Repositioning the mast, I begin on another stone in the pile. I am so far from the chute that I can’t see it glow, a reminder of how far I have to go. My underside is bruised from the labor, but still I pull down on the mast, bending it with my effort. This stone, though, will not budge.
I select another position on the rock slide, guiding the mast into a gap, and grasping one end of the lever with my flipper to keep it stable. Then, anchored by my tail once more, I pull down, down with my full strength.
In the exertion, memories escape from confinement, from the prison I’ve built for them to keep from going mad. I remember Itiia, and Ebiaria. They were so young! As were we all. We must have been foolish young pups to try such pranks as we did. To commandeer the chute for the purposes of mayhem. Some of my friends came back with fine monster stories. We snorted with happiness at the images of creatures running from grotesque freaks: ourselves! To our delight, many sentient life-forms were terrified of such as we. At the time, it seemed amusing. My courage was slow to kindle, so that I was one of the last to use the chute. I selected Earth, because the creatures there were known xenophobes, all the more hilarious. That must have been around the time they caught my companions and shut down the interstellar chute. Then, it seems, they went on with their lives, forgetting about me.
Until now.
When I go Home, who will remain among the old crowd? Itiia, I hope, and Ebiaria. Though we’ll have to act ashamed of what we did, I still plan on hearing their monster stories. We might be old by now, but I hope we can still laugh. Truthfully, my own stories will be a bit tame. The creatures aren’t really afraid of me, not like they used to be. You can’t keep a good horror story fresh forever. Because over time, people start to love their monsters.
That’s something I’ve learned.
I’ve also learned that the lever idea is a bust.
Something dangles in the water from the sunny top of the lake. Linked together are many small white globules.
I’m interested, but don’t like to admit it, because they’ve come—whoever they are—in a power craft. The propeller hangs in the water, churning it, scaring fish away, and worse, growling at a painful decibel level. I swim closer, to look at the item draped into the water. Strung together are many lovely white stones. The hand that grasps this item is wrinkled and spotted. It is the old woman, having forsaken the fine quiet boat for an obnoxious loud one. My spirits are low. I think about seeking out the quiet depths of the Loch. But instead, I move into the twilight realm, where just above me, I can see the hull rocking on a moderate chop of waves.
She turns off the engine. Sorry about the loud motor, she says. She leans over the side, sending her voice down to me, although this isn’t really necessary. Water carries sound all too well.
/ don’t row as well I used to. Did you like the clock?
Ah. Clock.
It belonged to Jack’s mother, and sat on her mantle for sixty years and then on ours for, oh, decades. There’s no one now to appreciate it, really. Except you. She shakes the little white stones. This is a pearl necklace, a rather good one, actually. Her grip tightens. But you’ll have to come get it.
Her face scrunches up, and she emits a little gasp. Disappearing into the boat, she takes the white stones with her. She’s playing a new game, one I don’t much care for.
I circle under the boat, waiting her out.
After a few trillion picoseconds, she peers over the side again. About the motor. I do apologize. Ugly, stinky things, I quite agree. But I’m past my rowing days, and since I’d like to die on the lake, this kind of boat will have to do. If there was anything more you wanted from the house, I would have brought it for you, but I assume there’s no way you can let me know. You can’t talk to me, of course. Maybe you can’t even understand me—though I used to tell Jack that you had picked up our language. He scoffed, of course. Jack was all for empirical evidence, but his eyes sparkled at me, and I knew he’d love to believe it. I hope you liked the funeral urn. He asked me to commit it to the lake, and so I’ve given it to you. I like to think you’re taking good care of him.
She leans farther over the boat. Of course, if you insist on circling under this boat, I’ll never know, will I?
Her mouth purses up, her eyes closing. Oh dear, that was a bad one. Gave up the little pills last week; they made me dizzy. Did you get them?
I hadn’t. Were they in a nice bottle, I wonder?
She isn’t leaning over the side anymore, and by her voice, I judge that she is lying down. The old woman is sick. Now that I am paying attention, I notice by the quaver in her voice that she is very sick indeed. The creatures’ inadequate medicine can’t help her. No wonder. They still burn fossil fuels and use disposable diapers. (Yes, I’ve seen a few of those, as well.)
I glance into the deep. So I’ve got the old man’s ashes. Well, as I say, people grow to like their monsters. In fact, she implied that—in my little stack at the bottom of the lake—I have everything she owns of value. It is startling to think that she has no one else to give them to, while for me, they’re just trinkets and collectibles. It shames me.
I am hovering now, some distance out from the boat, where it’s easier to see what she’s up to. She’s just sitting there, watching the water, no binoculars, no frenzy of anticipation. That’s when the decision comes to do it.
The sun is setting behind the crags, dragging a mist over the water. Anyone out for an evening stroll won’t see past the shoreline. I rise up, breaking the surface, unfolding my neck with considerable effort, and at the same time, extruding my tail in a matching curve above the water. The cool breeze wicks heat from my skin. I turn to regard her as she sits in the little boat. She is so small, her skin a pale pink like a turtle’s tongue, her head sprouting white hairs as delicate as dandelion pollen.
