Agent to the Stars

by John Scalzi

  After the water settled down for a few moments, I heard a small crack, and looked into the pool in time to see a thick liquid oozing out of the meteorite remains and floating to the top of the water. The stuff was mostly clear but oily-looking. Space phlegm. After a couple of minutes of accumulating, the phlegm did something surprising: it started moving toward the side of the pool. When it got to the edge, a tentacle shot out onto the patio concrete and the rest of the phlegm hauled up through it. When it was totally out, it launched up another tentacle that waved around for a second, then stopped and shot back down into the rest of the phlegm. It began to slide over towards me.

  I can’t even begin to tell you what was going through my mind at that moment, Tom. You know those dreams where something horrifying is coming at you, and you’re running as fast as you can, but you’re moving in slow motion? It was like that feeling: disassociated horror and utter immobility. My brain had stopped working. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. I’m pretty sure I stopped breathing. All I could do was watch this thing work around the patio to where I was standing. For the third and final time that night, I was utterly convinced I was going to die.

  The thing stopped short two feet in front of me and collected itself into a compact Jell-O mold shape. A bowling ball–sized protuberance emerged from the top and launched itself up to eye level, supported by a stalk of goop. And then it talked.

  “Carl? It’s Gwedif. We talked on the phone. Ready to take a meeting?”

  Tom, I did something I’ve never done before. I fainted straight away.

  I was down for just a couple of seconds; I woke up to find Gwedif looming over me. I caught a whiff of him: he smelled like an old tennis shoe.

  “I’m guessing that wasn’t planned,” he said.

  I rolled away from him as quickly as I could and reached for the nearest dangerous object. My beer bottle had broken, so I grabbed it and held it in my hand, jagged end out.

  “Eek,” Gwedif said.

  “Stay away,” I said.

  “Away put your weapon,” he said. “I mean you no harm.”

  The line floated in my head for a second before I attached it with what it was from: it was a line of Yoda’s in The Empire Strikes Back. It knocked me off kilter just enough that I relaxed just a little. I lowered the beer bottle.

  “Thank you,” Gwedif said. “Now, Carl, I’m going to move toward you, very slowly. Don’t be frightened. All right?”

  I nodded. Slowly as promised, Gwedif moved over to reaching distance.

  “You okay so far?” Gwedif asked. I nodded again. “All right, then. Hold out your hand.”

  I did. Slowly, he pulled a tentacle out of his body and wrapped it around my hand. I was surprised not to find it slimy; in fact, it was firm and warm. My brain looked for a concept to relate it to and came up with one—those Stretch Armstrong dolls. You know, the one where you pulled on the arms and they stretched out for a yard. It was something like that.

  My hand wrapped in his tentacle, Gwedif did the unexpected. He shook it.

  “Hi, Carl,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

  I looked at Gwedif, dumbfounded, for about twenty seconds. Then I started to laugh.

  What can you say about the experience of meeting an entirely new, wholly alien, intelligent species of life? Well, of course, Tom, you know what it was like; you’ve done it, too. But I think by now you may have noticed that I plowed you right through that first meeting with Joshua, and I did it for a reason. I wanted to give your conscious brain something relatively familiar to work on, while your subconscious was grinding its gears on the existence of an alien. I don’t know if it was fair to do it that way; it might have been a sort of coitus interruptus for appreciating the wonder of the moment. What? Well, it’s good to know it doesn’t bother you, then.

  Personally, it took me a good hour before I finally calmed my brain down enough that Gwedif and I could start having a real conversation. During the interim he answered my semicoherent questions, allowed me to touch him, literally sticking my hands into him on one occasion, and otherwise talking me down back into a rational state of mind. I was like a kid with a new toy. You’re looking at me like it’s hard to believe, Tom. And it is, I suppose; you folks at work only see me in control, and that’s also for a reason.

