by Neil Clarke
“Never mind! I don’t want to hear it, actually. I’m leaving,” he said unnecessarily, “and I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
“What’s going to happen?” she asked.
“It’s not up to me,” he snapped. “But I have my doubts they’ll be pleased.
This was not part of our agreement! Jesus, they can take us over! No wonder they were so eager for this partnership . . . this is not good, this is really not good. Where are they?” he said, stomping out of the bedroom.
Donna felt a chill as she followed him into the living room, and not in regards to Jared’s fears of planetary domination. “Can’t we talk about this?” she said, pleading with him.
“Talk? Talk about what?”
“Are they going to terminate the . . . the co-habitation?”
“Probably! Donna, I was supposed to be reporting anything strange. This is new technology—new law—new everything!” He shook his head. “I’m such an idiot. I knew something was wrong, but I believed your excuses. How stupid of me, to trust my own wife!”
Now Donna was furious; all her rage came bubbling up like lava, hot and toxic. “Trust! You want to talk about trust? If Glreerak hadn’t told me, how would I have known? You never even told me where you worked, what you did!”
“It’s top secret!”
“Top secret!” She scoffed at him. “You reached for me that first night, you know. Did it excite you, the idea of it watching us?”
He blushed. She’d never seen him blush, not in a decade of marriage. “It was here to learn about us! That includes how married couples . . . um, behave with each other!”
“I guess it learned a hell of a lot, didn’t it? Mission accomplished.” Something occurred to Donna, contemplating the way she and Jared had behaved with one another, before Glreerak. She really didn’t want to go back to that. Couldn’t go back to that. “Maybe . . . maybe you won’t have to terminate the relationship. Maybe there’s a way . . .”
“What?” Jared’s face crumpled. “A way? You’re more worried about losing your lover than my mental health! It was taking me over, Donna! It pushed me out of my own mind, my own body! My own marriage!”
“No. We pushed ourselves out of that.”
There was a knock at the door. Donna answered it. There stood Mr. Smoot; behind him were several military men brandishing weapons. Mr. Smoot was the only one who appeared unarmed, but given everything, it wouldn’t surprise her if he had something concealed on his person.
“Come in,” she said, as if this were the most typical of social calls.
“I’m afraid I can’t,” said he, equally pleasant. “Jared? Is that you?”
“Yes, it’s me,” he said, not exactly elbowing his way past Donna, but not waiting for her to move out of the doorway, either. “Let’s go.”
They walked to the black car parked in the driveway, Donna barefoot and following at a bit of a distance. She felt embarrassed to be seen with her damp hair and worn cotton pajamas, but she couldn’t help but tag along. She would likely never speak to Glreerak again. She had no idea if she would ever see Jared, either. He had to come back at some point . . . didn’t he?
Who could say? He’d never told her anything about any of it.
There was no time to ask. Mr. Smoot got in the driver’s side, and Jared slammed the car door shut in her face as she approached. He had clearly not calmed down at all, but maybe Glreerak would peek through, one last time. She looked into her husband’s eyes, hoping to see the familiar gleam . . . but as Mr. Smoot put the car in reverse, late afternoon sunlight glinted off the passenger window. It was impossible for Donna to tell who it was who mouthed “good-bye.”
Hugo and three-time Nebula award finalist Caroline M. Yoachim is the author of over a hundred short stories, appearing in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed, among other places. Her work has been reprinted in multiple year’s best anthologies and translated into Chinese, Spanish, and Czech. Yoachim’s debut short story collection, Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories, came out in 2016. For more, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com
Five Stages of Grief After the Alien Invasion
CAROLINE M. YOACHIM
DENIAL
Ellie huddled in the corner of her daughter’s room. She sang a quiet lullaby and cradled her swaddled infant in her arms. Lexi was four months old, or maybe thirteen months? Ellie shook her head. There hadn’t been a birthday party, and thirteen-month-olds didn’t need swaddling. She tried to rearrange the swaddling blankets so they didn’t cover Lexi’s face, but every time she moved the blankets, all she saw underneath was another layer of blankets.
