Alien Contact

by Marty Halpern

  “Spat out,” said Sel. “These were eaten.”

  “By what?”

  “Larvae,” said Sel. “Cannibalizing the adults because otherwise there’s nothing to eat here. Each generation getting smaller—look how large this one is? Each one smaller because they only eat the bodies of the adults.”

  “And they’re working their way back toward the door,” said Po. “To get outside where the nutrients are.”

  “When the Formics stopped coming…”

  “Their shells are too heavy to make much progress,” said Po. “So they get as far as they can, then the larvae feed on the corpse of the adult, then they crawl toward the light of the entrance as far as they can, cocoon up, and the next generation emerges, smaller than the last one.”

  Now they were among much larger shells. “These things are supposed to be more than a meter in length,” said Sel. “The closer to the entrance, the smaller.”

  Po stopped, pointed at the lamp. “They’re heading toward the light?”

  “Maybe we’ll be able to see one.”

  “Rock-devouring larvae that grind up solid rock and poop out bonded stone columns.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted to see it up close.”

  “But you do.”

  “Well. Yes.”

  Now they were both looking around them, squinting to try to see movement somewhere in the cavern.

  “What if there’s something it likes much better than light?” asked Po.

  “Soft-bodied food?” asked Sel. “Don’t think I haven’t thought of it. The Formics brought them food. Now maybe we have, too.”

  At that moment, Po suddenly rose straight up into the air.

  Sel held up the stick. Directly above him, a huge sluglike larva clung to the ceiling. Its mouth end was tightly fastened on Po’s back.

  “Unstrap and drop down here!” called Sel.

  “All our samples!”

  “We can always get more samples! I don’t want to have to extract bits of you from one of these pillars!”

  Po got the straps open and dropped to the floor.

  The pack disappeared into the larva’s maw. They could hear hard metal squeaking and scraping as the larva’s teeth tried to grind up the metal instruments. They didn’t wait to watch. They started toward the entrance. Once they passed the first gold bug’s body, they looked for the bits of blanket to mark the path.

  “Take my pack,” said Sel, shrugging it off as he walked. “It’s got the radio and the DNA samples in it—get out the entrance and radio for help.”

  “I’m not leaving you,” said Po. But he was obeying.

  “You’re the only one who can get out the entrance faster than that thing can crawl.”

  “We haven’t seen how fast it can go.”

  “Yes we have,” said Sel. He walked backward for a moment, holding up the lamp.

  The larva was about thirty meters behind them and coming on faster than they had been walking.

  “Is it following the light or our body heat?” asked Po as they turned again and began to jog.

  “Or the carbon dioxide of our breath? Or the vibrations of our footfalls? Or our heartbeats?” Sel held out the stick toward him. “Take it and run.”

  “What are you going to do?” said Po, not taking the stick.

  “If it’s following the light, you can stay ahead of it by running.”

  “And if it’s not?”

  “Then you can get out and call for help.”

  “While it has you for lunch.”

  “I’m tough and gristly.”

  “The thing eats stone.”

  “Take the light,” said Sel, “and get out of here.”

  Po hesitated a moment longer, then took it. Sel was relieved that the boy would keep his promise of obedience.

  Either that, or Po was convinced the larva would follow the light.

  It was the right guess—as Sel slowed down and watched the larva approach, he could see that it was not heading directly toward him, but rather listed off to the side, heading for Po. And as Po ran, the larva began speeding up.

  It went right past Sel. It was more than a half-meter thick. It moved like a snake, with a back-and-forth movement, writhing along the floor, shaping itself exactly like the columns, only horizontally and, of course, moving.

  It was going to reach Po before he could get out of the tunnel.

  “Leave the light!” shouted Sel. “Leave it!”

  In a few moments, Sel could see the light leaning against the wall of the cavern, beside where the low tunnel began, leading toward the outside world. Po must already be through the tunnel.

