[2016] Prisoner of the Alien

by Viv Phoenix

  I tightened my grip on myself and scooted into the far corner, too outraged to do anything but avert my gaze from the bucket that reduced me to a creature with no humanity. My captor hadn't raped me, but he'd taken away my entire being, rendered me into a thing subject to their control in every detail.

  I hid my face in my knees and wept behind the curtain of my hair.

  A pebble skittered. I jerked upright, flattening my back against the bars, far from the door. My haunches hurt from staying tensed on alert for so long I rose into a crouch, gripped my knife. The first alien, the handsome, massive one I watched, not the one who attacked me, approached the cage. He gazed at me as the sun fell into the dark. On him, the flared feet looked alright. He stood with his thighs spread, dust flaring behind him like a cape, much as I first saw him, his radiance undimmed by the darkness. I wanted to touch his sleek skin. Would he feel cool as water or as fevered as I felt?

  He motioned to the guard.

  The guard unlocked the cage.

  The big male beckoned me to him. As much as I hated the cage, I balked at the unknown. Was my life in his hands?

  Come. I'll keep you safe. I looked around me. The words seemed to come from him, but his lips hadn't moved.

  I've learned your language. I'm Koz. Our ship, like a boat that moves through space for years, had a failure and we had to land here. We're stranded. We've been watching your kind since we arrived. There seems to be nothing we can do to get home, although we keep working on our ship and searching your world for solutions. As much as we wish it otherwise, it's possible we must live out our lives here. Please, come out. Let's get to know each other. He radiated goodwill toward me. I crawled to the doorway and emerged, blinking up at him.

  "I'm Rar. It's because of the sound I made as a baby, between a mew and a roar."

  "Good. We'll speak. I want you to be comfortable with me, Rar." He motioned the guard away. He made no move to touch me.

  He said my name right, making a tiger roar. Impressive. It must be difficult to speak a new language, adjust to a new place outside the home of his ship and his world. I didn't want to be impressed or feel for him, but I did. I felt the loneliness, imagined the jarring strangeness of a foreign place and foreign people from deep inside my sense of being an outsider, outside my sister's and her husband's love, outside the loving families of other people who found a compatible mate. Outside most of my people who went about their lives without spending hours a day poring over the scrolls that told the violent, implacable and toxic history of our world and the apocalypse we brought on ourselves.

  He stood next to me in silence and looked up to the stars. His home spun somewhere in that vast space. It must hurt him to know he'd never see it again.

  We should have stopped the humans at any cost. Why didn't we at least try? Adults never answered that question. I began to understand why. My parents didn't mean to be evasive. They didn't know. Perhaps this nightmare turn of the wheel spared me from having children and having to meet their earnest, accusing eyes, and tell them I didn't know why shifters didn't save the world, only that we didn't. All this toxic mess you see around you is the legacy of our failure. Maybe death stood as the sole release from that shame. I squared my shoulders. I wouldn't go down without a fight. No matter what the cost. We'd survived this long, it couldn't end this way, under the power of cruel invaders who called us beasts. He tilted his peaceful face to the moon and stretched like a tiger. I quelled the hope flaring in my heart at the sight of his broad back.

  He started walking. Unable to imagine any other option, I caught up with him. Perhaps the caging did what they intended. I no longer thought of resisting or trying to escape. I'd do what I must to remain free of the cage. As disloyal as it felt to think it, it seemed these others might have much to share with us. Ships that flew through the air like birds! Such things hadn't existed here since the war that ended all war. But I didn't have the impression the strangers were the sharing kind.

  A guard opened a tent as we approached. This tent stood taller and spread out larger than all but one of the others. Every feature of their camp expressed inequality and a fighting culture. Why so many guards, all armed as though about to go hunting, if they wanted to befriend us? I didn't trust them. But this one, I found him appealing, with his tall, strong body. He was not unlike my brother-in-law, although in an unfamiliar form, with a longer torso and muscles that bulged wider. Was he bigger everywhere? I feared for my virginity.

  I blushed and hoped his sensitivity didn't extend to understanding my thoughts.