Normally, I would immediately plunge back down, but something keeps me frozen in place. For one thing, she hardly reacts to my appearance, giving me a surprise of my own. She just sits and watches me, nodding to herself over and over. I swim a little closer, despite the strain of holding my head up. I have my pride, after all. Monsters aren’t weaklings.
Her face has taken on an expression that I’ve learned is a smile.
You’re just as I always thought you would be. Quite wonderful She nods again. Thank you.
I let myself sink slowly, so as not to splash her. As I descend, I note that she has a long rope coiled in the bottom of the boat.
It hasn’t been easy to teach her. At first she tried to give me the entire rope, and there was no end of misunderstandings. At last we got her end securely tied and a noose rigged on my end.
Half the night is gone now, and we must hurry in order to finish before daylight attracts unwelcome attention. Sometimes my helper rests, and I think she may not last until morning, but if she’s in pain, she doesn’t show it. She keeps herself entertained by guessing what we’re dragging around down here. She has quite an imagination. Yet I feel sorry that I can’t tell her, sorry that at least one Earth creature won’t know the story of how I came here and how I went Home.
Above me, the motor screams under the strain of hauling the rocks, and the cacophony has shattered my tympanic membrane. Despite the pain, I reattach the noose, and give a tug on the rope. The old woman guns the engine, while I push with my nose. Somehow, the rock comes loose.
And so on, through the long night, moving enough rocks to allow my passage into the chute.
Now, dawn strains down through the depths, faintly, like the memory of a memory. I know that our time is gone.
But we are ready.
Swimming to the surface, I find her lying in the bottom of the boat. I arch over her, worried.
She says, Did we finish the work? Did you find what you were looking for? She opens her eyes, but they are cloudy.
I lay my head on the gunwale, resting, past all pride in front of her.
She nods. Good, It feels so good to finish something worthwhile,
&nbs
p; The mist on the water is rising, creating a thin white curtain, not like a lake at all, but some region of half-water, half-sun. Behind this scrim, I can perform the feat she’s asked of me. Not that I care anymore, what people see. They’d see a monster wresting an old woman down to a watery death. A lurid tale. One I’ve fostered, I suppose.
She has managed to sit on the side of the boat, legs dangling over, rubber boots filling with water.
I’m ready, she says.
I open my mouth, and gently take her in my jaws. The thick coat she’s wearing protects her skin from my teeth. She has folded her arms around my upper head, holding on tight. Then she pats me on the forehead. By this I know I have her permission to take her under.
And so I sink down. It’s difficult to see where I’m going, her arms being in the way, but I send out pulses, and the path is clear. Her hair streams behind like bright grasses, growing dim as I leave the upper regions.
All night I’ve been thinking how needless it is for her to die of simple physiological malfunctioning. My kind don’t live forever, but creatures like her have pitifully short lives. So I think of taking her through the chute, which, if done quickly, she might survive. Perhaps she could heal under our ministrations.
But I am not heading toward the chute. Instead, the old woman and I are approaching my lair. Her grip is loosening, but mine is steady. Now that we have arrived, I settle on the sandy floor, and wait with her. She has stopped breathing, but I sense her thoughts may still flow, and I would be ashamed to hurry this part.
It is a good time to reflect that during my imprisonment here not all things have been bad. I’ve formed a relationship with the local creatures. A twisted one, and built on lies, but still, it was better than being alone. Frankly, some years the tourists kept me alive, though it is a difficult thing to admit. And now, on the last day of my sojourn, I have made a friend. I feel that I know her, and her husband, too. Through the night she talked about their life together, and I listened well. So it is hard to bring her here instead of the chute.
But I think she wanted to be near the old man. She said so, though she didn’t know all the options. I have had to figure out, from what I know of her, what to do.
I carefully tuck her body into a crevice, amid my collected treasures. Then I find the vase and wedge it next to her, securing it with a good stone.
A strange feeling comes over me, like deep waters trying to flow through my tissues, trying to pass through my body in hidden channels. I let the feeling surge and ebb.
Then I carefully nip the strand of pearls from her outstretched hand.
It’s the only thing I’m taking Home.
Yet there is one more thing I have to do. As I rise to the surface, the sun is fully up, and the day’s warmth has brought a crowd to the overlook.
I wait until the last of the mist has evaporated. Then I arch steeply up, sliding out of the water, and raise my pectoral flipper at the astonished onlookers. Before they can loose their boats on the water, I speed downward, laughing, toward the still-glowing chute.
Back to Contents
THE EAGLE HAS LANDED by Robert J. Sawyer
I
‘VE SPENT A LOT of time watching Earth—more than forty of that planet’s years. My arrival was in response to the signal from our automated probe, which had detected that the paper-skinned bipedal beings of that world had split the atom. The probe had served well, but there were some things only a living being could do properly, and assessing whether a life-form should be contacted by the Planetary Commonwealth was one.
