I told a lie about someone I knew, so I could get a job in his place. And he had been the one who had told me about the opening. I'm so very sorry.
It was a human sin, weighing on an alien's soul. While Aurinn's sin, and the sin Perle had confessed, they were alien sins weighing on human souls.
The alien confessed another sin, then another, and another, and when the last sin had come out, it went limp and closed its eyes.
“Process complete.” Flikka's voice was frayed, but strong. “Potential zero. Absolution has been obtained.” She paused for a second or two, then added, “I'm removing the restraints.”
Then, moving quickly, she undid the length of chain. Caspar helped her. The effects of the cigarette had faded by now, and his mouth was empty of all words.
When they had removed half the chain, the alien opened its eyes and helped free itself. It rose from the bed, then took Flikka's hand in his and made a gesture with the other hand. Caspar could not understand it; in fact, he could not interpret the alien's body language at all anymore. It was like looking at a statue.
The alien released Flikka's hand and went out of the workhouse. Flikka and Caspar followed, uncertain. Outside were thirty Security, looking determined. The alien halted, spread its arms wide, hung its head, raised one foot then the other, alternately.
The ring of Security left one opening, leading outside. After a while, the alien stopped its display, looked around itself. It moaned gently, like a snatch of song, and began slowly going back, toward the landing field. Security closed up behind it and this way it returned to the metal fish. Caspar and Flikka trailed the procession, unwilling to let the being out of their sight. It did not look back at them; Caspar did not know if he wished it had, or not. No one prevented the alien from going aboard. The access door shut behind it, and then the shuttle took off in an astonishing fashion, floating five meters off the ground without any thruster firing, then suddenly rising in a steep parabola, up toward orbit.
Caspar and Flikka were taken to confer with Administration. Flikka told all she had seen, repeated it several times. Caspar was questioned also, a long and unpleasant process. His neck soon began to ache from all the nodding and headshaking. Flikka protested on his behalf, but the interrogator did not relent.
After a long while, the questions ceased. The Administration woman heaved a sigh, shut off the audio/video recorder.
“Thank you for your cooperation,” she said. “Please return to your residence now. If there is anything more, we will contact you.”
Flikka's body had been speaking anger louder and louder throughout the interrogation. Now she let her words take over.
“I'm not going away. I want answers of my own, and now.”
“You're lucky not to have been taken to carcery, Confessor Moën. Your actions endangered the whole of this station, and some Administrators wanted your head.”
“Fuck them.” Caspar started at the words. In Flikka's mouth they took on an intensity they never had in Perle's. “You know damned well I acted correctly. If it was a human who'd come down and killed left and right, we'd have had no recourse. Isn't that right? That's what I was taught in school: we serve starship crews, and their rights outweigh ours.”
“We've been through this already. Please go home now. You've had a very difficult time and.…”
“Answer my questions, Administrator. What did you learn about this being? You must have tracked the ship when it left. What happened to it? Tell me. Or is it that you're so low in the hierarchy that they didn't bother to tell you?”
The Administrator's mouth twisted in exasperation, a meaning which must have been plain to anyone. But then, surprising Caspar, she relented.
“It wasn't a ship that came down. It was only a shuttle; but you probably guessed that. The ship itself…is fifteen kilometers long. It looks like nothing you could imagine. It can't, or won't, answer us. From time to time, it broadcasts gibberish at various EM frequencies. We have no idea what it wants, or where it's from. We're defenseless against it. That's all we know. Now please, please go home, and keep this to yourself. People have already been panicking, and we've had six deaths too many.”
The mask had slipped from the Administrator's face and her weariness and concern were plain to see. Flikka lowered her gaze and left without further words, her hand linked with Caspar's.
When they entered the Moën house, the family fussed about them no end. Flikka recounted what had happened, but she refused to go into details. She seemed to have been won over to the Administrator's opinion now, and her hands said she wished she could stay utterly silent. Finally she broke free from her mother and father's attentions, and went to her room, locking the door.
Caspar was left the focus of attention, something he found unpleasant. He was asked a few questions, but everyone soon gave up, lacking the Administrator's persistence. When he was let go, he went to the standard-issue refrigerator and poured himself some juice, holding the pitcher in his left hand and clumsily steadying the glass with his crippled right. In the living-room his parents and grandfather were talking in lowered voices. From where he was he could just see the painting, in which Grandmother waited, waited, waited for the ball to reach her hands. Suddenly, with a queer shock, he remembered very clearly that at one time the ball hadn't been in the picture.
He ran up to his own room then, feeling bone-tired. He found he was crying, not for the Security who had died, but, strangely, for all those who had lived. He did not understand. He thought then, for the first time, of reading his own body, to understand what he said to himself. He looked at himself in the mirror above his dresser, but he could not make sense of what he saw. In the end, he crawled into his bed and fell prey to a sleep full of nightmares.
And in the morning, before the sun even came over the rim of the horizon, Security came for him and Flikka. The shuttle had returned. They were wanted.