  But there’s no way that I could contain my enthusiasm and excitement! Only one person on the planet gets to be the first person these aliens would meet, and it was me. I didn’t yet understand why, or for what purpose, but at that moment I didn’t care. The answer to one of the biggest questions humanity had ever asked—are we alone in the universe?—was sitting, globular and stinky, in the living room of my house. It was … indescribable. A boon of monumental proportions. About half an hour in, as the implications sank in, I wept with joy.

  We talked all through the night, of course; I was too excited to sleep and Gwedif, apparently, doesn’t need it. When nine o’clock rolled around, I called Marcella and told her I was taking a sick day. Marcella was concerned; she wanted to send a specialist over. I told her not to worry, that I could take care of myself. Then I went to sleep, but woke up two hours later, too excited to stay in bed. I found Gwedif outside, by the pool.

  “I’m just admiring my work,” he said. “I don’t know if you can appreciate it, but this”—he produced a tentacle and motioned at the pool—“took some doing. You try to shoot a pod into a swimming pool from fifty thousand miles out. And not have it do major damage. And have it look like a natural meteor on the way down.”

  “It was a nice touch,” I said.

  “It was, wasn’t it?” Gwedif agreed. “A pain in the ass, you should pardon the expression, as I obviously don’t have an ass to have a pain in. But we have to do it that way if we want to land near a city. You can fool some of the Air Force all of the time, and all of the Air Force some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the Air Force all of the time. Better this way than shot down by a Stealth fighter. Of course, there is the problem of getting back. That thing”—he pointed to the detritus at the bottom of the pool—“isn’t moving anywhere it’s not hauled.”

  “So how are you getting back?” I asked.

  “Well, we’ve scheduled a rendezvous near Baker for later tonight. There’s nothing out there in the desert, so we don’t have to worry about rubberneckers. Even so, we’ll probably light up the radar something fierce. It’s going to have to be quick in, quick out. I was hoping I could get you to drop me off.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “And also that you’d come with me,” Gwedif said.

  “What?”

  “Come on, Carl,” Gwedif said. “You can’t possibly think I came this far just for a quick hello. We have serious stuff to talk about, and it will go much, much faster if you come to the ship.”

  Even though I had known Gwedif for a very short time, I could tell that he was holding back on something. He wanted to have me come to the ship, all right, but I had a feeling it was for more than just a chat. I had the immediate brain flash to the alien abduction cliché, strapped down to the table while a blob of Jell-O readied the rectal probe. But that wouldn’t have made any sense. You don’t act all friendly with someone just to get them for lab experiments. They would have just grabbed me.

  And anyway, I wanted to go. Are you kidding? Who wouldn’t?

  That morning, I phoned for a taxi and went to a used car lot in Burbank to get a cheap, nondescript car. I paid two thousand dollars and got a twenty-year-old pickup. I then went to a pick-a-part place and pulled the license plates off of a wreck. Finally, I pried the Vehicle Identification Number off the dashboard. I didn’t know if Gwedif was right about the radar being lit up when they came to pick us up, but I didn’t want my own car there if anyone came to investigate.

  At about eight o’clock we set off down the 10, towards the 15, out to Baker in the middle of nowhere. Gwedif spread himself out under the bottom of the truck seat and popped a tendril over the back to see and talk.
The truck wasn’t worth nearly what I had paid for it; it almost died twice on the way out, and once I did an emergency stop into a gas station to add water to the radiator.

  About five miles to Baker, Gwedif had me exit the 15 and take a frontage road for a few miles until we came to an unmarked road heading south. We drove along that for another four or five miles, until literally the only lights I could see were my headlights and the lights of the stars above me.

  “All right,” Gwedif said, finally. “This is the place.”

  I stopped the pickup and looked around.

  “I don’t see anything,” I said.

  “They’re on their way,” Gwedif said. “Give them another three seconds.”

  The ground shook. Thirty yards to the left of us, a black, featureless cube twenty feet to a side had dropped unceremoniously from the sky. The ground cracked where it landed.

