by Hank Davis
We planned the raid accordingly to his knowledge of the terrain. He said the place where the ship’s main entry faced had more sentinels, so we’d go around the backside. I drove my beat-up Accord near the barricade that surrounded the spaceship where it’d landed, just about crushing the Denver Capitol. He’d double-talked the human guard into letting us through the barricade, which walled off about three blocks of the city in every direction of the destroyed government building and the circular, grey spaceship squatting atop of it.
That is perhaps something that no one who hadn’t seen it up close and personal will believe. Yes, I know there were pictures of the spaceship, and of the aliens, all fuzzy gold and with a face that looked like it was made for hugs and to be cuddled by a child. I know you heard them talk of the peace of civilized races, and also saw them meeting the president, right in front of their ship.
And I know that in these pictures, the ship looked high tech but not threatening.
Up close and personal, where we got, when Xavier had convinced the sentinel put there by our own government that we were just there to get some documents to translate, the ship looked wrong.
There’s nothing I can put my finger on, mind. It looked like glistening silver metal, and it felt body-temperature to the touch, which was the first thing that was wrong, but after that it looked pretty familiar: there were guarded doors, there was a cargo hold, there were stairs and ramps. If I hadn’t known it moved to space, it would have looked much like a no-frills municipal building. But it still felt wrong. It was I think a combination of a lot of little things. For instance there were no rivets visible anywhere in the not-metal. And no sign of joining. It was as though this blocks-wide structure had been made in a single piece. And then there were other, more subtle tells. Like what human would make stairs with each step a different height?
At the door to the ship there was another sentinel. Theirs. He was a golden spider monkey who looked less friendly than the ones on the news due to glowing red eyes. I wondered why we hadn’t seen any of those before, just as he made a guttural sound and advanced towards us. Xavier raised his arm high and hit him. The golden spider monkey sighed and fell, in a heap.
I was so shocked, I stood, paralyzed, wondering what he’d done and why—until Xavier got me by the arm and pulled me into the ship. He had his finger to his lips, so I had no idea how he apparently cold-cocked another alien who approached unexpectedly from our side.
I’d have asked, but he kept taking his finger to his lips, commanding silence, and I suppose it made sense. The aliens were not deaf.
We walked along dark corridors so long that I started wondering if I’d been crazy to come here, and also realizing that this was a fool’s errand and Xavier had been right. This was like searching a small town—the ship had at least three vertical floors, spread over the area of ten city blocks which it had crushed on landing.
But then I stopped being an idiot and started “feeling” for Cressy. Look, I can’t explain it, but ever since mom disappeared and I became responsible for her, I’d been able to find Cressy by going with my gut feeling of what she was doing. And also of whether she was in trouble. Which, all things considered, was a lot of the time.
So I took the lead, taking Xavier down two flights of uneven stairs, where we almost broke our necks, and towards the center of the ship, where Xavier’d cold cocked two more aliens, and then on towards . . .
A huge red-glowing door. My first thought was to kick it down, then I realized there was a plaque on the wall. It warned against unauthorized access. This was the engine room and only engineers—or as they called them keeper of the machine spirits—were allowed in.
Xavier whispered in my ear then, his breath ticklish and warm, “Are you sure we need to go in there?”
I nodded. Then I turned back and whispered into his ear, smelling his shampoo, feeling more intimate than I ever had with him, “Cressy is in there.”
He gave me a look, and I gave one back, and he nodded, as if that solved it. He raised his hand for me to stay, disappeared briefly down a hallway and came back with a necklace which held a softly-glowing green-gem pendant, which he applied to the middle of the glow on the door. The glow went down, the doors slid open and we entered . . .
I don’t think I can fully describe it, partly because it was in darkness. There were two . . . for lack of a better word, work stations, at which sat—no, knelt, two spider monkey aliens, looking into monitors covered with strange symbols. There were also vertical cylinders, and something that looked like it was a large tube made of glass and filled with varying light. If you looked at that light too long, you saw faces in it, not all of them human or spider-monkey.
But all these impressions were received, as it were, at the periphery of my vision, because what I was concentrating on were the three circles and the people on them.
Imagine, if you will, embroidery hoops eight feet across, made of glowing silver metal. Onto these, strapped with what looked like an intricate silver web which ran all along the sides, were three humans.
Two of them were young men, one looking respectable and like he wore what remained of a business suit, somewhat tattered and torn, the other looking like he’d been picked up on his way to the bong shop, with long hair, pajama pants and a yellow T-shirt with a smiley face.
The remaining one held Cressy, who looked like she was concentrating very hard on something and wore the dress I’d seen her wearing: a creamy lace thing, with all sorts of dips and ruffles that could only look good on someone who resembled a living China doll.
She was awake, and saw me, and opened her mouth and tried to say something. No sound came out.
The spider monkey aliens got up and advanced towards us. Fortunately they got to Xavier first. This time I saw where he hit them, with the butt of his gun, and had only to follow suit.
“How did you know where to hit them?” I said, as I looked around for instructions on how to release people from the embroidery hoops from hell.
