by Amanda Milo
“NO REBOOT!” I thunder. “For all the hive! Just let us pass already.”
“When did this get so slow?!” Simmi shouts in my ear depression for the second time.
“Have we ever been in a hurry?” I ask incredulously, still unable to believe what’s just happened. Of all the plants we raise here, the Morsuflos is the most dangerous. Yet this creature was drawn directly to it, and she managed to take the Morsuflos. She stole a bloom without receiving more than a prick on her digit! What are the odds it was random? Then there’s the matter of this creature arriving equipped with tools.
Animals don’t carry tools.
What is she?
For the last time: not she. IT!
What does it want with the Morsuflos?
Finally, the door gives us clearance and I rip the booties off of my feet, beginning to run full-out, feeling a stretch in my legs I haven’t enjoyed since I was a boy, playing with my Affected friends before their days of carefree running were no more, and their movements became restricted to numb-minded stumbling.
I forgot how good it feels to run. How much it makes me feel alive.
As I said: buried in the stark details of the data and clinical trials surrounding the individuals exhibiting disease, most days it feels as if I’ve contracted a minor case of hypochondria. I go to my dorm feeling like I’m as good as Affected myself, so immersed in it I feel.
But running under the sun like this, the light and heat touching my skin plates, I feel as if I’ve been healed of this disease I live with constantly in my mind.
My body is soaking up the startling freshness, the rushing wind, and I’m overcome with an inappropriate-to-the-moment sense of tranquility.
I wonder if this is what the Affected feel when they’re initially treated with Morsuflos’s extract.
Perhaps so, and this creature cut off our best-producing Morsuflos’s bloom!
This reminder spurs me to increase my speed.
Thanks to my legs being much greater in length compared to hers, I eat up the distance between me and my quarry, and I hear Simmi not far behind us.
When I’m near enough, I reach out and snag the humped back of the alien—only to have her back slough off in my hands.
“AHHH!” I shout, dropping her heavy sack of back skin to the ground with a dry thud, and scrambling to put distance between it and me.
Simmi does the same, his feet kicking up dust in his haste to retreat. He’s grimacing and holding his side as if it pains him. “It’s probably an escape mechanism, like we used to lose our tails if captured.” His breath comes in harsh pants, no more used to sprinting than I. “Probably nothing to be alarmed about,” he advises—although, I note that he doesn’t get any closer to it than I do.
The alien scampers ahead, evidently unharmed after dropping a piece of herself, but after looking over her shoulder and noting that her pursuers have stopped well away from her pile of derma, she slows. She comes to a stop and turns, and she looks right into my eyes.
My breath catches.
I imagine if art appreciation were a modern pursuit, I’d attempt to learn to sculpt just so I could capture the interesting way her body repeats curves—they flow down from the bubble of her head, to the flare of her shoulder, to the pleasantly convex swell of her belly, to her curvilinear form which is replicated at her hip and the top of each thigh—it’s fascinating. She may be strange, but she’s striking in her unusualness. “You’re so ugly that you’re beautiful,” I feel compelled to tell her.
Simmi cuts me a sharp look, and I feel my cheekbones start to swell, which means my skin plates have started to rouge.
The creature’s gaze moves from me to Simmi. Still clutching the Morsuflos bloom, not taking her eyes off us, she takes two tentative steps in the direction of her sloughed skin.
“What’s it going to do?” Simmi whispers. “Reattach it and wear it around?”
“Shhh,” I hiss at him. “Who knows? Maybe there are nutrients contained in it that she needs and retrieving them is a necessity.” Kamēlos are like this—well, not like this, their humps don’t fall off—but they have a sort of dorsal pouch where they store nourishment in the form of fats.
We watch in fascination as—sparing us both extended wary glances—the creature hunkers down, reaches for her skin—
And she does indeed slip it back on, putting her arms through webbing holes and tightening her backhump to her inner spine by yanking a series of dangling flesh cinches.
“That is disgusting,” Simmi whispers before he doubles over and retches.
