by David Coy
Conversation is a two-way street and over the months, the alien had surrendered much about itself and its species.
But a few questions every third meeting or so just didn’t cut it, at least for Felix. In the face of a one-of-a-kind opportunity for new perspectives and knowledge, Felix had a list of questions numbering in the hundreds he would never get to ask. A few of them burned in his brain. In spite of that, he’d been able to piece together some very interesting things about his captors. The most interesting to Felix was the fact that the aliens could not lie. It wasn’t as if they didn’t have the skill to lie, they just didn’t understand how an untruth could be spoken. It would be the same as saying up was down. It was an impossibility of logic. That didn’t mean they weren’t prudent or couldn’t hold their tongues. But they operated on the idea that one could not hold a truth and speak it as something else. It was woven into their culture, science and alien morality as thoroughly and firmly as threads in fine cloth. The way Felix saw it, that particular world view was the cornerstone of their oral history and the foundation on which their science and technology had evolved. It was the singular reason they had such an incredible technology to begin with. No distortions.
When he got to the alpha’s chamber, the alpha was standing eating from a large dull metallic cup. It was older, Felix guessed, by a factor of fifty than its peers. It was uglier, as well, if that were possible. Its bone structure was quite expanded, gaunt and angular, compared to the others. It moved slower and was more deliberate, as the aged are. One of the questions Felix had been able to ask was the alpha’s age. The alpha said he was over five hundred Earth years old. It was fitting, somehow, that this hideous creature was old. Most invading alpha aliens were, after all.
Felix had asked about their diet once and confirmed what he knew already: they were exclusively carnivorous. They had evolved not so much from parasitic stock but from flesh-boring predators that used their own bodies as weapons against the ancient and enormous relatives of the very ship that carried them. Felix knew how dangerous a little grass seed called a “fox tail” could be for dogs and other creatures unfortunate enough to have one work its tip under their skin. The one-way spines on it kept it moving, sometimes throughout the animal’s body, causing massive physical damage, infection and trauma. This alien race still possessed the evolutionary remnants of similar spines that operated in precisely the same way for the same purpose. He could imagine the smaller, harder, more pointed ancestors of this creature attacking en masse, squirming into the body of some hapless behemoth through any available orifice. He had wondered what higher ethic or system of morals could evolve out of behavior with such a ghastly foundation. He decided that the answer was right around him. Silly question.
Today the ugly fucker was lifting limp strips of red flesh out of the bowl with his thin fingers, as if the flesh were soggy, crimson French fries. Looking at that grisly repast, Felix decided then and there that he would never waste a question that sought to expose the exact nature of the meat they ate. He just didn’t want to know.
“Good day,” Felix said on entering.
“Good day,” the alpha replied with its rasp of a voice.
“May I ask a question today?” Felix asked, wasting no time.
“Today was the day you tell me of the weather.”
The use of the word “was” encouraged Felix. “I refuse until you allow my question,” he said, standing squarely. He didn’t know if such body language had any meaning at all to the alien but it was worth a shot. He smiled.
“If you do not tell me of the weather, you will suffer greatly.”
“Then I will suffer.”
“You are foolish.”
“Perhaps,” Felix said staring into the alien’s little black eyes. He’d taken the gamble and rolled the dice. All that was left was to see how they landed.
The alpha lifted another strip of meat up out of the bowl and sucked it into its spiny mouth.
“You are foolish,” it repeated.
The stare from the alien chilled Felix, and he was again reminded that this was not a human, but an alien being swept here from some unfathomable corner of the galaxy. Weakened by the force of those shark-like eyes, Felix was inches from rescinding his request and hoping he could somehow avoid the consequences of his action when the alpha spoke.
“Ask,” it said.
Felix slumped from the sudden release of tension. He had posed this particular question before in many forms and watched the alien deftly avoid it in all its incarnations. The alpha would find an outright lie an abomination, but it was quite skilled at not answering a question it thought imprudent. Felix had the bastard nearly checkmated now by its own alien glitch and its desire for the climate information. This question had burned in him since he’d been captured. The question occupied his nightmares and he would have his answer.
“Why are you here?” Felix almost demanded.
The alien sucked down another piece of meat.
“To keep the chosen planet habitable,” it said.
Felix stared then laughed briefly and it came out like the bark of a small and helpless mammal.
Of course. It’s perfect, just perfect. You’ve come to fill the pit we’ve reserved for you. It’s a deep, dark hole with your name written on the hatch in apocalyptic script. We’ve been waiting for you. Every culture, in every age, has waited for thee.
His fears were confirmed: a pogrom beyond imagination was in the making on board this alien vessel. Within the walls of this strange craft, the utter destruction of Homo sapiens was being planned, worked, implemented, executed.
It sounded so silly in his head that he barked again—a kind of chuckle, brief and deep.
As he stared into those dark, impenetrable eyes, fear dimmed his vision at the corners, leaving only a fuzzy tunnel with the alien’s hideous head at the end. Before he could stop it, his bladder released a teaspoon of urine into his borrowed pants.
