the neural impulse broadcaster—let his teeth click audibly. No one said a word.

  The pulse under Mitchell's ear began to pound. The wrangles—the free-for-alls that had gone on around this table! How had he let things drift so far? He leaned back, his elbow on the empty chair.

  "I'm surprised," he said, still mildly. "Let me remind you of the way we set up. Perhaps some of you haven't read the charter. It calls for periodic reviews of our program—our whole program—giving each of you as project head a voice, a vote if you like, in evaluating what it regrettably refers to as the thrust or the social impact of our work. As Director, I have two votes—three, with Hal away. Gentlemen, I am calling for your evaluation."

  Three men cleared their throats simultaneously. Mitchell looked toward Bill Enders, one of the phytocide biologists.

  "Well, Colin," Enders said awkwardly. "Each of these projects was discussed, at the time of initiation. I . . . I frankly don't quite see—"

  There were several nods, a shuffling release of tension.

  Morelake, as a non-voting consultant, kept his eye on his papers throughout.

  Mitchell drew a breath.

  "I confess I am surprised that no one sees anything to discuss here." His voice sounded oddly thick in his own cars.

  "Colin." A crisp voice; Chan Boden, biochemist was the oldest man present bar Pfaffman, with a lush, long-term grant.

  "One sees what you mean, of course, Colin. These problems in values, social responsibility. It's always been a difficult aspect. I'm sure all of us maintain awareness of, for example, the triple-A. S. ventilations of the problem. In our private lives," he smiled warmly, "we all undoubtedly do a bit of soul-searching from time to time. But the point is that here, in our professional personae, we are scientists."

  The magic word; there was audible relaxation.

  "That is exactly the point." Mitchell's voice was dead level. "We are scientists." This too was in the paragraphs, this had been expected. But why were the paragraphs fading? Something about the way they refused to respond. He shook his head, heard himself plow on.

  "Are we doing science, here? Let's get down to basics. Are we adding to man's sum total knowledge? Is knowledge merely a collection of recipes for killing and subjugating men, for eliminating other species? A computerized stone axe? I'm not talking about the horrors of gore and bloodshed, mind you. The hell with that—some bloodshed may be a fine thing, I don't know. What I mean—"

  He leaned forward, the paragraphs all gone now, the pound in his neck building.

  "Entropy! The development of reliable knowledge is anti-entropic. Science's task in a social system is comparable to the function of intelligence in the individual. It holds against disorganization, oscillation, noise, entropy. But we, here—we've allied ourselves with an entropic sub-system. We're not generating structure, we're helping to degrade the system!"

  They were staring, rigid.

  "Are you accusing me of being a virus particle, Colin?" Jim Morelake asked gently.

  Mitchell turned on him, eager for connection. The room seemed momentarily clearer.

  "All right, Jim, if you're their spokesman now. You must see it. The military argument. Biotic agents—because the other side has. Mutagenesis—because they may get it first. But they know we do it, and so they—Christ! This is at the ten-year-old level. Runaway forward oscillation!"

  He was fighting himself now, peering down at the dwindling table.

  "You're a scientist, Jim. You're too good a man to be used that way."

  Morelake regarded him gravely. Beside him Jan Evans, an engineer, cleared his throat.

  "If I understand you, Colin, and I'm not sure that I do, perhaps it might help if you gave us an example of the kind of project you feel is, ah, anti-entropic?"

  Mitchell saw Pfaffman freeze. Was the old man afraid he would cite his work? Afraid? The awful churning rose in his gut.

  "Right," he said clumsily. "Of course, one can't, at a moment's notice but here—communication! Two-way communication. Interlocking flow." He felt suddenly better. "You can understand why a system would seek information—but why in hell does it offer information? Why do we strive to be understood? Why is a refusal to accept communication so painful? Look at it—a process that ties the whole damn human system together, and we don't know fact one about it!"

  This was good! Panting with relief, shining-eyed, Mitchell searched from face to face for what must be coming. At the edge of his mind he noticed the Admin man was by the door. He didn't count.

  "Fascinating idea, Colin," Morelake said pleasantly. "I mean, it truly is seminal. But let's go back one moment. What exactly are you suggesting that we do?"

  Annoyance tugged at him. Why didn't the others speak?

  Something wrong. The swelling feeling came back, rose hard.

  "That we stop all this," he said thickly. "Close out the damned projects and kiss off D.O.D. Forget Cal Tech North. Get out and hustle some real research."

  Someone gave a snort of amusement. Mitchell looked around slowly in the silence. They seemed to be down there below him, the little faces—hard and blank as that cop's. Only old Pfaffman and the lad whose teeth clicked—they looked scared. The swirling grew inside him, the pound of seeking resonance. Why would they not respond? Mesh, believe the charge that was hunting wildly in him, straining the system?

  "You won't even discuss it," he said with terrible urgency. Dimly he saw that two little guards had come into the shrinking room.