“Oskar?” she called. “Come and hold the baby for a bit, I need to go out and buy formula.”
Oskar came in and gave her the same sad look he’d worn all week. Work, she decided, must be going poorly. She wished he would confide in her about it, but he didn’t like to burden her with his problems. Lexi’s room was dark, and the light switch wasn’t working. Ellie opened the blinds, but the window was covered in white paint, making it impossible to see outside.
“Did you paint the windows?” she asked. Their apartment was on the third floor, and it had a lovely view of the treetops. “Lexi will want to see the birds.”
“Sporefall killed all the birds,” Oskar said, his voice bitter, “and we don’t need formula. It’s been months, Ellie. I know how hard this is, but I can’t do this anymore. The pain is bad enough without reliving it with you every day.”
Ellie frowned. “If you’re too busy to watch the baby you should say so.”
Oskar leaned down and kissed the top of her head. “I’m going, Ellie. There’s a caravan heading down to L.A., and I haven’t heard a thing from Jessica since sporefall. She didn’t even answer the letter I sent about Lexi. I’ve hired a caretaker to help you get by without me, her name is Marybeth. She lost her wife to the sporefall, so maybe you two can help each other get through your grief.”
“A little extra help around the house will be nice,” Ellie said. “Tell your sister hello.”
Ellie smiled. Jessica was a good influence on Oskar. She’d cheer him right up.
Oskar’s eyes were teary when he turned to leave the room. She wondered if his allergies were acting up. He’d said something about spores. When she went to get the formula, she could pick up an antihistamine for him.
Ellie put Lexi in the high chair, still swaddled in blankets, and tried to spoon-feed her pureed peas. It wasn’t working very well. Four months was too early for solids and the entire jar ended up on the blankets rather than in the baby. Ellie put the empty jar in the sink.
Someone knocked on the door, unlocked it, and came inside. It wasn’t Oskar.
“Your husband gave me a key,” the woman said, “I’m Marybeth. You must be Ellie.”
Ellie nodded, “And this is Lexi. She’s a bit of a mess right now.” Ellie dabbed at the blankets with a napkin, then added, embarrassed, “She’s a bit young for it, but I tried to feed her.”
Marybeth smiled sadly. “Lexi died, Ellie. Nine months ago the Eridani seeded the planet with spores. Once they realized the planet was inhabited, they undid the damage as best they could, but they came too late for the elderly and the very young.”
“Well, I’m glad they came nine months ago and not now,” Ellie said, wiping the tray of the highchair with the food-smeared napkin. “Oskar hired you to watch Lexi? Do you do laundry, too? Her blankets are a mess.”
Marybeth carefully unwound Lexi’s outermost blanket and put it in the laundry hamper. “It would be better if you could move on, Ellie. This isn’t healthy.”
Satisfied that Marybeth could take care of Lexi, Ellie went to the bathroom and took a shower. Cold water poured down around her skin, and she scrubbed until she was red to be sure she got rid of all the spores. Oskar was allergic to spores, and she didn’t want to make his symptoms any worse. Oh, but the babysitter—she came from outside, she must
have been covered in spores.
Ellie ran out from the bathroom, dripping wet and wrapped in a towel. “You came from outside! You’ve exposed poor Lexi to spores!”
Marybeth put one hand on Ellie’s shoulder and gently guided her back to the bathroom. “Hush now, the spores are gone, all grown into plants. We don’t have to worry about spores.”
Marybeth returned the next day with an old man. Ellie hoped he wasn’t sick. He was dressed too warmly for the weather: clunky black boots, several layers of baggy clothes, and a fleece hat with flaps that covered his ears. He was short and stout with ashen skin and a grin too broad for his face. It made him look like a toad, Ellie thought, then pushed the uncharitable thought from her head.
“Come in, come in,” Ellie said, then realized that her welcome was too late and Marybeth and her—was the man her father? Maybe her grandfather—were already in the entryway of her apartment.