Felix stared and thought of what to do next and found few options. Marshaling some strength of will sired by late-night stories of his family’s resistance and silence in Nazi Germany, Felix spoke the oath in his mind:
This creature will get no more information from me. Silence is the only option and I will turn to stone before I speak more.
Feigning nonchalance, Felix opened his mouth to go through the motions of asking a logical follow-up, then asked himself why he should even bother. He’d heard all he needed to know. To make the planet habitable for this alien race, the dominant species on it would be neither subjugated nor ruled, but eliminated utterly. There could be no co-habitation with such an abominable species as this one. The puzzle was complete.
“Talk of the weather now,” the alpha continued.
Felix felt his mouth go dry as if it were packed with warm sand.
“I will talk of the weather only when I understand more about you,” he said with a flourish of false bravado. The sentence took all his air; and when he breathed in, he heard an audible tremble.
Felix had never seen the alien smile and had assumed it was impossible for it to do so. But as he watched the being’s face, he could have sworn he saw just a hint of one. The alpha put the bowl down on the pedestal and walked up to within inches of Felix’s face. For the second time, Felix felt his will
melting under the alien’s repulsive gaze.
The alpha reached out and lifted Felix’s right hand by the wrist. The unpleasant, cool touch put friction on Felix’s muscles and joints, making him resist the alien’s pull involuntarily. Holding it like a palm reader, the alien held a forefinger of its free hand up in front of Felix’s eyes. Felix watched as the very tip of the finger peeled back like a sheath to reveal another substructure, striated orange and yellow, underneath. The structure was tipped with a needle-like stinger. Felix felt the alien’s strong grip tighten on his wrist just as it turned the finger around and jabbed the stinger down into the center of Felix’s palm.
The pain radiated out from
the point of entry like scalding water, and his mouth shaped a scream before he had time to draw a breath. When he finally gulped air and screamed, the scream came out high-pitched like a child’s and the heat of the pain dropped him to his knees. He would have fallen over had the alien not supported him by his hand. He felt the fire flow down through his veins, like lava; and he would have spun into unconsciousness if it hadn’t mercifully slowed, then stopped just short of his shoulder.
As quickly as it started, the searing pain retreated and cooled to nothing.
When he finally wobbled back up to his feet, the alien was still holding the stinger over Felix’s hand. Felix could barely see or hear, but he knew enough to clench his fist as tightly as he could in defense from that evil bristle.
“You will tell me of the seasons now,” the alpha said. The words drifted in on the fog of shock one hissing syllable at a time and after they settled, Felix assembled them into words, and prepared his answer. Before he did, he prayed for the first time in his adult life.
“I will . . . tell you . . . of the seasons,” he said finally and firmly. “When . . . you . . . kiss . . . my . . . ass.”
The alpha released the hand. Still clenched, it came to rest at Felix’s side.
The hand was still clenched when the goon carried his convulsing body, covered with small puncture wounds, out of the chamber eight hours later.
Now used up as source of information, he was taken directly to an inoculation chamber and stung again—this time for a quite different reason. Over the months, Felix had watched in disgust as the aliens harvested these awful grubs. Now under the alien tools, he watched through the red haze of pain as the surgeon, one he had once watched from a safe distance, now removed larvae from his tissues. As he looked over at the translucent jug holding the bloody larvae, he asked how many would die from his own obscene spawn and the pain of that thought resonated deep in his soul.
* * *
From the soakers, Felix crawled on his hands and knees through the dripping water and lay on the pile of clothes in the adjoining chamber, unable to move, for what seemed like days. From there, he made his way to the tube and crawled like a wounded animal up into one of the holes that lined it, then collapsed.
When he awoke again, he saw the bespectacled man sitting cross-legged reading a Bible. He was so peaceful sitting there, reading, turning the gossamer thin pages of the holy book so silently and slowly that Felix was reminded of his Uncle Sol. Not a religious man himself, Felix was nonetheless comforted by the thought that he would die in the presence of one.
It had been months since he’d spoken to a human and the weight of it had built up like water behind a dam. Over the next few hours, Felix Bronkowitz talked and talked and related to the man, as if by confession, everything he had learned from the alpha about the alien’s culture, their thinking, the ship, its power source—and finally, the reason the aliens had come to earth in the first place. The man listened, and except for a few comforting words and platitudes, spoke little.
Felix told the man what he knew about the predatory wasps and how they could not be deployed without advance information about the weather. The weather, he explained, was the key to the whole invasion, and the wasps could only function and proliferate in a very narrow temperature band. Release them at the wrong time in the wrong hemisphere and the advancing cold would stall or halt the pandemic completely. The plague had to be released along a global ribbon, and had to be optimized by the weather conditions in the months following deployment, the latitude of the release points had to be perfect.
Getting the weather information wasn’t so easy because they had no direct taps into Earth’s data. There were only two ways left to get it.
One was to wait for the weather and plot it yourself and they probably had the technology to do that—but not the time. It would take at least a full year, probably two, for sufficient accuracy—and Felix guessed that they had to set down on the planet before then.
The second was to get it from a native who knew it. Felix fit the bill perfectly.
“With the information I have,” Felix grinned, “I could have traded an entire continent. You’re looking at the man who saved Homo sapiens from extinction.”
