I, Alien

by Mike Resnick (ed)

  But before that: doctors in and out of the room, the kid’s little face now a bowling ball, his fingers and toes fat little sausages. And the arms and legs unrecognizable in their edemic monstrosity. Massive does of be-nadryl to control the itching, sedatives to help him sleep in the fever’s furnace, antibiotics to kill the alien invaders ... if only they knew, if only they knew.

  No one told me that it would be this way. The Priests, they kept me in the dark. That was certainly wise of them. I was already protesting and if I had known it would be this way, would I have still gone on with it/ The burning, the excruciating itching which has made the merge possible.

  The merge possible. The next step.

  The transitional step as the host and the Voyager become fused.

  Now I am him: now he is me. I am Mikey in the fire, here we are in the flame, close to death, but we won’t die. We sill survive. We have survived and are so cute once again.

  They say we are cute again. Cute as a button.

  Merged to Mikey in the fire. Mikey the fiery, Mikey the funny, Mikey the redeemer. Listen to our song:

  / am Mikey

  And Mikey am I

  I come from the sky

  And I can fly.

  Why, sky, fly, oh my, so high.

  Never shy and never will die

  I am Mikey

  Mikey is me

  And we can change the world

  Just wait and see.

  Me, we, he, hee wheel

  / am Mikey

  Mikey is laughter

  I was serious before

  But this is after

  Ha ha, Mama, Papa, ha, ha, ha, ha

  So that’s it. Laughter. My mission. From the solemn emerges the irreverent, and it is the Road of Redemption. Make ‘em laugh. Shake ‘em up. Sacred sounds, as their bellies jiggle, the hips wiggle when they giggle.

  Like the vase. It’s funny. That’s what it is. To watch that vase sail across the room, banging into the wall and then the little pieces of glass showering the floor. How they twinkle in the sun, those colors streaming in rainbow splash as they fall. The rainbow shower is ever so much prettier than a dumb old vase sitting on the shelf.

  A flying vase is funny. As funny as telling my teacher that I was born in China, adopted by Mommy, had plastic surgery to make me look American, but couldn’t do the homework because my English skills were still poor. And talking fake Chinese the rest of the day. Ong. Pong. Ching chong. The other kids laughed. They liked it. The rest of the day, we were all going around saying Ing, Ping, Ong Pong, Ching Chong. Only the teacher didn’t think it was funny. Why?

  It was as funny as the sound of tinkle in the kitchen sink. Sinkle. And watching the mailman slide along the path on the yellow thing I left there just for him. Squeal on a banana peel!

  Why won’t Mommy see that?

  Because she just won’t. Not when I’m the one doing it. Oh, she laughs at the guys on television—or at least she used to. The big fat man and the short man. She laughs when they get pie in their faces and when they slip on banana peels and when they throw things at one another. She laughs at circus clowns, doesn’t she? So why won’t she laugh at my red nose and my cheeks? My flying vase and banana peel. And if I can’t make her laugh, how will I make the rest of the world laugh, too?

  Because that is my mission, to make them all laugh. Clever of the Priests to make it so serious—classes and lectures and that scary injection—when it’s really all about being funny. Your mission will emerge, they said. You will learn by going where you have to go. And so it has. To turn everything topsy-turvy. To get them to shred their assumptions. What makes a vase pretty on the shelf and ugly in pieces on the floor? What makes a banana peel funny on television but not in real life? Only those stupid beliefs passed from parents to children. Change those and you can change it all.

  How will they learn to change their assumptions?

  By laughing at everything.

  Everything!

  Down the railing and up the stars, bet you can’t catch me, Mommy! Funny, how you run! You weren’t made for this, were you? Whoops! And when you put the salad on the plate, I suddenly whisk it away so the salad goes right on the table. And when you try to catch me, I say you can’t catch me. No one can catch me! Catch us, I should say. Catch me and Mikey.

