We're Not from Here

by Geoff Rodkey

  Instead I smelled doughnuts.

  “MAKE THE WALK!” someone yelled.

  “TRY TO FLY AGAIN!” whined somebody else.

  I just smiled as I weaved my way to the front door.

  I was definitely on to something with this comedy business.

  But that something was dangerous. When I walked outside, my guard was waiting. He usually held his prong weapon low and pointed at the ground, but as he followed me to our pod, he held the business end of it up in front of his chest, tilted slightly toward me. It was such a hostile move that as we got into the pod together, I wondered if I’d survive the trip.

  Fortunately, he settled into his usual seat, and other than leaving his weapon pointed up, he ignored me. Eventually I felt safe enough to take out my screen and send a long message to Naya:

  Hi! Need HUGE FAVOR ASAP: can you search ship’s archive and send me clips of best 10+ moments of physical/slapstick comedy you can think of? Scene in Ed & Fred when Ed barfs on Fred for 30 seconds straight—on Bonehedz when Howie falls off balcony—also Internet vids, like basketball hoop crashing down on annoying kid’s head—any others you can think of. More dumb/physical = better. Hard to explain why but VERY important. Don’t send whole movies/shows, just short clips. Maybe ask other people for their favorites too?

  PLEASE SEND ASAP!! NEED IT TONIGHT!! THANK YOU!!!

  Ruff, ruff

  After I sent the message, I jotted down some ideas on my screen for what I’d decided to call Meet the Human! It was going to be the funniest pro-human video presentation ever seen on any planet anywhere. It’d make every Zhuri who watched it sweat their pants—or just sweat, since they didn’t wear pants—with laughter.

  Once I created the video, I had to figure out how to show it to the whole planet without getting myself arrested or kicked off of Choom.

  I suspected Marf could help me with that. There might even be money in it for her. So when our house came into view and Marf’s pod was already parked outside, I practically jumped from my seat.

  I stood at the pod door as we landed, eager to hop out as soon as it opened. Somehow I’d managed to forget all about the soldier who’d electrocuted me at lunch, even though he was still sitting just a few feet away.

  As the door started to open, I heard the whine of his voice behind me.

  “Everyone agrees your time is short.”

  I turned to look at him. He was close enough that I could see glittery shards of my face reflected back at me from his compound eyes.

  “Your kind will leave here,” he said. “Sooner than you think.”

  “Have a nice day, sir,” I managed to say. Then I ran as fast as I could into the house.

  * * *

  —

  I BURST INSIDE, expecting to see Marf and Ila. But the place was empty except for some open containers of Ororo food on the dining table.

  “Hello? HELLLOOOOOO?”

  Ila’s bedroom door opened, and she sprang into the room. Marf lumbered in after her, carrying a bag of tools.

  “Hi! How was school?” Ila practically skipped over to the food at the table.

  “What were you doing in the bedroom?”

  “Nothing. Marf just wanted to see it.” She popped a chunk of purple Ororo food into her mouth.

  Something weird was definitely going on. Marf moved past me, headed for the door with her bag.

  “Can I talk to you about something important?” I asked.

  “I am in a great hurry,” she said. “But I have something I want to give you. Can you walk with me to my pod?”

  “Sure thing.” I followed her outside, past the guards in front of our door. “Why are you in such a rush?”

  “Because sometimes events move faster than we’d like.”

  “What events?”

  “STOP! THE HUMAN CANNOT BOARD THAT POD WITHOUT APPROVAL!” The guards were flitting toward us, their weapons out.

  “The human is not going anywhere,” Marf informed them. Then she turned back to me. “Wait here a moment.” She disappeared inside her pod for a few seconds. When she came out, she was holding the two-foot-tall Krik robot she’d shown us the night before. She handed it to me.

  “I want you to have this.”

  “Why?” I stared up into her big dark eyes—and, for the first time, I saw the sadness that Ezger had told me about.

  “Because if we don’t see each other again, I’d like you to have something that helps you remember me.”

  A clammy feeling started to creep through my whole body. “What are you talking about? Why wouldn’t we see each other again?”

  Instead of answering, Marf gestured toward the little robot in my hands. “The power switch is behind its neck. Don’t leave it on, or it’ll eat all your electronics.” She turned away, toward the pod door.

  “Wait! Marf! You’re freaking me out here!”

  “Goodbye, Lan. I enjoy your company! But I must go.”

  “Wait! Where are you—”

  She shut the door before I could finish the sentence. Two seconds later, the pod shot straight up in the air like a silent rocket. It crossed the fence with a piercing BZZZT!, paused in midair, then zipped off toward the center of the city.

  I looked down at the silver metal Krik. Its lifeless eyes stared back at me. The creeping dread was getting worse. I went back into the house.

  Ila was at the table, eating Ororo food and drumming her fingers to a song in her head. “What the heck is going on?” I asked her.

  “Nothing. What’s up with you?” she said through a mouthful.

  “Where was Marf going? And why were you in the bedroom together?”

  “She just wanted to see it. What do you think—we were making out?”

  Just then, my screen beeped with a message from Mom:

  What happened at school today????