  "Colin, this is very painful," said Morelake's voice from the pulsing roil.

  "You're going to pretend I'm sick," his own voice chattered. Pygmy guards were closing on him, reaching out. Faces were in the doorway now. One small dark head. Incongruous newspaper in her hand: Eleanor Mulm had been reading that the nude body of a man identified as Dr. Colin Mitchell had been found on the rocks below coastal lookout 92.

  "Believe me, Colin, this is very painful," Morelake was saying to the choking thing that looked like Mitchell.

  "Entropy!" it gasped, fighting hard. "We must not!"

  The guards touched him. The human circuits—the marvelously dense gestalt he had modeled from the man-system floating in the sea—retained its human integrity long enough to make him yell:

  "ELEANOR! RUN! RU—UU—UU—"

  —And the strained equilibrium ruptured.

  The huge energy which had been stressed into the atomic lattice of a human body reverted back to immaterial relatedness and blossomed toward Vega from a point in Lower California. The resulting implosion degraded much of San Bernardino County, including Colonel Morelake, Pfaffman, the S.B.R. Institute, and Eleanor Mulm.

  —and he came finally to equilibrium among the stars.

  But it was not the same equilibrium. . .

  What served him for memory had learned the circuitry of self-consciousness. What served him as emotion had sampled the wonder of communication between systems, the sharing of structure.

  Alone of his lonely race, he had touched and been touched, essayed to speak and been heard.

  Reforming himself, he perceived that the nuclear portions of his being were still caught against the little planet by the solar wind—naturally, since the eversion had occurred at noon. It was no trouble to balance there on the standing wave.

  He considered fo
r a time, as his distributions stabilized. Then zestfully, for he was a joyful being, he let the radiance take him, swerved out and around to the haven of the planet's shadow. Here he hung idle his immense periphery feathered out to the nearby stars. He preened new structural resonances, tickled by wandering wavicles.

  Then he began to scan the planetary surface, tasting, savoring the play of tiny structurances. But it was different now. Somewhere in his field gradients, impalpable residuals of the systems he had copied lingered on. An astronomer in the Andes found something like a burro on his plates of Beta Carinae and chewed out his darkroom aid. A Greek farmer saw the letters E L E A glimmering in Scorpio, and carried corn and laurel to a certain cave.

  The planet turned, the continents passed into the shadow where he hung, a lonely vastness slightly other than a vacuum. Playing his random scan, relishing energic intricacies. Feeling in what was not a heart a huge and capricious yearning which built and faded erratically, now so faint that he let himself diffuse almost to where the currents would whirl him eternities away, now so strong that he focused to a point on one human creature alone for a moment in the open night.

  Temptation grew, faded, grew in him again. Would he? Again? . . . He would. Which? . . . Water; they were often by water, he had found. But which? This one, who played . . . was it music? . . . on the shore? He was seeking, he recalled now, a communicator. The world turned, carried the music-maker away. One who . . . spoke? . . . and was received, respoken. A linker. One-one? Or why not one-many? Was it possible? Restlessly, he drew a few parsecs of himself into the system, spelled D.O.D. in colliding photons, and began more intently to search for something to become.

  —tumor. That's what scares me, Jack. Everything gets small. It's so real—Headaches? No, no headaches, why? No colored haloes on things, either. Personality change? I wouldn't know, would I? You be the judge, I don't think so. Except for the fear, Jack, I tell you, it's physical! The interaction starts, the rapport—that terrific feeling that we're in really communicating—all those people, I'm with them. Agh, we don't have words for it. Do we? And then this other thing starts, this swelling—the bigness, I mean BIG, Jack. Big like bigger than houses, bigger than the sun maybe! Like the interaction feeds it, it's going to burst, it's going to kill everybody—

  All right, Jack. All right.

  If you think so. I know it sounds crazy, that's why—Do you honestly? Do you think so? That's true, I don't have headaches. I've heard that too. Maybe I—Yes, I know I can't quit now. You're so right. But I have to take a day off, Jack. Cancel something. Cancel that Dartmouth thing, it's entropic anyway. Useless, I mean. We've got to take a day and hole up somewhere and rest. You're right, Jack. You fix it. Before we tackle Dallas.

  The Hero as Werwolf

  Gene Wolfe

  Gene Wolfe is perceived by many critics to be one of the best—perhaps the best—SF and fantasy writers working today. His most acclaimed work is the tetralogy The Book of the New Sun, individual volumes of which have won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His other books include the classic novels Peace and The Devil in a Forest, both recently re-released, as well as Soldier in the Mist, Free Live Free, Soldier of Arete, There Are Doors, Castleview, Pandora by Holly Hollander, and The Urth of the New Sun. His short fiction has been collected in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories, Gene Wolfe's Book of Days, The Wolfe Archipelago, the recent World Fantasy Award-winning collection Storeys From the Old Hotel, and Endangered Species. His most recent books are part of a popular new series, including Nightside the Long Sun, The Lake of the Long Sun, Calde of the Long Sun, and Exodus from the Long Sun.