My stomach is curling too. (But mostly in reaction to hearing Simmi.) I might be more disturbed by the sight of her reattaching her skin if I wasn’t seeing the way she keeps the Morsuflos bloom held carefully throughout the entire process.
The bloom is precious to her.
This bloom is precious to us.
What does she know of it? What does she need it for? Are her people like ours?
“I’m going to catch her,” I announce, more to test if she understands our language than to alert Simmi.
“Don’t touch it; it’s not worth it,” he says miserably, clutching his stomach before he heaves again.
Her gaze flicked to me when I spoke, but quickly returned to Simmi, worry and perhaps—is that sympathy reflected on her open face?
I don’t let the opportunity escape.
Evidently unaware of my long reach, she doesn’t expect me to snatch her right off her feet, but I do.
She shrieks.
I almost drop her.
“Ugh, its backflesh touched you!” Simmi narrates, as if I don’t feel the heavy weight of her sloughable back slap into my arms as she flails in my grasp.
She kicks, and struggles—but this time, I know better than to touch her spinal region so she keeps her backflesh on, much to my relief—and she also doesn’t fight too hard, because she’s trying to be very, very careful with the Morsuflos.
“LEHT MEE GOH!” she howls.
“Unholy hells. Do you think it talks?” asks Simmi.
I turn her until she and I are face to face, and she goes quiet, even cringing. “Could be random vocalizations, I suppose,” I offer, “But why not? I was thinking that it’s unlikely that an animal would have tools.”
“Yes, I noticed those,” Simmi says, wiping his mouth against the back of his wrist, which produces a rasping sound that makes the creature’s eyelid twitch.
“Eeen-spayce-noh-won-kahn-heer-yoo-skreem, ALE-EE-ENS,” she breathes with a concerning shudder.
Being that much of my work revolves around individuals with motor tics, I study her even more closely.
I move to take the Morsuflos bloom out of her hands before she can crush it, but she adjusts her hold, still careful to keep her fist between the thorns, and with her other hand, she blocks me, bleating, “Noh! Pleees!”
My gaze cuts to Simmi. “These definitely sound like words to me.”
His gaze rakes up and down her odd form. “It’s still an alien, whatever it is.”
“She’s most certainly that,” I agree, taking her in. I sink down, keeping my hands clamped on her but needing her to meet my eyes. I speak slowly. “We’re taking you into custody.”
“We are?” asks Simmi. “Wouldn’t it be wiser to report it to whatever department might be equipped for dealing with nonnative exotics? What are we going to do, keep it in a lodent habitat? Feed it protein pellets and watch it run on the wheel?”
I try to urge her to walk with me, but she’s trying to pull herself free—to no avail of course, but it’s not stopping her from attempting. “I don’t know yet, but if there’s one of her hunting for Morsuflos blooms, there could be more.”
“Exactly!” shouts Simmi. “All the more reason to report it!”
I carefully run my claw along the clear, bubble-shaped outer skull of the creature, watching her watch me as I disagree. “Let’s wait.”
CHAPTER 4
We don’t report our ‘fr
eakish thief’—this is Simmi’s terminology, not mine.
I don’t consider her freakish.
But ten time-allotments of staring at her later, and we watch the creature suddenly do something very, very peculiar. She peels her belly-skin down the middle with a jarring zzzzt!, starts to shove it off her body, squats, and…
“Is it URINATING?” Simmi asks in horror.
It does indeed look as if she’s marking in the corner. “Uhhh…”
She jumps, startled—still urinating—when Simmi rips open the hatch to her containment enclosure (yes, one designed for lodents; it’s not as if we entertain alien species on a regular basis—we have nothing else to hold her in) and points to the tray of shavings. “Here! You urine mark here, combit! We’re scientists, not hostel maids!”
Earlier, she’d been resting on the shavings meant for her marking bin, but since they were fresh shavings, we didn’t think much of it. What was there to suspect? We concluded that perhaps her species eliminated on their sides. Or perhaps they secreted waste through body oils. Or perhaps any number of unknowns—we’ve never seen anything like her; we have nothing to compare her to. But it’s going to create quite a mess if she’s randomly spraying corners of the enclosure, and by the looks of it, she holds a great deal of water.