There were three of the aliens now. They were utterly identical: size, shape, and colors. But Caspar could tell them apart; two of them shouted pain and terror from their bodies, while the third was as unreadable as a piece of stone. By that he thought to recognize the one he had helped yesterday. The aliens had been standing at the foot of the shuttle, almost motionless, until they saw Caspar and his sister. Then they came forward, and the absolved one spoke again in its music-like language.
And they proceeded as before. The aliens went with them to Flikka's workhouse, and one, then the next, were chained, confessed, absolved of the human sins that weighted them. Flikka knew fear this time, Caspar saw, she was no longer overwhelmed by what she did, and she could fully taste the weirdness of it.
But it went well, and eventually it was done. Flikka collapsed in a chair, drained. The aliens made gestures and spoke words no one could interpret, Caspar least of all. Then the first one came to him and took his crippled hand in his, and led the way out of the workhouse. The other two followed, and Security, and Flikka.
The aliens made their way back to the fishlike shuttle; then Caspar's hand was let go, and the three went inside. “They're going away, now,” said Flikka in a tired voice. “They'll never come back, will they?”
Caspar did not know, and it hurt him deep inside, not to be able to know. It was as if some essential meaning had drained from the world. He waited in silence, along with the others, for the shuttle to lift off.
But then, the door opened again and one of the aliens came back out. It carried a bag on a strap across its shoulder. It put the bag down, opened it. Took out six strange objects of metal and lights, a meter and a half high, and set them on the ground. The pattern they made seemed familiar; then Caspar understood it was the pattern the bodies of the six dead Security had made.
Two more things the alien took out of the bag. One was carved, from some sort of wood, crimson with gold veins. It might have been a musical instrument; it might have been something else. The alien stepped around the pattern it had built and presented the wooden object to Flikka. She accep
ted it, keeping silent.
The alien took the last object from its bag then, and put it in Caspar's arms. Flikka hissed in astonishment. Security shouted incoherently. Caspar, for the first time in his life, knew what it was to have one's hair stand on end.
It was a doll, nearly a meter high. A slim young girl, dark-haired, wearing multicolored robes and calf-high boots. She looked fully human, and she was warm to the touch.
Caspar looked up from the doll, and saw the alien moving back into the shuttle, and then there was no more delay: the metal fish rose from the ground and sped off into the sky.
Once Aurinn had recovered, Flikka and Karl rented a small boat and took her, along with Caspar, on a brief cruise. On their first evening, when the sun had slipped below the horizon and the North Sea lay all about them, they sat down on deck. Karl lit a cigarette and gave one to Caspar. Aurinn was shocked, then amused: on Wolf's Hoard, such practices were considered the depth of barbarity. Greatly daring, she tried a puff, and coughed herself hoarse.
When Aurinn had stopped coughing, Flikka said, suddenly and quietly, “I don't think they were aliens.”
“How can you say that?” said Karl. “You saw them. No one except Caspar saw them from closer up. They weren't human. You saw their ship.…”
“But we've all seen this.” And she pointed to Caspar's doll, which was dancing slowly on the planks of the deck. The doll wasn't just a manikin; it moved, it looked about, it danced, at odd moments. The Administration had tried to take it from Caspar, but the doll had evaded their grasp, and finally, afraid of it, they had relented. Now it accompanied him wherever he went, a dreamtoy, living and not.
“Karl, do you think they could have made such a thing in the few hours between our first meeting and their return? And even if it was possible, how can you explain that they looked so much like us? By any rational account they should have been completely different. We've both seen sinners who looked almost as strange.…”
“You think they were human,” said Aurinn. “But you said they didn't speak. And the sin that…that almost killed me…it wasn't a human sin.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Humankind is spread out so wide. Maybe somewhere, they've been engineering themselves into something…new. Different. I think that's what we saw: humans who've been altered so profoundly that we almost can't recognize them. People who were isolated from the rest of humanity for so long that they forgot many things…I don't know. We can't really know, but that is what I think.”
“And what is this, then?” asked Karl. Caspar's doll danced on the deck, long black hair flying, booted feet stamping a complex rhythm on the planks. “A toy? An idol?”
“Administration feared it was a spy; an information-gathering device. They thought it might be transmitting data back…somewhere. But what if it is, anyway? If we are coming into contact, whether it's with aliens or with a long-forgotten branch of ourselves—isn't it better that they learn more about us?”
“I'm sure Administration fears they'll use the information against us.”
“I know. But the one that came down…one of only three crew for that huge ship…it only killed when it was blocked. Caspar guessed, somehow, what it had come down for. The same as all of our crews: to be absolved of the strange sins it had picked up crossing overspace. And when it dies, its soul will dissolve into overspace and its sins will float there, waiting to be snagged by a living soul, and perhaps then laid to rest at long last.…”
The doll danced on, oblivious to Flikka's musings. Caspar rose and walked a ways toward the prow. The doll followed him, still dancing. Caspar drew on his cigarette, letting the smoke bubble up to his head. The doll spun and whirled, smiling, then slowed her dance into a courtly pavane. The others might speculate all they wanted, but Caspar knew what her purpose was. He knew that one day she would be able to speak, and that on that day the strangers would return.