  And the look you give. Oh, Mikey, you’ve changed, you say. Your forehead wrinkles and that new annoying line comes between your eyes. Tears on your cheeks. I was supposed to make you laugh, not cry. What’s going on? Why do you take me to that lady, Mrs. Burton, the one who tries to look so important with her silly dolls dressed like doctors and nurses. Why do you get so angry when I make the dolls fly across the room? I’ve got great aim, haven’t I? And Mrs. Burton herself when she reaches clumsily for them. A flying Mrs. Burton!

  Oh, ladies, stop whispering. All those long, serious words about “trauma and adjustment,” “aggressive tendencies,” “repressed rage,” and “inappropriate affect.”

  Laugh and dance. Dance and laugh. Light and fun. Come on, Mommy, watch me run. Mommy, you can help me change the world. Get everyone to see everything different. Hey, is your world so great? War and terror and cheating and pain. Wouldn’t it be better to just laugh and laugh? Mommy, you’re not laughing—

  Mommy is crying.

  “I understand, ma’am,” he says. “There’s nothing more painful than having to institutionalize a child. But you’ve tried everything for this boy. Thirteen years since that bizarre early childhood illness. Thirteen years of treatment. Individual therapy. Family counseling. Psychotropic drugs, acupuncture, herbs. There’s nothing more you can do. But your son is in good hands here and he’ll do very well. Won’t you, Michael?”

  I thought it would be simple once Mikey and I became one. To get them to laugh. To turn sadness into happiness, to change the world, shatter their assumptions, break their idols and make them happy. Simply happy. They were so aggressive, so destructive, but laughter would solve it all.

  But they wouldn’t laugh. Why didn’t the Priests understand, in Orientation Chamber, that they could not laugh? They are not like us. Their complexity, their convoluted, crazy world, it cannot respond to laughter.

  The Priests didn’t know. They did not understand the situation. They had misappraised. But I know now. I have learned.

  The question is—what do I do now? To get it back. Retrieve the mission. A serious mission, to bring frivolity? Infect with laughter, infect the world? What can I do, stuck away in this loony bin, with all these—

  Then all at once I know what to do. And fall down

  in awe, for the Priests understood after all. How to bring the mission, where to execute it, my very failure the necessary stepping stone to my success.

  Begin right at home, of course. What better place than a nuthouse for laughter?

  So I hold a meeting after lights-out and before the meds kick in. Tommy is sleepy and mumbling as usual about the Government. James is preparing for his Second Coming. Arnold is moaning and rocking. Dorian— Well, you don’t want to know what Dorian is doing. The orderlies are somewhere down the corridor, of course. They don’t care. A typical night.

  “Well, folks,” I say, “Do you want to change the world?

  They become quiet. No more Government or Return of the Son. They have never heard me say anything serious before. They have barely heard me speak. I sure have their attention. The orderlies yap on, I hear their voices from down the hall.

  “If we change the world, will you change the Government so they won’t be after me anymore?” Tommy asks.

  “We’ll have a different Government, sure,” I say.

  “But will they show any compassion? Will they leave good citizens alone?”

  “Great compassion. All the compassion you could possibly want and more of it.”

  Tommy considers this. James says, “Government can’t change. The world can’t change until the second coming.”

  “I am the second coming,” I say. “
I begged pass this cup and they did not listen and now I am here.”

  They say nothing to this.

  “Blessed are the light of heart because they shall uplift the world.”

  “Amen,” James says and crosses himself.

  “The Lord God is a God of Laughter,” I tell them. “Just read the second Psalm.” Psalms had occupied a lot of my time years ago. When Mommy went off to cry.

  “You get a lot of good information from the Psalms,” I say. “You’d be surprised what is in there. Harps and lyres and whatnot.”

  “I don’t know what lyres are. What we gotta do?”

  “We laugh,” I say. “That is how it begins. And then we do things to make everyone laugh. If each of us make two others laugh, and each of those take on another two, we can take over the world.”

  “Just laugh?” James says doubtfully.

  “That’s it.’

  ‘Seems pretty silly to me,” Arnold says. “But it beats the crappy therapy and basket weaving. Sounds like more fun than Basic Living Skills, too.”

