Elemental

by Steven Savile

  “I do apologize for doing that, sir,” the taxman was saying. “I have called an air ambulance to assist. I do hope, sir, that they arrive here before you die.”

  “Oh I do hope,” said Macbeth, in a gaspy voice, “not.”

  Abductio ad Absurdum

  BY ESTHER M. FRIESNER

  Esther M. Friesner is an author, poet, short story writer, editor, and self-proclaimed Queen of the Hamsters. Perhaps best known for editing the ever-popular Chicks in Chainmail series of anthologies (Chicks in Chainmail, Chicks N’ Chained Males, Did You Say Chicks?, The Chick Is in the Mail, and Turn the Other Chick), Friesner most recently teamed up with fellow funnyman Robert Asprin for the novel E. Godz. She has won the Nebula Award twice, for her short stories “Death and the Librarian” and “A Birth Day.”

  According to Friesner, “Abductio ad Absurdum” was written as the result of one too many TV programs and/or tabloid stories about alien abductions. “I had reached my saturation point when it came to media coverage of the ongoing set-to between Evolutionists and Creationists,” she says. “And so, in an effort to forget that there was nothing good on TV I began to wonder: How long has this alien abduction thing been going on? Besides aliens, what other beings have been known to snatch up earthlings? Even those humans who share a common cause seem unable to set aside competition in favor of cooperation. How would beings that are supposed to be superior to humans deal with such a situation? What if everyone was right about what happened Way Back When? Am I going to have fun writing about this?” The answer to the last question being affirmative, the rest is history.

  Esther Friesner lives in Connecticut with her husband, two children, two rambunctious cats, and a fluctuating population of hamsters.

  “I beg your pardon,” said the alien. “There appears to have been some mistake.”

  “I should say so,” his unwilling guest replied with an indignant snort. He made a great business of shaking the rumples out of his robes and brushing invisible specks of dust from his person. “And you’ve made it.”

  The alien’s luminous blue skin went watery green, a sure sign of embarrassment. Probing himself sheepishly with one barbed tentacle, he sidled over to the viewing panel of the little scout ship, his slime trail minty with dismay. “I can’t for the lives of me understand what went wrong,” he bubbled, all five eyes sliding wildly over the surface of his head, searching the banks of screens and telltales for the elusive answer. “I was aiming for the brown, hairy one. You’re neither, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “Bah,” was all the answer the visitor deigned to return. One toss of his head and his long, golden curls took on a life of their own, filling the control pod with the radiance of a thousand dawns.

  “Oh my. You can do—you’re certainly not—What else might you be able to—? Dear me.” The calculated display of celestial splendor threw the alien for more of a loop than the one he was already riding. At a complete loss, he sucked a tentacle nervously, forgetting about the barbs, and cut his rubbery lip badly.

  His abrupt cry of pain wrought a radical change in his conscripted guest. Light flared from the visitor’s hand, a spout of flame that congealed into the dimensions of a sword, but when the fire dimmed, the object showed itself to be no more than an olive branch. Waving the lithe bit of greenery in a no-nonsense-now manner, the alien’s abductee seized his captor’s oozing face and declared, “Let me see that. I’m a trained professional. Healing’s my specialty, not these ridiculous reconnaissance assignments.”

  The alien eyed his captive charily, three of them firmly fixed on the visitor, a pair left over to mind the ship’s controls. The olive branch whisked across his lips, leaving a pleasant tingling sensation in its wake and filling his scent receptors with the rich perfume of the homeworld jungles. He gave a little shudder of ecstacy and molted in spite of himself.

  The visitor jumped back, his disgust plain to see. “What was that all about?” he demanded, toeing the alien’s sloughed skin with one golden-sandaled foot.

  The alien went positively emerald out of sheer mortification. As with many species, he immediately sought to counteract his discomfiture by going on the offensive. (It Is Better to Bluff Than to Squirm is a dictum embroidered on samplers all across the universe and outnumbers Home Sweet Home by a factor of a trillion and three.) His whole attitude toward his peculiar guest turned crisp and curt. “Look, I don’t have time for this,” he said. “I’ve got a job to do; a job you’re delaying.”