  In the brilliant and evocative story that follows, the aliens hiding in the shadows are us, ordinary, everyday people, in a strange high-tech future where that is no longer good enough . . .

  Feet in the jungle that leave no mark!

  Eyes that can see in the dark—the dark!

  Tongue—give tongue to it! Hark! O Hark!

  Once, twice and again!

  —RUDYARD KIPLING

  "Hunting Song of the Seeonee Pack"

  An owl shrieked, and Paul flinched. Fear, pavement, flesh, death, stone, dark, loneliness and blood made up Paul's world; the blood was all much the same, but the fear took several forms, and he had hardly seen another human being in the four years since his mother's death. At a night meeting in the park he was the red-cheeked young man at the end of the last row, with his knees together and his scrupulously clean hands (Paul was particularly careful about his nails) in his lap.

  The speaker was fluent and amusing; he was clearly conversant with his subject—whatever it was—and he pleased his audience. Paul, the listener and watcher, knew many of the words he used; yet he had understood nothing in the past hour and a half, and sat wrapped in his stolen cloak and his own thoughts, seeming to listen, watching the crowd and the park—this, at least, was no ghost-house, no trap; the moon was up, nightblooming flowers scented the park air, and the trees lining the paths glowed with self-generated blue light; in the city, beyond the last hedge, the great buildings new and old were mountains lit from within.

  Neither human nor master, a policeman strolled about the fringes of the audience, his eyes bright with stupidity. Paul could have killed him in less than a second, and was enjoying a dream of the policeman's death in some remote coiner of his mind even while he concentrated on seeming to be one of them. A passenger rocket passed just under the stars, trailing luminous banners.

  The meeting was over and he wondered if the rocket had in some way been the signal to end it. The masters did not use time, at least not as he did, as he had been taught by the thin woman who had been his mother in the little home she had made for them in the turret of a house that was once (she said) the Gorous'—now only a house too old to be destroyed. Neither did they use money, of which he like other old-style Homo sapiens still retained some racial memory, as of a forgotten god—a magic once potent that had lost all force.

  The masters were rising, and there were tears and laughter and that third emotional tone that was neither amusement nor sorrow—the silken sound humans did not possess, but that Paul thought might express content, as the purring of a cat does, or community, like the cooing of doves. The policeman bobbed his hairy head, grinning, basking in the recognition, the approval, of those who had raised him from animality. See (said the motions of his hands, the writhings of his body) the clothing you have given me. How nice! I take good care of my things because they are yours. See my weapon. I perform a useful function—if you did not have me, you would have to do it yourselves.

  If the policeman saw Paul, it would be over. He was too stupid, too silly, to be deceived by appearances as his masters were. He would never dare, thinking him a master, to meet Paul's eye, but he would look into his face seeking approval, and would see not what he was supposed to see but what was there. Paul ducked into the crowd, avoiding a beautiful woman with eyes the color of pearls, preferring to walk in the shadow of her fat escort where the policeman would not see him. The fat man took dust from a box shaped like the moon and rubbed it between his hands, releasing the smell of raspberries. It froze, and he sifted the tiny crystals of crimson ice over his shirt-front, grunting with satisfaction; then offered the box to the woman, who refused at first, only (three steps later) to accept when he pressed it on her.

  They were past the policeman now. Paul dropped a few paces behind the couple, wondering if they were the ones tonight—if there would be meat tonight at all. For some, vehicles would be waiting. If the pair he had selected were among these, he would have to find others quickly.

  They were not. They had entered the canyons between the buildings; he dropped farther behind, then turned aside.

  Three minutes later he was in an alley a hundred meters ahead of them, waiting for them to pass the mouth. (The old trick was to cry like an infant, and he could do it well; but he had a new trick—a better trick, because too m
any had learned not to come down an alley when an infant cried. The new trick was a silver bell he had found in the house, small and very old. He took it from his pocket and removed the rag he had packed around the clapper. His dark cloak concealed him now, its hood pulled up to hide the pale gleam of his skin. He stood in a narrow doorway only a few meters away from the alley's mouth.)

  They came. He heard the man's thick laughter, the woman's silken sound. She was a trifle silly from the dust the man had given her, and would be holding his arm as they walked, rubbing his thigh with hers. The man's black-shod foot and big belly thrust past the stonework of the building—there was a muffled moan.

  The fat man turned, looking down the alley. Paul could nee fear growing in the woman's face, cutting, too slowly, through the odor of raspberries. Another moan, and the man strode forward, fumbling in his pocket for an illuminator. The woman followed hesitantly (her skirt was of flowering vines the color of love, and white skin flashed in the interstices; a serpent of gold supported her breasts).

  Someone was behind him. Pressed back against the metal door, he watched the couple as they passed. The fat man had gotten his illuminator out and held it over his head as he walked, looking into corners and doorways.