She squeaks at Simmi, sounding distressed, so I grab him by his neck plate and haul him back, letting the door slam shut. “Don’t shout at her—maybe she doesn’t know any better!”
Simmi slams four fingers to my chest plate. “What’s this ‘her’ business?”
Uncomfortable, I let my shoulder plates lift. “This specimen looks overtly feminine to me.”
Simmi eyes me incredulously. “How so? The bubble-head? The short legs? The dorsal section it can shed and reattach as if it’s painless? And did you not just watch it slough off its upper-self to piss?”
“Simmi…” I start, warning coloring my tone. He’s perilously close to insubordinate with how he’s addressing me. “You’re correct that we don’t know enough to accurately ascribe it a gender this early on, but as senior scientist of this research wing,”—with two employees, if I’m counting myself—“I feel I must warn you that if you continue to address me this heatedly, there are limits to the amount of insolence I’ll take before I enforce formality protocols.”
Simmi’s nares flare with emotion. “You really want to talk protocols?”
Ehhhm…
No, I really don’t. We’ve been arguing whether we should report this creature’s existence for the last five time-allotments we’ve held her in captivity. We both know what we should do—but to give up the opportunity to study her…
Simmi feels he didn’t sign on for the level of stress that this situation has created. I didn’t sign on for this either; never have I ever considered hiding anything, let alone something of this magnitude. But what will an investigative team do that we can’t? Absolutely nothing. They’re no better equipped to handle alien lifeforms than our laboratory wing. Our planet hasn’t seen aliens since our people frightened galaxy after galaxy by very suddenly displaying terrifying signs of debilitating disease. We’ve spent generations cut off from everyone outside of our celestial sphere.
Besides—Simmi and I should keep her because she took the bloom off of our research subject.
Simmi closes his tabulation device’s cover with a felt-lined snap. With disapproving, direct eye contact and chilly restraint, he presses his chair into his cube’s station. As he does so, the chair’s legs give a muted squeak of aggression, sliding over highly polished flooring. “Fine. If you’re going to pull rank, Senior Scientist? You can clean up after it.”
He manages to storm out with a remarkable amount of silence. He’s had an overlong shift; I imagine he’ll feel more rational tomorrow, provided we aren’t caught and punished for holding our tongues on the alien presence in our laboratory. Despite the near-palatable strain he left in his wake, with Simmi gone, I finally feel like I can relax.
Once I do, I find I’m starving. By now, I’d normally have taken a lunch, ended my shift, and enjoyed an evening meal. But neither Simmi nor I could peel ourselves away from observing our guest.
She’s still got the Morsuflos bloom; she hasn’t wanted to release it. Being as necessary to our laboratory’s work as it is, we have to wonder what serves as her attraction—the alien’s intrepid arrival and collection of our Morsuflos flower was not random. Do her people struggle with Lʊʊnjaɠ too? There must be some great purpose if she risked herself to breach our atmosphere and steal our bloom.
I pull my meal out of my insulated transportation tray, inhaling the scent of chopped weshmik and hard-boiled gredds. I bring the first spoonful to my mouth… only to wonder what this alien eats.
She hasn’t so much as touched the protein pellets that are stacked in the enclosure’s gravity feeder.
Against reason, I take up my meal and enter her domain.
She backs herself to her shavings, her sloughable spinehump pressing to the wall before she sinks down low, resting a rounded hind on short heels.
I brace my feet and sink down too, feeling my thigh muscles bunch as my weight comes down on my own heels. Pleased that I’m able to balance comfortably if I concentrate on my center of gravity, I peel back the translucent nanocover film to expose more of my food.
When I see the alien watching me—or, rather watching my food—with rapt attention, I offer her a cube of hagnot. “This is hagnot, a popular dish in the region I was propagated in. It goes through an interesting process when it’s made,” I offer conversationally. “As you can see, this dish is prepared using ruffled ribbons of soyk, which is made from a plant that yields a grain high in starches.”