  But the larva was ignoring the light and heading into the tunnel behind him. With Po struggling to move through the low tunnel, the larva would catch him easily.

  “No. No, stop!” But then he thought: What if Po hears me? “Keep going, Po! Run!”

  And then, wordlessly, Sel shouted inside his mind: Stop and come back here! Come back to the cavern! Come back to your children!

  Sel knew it was insane, but it was all he could think of to do. The Formics communicated mind to mind. This was also a large insectoid life form from the Formics’ home world. Maybe he could speak to it the way the Hive Queens spoke to the individual worker and soldier Formics.

  Speak? That was asinine. They had no language. They wouldn’t speak.

  Sel stopped and formed in his mind a clear picture of the gold bug lying on the cavern floor. Only the legs were writhing. And as he pictured it, Sel tried to feel hungry, or at least remember how it felt to be hungry. Or to find hunger within himself—after all, he hadn’t eaten for a few hours.

  Then he pictured the larva coming to the gold bug. Circling it.

  The larva reemerged from the tunnel. There had been no screaming from Po—it hadn’t caught him. Maybe it got too near the sunlight and it blinded the larva and it couldn’t go on. Or maybe it had responded to the images and feelings in Sel’s mind. Either way, Po was safely outside.

  Of course, maybe the larva had simply decided not to bother with the prey that was running, and had come back for the prey that was standing very still, pressing himself against a column.

  “Nice larva,” whispered Sel. “How about some nice dried dog?”

  When he reached for his pack, to extract the food, it wasn’t there. Po had his pack.

  But he had the little bag at his waist where he carried the food for each day’s hike. He opened it, took out the dried dog meat and the vegetables that he carried there, and tossed them toward the larva.

  It stopped. It nudged the food lying on the ground. Then it rose up and plunged its gaping mouth down on the food like a remora attaching itself to a shark.

  Sel could imagine a smaller version of the larva being exactly that—a remora, attaching itself to larger creatures to suck the blood out of them. Or to burrow into them?

  He remembered the tiny parasites that had killed people when the colony was first formed. The ones Sel had invented blood additives to repel.

  This creature is a hybrid. Half native to this world. Half formed from something from the Formic world.

  No, not “something.” Formics themselves. This thing was a hybrid between Formic and parasite. It would take very expert gene-splicing to construct a viable creature that combined attributes of two species growing out of such disparate genetic heritages. The result would be a species that was half Formic, so that perhaps the Hive Queens could communicate with them mentally, control them like any other Formics. Only they were still different enough that they didn’t completely bond with the queen—so when this world’s Hive Queen died, the gold bugs didn’t.

  Maybe not. Maybe they already had a species they used for menial tasks, one that had a weak mental bond with the Hive Queens, and that’s what they interbred with the parasitic worms. Those incredible teeth that could burrow right through leather, cloth, skin, and bone. But sentient, or nearly so. It could be ruled by the Hive Queens’ minds.

  A
nd mine? Or did it come back for the easy food?

  By now the larva had plunged down onto each of the bits of food and devoured them—along with a thin layer of the stone floor at each spot. The thing was hungry.

  Hungry enough to override Sel’s commands?

  He formed a picture in his mind—a complicated one now. A picture of Sel and Po bringing food into the tunnel. Feeding the larva. He pictured himself and Po going in and out of the cave, bringing food. Lots of food. Leaves. Grain. Fruit. Small animals.

  The larva came toward him, but then circled around him. Writhed around his legs. Like a constrictor? Did it have that snakelike pattern, too? No. It didn’t get tighter. It was more like a cat.

  Then it pushed from behind. Nudging him toward the tunnel. Sel obeyed. The thing understood. There was rudimentary communication going on.

  Sel hurried to the tunnel, then knelt and sat and started to try to slide along as he had coming in.

  The larva slid past him in the tunnel and then stopped.