  “Hmmm … a little early,” Gwedif said.

  I peered over to the cube, which, disregarding the fact it had just fallen from the heavens, was severely lacking in grandeur. “Doesn’t look like much,” I said.

  “Of course it doesn’t,” Gwedif said, transferring from behind the seat. “We’ll save all the pretty lights for when we want to have our formal introduction. For now, we just want to get up and out without attracting attention. Ready?”

  I started to open the door.

  “Where are you going?” Gwedif asked.

  “I thought we were leaving,” I said.

  “We are,” Gwedif said. “Drive into it. We can’t very well leave this car in the middle of nowhere. Someone might find it. That’s why I had them send an economy-sized box.”

  “I wish I’d known,” I said. “I would have brought the Mercedes.”

  “I wish you had,” Gwedif said. “Air conditioning is a good thing.”

  I turned the wheel and drove gingerly towards the black cube. When the bumper nudged against the cube’s surface, I lightly tapped on the gas pedal. There was a slight resistance, and then almost a tearing as the cube’s surface enveloped the pickup.

  Then we were inside the cube. The inside was dimly it, from luminescence coming off the walls. The space was utterly nondescript, the only architectural feature being a platform ten feet up that I couldn’t see onto, since we were underneath it.

  “When do we leave?” I asked.

  Gwedif stretched out a tendril to touch the nearest wall. “We already have,” he said.

  “Really?” I said. “I wish this thing had windows. I’d like to see where we’re going.”

  “Okay,” Gwedif said. The cube disappeared. I screamed. The cube reappeared, transparent but visibly tinted.

  “Sorry,” Gwedif said. “Shouldn’t have made it completely clear. Didn’t mean to freak you out.”

  I gathered my wits, rolled down the window, and stared down at the planet, which was tinted purple by the shaded cube.

  “How far up are we?” I asked.

  “About five hundred miles,” Gwedif said. “We have to go slow for the first few miles, but once we’re up about ten miles, nobody’s looking anymore and we can really pick up speed.”

  “Can I leave the truck? I mean, will the floor support me?”

  “Sure,” Gwedif said. “It’s supporting the truck, after all.”

  I opened the door and very carefully placed a foot on the cube floor and added weight to it. It felt slightly spongy, like a wrestling mat or a taut trampoline, but it indeed held my weight. I stepped fully outside, leaving the truck door open, and walked away from the pickup. I looked up, and I was able to see through the platform; on the other side of it were two other blobs, also with tendrils extending into the walls—the pilot and copilot, I assumed.

  After a few minutes of walking around, I had Gwedif make the cube totally transparent. For the briefest of seconds, I felt a surge of panic again, but it was immediately replaced by the most astounding sense of exhilaration—a God’s-eye view of the planet, unencumbered by spacesuit or visor. I asked Gwedif if there was artificial gravity in the cube and he said that there was; I asked him if we could cut it off so I could float, but he demurred. He said he’d prefer not to have the pickup floating around aimlessly. They did decrease the gravity to match the spaceship that we were going to; suddenly I was forty pounds lighter. After a few more minutes I asked them to retint the cube—my forebrain had accepted I was safe, but the reptile regions were having trouble with it.

  The flight was a little under a half-hour long; we slowed appreciably as we approached the spaceship although I of course didn’t feel the deceleration. But I saw it—one moment I was staring at the blackness of space, and the next a huge rock came hurtling at me, not unlike the meteor had the night before. I cringed involuntarily, but suddenly it appeared to stop, hovering what seemed a few miles away.

  “There it is,” Gwedif said. “Home sweet home.”

  It was impossible for me to judge how big this asteroid-turned-spaceship was. As we got closer, I guessed that it must be close to a mile in diameter, a guess that was confirmed by Gwedif to be in the right ballpark. The asteroid appeared to have no nonnatural features, but as we approached, I saw featureless black streaks dotting the surface. We were heading towards one.

