by Geoff Rodkey
I turned in the direction she was pulling me.
That’s when I realized the swarm was coming for us. The whole seething cloud of thousands of Zhuri was halfway across the tarmac, shrieking as they zoomed through the air straight at me.
I stumbled as I ran for the shuttle and almost didn’t get back in time. Half a second after Dad slammed the door shut behind me, the first wave of attackers hit the ship.
THE ZHURI WERE spitting some kind of liquid on our shuttle. We could hear it splatter against the roof and sides. It was running down the windows in such thick orange smears that pretty soon we couldn’t see outside. A heavy gasoline stink filled the inside of the shuttle. Breathing it in made me want to retch.
The screams of the Zhuri were so loud that the translator had no trouble picking up the words now.
“GO HOME!”
“DIE HUMANS!”
“ALIEN SCUM!”
“LEAVE OUR PLANET!”
I took out my earpiece so I wouldn’t have to hear the words. Dad hugged me tight. Mom was trying to comfort Ila, who was freaking out.
We’d been through some scary moments during our last hours on Earth. In some ways the food riot on Mars had been even scarier. But this was much, much worse than either of those.
“It’s going to be okay,” Mom kept saying.
“We’re safe in here,” Dad said as he rubbed my back. “Don’t worry.”
Worry didn’t even come close to describing it. I was petrified.
It’s hard to say how long the attack went on. It felt like forever, but it could’ve been as little as half a minute before we heard an amplified Zhuri voice outside on the tarmac, broadcasting over the screams of the swarm. I put my earpiece back in to hear what it was telling the attackers:
“YOU ARE DISPLAYING EXCESSIVE SMELL. CLEAR THE AIR AND EXIT THE LANDING AREA IMMEDIATELY.”
The announcement kept repeating, over and over again. Slowly the splat-splat-splat of the spitting attacks slacked off, and the angry screams quieted a bit. We started to hear a new noise—a crackling BZZZT! like the sound the dome had made, only lower-pitched and not as loud.
Then the attacks stopped completely, and enough orange muck slid off the windows that we were able to get a blurry look outside.
The Zhuri soldiers were using their long metal prongs to force the swarm away from our shuttle. The prongs seemed to work like cattle prods—when they touched one of the attackers, there was a BZZZT! and a little blue arc of electricity, and the attacker would get zapped back about half a foot before dropping onto the tarmac.
Then it would lie there twitching for a few seconds before it staggered to its feet and flew away in a dizzy, confused-looking path.
It took maybe ten minutes for the Zhuri soldiers to clear everyone away from the shuttle. By then the gasoline stink was fading, and Ila had calmed down enough to talk.
“I thought they were peaceful!”
Mom stroked Ila’s hair. “So did I, sweetheart.”
“What are we going to do?” I asked.
“We’re going to wait,” Mom said.
A few seconds later, a Zhuri voice came through our shuttle’s speakers with instructions for us:
“DO NOT EXIT THE SHIP. REMAIN IN PLACE.”
They didn’t need to worry. We weren’t going anywhere. A minute later, there was another announcement from the shuttle speakers:
“THE UNIFIED GOVERNMENT OF CHOOM APOLOGIZES FOR THIS DISTURBANCE. WE ARE CLEARING THE AIR OF EMOTION. DO NOT EXIT THE SHIP.”
Eventually they managed to clear all the attackers off the tarmac and get the electric fencing up again. Then some kind of hover truck came out, and a bunch of little green Krik wearing these weird pants-free overalls—which were the first clothes I’d seen on any of Choom’s creatures—hosed down the ship, cleaning all the orange muck off of it. After that, we watched another group of Krik workers take down the stage that had been set up for our arrival.
“So much for the welcoming ceremony,” Dad said as they carted off the pieces.
“We can’t stay here,” said Ila. “We have to get off this planet.”
“Let’s just take things one step at a time,” Mom told her. “We’re safe right now. That’s the important thing.”
After the Krik workers finished cleaning the shuttle, they flew off in the hover truck, leaving the tarmac empty. Then nothing happened for a long time, except that the speakers occasionally reminded us not to go anywhere:
“DO NOT EXIT THE SHIP. AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.”
We sat there for a couple of hours. Over time it got less scary and more boring. Eventually Ila and I started watching Birdleys episodes. We were on our third one when the shuttle began to move.
It taxied across the tarmac and into an open hangar, which closed behind us. The shuttle came to a stop.
“PLEASE EXIT THE SHIP.”
The frame of the exit door lit up again, its handle blinking for us to open it. We all went to the right-hand windows and looked out.
Half a dozen Zhuri soldiers stood on either side of the exit door, holding pronged weapons. Between them, two unarmed Zhuri waited, facing the door.
“What if they attack us?” Ila asked.
“They’re not going to attack,” Mom said. “I promise.” The rest of us followed her to the exit.
“Remember,” Dad told us as he put his hand on the door handle, “we’re friendly and peaceful.”
“They just tried to kill us!” Ila yelped.
“I didn’t say it’d be easy.”