  Sel took hold of the creature’s dry, articulated surface, and it began moving forward again. It was carefully not thrashing him against the wall, though he scraped now and then. It hurt and probably drew blood, but it didn’t break anything. It wouldn’t even have bothered a Formic. Maybe the Formics rode the larvae in and out of the tunnel just like this.

  The larva stopped. But now Sel could see the light of day. So could the larva. It didn’t go out there; it shied from the light and backed down the tunnel past Sel.

  When Sel emerged into the daylight and stood up, Po ran to him and hugged him. “It didn’t eat you!”

  “No, it gave me a ride,” he said.

  Po wasn’t sure how to make sense of this.

  “All our food,” said Sel. “I promised we’d feed it.”

  Po didn’t argue. He ran to the pack and started handing food to Sel, who gathered it into a basket made by holding his shirt out in front of him.

  “Enough for the moment,” said Sel.

  In a few moments, he had his shirt off and stuffed with food. Then he started laboriously down the tunnel again. In moments the larva was there again, coiling around him. Sel opened the shirt and dropped the food. The larva began eating ravenously. Sel was still close enough to the entrance that he could squat-walk out again.

  “We’ll need more food,” said Sel.

  “What’s food to the larva?” asked Po. “Grass? Bushes?”

  “It ate the vegetables from my lunch pack.”

  “There’s not going to be anything edible growing around here.”

  “Not edible to us,” said Sel. “But if I’m right, this thing is half native to this world, and it can probably metabolize the local vegetation.”

  If there was one thing they knew how to do, it was identify the local flora.

  Soon they were shuttling shirtfuls of tuberous vegetables down the tunnel.

  They took turns carrying food to the larva.

  It was still eating when two skimmers arrived. It was new technology, obviously developed long after Sel’s transport had left Fleet Command on the long voyage to war. The pilots were strong young soldiers, with potent-looking side arms. One skimmer held supplies in bags and boxes. The other had a passenger. A fourteen-year-old boy in civilian clothes.

  “Ender Wiggin,” said Sel.

  “Sel Menach,” said Wiggin. “Po said you had a giant worm situation going on here.”

  “No weapons needed,” Sel said to the soldiers, who already had their weapons at the ready. “We’re not exactly talking with the thing, but it understands rudimentary images.” And he explained about his theory of crossbreeding.

  “So these aren’t actually Formics,” said Wiggin. He looked disappointed.

  “None of the Formics could have survived,” said Sel. “But they’re somewhat like Formics. When we get back, we can do the gene comparison and see just how these things were made. And also, we can get all the gold we’ll ever want. There might be iron bugs and silver bugs and copper bugs elsewhere. We need to do a search for the likely sites—forty years of surviving by cannibalizing each other is a long time, and they might all be on their last legs, so to speak.”

  “Count on it, we’ll do it at once,” said Wiggin.

  They stayed long enough to make sure the soldiers could project images of food to the larva—at least enough not to get eaten when they carried food down the tunnel. Then a training course in which plants had nutrient-rich roots. Then, leaving Po behind to supervise, Sel climbed into one of the skimmers with Wiggin and the DNA samples and headed back to the colony.

  Over the next few weeks, as Po organized the search for more Formic mines that might contain similar bugs and Sel learned how to use the new, improved equipment so he and the new xenobiologists could decode what the Formics had done to create these creatures, a few of the old settlers did come to him, just as he had feared, trying to enlist him in some kind of resistance to whatever it was the new colonists were doing.

  Sel’s answer was always the same. “I’ve got real work to do here! Get out of my lab! Go take your complaints to the Governor. That’s his job now, not mine.”

  Something of the Formics had survived on this world after all. Only a biological remnant, but it was something. It was so irritating that he was probably going to die before they had learned everything this world could teach them. How have other scientists put up with this death thing? It would be such a tedious interruption to his career, just when it was getting really interesting.

  he alien and the boy, who was twelve, sat in the windowless room high above the city that afternoon. The boy talked and the alien listened.