  “And what do you think I’m supposed to be doing with my time?” came the testy reply. “Planting fig trees? I was just about to Reveal myself to the chosen creatoid when zap!—I’m jerked right off the earth to this Himforsaken place. Not that He isn’t everywhere, of course, but you get my meaning,” he added quickly.

  “Uh … sure I do,” said the alien, who didn’t. “But what’s a … creatoid?”

  The visitor sighed, and the smaller plumes edging his mighty wings riffled delicately in the breeze. “A creatoid is something that He created, naturally. Only it’s something that—well—something that’s not exactly like the rest of His creations. You see, most of His work’s got a fairly straightforward purpose, a clear-cut and obvious use or function. It’s there for a reason. Trees give fruit and shade and a nice place for cats to sharpen their claws. Mosquitoes give frogs something to eat, frogs feed storks, storks bring babies. Otters and dolphins and larks make joy more than just a word, even if the Word did get here before the otter. Platypuses are comic relief and Tyrannosaurs keep the rest of them on their toes—those of them that have toes. But these things, these creatoids—” He sighed again.

  “Which ones?” The alien glided back to the viewing panel. It was filled with a glowing, golden vista of the wide African savannah. Vast herds of herbivores meandered lazily across the plain. Steel-muscled packs of predators crouched in the tall grass, awaiting developments. In the foreground, a lone, brown, hairy being huddled in the branches of the only tree to be seen for a hundred yards around. Her tiny, bright eyes scanned the horizon anxiously. At the foot of the tree lay a number of bones, including a skull showing the same aggressively overdeveloped brow-ridges as her own. All bore the marks of a big cat’s busy jaws and all were proof of how right she was to be vigilant, terrified, and arboreal.

  “That’s the one!” the alien’s guest exclaimed, delighted. “That’s my assigned creatoid right there!”

  “That one’s your target too?” asked the alien.

  “Too?” This was not the sort of Revelation to which the visitor was accustomed. “You don’t mean it. What business could you possibly have with something like that?”

  “Hey, I just get my orders from the group-supes and if I know what’s good for me I follow them, no questions asked. What I was told to do was come to this planet and check out certain designated life-forms for any signs of potential higher intelligence that might prove worthwhile for us to nurture, develop, and encourage.”

  “Why?”

  “I told you, I don’t ask questions. What were you supposed to do with that—creatoid—before you got in my way?”

  “It’s like I was saying: Where I come from, at the moment we’re none of us too sure why He bothered creating something like that, so my superiors commanded me to descend and investigate. I’ve got to find out what use it is. Not that we’re questioning His grand design or anything, perish the thought, but we would like to have a clue as to whether we should ignore it, sustain it, or accidentally-on-purpose smite it out of existence before things get too far out of hand. And so, if you’ll excuse me—” There was a burst of light and the alien felt momentarily trapped within the heart of a C-major chord before regaining full use of his senses. When most of his eyes could once more focus, he found himself alone in the scout ship.

  The alien was rather miffed. Usually the beings he brought aboard were powerless to leave until he was through studying them. This was the first time that one of his subjects had left of its own will, un
der its own figurative steam. He checked the view panel. Yes, there it was, wings and all, back on the savannah, standing among the bones at the foot of the solitary tree. It seemed smaller than it had been on board ship, much smaller, shrewmouse-small, so small that the brown, hairy thing up the tree didn’t even notice its presence below.

  “Clever,” the alien muttered. “Less likely to scare off your target, that way. And you’re a nimble little bugger, aren’t you? Flashing here, there, and everywhere like that, getting right in the way of my snag-beam when I was trying to lay hold of that—that—creatoid-thingy. Well, young teleporter-me-lad, you may be fast and you may be clever, but you’re not going to muck up my service record. I saw her first.”