Dad twisted the door open, and we put our feet down on Planet Choom for the second time. Now that I knew they could deliver a jolt of paralyzing electricity, the pronged weapons pointing at us from both sides were even scarier. I tried to smile as I walked behind Mom and Dad toward the two unarmed Zhuri. But the guards shifted their weapons to follow us with each step, and it’s tough to smile when you’re afraid you could get electrocuted at any second.
“Greetings,” said one of the Zhuri. The translator gave him a gruff, raspy voice. “I am Heeor. I represent the Executive Division of the Unified Government of Choom.”
A funky sour-milk stink was filling my nose, making it even harder to smile.
“I am Leeni of the Immigration Division,” the second one said. She must’ve been the same official who’d spoken to us in the videoconference, because the translator app—which had thousands of human voice signatures in its library, and was programmed to assign a specific one to each Zhuri so we could tell them apart by their voices—gave her the same squeaky little-girl signature as before.
“Greetings,” Mom said to them. “I am Amora Persaud of the Governing Council of the human species. This is my husband, Kalil Mifune, and our children, Ila and Lan.”
The sour-milk smell was getting worse. It seemed to be coming from the Zhuri themselves.
“We apologize for the disturbance following your arrival,” the gruff-sounding one said. “There was a mechanical failure in the protective fencing.”
“May I ask what exactly happened?” said Mom in her most diplomatic voice. “The crowd seemed to be spitting on us.”
“That was venom,” said Leeni, the squeaky-voiced one. “It is a biological defense that evolved in the Zhuri’s pre-civilized state. It is even more strongly discouraged in our society than smell. But like smell, it can be difficult to control in extreme situations.”
“Please forgive our ignorance,” Dad said, “but what is ‘smell’?”
The Zhuri looked at each other before answering. “Smell is emotion,” Leeni explained. “It is how the Zhuri express feeling. When the anger smell becomes strong enough—as it was among the crowd when you arrived—it triggers the release of venom.”
So that gasoline smell during the attack was anger. I wondered if the sour-m
ilk stink they were giving off was an emotion too.
“Why were they so angry with us?” Mom asked.
“Because your species is violent,” the gruff one explained. “You threaten our peace.”
“With all due respect,” Mom said, “we are not violent.”
They both reared their heads back like Mom had just insulted them.
“You destroyed your own planet.”
“Other humans did that. Not us. We have learned from the terrible mistakes of others. All the humans who wish to take refuge on Choom are peaceful. We renounce violence and will not harm anyone on your planet.”
“Hundreds of Zhuri made strong disagreement all over the shuttle while you were inside,” the gruff one said. “If you are so peaceful, why are you not in great fear for your safety?”
“We are in great fear,” Mom told him. She looked at the rest of us, and we all nodded.
“Our children are terrified, and so are we,” Dad said.
The Zhuri looked at each other again.
“But you make no smell,” Leeni pointed out.
“Humans do not show emotion through smell,” Dad explained.
“Then how do you communicate your emotions to other humans?”
“It shows on our faces, and in our voices.”
“So at the moment, you are in fear also?” Leeni asked.
“Yes! Of course,” said Mom. “We were just attacked by a swarm of your people.”
“That was not a swarm,” the gruff one said. “It was an angry gathering.”
“What is the difference?” Mom asked.
“A swarm is violent.”
“How does it get more violent than that?” Ila yelped.
Mom clicked off her translator and turned to my sister. “Ila: Don’t talk.”
“Sorry.”
“As I said,” the gruff one continued, “we apologize for this disturbance. We are preparing another shuttle to return you to the human ship. It will be ready soon.”
Mom looked confused. “Why would we return to the human ship?”
“For your own protection,” he said. “As you have seen, your presence causes strong disagreement. For your own safety, surely you do not wish to stay?”
“We very much wish to stay,” Mom told him. “As we have told you many times, there is nowhere else for us to go.”
The Zhuri looked at each other again. “But everyone agrees it is best if you leave,” said Leeni. “The emotions you have created make it too dangerous for you to live on Choom.”
“With all respect, we did nothing to create those emotions. All we did was step off the ship. Our only wish is to live here in peace. If you give us the chance, we will prove this by our actions.”
The two Zhuri leaned their heads toward each other and began to whisper in voices that were too low for our translators to pick up. As they did, the sour-milk smell, which had been fading away, spiked up again. Leeni began to rub her wings together in a strange, awkward movement.
Finally they turned back to us.
“We will discuss this with others and return shortly,” the gruff voice said.
The two of them walked in their bendy-legged way to a door and exited through it, leaving us surrounded by the six Zhuri soldiers. Whatever the sour-milk smell was, it disappeared along with the unarmed officials.
“Hello,” Mom said to the nearest soldiers.
They didn’t answer.
“My name is Amora,” she said. “May I ask what your names are?”
The soldiers said nothing. They just kept staring, their weapons pointed right at us.
Eventually we got the hint. The four of us went back inside the shuttle to sit and wonder what the heck was happening.
“What do you think that sour-milk smell was?” I asked.
“Bureaucracy,” Dad answered.
I knew that was a joke, but I didn’t get it. “What do you mean?”
“He means,” Mom said with a sigh, “that those two didn’t have the authority to make a decision about us. So they went to find someone who does.”