“I thought it’d be good for you to meet one of the Eridani,” Marybeth said. “It might help you come to grips with what happened.”
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Eridani,” Ellie said. It was time for Lexi’s nap. The apartment was warm, good for sleeping, but Ellie could use some fresh air. “Do you sing, Marybeth?”
“Sing?” Marybeth asked. “No, not really.”
“What about you, Mr. Eridani?” Ellie turned to the old man. “Will you sing my daughter lullabies? I’d like to go for a walk.”
“It might be good for her to get out of the house,” Marybeth told her grandfather. “I think Oskar made a mistake in painting the windows.” She went over to the kitchen window and pried it open, sending flecks of dried paint flying everywhere.
Ellie turned her back on the kitchen, trying to protect Lexi from the nasty paint dust. “Don’t let her breathe the dust, she just got over a terrible cough.”
The old man nodded, then held out his arms to take Lexi. He held her gently, and while his mouth was fixed in the same broad smile, his bulging black eyes seemed sad. Ellie wondered if he was longing for grandchildren of his own.
“Don’t be sad. Lexi clearly likes you. She didn’t even cry.” Ellie put on a sweater and opened her apartment door. “I won’t be gone long.”
The trees along the edge of the sidewalk had oddly purple leaves, and the people that passed looked far too weary for a sunny Saturday afternoon, but as she walked beneath the open windows of her apartment, she could hear the low hum of a lullaby, slow and sweet, sure to soothe her daughter straight to sleep.
ANGER
Amelia was twelve the night the spores fell, and she remembered it vividly. Thousands of meteors burned bright as they fell through the atmosphere. Charred black pods burst open when they crashed to the ground. By dawn, the air was filled with swirling clouds of orange mist, like pollen blowing from the trees. Every person and creature on the planet breathed the spores. The birds were the first to die, but not the last.
“Come away from the window, Sis.” Brayden tried to tousle her hair like she was six years old or something. “Dad will be home soon, and you haven’t done your homework yet.”
“I didn’t do my homework because it’s stupid to pretend that nothing has changed,” Amelia said. “Everyone in my class lost people to the spore. Friends, grandparents . . . siblings. Tia’s parents got killed in the riots. Zach’s older brother died in one of the fires. Then the way they healed us—”
She shuddered. She still had nightmares about the croaker that thinned into some kind of fog and poured itself down her throat, picking the spores out of her lungs and healing the damage the sprouting plants had done. It was that or die when the spores grew, but she’d still thrashed so much that Dad had to hold her down to keep her from hurting herself.
“It was eleven months ago,” Brayden said. He stared at the sky for a moment, lost in his own thoughts. “What’s the alternative to going back to normal? If you didn’t have school, you’d sit home and sulk all day like that guy that came down from Portland.”
Their neighbor’s brother had showed up on the caravan last week, looking for Jessica, but she’d already left for the space station. She was one of the scientists chosen to help negotiate a treaty with the aliens. The only treaty Amelia wanted to see was ‘get off our planet and take your damned purple plants with you.’
“Oskar sits around and sulks all day,” Amelia said, “but I would go out and kill croakers.”
Brayden shook his head. “You can’t kill croakers. People have tried. They can’t be poisoned, stabbed, or shot. No matter what you do to them, they recohere, they heal. If you did more of your homework, you might know that.”
Unlike the rest of her classes, which she’d given up on, Amelia had paid careful attention to all the details of croaker biology. Despite their solid-seeming forms, croakers were essentially sentient fog. The squat frog-like body they used on Earth was a dense gray cloud, thick enough to hold up the clothes they wore, but little else. Projectiles and blades passed right through and did little harm, and poison passed through unabsorbed.
Amelia had a different plan. She would trap a croaker bit by bit in a hundred glass jars. Then she’d throw the jars into a fire, one by one. Would the pain of that death be as bad as the last desperate gasps of her little brother? Gavin was four, and screamed all his last night in pain and fear. Spores made his lungs burn, the doctor said.