  The boy was ordinary—the genes of three continents in his features, his clothes cut in the style of all boys in the vast housing project called LAX. The alien was something else, awful to behold; and though the boy knew it was rude, he did not look up as he talked.

  He wanted the alien to kill a man, he said. It was that simple.

  As the boy spoke, the alien sat upright and still on the one piece of furniture that could hold him. Eyes averted, the boy sat on the stool, the one by the terminal where he did his schoolwork each day. It made him uneasy that the alien was on his bed, though he understood why. It made him uneasy that the creature’s strange knee was so near his in the tiny room, and he was glad when the creature, as if aware, too, shifted its leg away.

  He did not have to look up to see the Antalou’s features. That one glance in the doorway had been enough, and it came back to him whether he wanted it to or not. It was not that he was scared, the boy told himself. It was just the idea—that such a thing could stand in a doorway built for humans, in a human housing project where generations had been born and died, and probably would forever. It did not seem possible.

  He wondered how it seemed to the Antalou.

  Closing his eyes, the boy could see the black synthetic skin the alien wore as protection against alien atmospheres. Under that suit, ropes of muscles and tendons coiled and uncoiled, rippling even when the alien was still. In the doorway the long neck had not been extended, but he knew what it could do. When it telescoped forward—as it could instantly—the head tipped up in reflex and the jaws opened.

  Nor had the long talons—which the boy knew sat in the claws and even along the elbows and toes—been unsheathed. But he imagined them sheathing and unsheathing as he explained what he wanted, his eyes on the floor.

  When the alien finally spoke, the voice was inhuman—filtered through the translating mesh that covered half its face. The face came back: The tremendous skull, the immense eyes that could see so many kinds of light and make their way in nearly every kind of darkness. The heavy welts—the auxiliary gills—inside the breathing globe. The dripping ducts below them, ready to release their jets of acid.

  “Who is it…that you wish to have killed?” the voice asked, and the boy almost looked up. It was only a voice—mechanical, snakelike, halting—he reminded himself. By itself it could no
t kill him.

  “A man named James Ortega-Mambay,” the boy answered.

  “Why?” The word hissed in the stale apartment air.

  “He is going to kill my sister.”

  “You know this…how?”

  “I just do.”

  The alien said nothing, and the boy heard the long whispering pull of its lungs.

  “Why,” it said at last, “did you think…I would agree to it?”

  The boy was slow to answer.

  “Because you’re a killer.”

  The alien was again silent.

  “So all Antalou,” the voice grated, “are professional killers?”

  “Oh, no,” the boy said, looking up and trying not to look away. “I mean….”

  “If not…then how…did you choose me?”

  The boy had walked up to the creature at the great fountain by the Cliffs of Monica—a landmark any visitor to Earth would take in, if only because it appeared on the sanctioned itineraries—and had handed him a written message in crude Antalouan. I know what you are and what you do, the message read. I need your services. LAX cell 873-2345-2657 at 1100 tomorrow morning. I am Kim.

  “Antalou are well known for their skills, Sir,” the boy said respectfully. “We’ve read about the Noh campaign, and what happened on Hoggun II when your people were betrayed, and what one company of your mercenaries were able to do against the Gar-Betties.” The boy paused. “I had to give out ninety-eight notes, Sir, before I found you. You were the only one who answered….”

  The hideous head tilted while the long arms remained perfectly still, and the boy found he could not take his eyes from them.

  “I see,” the alien said.

  It was translator’s idiom only. “Seeing” was not the same as “understanding.” The young human had done what the military and civilian intelligence services of five worlds had been unable to do—identify him as a professional—and it made the alien reflect: Why had he answered the message? Why had he taken it seriously? A human child had delivered it, after all. Was it that he had sensed no danger and simply followed professional reflex, or something else? Somehow the boy had known he would. How?