  Carlo, Ben, Jamal, Kenneth, Dorian, and the others come to join us. The whole men’s ward. “Try it,” I say. “Ha.”

  “Ha.”

  It begins so feebly.

  Ha.

  But it builds. Piece by piece, sound by sound, we give to the world the sounds which the world deserves, which it has always needed. Ha and ha and ha again. And the orderlies come with their syringes and restraints, but there are too many of us, so they call the nurses, but there are still too many of us, as we hear the sacred syllable of redemption from Wards 3 and 4, so they call the doctors, but there are still too many of us, as the women’s wards begin, ha and ha and more ha.

  And the plates go flying, the people go flying, until the top of the nuthouse itself is levitated by our laughter, lifted by that sound, twinkles and twirls at that sudden elevation and as Arnold and James and Jamal and Carlo and Ben and Dorian and Kenneth and I continue that levitating laughter it seems to overtake the world itself; manifest silken strands of light and laughter penetrating the closed and open spaces.

  There is much more to this, but it is not for me to tell that story. My story is of origins, masques, and the sudden flight of running blood. Of contagion, cell to cell, voice to voice, echo to echo. From here, it is for the Kings and the Popes, the Presidents and the Preachers, the Priests and the Headquarters to take over that fierce obligation of laughter, laughter as hot as the sun, burning into all the spaces and places of human habituation.

  Hi, Mikey.

  Good-bye, Mikey.

  Finita la commedia.

  Back to Contents

  HARVESTING by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  I

  STEPPED OUT of the dimension gate at the forest’s edge. The sun was high overhead. It always disconcerted me when I wound up in a different time zone, which was ridiculous, because I always did. At home, it was the hour before the evening rush at the restaurant; here it was before noon, a good time to harvest.

  It was hot and humid in the half-dark below the trees. Unfamiliar, sparkling bugs whined. The air smelled swampy. Sweat started all over me. I shifted the packstraps on my shoulders.

  A small dirt-brown boy with only two arms and legs stooped among low, light-green plants in a clearing nearby. He had a string bag in his hand. He was picking wild lettuce. On his back was another string bag, with three glass balls the sizes of fists in it, separated from each other with moss, each visible in subtle, glowing colors, gleaming in the green-filtered forest sunlight through the meshes of the string. I had never seen anything like those globes before, but I could tell just from their sight and scent that they were valuable, full of promises.

  Anger rose in my throat. I wanted to kill someone. I drew my big knife.

  “Hey,” I said to the boy. He looked up, startled, then thumped back on his heels. “Let me help you.” I sliced through the stems of many baby lettuces at once, angling my blade so that the severed plants flew toward the boy.

  “What?” His eyes were wide, his eyebrows up.

  “Pick fast. You shouldn’t be here. It’s too dangerous.” Who would send a boy alone into a demon wood with such globes strapped to his back? Home in my hive, we wouldn’t let such little ones out at all. His skin wasn’t thick enough to survive brushes with reality.

  What if I were hunting meat instead of fungus? Such a young, soft creature, tender and tasty. I wasn’t the only one who came to gather in these woods. Node pull was strong here.

  He put the sheared lettuce into his bag, glanced at me and away, his face flushed. I squatted nearby, the blade dangling between my foreknees. “Who sent you here?” I asked.

  I could hardly concentrate on my own words. The globes on his back glistened and called to me. “Own us,” they whispered. “Caress us. If you have us, everything snarled in your life will straighten out. All you need is us.”

  “Who sent you here with those things on your back? Don’t they know you’re in danger?” I scythed more lettuce for him.

  He licked his lips. He placed the lettuce in his bag one small plant at a time. Why wasn’t he picking them in armfuls? He had to be quick.

  “We want to be with you,” the globes whispered. “We don’t like it where we are now. We’ll make all your heart’s dreams come true. Take us.”

  I grabbed the bag out of the boy’s hand and stuffed it full of lettuce. I handed it back. “Go home,” I told him. Why was I bothering with this boy? I was only on this world to get swamp truffles for tonight’s special dish at the most expensive restaurant on my world.