  The alien hunted up a portable, tentacle-held model of the aforementioned snag-beam, checked it out and strapped it on. “This way I won’t miss,” he told himself, his newly healed lip taut with a grim smile. “There’s nothing like the up-close-and-personal touch.”

  He slid over to another part of the ship’s controls, flickered his barbs over buttons, switches, sensors and knobbly things, then stepped into the center of the glowing disc that materialized in the middle of the deck. The light was cool and smelled of vanillaworms, a superfluous sensory input that allowed the traveler to relax and forget about the fact that his disassembled particles were being spewed through space. It was also mildly hallucinogenic.

  The alien enjoyed a good snort of vanillaworm as much as the next entity. He was always sad when the light of the translocator beam faded and the trip was over, but work awaited. Thick grass cushioned his bulk until his gravitation adjusters kicked in, making his atmospheriskin crackle loudly. He was right under the tree and ready for business.

  It was just then that his former visitor chose to rear up to a magnificent height, bringing him eye-level with the creature in the branches. “Be not afraid!” the alien’s erstwhile guest declared cheerily, extending an olive branch that became the biggest banana the young world had ever seen.

  It was history’s worst case of bad timing since the last comet strike. The creature in the tree looked from winged messenger to blue blob, from titanic banana to bells-and-whistles ray gun, bared her fangs, let out a screech that got the attention of every pack of giant hyenas on the plains, and launched herself from the branches. She hit the ground running on all fours, but soon picked up speed and was skimming along on her hind limbs until she was no more than a speck in the distance.

  The alien and his former guest exchanged a significant look. “That does it. I quit,” the alien said at last. “I’m going home and I’m going to tell them that the creatures were all extinct when I got here.”

  “But that’s a lie,” the visitor chided.

  “The truth is as much a matter of when as it is of what,” the alien countered. “I live a long way away from here. Who’s to say what the truth will be by the time I get home? I mean, come on, honestly, do you think something that weak and scrawny’s got what it takes to survive much longer?” He picked up a chewed-over legbone and used it to point in the direction his elusive target had bolted. “No claws, no horns, and did you get a look at those sorry excuses for fangs? Pitiful.”

  The visitor shrugged his mighty wings and absently took a bite of the banana. “I suppose you’re right. But still, I can’t lie about this to my superiors. We’ve got all sorts of administrative policies in place against stuff like that. They’re going to insist I come back and do something about that critter, Who knows what. Maybe I’ll get lucky. Maybe by the time they do decide what to do about it, it will be extinct.”

  “You can always hope,” the alien suggested amiably.

  “And pray.” The visitor stopped chewing a mouthful of banana long enough to notice that he’d been snacking on his symbol of office. “Want some?” he asked, blushing.

  It was a slip that never should have happened. It was an action forbidden by every basic regulation in the alien’s training, but the higgledy-piggledy state of his mission made him forgetful and careless. He took the fruit and ate of it, relishing its sweetness. Only then did the full knowledge of what he’d done hit him.

  “Oh, my God!” he cried.

  “Your what?” asked the visitor.

  The alien wasn’t listening. “What have I done? I’m contaminated! Doomed! I consumed extraplanetary nourishment! Who knows what sort of microbes it’s carrying? Even if it doesn’t kill me, I can’t go home again and risk introducing potentially fatal organisms to my people. I’m an exile, an outcast forever!” He began to leak copiously.

  The visitor was abashed. “The sin is mine,” he said, full of contrition. “I was the one who enticed you to eat it.”

  “That’s not going to make a lot of difference to my group-supes,” the alien blubbered.

  The visitor nibbled his lower lip and cast a mindful glance skywards. “I probably shouldn’t even be suggesting this to you, but … do you have to tell them about it?”

  “You know nothing of our reentry procedures, so save your breath. The first thing they do to you is run you through a battery of diagnostic devices that can tell what your eggmom had for breakfast the day she extruded you. If I tried to return, they’d immolate me before I could finish saying, ‘But it wasn’t my fault!’ I don’t want to be immolated.”