  “Does the ship have a name?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Gwedif said. “Give me a second to translate it.” He was quiet for a moment, then, “It’s called the Ionar. It’s the name of our first sentient ancestor, like an Adam or Eve for you. It also means ‘explorer’ or ‘teacher’ in a loose sense of those words, in that Ionar, realizing he was the first of his kind, learned as much as he could about the world so that his”—another pause here—“children could know as much as possible. His exploration is our culture’s first and greatest memory epic. We thought that his name would be a good one for this ship. Provident. That reminds me, we should plug your nose before we go out into the ship.”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “We communicate with smells,” Gwedif said. “When I said I had to translate, I meant that I had to translate the smells that we associate with a concept into an auditory analogue. But only a few of us know this translation as yet—and obviously the rest of us will be speaking our ‘mother tongue.’ But I don’t think that you’ll find our conversation very appealing to your senses.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be rude,” I said.

  “Well, here,” Gwedif said. “Here’s how we say Ionar.” A smell erupted from Gwedif like fart from a dog. “And here’s how I say my name.” The fart this time came from a larger dog than the first. My eyes watered.

  “Now, keep in mind that there’s a couple thousand of us in this ship,” Gwedif said.

  “I see your point,” I said.

  “I thought you might. I’ll make arrangements. Look, we’re about to dock.”

  Our cube was coming to rest on the edge of one of the black surfaces, about a hundred yards long and half as wide. Underneath the surface of the cube, the black surface thinned out and cleared away, leaving what seemed to be an airtight seal around the outside of the cube. The cube dropped slowly through the seal. As we cleared the skin, I could see that we were dropping into a cavernous hangar about a hundred feet deep. The hangar was dimly lit, and as far as I could see there weren’t any other cubes or anything else that might resemble a ship.

  I thought about asking Gwedif about it, but then there was a gentle thump and we landed. Almost instantly the cube began to melt; a circular hole started in the center and became wider, with the residue sliding down the walls of the cube, which were themselves sliding away. The Yherajk on the piloting platform slid down the walls a fraction of a second before the walls dripped away like wax; the platform itself sucked into the wall and disappeared. The mass of the cube lay in huge mounds on the floor of the hangar; then were suddenly absorbed, leaving me, the three Yherajk, and the pickup. The whole process took less than a minute.

  “Interesting,” I said.

  “Yup,” said Gwedif. “
We grow ’em when we need ’em. Making a cube, though, takes slightly longer than breaking one down.”

  From a near wall a door appeared and a Yherajk stepped out and approached us. It was carrying what looked like cotton wads in a tentacle. It came up to Gwedif, touched him briefly, and presented the cotton wads to me.

  I took them. “Do I eat these?”

  “I don’t think you’d want to,” Gwedif said. “Stuff them in your nose instead.”

  I did and immediately felt the ‘cotton’ expand, totally blocking my nasal passages. I suppressed the urge to sneeze.

  The Yherajk who presented me with the wads exited, as did the pilots, after briefly touching Gwedif.

  “Now,” Gwedif said, after we were alone. “Oewij, who came with the nose plugs, tells me that the ship-wide meeting has been arranged at our communion hall, and that our presence is requested immediately. However, I feel that it is only fair and courteous to allow you some time to collect yourself or even sleep if you so desire. I know you’ve haven’t had much rest since we’ve met. Or, if you’d like, I can arrange for the tour of the ship. It’s up to you, really.”

  “I’m not tired,” I said. “I’d love a tour of the ship, though. May I have a tour after the meeting?”

  “Of course,” Gwedif said.

  “Well, then,” I said. “Let’s go have a meeting.”

  Gwedif and I entered the Ionar through the same door that the other Yherajk disappeared into. I had to duck to get through the door and then had to hunch down as we walked down several corridors; the ceiling was about an inch shorter than I was tall. I suppose that this would make sense: the Yherajk are not exactly tall. These corridors must have seemed roomy to them.