  All ingredients guaranteed fresh and organic, but don’t ask where they come from. My leash was pretty tight. If I didn’t return in the next hour with the truffles, someone would tug it, and I would suffer.

  “Take us,” sang the globes. “We will free you of everything that binds you. That Over who plagues you in unfair tasks and orders? Become an Over yourself. That Other you’ve had your eye on? Show her only one of us and she will come to you.”

  Swamp truffles! I’d forgotten my mission. I’d visited this world often to gather produce. There wasn’t much heavy industry here; everything from this world tasted wonderful and fresh. I knew where I was. There was a truffle patch only a little way from here under some ancient oaks.

  I took the boy’s arm and pulled him to his feet. “Go home,” I said again. I shoved him toward the edge of the forest.

  A flood of people came out of the trees. One tossed a leather rope-thing with weights on its three ends. It wrapped around my upper arms and torso. One of the spinning weights hit a globe on the boy’s back, shattering it. It screamed as it broke. Its despair at its own wasting filled me with echoing despair. I had resisted the call of the globes, and for what?

  The stones at the ends of the rope slapped into my sides with bruising force. Pain burst through me. Once my upper arms were immobilized, the weights dangled, swaying.

  “You don’t want to do this,” I said to the people who gathered around me. One darted forward and tugged the big knife from my upper right hand. Another made a loop in some rope he held, and reached for my lower right hand. I tucked my lower hands inside my shirt, gripped the handles of the little harvesting knives in their sheaths.

  A woman broke from the line of people and ran to the boy, hugged him to her.

  “It didn’t hurt me,” he said. “It only helped me.”

  “You caught it for us, Kutu,” said one of the men. “Good work.”

  There were provisions for gatherers who encountered disaster on harvesting forays. In the best-case scenarios, gatherers were abandoned. There were too many of my people on my world, and we were too easily trained for us to be very valuable as individuals.

  Worse-case scenarios involved self-destruction. I wasn’t important enough to rate a bite-down poison, though. Worst-of-all-case scenarios meant that the gatherers were gathered for something unpleasant.

  I had worked my way up from fuel gatherer to fungus hu
nter. My masters valued my special sense of smell; I could find funguses others missed. But I wasn’t the only one like me.

  If only I’d gone for the truffles and left the boy alone.

  I slid a knife free and slipped my hand up under my upper arms. I sawed on the rope thing that had caught me. Even though I kept my knives super sharp, they couldn’t saw through the ropes that bound me.

  Who were these people? Where did they get their ropes? Usually on this world I avoided contact with the natives. Wrong-shaped people in other dimensions got upset when they saw me, so I had made stealth my practice.

  I had no interest in being a meat-hunter. Fungus was what I liked to harvest. It didn’t fight back, and I could snack on it while I gathered. I had finally gotten the job I had always wanted.

  A line of fire striped the backs of my legs, then another. My homeworld handlers were jerking my leash a little early.

  Some of the people around me stirred. They brought out more ropes, made loops, dropped them over my upper parts. Many of these few-limbed people spread out around me, gripping ropes that ended in loops that restrained me, tugging from different directions.

  When there were enough ropes, they dragged me out of the forest into the hot wet daylight

  “But it didn’t bite me,” Kutu said.”

  “You were lucky,” someone told him.

  “You told me it would eat .me or kill me for the wishballs. It just cut leaves for me and told me to go home. It didn’t even try to get the balls.”

  “You were lucky.”

  He pushed away from his mother and came back to where I walked along, responding to the tugs of eight different people with ropes on me, all going in more or less the same direction.

  “I’m sorry, Monster,” he said.

  “Me too.”

  “Kutu, get away from that thing!” said someone.

  He pulled one of the globes out of the bag on his back. I saw where the first one had cut him when it broke. Black blood.

  “Would you like this?”

  I sheathed my useless knives and grabbed the ball from him with one of my lower hands.