I tip my tray to offer her a better view, and after a moment, the alien dutifully stretches herself up to peer at it, coming an increment closer to me, but not yet reaching for the hagnot cube.
“The grain is ground into a powder, mixed with mechanically processed water, and is then extruded into the stamped shape you see here.” I point to one of the soyk ribbons. “Layered one atop another, they’re separated by a new ingredient: jellied snout-cheese, seasoned sauce made of pungent bean curd, and finally, fermented Surströmm as a top layer. This is my favorite meal ration.”
As I blather on, she gradually relaxes, even changing her position to one where she folds down on her legs. The anterior surface of her knee joints is all I see; her weight rests along the lengths of her severely short tibia bones. This forces her feet to straighten behind her, pressing her ankles flat to the floor. The thick bottoms of her feet are exposed, and when I crane my neck around her to get a better look at what I think I see, she scoots back.
“Sorry,” I say. I point to her feet. “I’m simply curious—it looks as if you have heavily textured footpads. Your native environment must have very rugged terrain.” I imagine a craggy-surfaced moonscape, and wonder just where she came from. From all appearances, it’s somewhere harsh enough her body has adapted by way of textured feet and a nutrient-storing hump at her back.
Her gaze follows to where I’m pointing at her feet. When she swivels her head back to look at me, I set my ration tray down and adjust my position until I can show her the bottoms of my own feet, which are almost flat in comparison to hers. “See?” I say, pointing. “We have a somewhat textured surface of our own—more like claws, I suppose. It’s so that we don’t skid from the propulsion of a leap.”
I stop talking when she begins to scoot closer to me—walking by way of her kneecaps. “Oh,” I say faintly. “That’s odd.”
Perhaps entirely due to my expression as I take her locomotion in, she releases a light laugh.
It makes me smile.
Her gaze touches mine, her eyes very starkly defined with a ring of black, then of color, all set in an orb of glaring white. Her lids are shaded with heavy lashes, leaving me to surmise that she is also from a dust-covered planet.
As I take note of her features, she edges even closer,
her skin swishing with her movements, and then she reaches up to her throat and touches a rounded black scale—shiny like a fish scale, right at the base of her neck.
The transparent skull-shield that acts as a partition between her delicate-looking inner skin from the environment retracts.
For the first time, I see her features unencumbered by the glare of this round covering.
I’d been thinking that our skulls are more cylindrical than her very round, pellucid skull. But her inner-skull is not round. It’s almost an oval.
She looks like nothing I’ve ever seen. Most lifeforms I’ve spied mentions of in our old textbooks depict people who appear much like our own race, or near enough.
This being is so completely alien.
And it’s as if she’s shrinking before my eyes with just this one alteration she’s made. Without her skull-shield, she appears even smaller than before. Perhaps it’s an elaborate defense mechanism—she looked like she’d be difficult to eat before, but exposed like this, she looks more like fragile prey. Which sounds like a terrible state to live in. I’d want to adapt too!
I’m frozen, staring at her, so I’m startled when she pulls the hagnot cube out of my fingers.
I’d been holding it out as an offering—but because she made me forget myself, when I feel it leaving my fingers, I jump.
She jumps too, and drops the cube on the floor between us.
We stare down at it for a moment, and I clear my throat. “Sorry.”
Grimacing—or what I believe is her version of a grimace, her features are all so pliable they pull and twist in such a way it should be beyond grotesque… but somehow isn’t anything other than visually appealing—she reaches for the dropped hagnot.
“No need.” I reach out to touch her wrist with two of my fingers, intending to stall her.
She snatches back her hand as if my intention is to burn her.
I huff a laugh. “Allow me to offer another apology.” I spoon up a second small serving. “Here. Eat this. Ignore that,” I use my tail to sweep the wasted portion behind me.
Eyes tracking my every movement, she tilts her head a little, her lips parting before she exclaims, “Eyym starrteeng too underrstahnd yoo!”