It would have been fascinating to have been present for that first fission explosion: it’s always a fabulous thing when a new species learns to cleave the atom, the dawn for them of a new and wondrous age. Of course, fission is messy, but one must glide before one can fly; all known species that developed fission soon moved on to the clean energy of controlled fusion, putting an end to need and want, to poverty, to scarcity.
I arrived in the vicinity of Earth some dozen Earth-years after that first fission explosion—but I could not set down upon Earth, for its gravity was five times that of our homeworld. But its moon had a congenial mass; there I would weigh slightly less than I did at home. And, just like our homeworld, which, of course, is itself the moon of a gas giant world orbiting a double star, Earth’s moon was tidally locked, constantly showing the same face to its primary. It was a perfect place for me to land my starbird and observe the goings-on on the blue-and-white-and-infrared world below.
This moon, the sole natural satellite, was devoid of atmosphere, bereft of water. I imagined our homeworld would be similar if its volatiles weren’t constantly replenished by material from Chirp-chirp-CHIRP-chirp, the gas giant planet that so dominated our skies; a naturally occurring, permanent magnetic-flux tube passed a gentle rain of gases onto our world.
The moon that the inhabitants of Earth called “the moon” (and “La Lune,” and a hundred other things) was depressingly desolate. Still, from it I could easily intercept the tens of thousands of audio and audiovisual transmissions spewing out from Earth—and with a time delay of only four wingbeats. My starbird’s computer separated the signals one from another, and I watched and listened.
It took that computer most of a smallyear to decipher all the different languages this species used, but, by the year—being a planet, not a moon, Earth had only one kind of year—the Earth people called 1958, I was able to follow everything that was happening there.
I was at once delighted and disgusted. Delighted, because I’d learned that in the years since that initial atomic test explosion had triggered our probe, the natives of this world had launched their first satellite. And disgusted, because almost immediately after developing fission, they had used those phenomenal energies as weapons against their own kind. Two cities had been destroyed, and bigger and more devastating bombs were still being developed.
Were they insane, I wondered? It had never occurred to me that a whole species could be unbalanced, but the initial fatal bombings, and the endless series of subsequent test explosions of bigger and bigger weapons, were the work not of crazed individuals but of the governments of this world’s most powerful nations.
I watched for two more Earth years, and was about to file my report—quarantine this world; avoid all contact—when my computer alerted me to an interesting signal coming from the planet. The leader of the most populous of the nations on the western shore of the world’s largest ocean was making a speech: “Now it is time,” he was saying, “to take longer strides”— apparently significant imagery for a walking species— “time for a great new American enterprise; time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth . . .”
Yes, I thought. Yes. I listened on, fascinated.
“I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade”—a cluster of ten Earth years—”is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth . . .”
Finally, some real progress for this species! I tapped the ERASE node with a talon, deleting my still-unsent report.
At home, these “Americans,” as their leader had called them, were struggling with the notion of equality for all citizens, regardless of the color of their skin. I know, I know—to beings such as us, with frayed scales ranging from gold to green to purple to ultraviolet, the idea of one’s coloration having any significance seems ridiculous, but for them it had been a major concern. I listened to hateful rhetoric: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” And I listened to wonderful rhetoric: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’ “ And I watched as public sentiment shifted from supporting the former to supporting the latter, and I confess that my dorsal spines fluttered with emotion as I did so.
Meanwhile, Earth’s fledgling space p
rogram continued: single-person ships, double-person ships, the first dockings in space, a planned triple-person ship, and then . ..
And then there was a fire at the liftoff facility. Three “humans”—one of the countless names this species gave itself—were dead. A tragic mistake: pressurized space vehicles have a tendency to explode in vacuum, of course, so someone had landed on the idea of pressurizing the habitat (the “command module,” they called it) at only one-fifth of normal, by eliminating all the gases except oxygen, normally a fifth-part of Earth’s atmosphere . . .
Still, despite the horrible accident, the humans went on. How could they not?
And, soon, they came here, to the moon.
I was present at that first landing, but remained hidden. I watched as a figure in a white suit hopped off the last rung of a ladder and fell at what must have seemed to it a slow rate. The words the human spoke echo with me still: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
And, indeed, it truly was. I could not approach closely, not until they’d departed, but after they had, I walked over—even in my environmental sack, it was easy to walk here on my wingclaws. I examined the lower, foil-wrapped stage of their landing craft, which had been abandoned here. My computer could read the principal languages of this world, having learned to do so with aid of educational broadcasts it had intercepted. It informed me that the plaque on the lander said, “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969. We came in peace for all mankind.”
My spines rippled. There was hope for this race. Indeed, during the time since that speech about longer strides, public opinion had turned overwhelmingly against what seemed to be a long, pointless conflict being fought in a tropical nation. They didn’t need quarantining; all they needed, surely, was a little time . . .
I, Alien Page 7