WE WOUND UP sitting in the shuttle until the middle of the night.
Early on, we got hungry, so Dad opened a container of Chow. I’d been hoping that once we got to Choom, I’d never have to eat it again. But getting attacked by venom-spitting aliens (no, sorry, we were the aliens, according to Dad) had left me too hungry to pass it up. I forced down a slice of Barfing while Ila and Mom ate some Choking. Dad had Heaving, which he always picked even though it was the worst flavor by a long shot. I’m pretty sure he ate it out of guilt for having helped create the stuff.
After a while, we all had to go to the bathroom. But the Zhuri ship didn’t have one, and when we asked the soldiers if there was one in the hangar, they just stared at us. In a weird way, I was grateful for the distraction. Until my bladder filled up, my mind wouldn’t stop racing with the same question, over and over: How can we live on a planet where swarms of people spit venom at us just for being here? The worse I had to pee, the harder it was to focus on being scared out of my mind.
For a while, Ila and I tried to take our minds off of our bladders by watching the Birdleys episodes we’d brought along. After we went through all the ones on our screens, I tried to download more from the library up on the transport, but I couldn’t make a data connection.
“The ship’s in orbit on the far side of the planet,” Dad explained. “We can’t get a signal until it comes around again.”
“How long will that take?”
He checked his own screen. “An hour, maybe?”
“Just try to get some sleep,” Mom said. “Isn’t this gravity making you tired?”
“Tired” wasn’t quite the right word. It felt like my flesh was drooping off my skeleton. I lay down on the floor of the shuttle, but it was hard and uncomfortable, and I worried that if I fell asleep, I’d wet my pants.
Finally Leeni came back for us. “I will be your guide until you return to the human ship,” she said. “The Immigration Division has found you temporary housing, where you may stay until you leave our planet.”
Mom didn’t bother explaining again that we couldn’t leave because we had nowhere else to go.
Leeni and four of the armed guards got into the shuttle with us, and we flew out of the hangar and across the city. Mom sat in the front row with Leeni. Ila and I were behind them. Dad got stuck in back with the guards.
The sour-milk smell had returned when Leeni did. It was clearly coming from her.
“I have noticed,” Mom said, trying to pick her words very carefully, “that there is a smell. Is it caused by an emotion?”
I saw the top of Leeni’s head rear back when she heard the translation.
“It is not polite to point out another’s smell when they are attempting to control it but cannot,” she said.
“I’m so sorry!” Mom said quickly. “I did not mean to offend you.”
“I am making a great effort to control my fear smell. It is difficult in your presence.”
On top of the sour-milk smell of fear coming from Leeni, I caught a little whiff of gasoline anger. That seemed to be coming from the soldiers behind me. They must not have liked the way Mom was questioning Leeni.
“Please do not be afraid of us,” Mom said to Leeni in a gentle voice. “We are peaceful. We would never do anything to hurt you.”
“Thank you for saying that,” she replied.
Nobody spoke for the rest of the trip. By the time we got where we were going, both the fear and the anger smells had faded away.
We touched down in a little subdivision of a dozen identical honeycomb-shaped houses, all arranged in a six-sided ring around a wide lawn. The shuttle landed on the lawn’s edge, and Leeni led us through the moonlight—which was much brighter than on Earth, because
Choom had three moons—to the nearest house.
Like all the others in the ring, it was dark, empty-looking, and a single story tall, although that one story was at least as high as a two-story building would’ve been on Earth.
“These houses were built for Ororo, so their features are quite large,” Leeni said, and she wasn’t kidding. The front door was wide enough to drive a truck through. Or a six-foot-tall marshmallow, which I guess was the point.
We stepped inside, onto a spongy floor that reminded me of kiddie playgrounds back on Earth. There were three bedrooms connected by large doors to the big main room, which had what looked like a giant couch at one end and an equally giant (but very low) table in the middle surrounded by chairs as wide as park benches. At the back end of the main room was a wall of machinery and countertops that looked like a kitchen.
The room we were all desperate to find was in the far right corner.
“The Ororo make body garbage in the same way humans do,” Leeni said, pointing to the bathroom door. “You may put yours in the container inside that room.”
“First!” Ila yelled as she ran to it, slamming the door behind her. I lined up to go next.
“Hurry up, Ila!”
“Do the Zhuri not make…‘body garbage’?” Dad asked Leeni.
“Our waste products leave our bodies as sweat,” she told him. “Biologically, this is much more efficient.”
Also much more gross, I thought as I heard Ila yell from the other side of the door:
“OHMYGOSH, THIS THING IS ENORMOUS!”
A moment later, there was a noise from the bathroom like a rocket engine.
“Everything okay in there?” Mom called out.
Ila emerged, shaking her head. “Don’t sit on it when you flush,” she told me. “It’ll kill you.”
She was right. The toilet was practically hot tub–size, and just low enough for a human to perch on its edge. When I pressed the flush button, the whole thing rose up two feet, shrank to a third its normal width (which was still about five times too wide for a human to sit on), and created a noisy suction so strong that I could feel the air getting sucked into the bowl from halfway across the room.