  I knocked out a quick reply:

  Long story. Can explain when you’re home. But good news!

  Then I went back to grilling my sister. “Ila—what’s going on? Tell me!”

  She snorted. “Nothing! Why are you being so paranoid?”

  My screen beeped again. When I looked down at Mom’s reply, my stomach dropped to somewhere around my knees:

  It’s not good. Turn on the TV.

  I RAN TO the couch and turned on the TV news. It was showing a segment about some kind of hive construction project the Unified Government had just announced.

  “What’s happening?” Ila asked.

  “I don’t know yet. Just wait.”

  We didn’t have to wait long. The next segment began with a shot of my school.

  “Today marked a disturbing new development in the Unified Government’s human immigration experiment. The children of the Iseeyii Interspecies Academy were terrorized during their midday nutrition when a human younger ran amok.”

  There must have been a drone camera somewhere in the lunchroom, because the image switched to a grainy, slow-motion replay of my leap onto the empty stool. The lower legs of one of the Zhuri kids in the cluster above me were just visible, and in slow motion, the way I flapped my free hand in the air made it look like I was reaching up to grab at the kid’s leg.

  Even worse, with the sound stretched out, the delighted shrieks of all the kids in the lunchroom sounded more like cries of agony.

  “Without warning, the violent and primitive animal lunged at a defenseless Zhuri child, attempting to drag it to the floor.”

  “THAT’S NOT WHAT HAPPENED!” I yelled at the screen. My dread was curdling into panic.

  “Iseeyii’s chief educator expressed shock and concern at this act of violence.”

  The image switched to an interview with the principal outside the school’s front door.

  “This was both unnecessary and hurtful,” the principal said. “For
the safety of all our students, I have taken steps to change our security arrangements by—”

  His interview ended in mid-sentence, the image replaced by an old Earth horror-movie clip of a man with knives for fingers chasing a screaming teenager.

  “It is unknown at this time whether the new security measures will include banning the human animals from attending school.”

  “THAT’S NOT WHAT HE SAID! HE WAS TALKING ABOUT THE GUARD!”

  “Regardless, the human presence on Choom may come to an end as early as tomorrow.”

  The image switched again, to a shot of a cluster of older Zhuri, led by the dead-eyed chief servant, flitting from a pod into a building.

  “In response to the latest violence, the chief servant has scheduled an emergency meeting with representatives from the Immigration Division. The meeting will take place in the late morning, after which everyone agrees the Unified Government would be foolish not to announce the end of the human experiment.”

  Ila stared at me in horror. “What did you do?”

  My whole body felt like it had turned to jelly. All I could do was shake my head. “I just made them laugh.”

  * * *

  —

  “YOU’VE GOT TO understand,” I told my parents for the third time, “they all loved it. And the principal was totally on my side! He practically told me to make a video! With comedy in it! That whole news report was a lie!”

  “I know,” said Mom as she rubbed some of Hunf’s antivenom cream onto her arm. “Unfortunately, it was an effective lie.”

  By the time Mom and Dad had left work, huge antihuman protests were underway outside both their workplaces, and Mom had gotten hit with a stream of venom. The TV news had claimed the protests were more evidence that we were causing disagreement, even though what had really caused the protests was the TV news’s lying about what I did in the lunchroom.

  They were still running the lie on the news every few minutes, and the longer they kept it up, the worse the protests got. Judging by the noise of the whining we could hear as we sat at our dining table, there were at least a thousand angry Zhuri outside our subdivision.

  “I’m sorry.” Tears welled up in my eyes. “This is all my fault.”

  Mom reached across the table to take my hand. “It’s not your fault. You won over a whole school full of kids. That’s good. And not everybody believes the news. Leeni’s on our side, and I get the sense he’s not the only one. There are a lot of people in the Immigration Division who I think want to give us a chance.”

  “The trouble is,” Dad said, “will they have the courage to speak up for us in that meeting tomorrow? Or will ‘everyone agree’ we should leave?”

  “I don’t know,” Mom admitted. “I can’t tell how much influence Immigration has inside the government. It seems like the Executive Division’s the real center of power.”

  “The Executive’s run by that old guy who came to dinner, right?” Ila asked. “The one with the dead spots in his eyes? Who said art was poison?”

  Mom and Dad both nodded.

  “And at this meeting tomorrow,” Ila went on, “he’s going to decide whether we stay or go?”

  “Unfortunately, that’s what it sounds like,” Dad said.

  My screen beeped. It was a message from Naya.

  These are the best clips I could find. WHY DO YOU WANT THEM?? So random!!

  Ruff, ruff

  Attached to the message were a dozen files. “Naya just sent me the clips,” I announced. I’d already explained my idea for Meet the Human! Mom and Dad had both agreed it was worth a shot.

  “Get to work on the video,” Mom told me. “Your father and I will try to figure out how we can get the Zhuri public to watch it. It’s going to be risky, and there isn’t much time. But Leeni might be willing to help us.”

  “I’ll try to find Marf before school and ask her too,” I said.