“They gave us what I think are their secondary education books. One of them was an anatomy manual. Hitting them where we did should concuss them but not kill them. They’ll be fine when they awake.”
“Is that how you learned that the necklace thing would open doors?” I asked, and he nodded.
We’d continued looking for instructions, while Cressy tried to mouth something at me, and so did the guy in the remains of the suit. The other guy looked thoroughly spaced-out and I wasn’t sure he even knew we were there.
It was infuriating. There were no affixed instructions to anything, in this room. But there were, against the far wall, a series of plaques, and Xavier called me over with a strangled sort of voice, like someone who just found a bunch of spiders crawling on his breakfast cereal.
I went around the embroidery hoops to where he stood, facing a wall of plaques. There were pictures on the plaques. Not all of them human. One of the pictures was of my mother. I traced the wording next to it, engraved deep in the shiny golden metal in alien characters I’d learned to parse out. “To Maureen Farewell, who gave her”—spider-monkey word that we’d determined could be mind, but also essence or all—“to reach the stars.”
There were hundreds of plaques. I looked at Xavier and he at me. I wondered if the aliens imagined these people had been volunteers. I looked back at the hoops. What a strange way to do this. “The instructions are probably in the computers,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “But it is only in movies that humans instinctively know how to program alien machines.”
“True, so what do you propose?”
I reached into my pocket and got a gun. “Brute force. Smash enough and they’ll be free.”
“Okay,” he said. “But if we smash machinery, it might kill them.”
“So, we smash the hoops,” I said.
We did, starting at the bottom, using the butt of our guns. Halfway through breaking the hoop, which was stronger than it looked, alarms started up. I beat
the hoop that held Cressy faster. And suddenly, without warning, there was a yellow glow, and she fell, as did the stoner guy, whom Xavier had been freeing.
She fell straight down, all of a heap on the floor, and I thought she would start yelling at me, as soon as she was done taking deep breaths and looking like she’d been starved of oxygen for days, but meanwhile Xavier and I had started on the hoop that held the businessman and hammered on it with a will, until he also dropped.
This was when the lights started flickering madly, and Xavier was doing something on one of the two work stations. I didn’t know what and couldn’t see the screen, but stoner-boy and Cressy were on their—shaky—feet and I helped businessman up and told all of them, “Any minute now, they’re going to come check what’s going on,” this is when the power on the ship went out, and an alarm sounded which made exactly the same sound as a dog baying at the moon, only much louder, like this was a Doberman from hell.
“She’s right,” Xavier said, somehow audible over the alarm, “Let’s get, ladies and gentlemen.”
At which point we proceeded to flank the three dazed rescues and lead them in the direction of the hallway and out of the ship, at a trot.
No, we didn’t get very far, and I can’t say I remember this part very clear. I remember, in the utter darkness, spider monkeys with laser—were they laser? I must remember to ask the researchers going over their equipment—weapons trying to shoot us, and Xavier shooting at them, at first alone, till I joined him. I remember dead spider monkeys underfoot and having to walk on them to try to get out, all the while sure that there were only two of us armed.
And then Cressy had grabbed the high tech weapons of the fallen monkeys and started shooting wildly at them too, which seemed very odd in my sister, who proudly displayed a bumper sticker that said Arms are for hugging. I swear she was saying under her breath “die, motherfuckers,” and what I could see of her was blood splattered, as she shamelessly grabbed more weapons from the cadavers of the monkeys she’d killed. The two guys belatedly joined in too.
Of course when we reached the exit, it was blocked by a dense crowd of monkeys, a vast enough crowd we could never make our way through them, and they were shooting at us, so we flattened ourselves against the wall of the ship.
For some reason they wouldn’t shoot when we were near the walls, and instead started walking towards us.
Stoner boy turned to run, but I grabbed his shirt at the back, and I told Cressy, “Cressy, shoot the wall, that wall. It will lead to the outside.”
She turned without a word, and started cutting a rough circle in the wall, in which businessman joined her, and eventually stoner boy did too.
The guard of spider monkeys seeing what we were doing ran towards us and Xavier and I shot them down using all our spare ammo. Just as we ran out, the portion of the ship fell out, and we ran out with spider monkeys in hot pursuit.
Yes, we were arrested. No, the policemen didn’t deliver us to the spider monkeys as a matter of course, and instead we were driven to the local police station for questioning. Apparently the police had seen enough weird things in their days of guarding the ship to sense this was not quite the peaceful expedition it depicted itself as. Plus there were many of them who had family die in the obliteration of Capitol Hill.
And in the end, with Xavier, who had a reputation as not just the best linguist on Earth, but the coolest headed one, explaining the lacunae and omissions in the aliens communication, and with my sister explaining that she’d been strapped into their engine, to provide power, somehow, and that those plaques were people—or at least sentient beings of various species—they had killed to power their FTL and their ships, even our president had come around to figuring out that there was something very wrong.