Amelia would make a croaker burn.
Croakers wandered the streets like ghosts, occasionally stopping to eat leaves from the purple plants that had grown from the spores. According to the news, the croakers were observing, collecting data so they could repair more of the damage they did at sporefall, but as near as Amelia could tell, the big gray frogs were just making themselves right at home. Amelia waited behind one of their licorice-smelling plants with a cardboard box full of glass jars.
A croaker came to nibble at the leaves, and she jumped out from behind the bush, jar in hand. She scooped out a big section of the croaker’s ugly frogface. The croaker was thicker than she expected, like gelatin or pudding, rather than air. The gray goo in the jar was repulsively flesh-like, and her stomach churned as she screwed the lid into place. The croaker let out a high pitched whine. Its face appeared unchanged, despite her jarful of gray goo.
She couldn’t do it. She had a boxful of jars, and she wanted the croaker to burn, but she couldn’t bring herself to take another scoop of its ashen flesh. It stared at her with round black eyes, still making a high-pitched sound, though softer now, a sad keening sound.
“You killed Gavin!” she screamed. “You messed up my whole world and now you stay here like you own it! You should burn for it!”
She hurled the jar of gray goo at the sidewalk. It shattered against the concrete and shards of glass flew everywhere. A cloud of gray swirled up from the shimmering fragments of the jar before drifting back onto the croaker. Into the croaker.
She grabbed another jar from her box and threw it at the croaker. It bounced off the alien’s face, and the froglike grin didn’t even flinch. “Go back to where you came from!” she shouted and flung jar after jar at the croaker, until her cardboard box was empty and the sidewalk was buried beneath a pile of shattered glass.
The croaker scooped up the broken glass in big webbed hands, mounding it and sculpting it into its own image. Amelia watched, fascinated despite herself. The croaker smoothed the bits of glass as easily as a sculptor might shape clay. It made a statue of a croaker, and in the statue’s broad glass hands there was a human child with indistinct features. Not her brother, but a child like him. Perhaps all children like him. Unlike every croaker Amelia had ever seen, there was no froglike grin on the statue’s face.
Brayden ran over. “I heard all the noise, and—” He stared at the statue.
“I wanted to set a croaker on fire, but I couldn’t do it.” Amelia said. “Not even after everything they did.”
Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but the statue didn’t look empty. Delicate orange flames danced in
side the statue of the croaker, complete with thin wisps of gray smoke that reminded her of the swirling cloud when she broke the jar and let the croaker go. It had left a piece of itself inside the statue, to burn inside the glass.
She thought her mind was playing tricks on her, but Brayden saw it too. “They already burn for what they did.”
The croaker bowed its head, then turned and walked away.
BARGAINING
The alien standing in front of Jessica was four feet tall, slate gray, and shaped like an oversized toad. It smelled like chalk and made a quiet wheezing noise, barely audible over the hum of the orbital stabilizers. The temperature onboard the station was comfortable for humans, but the alien wore a thick sweater, knitted by one of Jessica’s former graduate students as a gesture of goodwill from all humankind. A large round button with the number 17 was pinned to the purple wool. Eridani didn’t use names.
Eridani 17 extended a webbed hand. The flesh of its fingers thinned, creating the illusion of wisps of smoke curling up from its palm. The smoke shaped itself into North America, and then a city skyline.
“Toronto?” Jessica asked. The city had a distinctive tower. Eridani 17 shook its head.
Negotiating with the Eridani was like a game of Pictionary, except that Jessica was sober and—thank god—didn’t have to actually draw anything. Her brother Oskar had always been the artist in the family, excelling at Pictionary even when he was half her age. If his most recent message was any indication, all he ever drew now was pictures of his estranged wife, who lost her mind after sporefall killed their baby.
“Seattle,” Jessica said.
The Eridani understood spoken language, but not by translating individual words. According to the best available translation, the Eridani heard ideas in the spaces between the words.
She hoped that this was true. She was not authorized to ask for what she truly wanted, and the sessions were recorded.