  I followed him into the tent, wary, but again aware of no other option. These strangers could kill everyone I knew, render our entire culture and history meaningless, ended.

  "Be comfortable. I'll prepare refreshment." Koz presented his back with the ease of a man who knew no threat, a warrior to his core.

  I'd seen pictures of many dead, piles of bodies, in scrolls of the old times, before all the kinds chose to cooperate instead of war. The cooperation came too late. The warring ended many peoples, entire kinds of the humans and us, before it stopped. Many survivors died in agony from radiation, diseases and murdering each other for food and access to water in the blasted wasteland.

  I walked around the tent on the odd floor that gave under my feet, and kept the ever-present dust and sand out. I searched for books of any kind, pictures of his world, his mate, but saw none.

  "You have no mate?" I blurted. I covered my mouth.

  "No." He kept his back turned mercifully. "Relax. Tell me what happened to your world. From space we saw it bears scars from brutal wounds."

  I took a long breath, tried to compose myself. This might be more difficult than fighting. But I didn't want to fight this one. I watched lamplight lick his defined shoulders and my fingers twitched.

  "Despite learning to read the scrolls and poring over them from the time I learned to read, I don't understand the war that ruined our planet. All the killing, for what?" I shrugged, although he couldn't see me. He picked up a long knife and I tensed. He started slicing fruit and I resumed my tale. "Long ago, our world wasn't so much desert and so many empty places with no life." My head hurt, thinking about it. "What did anyone desire to gain that justified such mass murder and the destruction of the exquisite ecosystems that once thrived here? I kept studying, I still do, looking for an answer. Pictures of intricate life webs that extended through the earth, the trees and the waters-- so much wonderful water-- stab my heart." All my years of questioning and I never imagined trying to explain my legacy of shame to an alien from space. This was the story etched on my heart, over the origin story we all learned as children: how our world became the planet Gon, transformed from a miracle planet sustaining uncounted life forms to a wasteland with a few species dwindling to their inevitable ends.

  "Yet some of you live."

  "We survived for generations, the shifters and a few species of animals, birds and fish. No non-shifting humans remained-- people who had one shape and created bombs and biological warfare for inflicting unthinkable horror. They weren't missed. Explorers, my parents among them, set out every few years to try to find other survivors or learn if any parts of the world fared better."

  "Did they find any?" He continued slicing with a soothing rhythm.

  "They all died. Miren the eagle often found the bodies, dried as mummies." I kept the worst part, the part it was better the aliens not know, to myself.

  We were all dying, our numbers dwindling because so few in each generation were fertile. We didn't mate with shifters of other species, that was taboo to us, so we would die out. I'd solved that equation years ago, watched the shadows on my parents faces when I asked about it, watched their averted eyes as they lied and said we should have hope.

  I fingered the fabric of a cloak, marveling at its unwoven texture. I paced his tent, glad he didn't press me to speak more.

  My sister gave me a strange hope that ended up twisting inside me. She broke the taboo. She mated with a
bear shifter by learning from Miren how to enter the other world, an alternate world humans haven't destroyed, yet, but where shifters have to hide. Lida endured difficult rites for years to hone the power to enter that dangerous world. She explained without condescension that even with years of training, few had the innate ability to do it, that for most, it would be as ineffective as training as a singer without musical talent. She understood I wanted to go, and didn't like having to tell me it wasn't as straightforward as opening a door and walking into a new place, or making the grim trek to the empty city. She met my eyes without recrimination, her knowledge that I went there there hanging between us. Most of our people had no interest in esoteric practices, in the mental mastery required to make that journey. My sister vowed not to do it again. All she needed from there was Garhan. I rested my palm on a table, tired. I ached as though I'd walked all day. All the things I'd lived with, pushed to get out, but I wouldn't betray my people to the aliens.

  Koz washed berries at a basin on the table, taking care to use little water. My mouth watered.