  “You won’t have to be,” the visitor said, suddenly sanguine. “Listen, I’ve got an idea: If you can’t go home again, why not stay? It’s not such a bad world. I can make one or two little changes to your body so that you won’t have any problems living here.”

  “You could do that?” The alien’s tears were already hardening to chunks of amber.

  “I said I’m a healer. Healing changes your body, so why shouldn’t changing your body count as healing? Now let me see …” He rolled up the sleeves of his resplendent gold and silver robes and set to work. “First I’ll fix it so you can breathe the air, drink the water, eat the food, the whole basic package. Now then, the gravity’s a bit more than you’re used to, so we’ll have to go with a low-slung chassis, something simple yet elegant, not too fussy—I’m working without an olive branch here, and I never was much of an artist, but still … there! Done.”

  The alien tasted the air with his freshly forked tongue and swayed from side to side, surveying the scaly length of his new body. “Not bad. I look like one of my old tentacles. But what’s with the four little legs?” he asked. “I mean, these stomach muscles can take me anywhere I want to go, so what’s the point?”

  “Most of the land-creatoids I’ve seen have them,” the visitor said. “I was just going along with the trend. If you don’t like them, we can try getting them removed later on. Happy?”

  “I guess,” the alien allowed grudgingly. “I’d be happier if I had somewhere a bit safer to live, though. Have you smelled the air? It reeks of carnivores, and in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m carnal. I don’t think these dinky little legs are going to outrun any halfway healthy meat-eater.”

  “Where would you like to live?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Some nice, green garden spot with a lot more trees and bushes and plants. Especially trees. It’s always safer in the trees.”

  The visitor bent down and picked up the alien, draping him around his neck. “I know just the place,” he said, heading east. “Very tranquil, very safe, and not too many other inhabitants, none of them carnivores. A little isolated, but that’s all to the good. I just hope you won’t find it too, well, boring.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” the alien said with a hissy chuckle. “If it becomes too tedious, I can always do a spot of recreational research with any accessible subjects. Most experiments are nothing more than minor variations on the universal theme of ‘What do you suppose would happen to this if I did that?’ I’ll find what to keep me busy, never fear. Once a scientist, always a scientist.”

  For some reason known but to the Source of otters, anthropoids, angels, and aliens alike, the new-made serpent’s words made the visitor shudder t
o the roots of his shining wings.

  In the Matter of Fallen Angels

  BY JACQUELINE CAREY

  Jacqueline Carey is the bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Kushiel’s Legacy trilogy of fantasy novels (Kushiel’s Dart, Kushiel’s Choice, and Kushiel’s Avatar) and The Sundering epic fantasy duology (Banewreaker and Godslayer). Her short stories have appeared in the anthologies Emerald Magic: Great Tales of Irish Fantasy and I-94: A Collection of Southwest Michigan Writers. She has also written a nonfiction coffee-table book on Angels entitled Angels: Celestial Spirits in Art & Legend.

  Over the course of writing Angels and developing the theology woven into the setting of the Kushiel’s Legacy series, Carey did a fair bit of research into angelology. “In the Matter of Fallen Angels” has absolutely nothing to do with any of it. Rather, it was inspired by the distant memory of reading a short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” a piece of magic realism that uses the manifestation of the miraculous to explore unattractive aspects of human nature. “In the Matter of Fallen Angels” utilizes a similar device in an inverse manner. It’s a much lighter and more modest piece, surreal and absurd. And although it’s centered on the extraordinary, in the end, it’s the ordinary, simple joys and rhythms of small-town life that it celebrates.

  Jacqueline Carey lives in Michigan. You can find out more about Jacqueline Carey and her work at www.jacquelinecarey.com.

  No one could ever say for sure when it happened, that is, whether it happened before midnight or after or on the stroke. Even religion was no help in the matter, because if you read the event one way it was likely that it happened on the Sabbath, but if you read it the other then it was likely that it happened after, and who knew what it meant if it happened on the crux?