Six months later, the secret of travel to the stars had been figured. And we were never going to do it. At least not while we retained the sense of horror of what had almost been done to us. We couldn’t go to the stars, because FTL required—for lack of a better word—the soul of a sentient being to power it.
Maybe someday our scientists will come up with another method, because there are some more things we now know: apparently sentience is rare in the stars, and the spider monkeys have run through all of the easy pickings within reach. The primitive tribes who believe it an honor to be sacrificed to the sky-traversing gods are pretty much all gone. All that is left in their—and our—corner of the sky are technological civilizations, deeply suspicious of sky-gods and ready to kill any of them who try to land.
We were the last one where they might come in pretend peace, and get, perhaps, a delegation of us to go back. And then perhaps “immigrants” under which guise we could provide them fuel for centuries of travel.
Thank heavens for Cressy’s innocence and the aliens’ greed. There had in fact been a loss of power, their last victim, a Canid from a nearby star, having died unexpectedly. They ran out of power before being able to maneuver to land. So they’d taken Cressy and two other chance-met victims.
Which had allowed us to figure out the whole thing just in time. Now, until and unless we find a way to travel through the stars and clean them out, we’re going to have to watch the sky with extreme prejudice, ready to shoot down any so-called friendly alien on a run for souls to power their ships.
Because it turns out the sky isn’t filled with angels. At least not angels of the benevolent variety.
In the aftermath of all this, I met with Cressy at a coffee shop, in between one of the presentations Xavier was making and one I was due for. Cressy had cleaned up in the last six months. All the appearances on TV perhaps, or perhaps the fact that her illusions had shattered with a rather loud bang.
She was wearing a skirt-suit in cream-colored silk and looked if anything a little pale and wan, as she toyed with her sandwich and took little sips of her coffee. She’d thanked me for, what I swear was the first time, for rescuing her, and now she cleared her throat. “I’m going to marry him, of course.”
“Him?” I said.
“Joe,” she said.
And since the idea of my sister marrying was wholly alien, but if she were getting married I thought I knew her taste, I said, “Stoner boy?”
She grinned. “That’s Malachy. He’s not a stoner. In fact, he owns one of those Aspen ski resorts, you know? Entrepreneur, fabulously rich.” She sighed.
“But he didn’t propose?”
“Oh, no, he did, but he’s . . . you know, peace and harmony and blah, blah, blah. I think . . . I don’t know, Lillian, I think this whole thing made me tougher. Harder, you know. And Joe has been teaching me to shoot.” She brightened up. “He owns a used book store. It will be a little tight, but we’re going to get married and see what we can make of this.” She smiled happily. “And you? Are you going to get married?”
“We did,” I said. “When they let us out of custody. You see . . . you see . . . If we have to keep watch and if we’re going to find a way to get to the stars and stop them, we’re going to need a new generation.”
“Yes,” she said. “We do. And besides, we’ll need lots of bright people to figure out how to get to the stars without this horrible trade off. Because you know, some humans—”
“You mean the less conscience-impaired regimes will go to the stars anyway? And kill people to do it?” I shuddered. “If one of these ships lands in North Korea, or if they steal our research—”
“That,” she said. “So we’re doing our best to marry and raise children who will come up with a solution to the problem and preserve the future for free… sentients who will not kill others for their benefit.” And she smiled as though she knew very well that wasn’t why I’d got married.
PLAYTHING
by Larry Niven
There is a frequently reiterated refrain about how adults are the ones who have messed up the world, and children, on the other hand, are uncorrupted, wiser, and more understanding. The people who write things like that must not know many children—hu
man that is. And how about the extraterrestrial equivalent?
***
Larry Niven is renowned for his ingenious science fiction stories which are solidly based on authentic science, often of the cutting edge variety. His Known Space series is one of the most popular “future history” sagas in SF and includes Ringworld, one of the few novels to have won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, as well as the Locus and Ditmar awards, and which is recognized as a milestone in modern science fiction. Four of his shorter works have also won Hugos. Most recently, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have presented him with the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award, given for lifetime achievement in the field. Lest this all sounds too serious, it should be remembered that one of his most memorable short works is “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex,” a not-quite serious essay on Superman and the problems of his having a sex life. Niven has also demonstrated a talent for creating memorable aliens, beginning with his first novel, World of Ptaavs, in 1966. A possible reason for this, Niven writes, is that, “I grew up with dogs. I live with a cat, and borrow dogs to hike with. I have passing acquaintance with raccoons and ferrets. Associating with nonhumans has certainly gained me insight into alien intelligences.” His insight and ingenuity are on full display in this hilarious example of a less than optimal first contact.
The children were playing six-point Overlord, hopping from point to point over a hexagonal diagram drawn in the sand, when the probe broke atmosphere over their heads. They might have sensed it then, for it was heating fast as it entered atmosphere; but nobody happened to look up.
Seconds later the retrorocket fired. A gentle rain of infrared light bathed the limonite sands. Over hundreds of square miles of orange martian desert, wide-spaced clumps of black grass uncurled their leaves to catch and hoard the heat. Tiny sessile things buried beneath the sand raised fan-shaped probes.