  Mom and Dad gave me quizzical looks. “How can Marf help?”

  “I don’t know for sure. She won’t give me a straight answer to anything. But yesterday…” I paused. “She made me swear I wouldn’t tell you this. But she’s got some kind of illegal business. She offered me a ton of money for my Birdleys videos. At first I thought she was reselling them to other Ororo. But now that I think about it, she might have wanted to sell them to Zhuri instead. Maybe she can help us distribute a video to people.”

  “How much money did she offer you?” Ila asked.

  “I think it was four hundred rhee an episode?”

  “That’s it?”

  “What do you mean, ‘that’s it?’ ”

  Ila bit her lip. “She gave me five thousand.”

  “What?”

  Ila reached into her pocket and pulled out a shiny metallic disc, crosshatched with circuitry. She showed it to us in the palm of her hand. “Supposedly, there’s a ton of money on this chip. Unless Marf lied to me.”

  Mom was shocked. We all were. “Why did Marf give you five thousand rhee?”

  “So I’d play a song for her.” Ila stood up. “There’s something I have to show you guys.”

  * * *

  —

  ILA LED US into her bedroom. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you right away. I just didn’t want to mess it up.” She opened one of the bottom drawers along the wall. It was empty, but she bent down and probed with her fingers along the inside of the upper frame.

  “Oh geez, where is it…? Here!” She pressed an unseen button. A few feet away, a three-foot-square trapdoor opened in the floor.

  “What the heck?” Dad exclaimed.

  Ila reached into the secret compartment and pulled out an acoustic guitar. The body was made from some kind of red plastic, and it was strung with gold wire.

  She took the guitar over to the bed and sat down, laying it across her lap. Her face practically glowed with joy. I hadn’t seen that kind of look from Ila since we’d left Earth. It was like she’d suddenly rediscovered her whole reason for living.

  “It took forever to tune,” she said as she strummed the guitar lovingly. “And Marf had to rebuild the bridge a couple of times. But it sounds so good now. I played ‘World Turning Round’ for her, and she recorded it on one of those drone cameras. Then she built me this compartment to hide the guitar in. She said I could keep it as long as I didn’t tell anybody.”

  “How long was she here?” I asked.

  “A few hours. She came in the middle of the day.”

  So that was where Marf had gone when she left the lunchroom.

  “This is amazing,” said Mom, shaking her head.

  Dad nodded. “And it explains something…I think.”

  “What?”

  “This afternoon at work,” he said, “one of the Zhuri supervisors came up to me. He was whispering, like he didn’t want anyone to hear him. He said, ‘Can you make the noises?’ When I said, ‘What noises?’ he got spooked and walked away. I think he must’ve been talking about music. But this would’ve been before Marf recorded you today.”

  “She already had my Pop Singer videos,” Ila told him. “She got them off my screen when she stole it from Lan. That’s why I played ‘World Turning Round’ for her—when she gave me the guitar, I started to play ‘Under a Blue Sky,’ but she said she already had that one.”

  “I bet she’d already sold the Pop Singer clips to people,” Dad said. “And the guy at work saw one of them. For him to approach me like that…he must’ve really loved it.”

  Mom looked at me. “Can you get hold of Marf? Right now?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know how to get in touch with her. I either see her at school, or she comes here.” I turned to Ila. “What about you? Can you reach her?”

  It was Ila’s turn to shake her head. “She said she’d come find me when she wanted to make another video.”


  “Does anybody remember how to get to their house?” Mom asked.

  “It was all a blur,” said Dad. “We were moving too fast. And on the way home, it was too dark to see.”

  “The guards outside might know.” Mom turned and started for the door. “I’ll tell them we need more antivenom cream from Marf’s parents. Maybe they’ll give us a ride.”

  Unsurprisingly, the guards wouldn’t give us a ride. They also wouldn’t answer Mom’s questions about how to get to Marf’s house, or even how to get in touch with Leeni to ask him for help.

  “Leeni’s planning to come by in the morning,” Mom told us. “Until then, I don’t know what we can do.”

  “I can try to find Marf before school,” I offered.

  “That doesn’t leave us much time. The government’s having their meeting in the morning.” Mom sighed. “But I guess it’s all we can do.” She turned to me. “Get to work on that video.”

  “Clips of people tripping over themselves aren’t going to save us,” Ila told me. “You should make a video with music instead of comedy in it.”

  “No,” said Mom. “We should make one with both.”

  * * *

  —

  THE FOUR OF us worked on it together, huddled over my screen at the dining table until the middle of the night. When we finished, Meet the Human! was ninety seconds of physical-comedy gold, followed by Ila’s tear-jerking version of “Under a Blue Sky” from the Pop Singer show. The song didn’t have anything to do with the comedy, but somehow it all seemed to work.

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t use a different song?” Ila asked. “I mean, if people have already seen this one—”

  Dad interrupted her. “Sweetheart, if the whole planet had heard ‘Blue Sky’ already, they wouldn’t be having a meeting to talk about throwing us out. They’d be breaking our door down with free guitars.”

  Or throwing us in jail, I thought. But I didn’t say it out loud.