He breathed in the smoke of the cigarette, and his dead tongue was loosened in his mouth. He spoke tobacco words to the doll. And, in the midst of her dance, she winked at him, to show that she understood.
Invasion
JOANNA RUSS
Joanna Russ is one the finest stylists of the last forty years in science fiction. Her stylistic excellences were indeed the foundation of her reputation in the 1960s and early 1970s, only to be superseded by her reputation as perhaps the most cutting-edge feminist in SF in the 1970s, the author of The Female Man, “When It Changed,” and The Two of Them. She also wrote critical essays (for which she has received a Florence Howe Award from the Modern Language Association and later the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association) and reviews (mostly in Fantasy & Science Fiction) throughout the 1970s; she then fell silent in the mid-1980s.
She has published too little fiction since winning the Hugo award for her novella, “Souls,” in 1983. Not even a story a year. So it is a rare treat to find a stylistic tourde-force such as “Invasion.” It appeared in Asimov's in the same month (January) as a letter from Russ in the magazine's letter column responding to an editorial. She also published a substantial collection of her essays, To Write Like a Woman, a Hugo nominee in 1996. We can only hope for more. This story is pure fun.
They were terrible.
The Doctor found one under the operating table in the hospital (impossible to tell its sex) that regarded her suspiciously and then, as she reached for it, vanished with a pop! of inrushing air.
The Second-in-command discovered three of them between the sheets as he started to make the bed in the quarters he shared with the Captain. The creatures rolled away from him, grinning, and vanished.
An especially small one—who'd been in the swimming pool, it seemed, and who was dripping wet, its yellow costume all soggy—materialized against the hand-woven tapestry on the cabin's wall, slid down, and left a trail of water-blurred color behind it. It shrieked excruciatingly and vanished.
The Navigator walked into her study area and found two of them sitting on top of her antique wooden book-case. Normally a peaceful woman, even a bit shy, she threw herself at the intruders, shouting “No!” only to receive a painful barrage of books in the face, most of which then rolled under the bed as she grabbed for them, acquiring disc-destroying grit in the process. Several hit her on the forehead, hard. When she was able to scramble out from under the bed, her hands full of them, the intruders were gone.
One perched weightlessly on the Communicator's head as he was combing his hair. Two others landed heavily in his lap. One said, “Comb my hair”; another, “Give us a kiss.” The one sitting on his head dropped into his lap, crowding the other two (who kicked and rocked for a few seconds, trying to get the lap back for themselves alone) and asked, in an unexpectedly deep, hoarse voice, “Do you like worms?”
The Communicator thought for a moment. Then he said, “Worms are fine in the soil of Botany Level Two, but nowhere else.”
Little number three looked in its overall pocket, sighed, its whole face expressing woe, and vanished. Little number one-in-the-lap cried, “Comb my hair!” so he did, using the mother-of-pearl-backed hair-pick that had been in his family for generations. Two rocked back and forth on his lap, humming—they were actually fairly heavy littles, he decided—and number one subsided into dreaminess while having its wild, fuzzy, orange hair combed. The combing accomplished, the Communicator thought for a minute or so while little number two sucked its thumb. Then he said, carefully, “I'm going to tell you a wonderful story. Once there were three little people and they were just like you—”
The Engineer found that one of the creatures (a really young one) had crawled inside a ventilation duct and was gnawing at the lining with a look of fascination on its pudgy features. An older one was reaching for the fusion reactor controls. The Engineer was not one to act hastily or unthinkingly, even when something threatened her engines, and she also had the great advantage of having been brought up on a male-dominated planet as the eldest of nine. Stealthily she reached for the shelf nea
r the radiation-proof door, on which she kept items confiscated from tourists or staff, mostly food and some gadgets her assistants had carried into the area, or rather had planned to carry, for she was down on anything that might interfere with efficient single-mindedness. (She over-compensated for her bringing-up.) The little one (she thought) should like a jingling bunch of keys, while for the other she took off the shelf a torus toy, made of rubber and filled with nothing stranger than plain water…that crawled out of your hand no matter how you held it. She mimed dramatic dismay. The small little crawled with amazing speed out of the duct, its plump rear switching from side to side. It pounced on the fallen torus, only to have the older little pounce on it, in turn, and pull the toy out of the baby's grasp. The younger proceeded to mourn its loss with loud screams of anguish. The Engineer picked it up, like the expert she was, and jiggled the little. Then she jiggled both the little and the keys against her shoulder. It grabbed for the keys and inspected them. It made them jingle. The bigger one looked calculatingly at her as if to say, You want this back, don't you? and she shook her head. Then, wondering if the creature could understand any human speech or behavior, she spread both hands out, palms front, meaning It's yours if you wish. The little went to its companion, picked it up (staggering under the other little's weight) and made it way to the corridor. The Engineer, enormously relieved, punched the complicated signal that locked the Engine Room. Now the doors would open only to her voice command or that of her primary assistant.
There was a tap on her knee.
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