Those were the last words Felix Bronkowitz ever said because Gilbert Keefer, not knowing exactly how to go about it, put his hands over Felix’s nose and mouth, first one way, then another, and clamped tight until Felix stopped struggling. Gilbert thought at the time how weak Felix was. He had expected him to put up more of fight.
When Felix was dead, Gilbert lowered his head and thanked God for the miracle He had delivered to him. He reached over and plucked the gold star of David off Felix’s neck and placed it in the open pages of his Bible. It would make an appropriate bookmark and be an eternal remembrance of this time and place in God’s history. Someday, Gilbert thought, I’ll have a shrine built for that. All I have to do, right now, is find this alpha creature. I know a lot about the weather.
Gilbert Keefer, an alumnus of Ohio State University, was a degreed and—until his abduction—a practicing meteorologist working for the National Weather Service in Akron, Ohio.
He dumped Felix’s body out in the floor of the tube then dragged it back to the clothes pile near the soakers. It was a common place to die and none would be the wiser.
* * *
Mary crawled up through the opening in slow motion. Her limbs were stiff, and she felt old and beaten. It was a common aftermath of having your body utterly exploited. The sound, the din of groaning voices, persisted this time. It was like a macabre song stuck in her head; and try as she might, she couldn’t shake it. When she saw Bailey curled up and sleeping in the nest, a note of brief joy drifted like a white wisp up out of the bedlam, then died as the dark groans overtook it from below.
The dead man lying on the clothes had been particularly depressing. He’d been so handsome and there had been a sensitivity behind his dark eyes that shone through even in death. He obviously couldn’t take the shock of capture and being processed. She’d seen it before.
She wanted to lie down next to Bailey and forget what she’d been through. She wanted something to somehow make it vanish, disappear completely from her memory. If she could have anything, it would be that single, simple thing.
She lay down and felt herself draw slowly up into a knot. It was an automatic response and unstoppable once it started. Her knees came up and her arms wrapped around them and tightened. With the strength of her will, she forced out the sounds of pain and the wrenching, twisting feel of grubs deep in her loins. She erased the alien’s hideous countenance and thin, nimble fingers. She obliterated the biotic tools and their clever, cruel shapes. Slowly, surely, she erased the chamber’s black ceiling from her mind in broad sweeps.
Before she drifted into the sanctuary of sleep, she felt Bailey’s comforting hand rest easily on her shoulder. She sensed a hesitation; but a moment later, she felt the warmth of Bailey’s legs against her own as Bailey drew up around her, returning the solace Mary had given Bailey after her first cycle.
She slept and dreamt of nothing at all.
* * *
The virulent sound of wasp wings crashed through the walls of sleep and set off alarms of panic in Mary and Bailey. They jerked awake, squealing and rolling under the power of the now all-too-familiar sound.
“Where is it!” Bailey screamed, slapping at her hair.
The sound in the chamber was nearly omnidirectional and Mary tried to locate it by sight, looking frantically everywhere at once.
“There!” she yelled, finding it and pointing it out.
They moved as far from it as possible, to a point against the curved wall of the chamber. Looking for a weapon, Mary darted back up to the nest, grabbed one of her athletic shoes and scooted back.
“What happens if it stings us? Stings us now. Here.” Bailey asked.
Mary’s mind filled with the thoughts of being stung and impregnated by the wasp without benefit of th
e alien’s surgical skill to remove its progeny. All she could manage was, “Quiet!”
It would have to sting and paralyze them both before it could get on with the business of laying eggs in them. But the godamned things were so fast and they seemed to know exactly what you were going to do next and dodged your every move. Mary knew it was possible for it to get them both. She raised the shoe up to the ready and waited and tried to think of what to do. Their only chance was to get the others down here and hope that one of them could kill it before it stung everybody in the tube. There was strength in numbers. Maybe they could overwhelm its uncanny dodging with enough hands and shoes aimed at it.
The wasp sniffed the air with its antennae and almost all the scent was the same. But it detected a few molecules of just-right scent and turned and swooped back and forth to gain its direction.
Mary had seen many wasps in that pre-attack mode. “Scream!” she yelled. “Scream your head off!”
Before they could get the screams out, the wasp had taken a dozen samples of the air around it and locked onto the right scent as surely as a fighter pilot could lock onto a target with radar. It changed the angle of those buzzing wings and flashed out the chamber’s opening.
Bailey turned her scream into a breathy, “It’s gone!”
Mary just let her breath out with a long sigh.
Bailey pulled the husk of the pupa’s casing out by the nylon cord and looked at it.
“Oh, my god . . . ” she said.
“What the hell is that!”
“Phil gave it to me . . . he said it was dead!”
The wasp dove into the strong stream of just-right scent in the tube and veered one way and felt the scent weaken. It turned then and flashed along in another direction. Swooping back and forth in wide sweeps to stay on track, it waited for the weakening in the scent that would signal a change in direction. The signal came as it flew past the opening of the chamber of Pui Tamguma and his brother James. The wasp veered and turned back and feeling the strongest scent closest to the chamber opening, it darted through it.