  Garhan was a doctor. Lida appealed to him for help, but she refused to tell me why. He repressed his bear nature to live in that world and Lida roused his nature. He took her in his exam room. Her telling me of their mating sparked my desire for a mate. Because of all my sister and her husband did for us, which no one would name, people spared them the penalty for their crime and accepted them in a way. No one else dared break the taboo.

  Koz poured precious water into cups for us and filled a tray with berries and nuts. He moved with fluid grace for such a huge man. Lamplight caressed his sculpted chest, his belly muscles, the silvery trail to his bulge. Perhaps perversion ran in the family.

  As afraid of the strangers as I felt, I couldn't help wondering if they might help us. If they might be, strange as they were, able to mate with us. My face went hotter and I ducked my head to hide in my hair.

  I walked around his tent to avoid seeming impatient for food.

  Fabrics so fine none of them showed any weave made up his tent and beautified the large platform of pillows that dominated it. I marveled at everything, gaping like the boy in a favorite story who went to a city to seek his bride, back in the ages when cities lived.

  "It's not what we're used to, but we're doing our best to," he paused and stroked his chin, "Learn new ways. Your world seems to have nothing of use for our ship or for things we build where we're from," he pointed into the sky as though I might not have figured out that he meant they came from another planet, "But it's rich in trees, plant fibers. Much lower in animals than I would have expected, though, and with few people." He held out his arms, seeming to express he found our world mystifying. "I decided we won't use leather and the captain agrees. It's better to let the animals live and mate so there will be more of them in the future. Of course, we'll make full use of any that die."

  "I see." I ducked my head to show I understood. Did he include us in the things he'd make use of when we die? Would I become part of a tent for the invaders, my bones polished to make utensils?

  I struggled to think of these aliens living here, doing what they liked to anything and anyone because they had the power-- the power to cause agony and kill. I blushed at the thought of him doing to me what I saw Garhan doing to Lida. And this one, this alien had the power to blackmail me for my foolishness in allowing my curiosity to undermine my duty. Yet having everyone learn that shame would be better than the strangers killing everyone, searing their brains. My cruel mind showed me my sister's face, stretched not in pleasure but in excruciating pain.

  "It's still a habitable place. We're continuing our scans. Like you, we want to know if other areas have greater resources for sustaining life. By keeping our impact her minimal, the area and the animals recover. Not in our life times, though."

  At least he seemed perceptive to our world's diminished state. If they slaughtered animals to use their skins and pelts as people used to do, there would soon be none left. And if they hadn't noticed we transformed, they might have killed us, too, before stopping to consider or communicate. Our world had a history of people who did such things and called it colonizing. Moving to a land and taking it, decimating the inhabitants, fouling it, making it theirs the way a plague makes a host body its own by destroying it. Long in the past. I liked to believe we changed, that none of us would exploit or harm others of any species. But I wasn't sure of it.

  These strangers made me aware of doubts and concerns about everything, including our natures. I learned so much from Mom and Dad, but I realized they lied, lies meant to spare me pain. They treasured me beyond life as one of the few children for miles. They knew how rare their joy in being able to make a family was in this blasted land. Perhaps they had no way to foresee my disillusionment, my grief, the belated and intensified pain at their deaths turning inward and making me long to die, too. I didn't tell anyone, not even Lida. I finished shrieking in the church, and huddled on the stone floor below the thorn-crowned corpse and thought all night about killing myself.

  Koz beckoned me to the table. I perched on a rickety bench that matched the one groaning beneath his weight. The rough table and seats didn't match the rest of his place.

  "Forgive the furniture. I had to make it myself. My specialties are security and linguistics, not carpentry." He grinned and his eyes sparkled.

  I couldn't help smiling. The meal of things that grew from the ground reassured me. Maybe the horrible one threatening to eat me lied. I shuddered.

  "Thank you for the food and drink." I quaffed the clear water. It eased my dusty throat and cooled me. The dark hadn't brought relief from the heat. Some days, no breezes moved. I slid my fingers, chilled from the cup, across my brow. My nipples hardened and I hunched to hide them.

  Koz ate with good appetite. I picked at the berries and nuts, despite my hunger. My guilt lay too heavy on me for feasting. If I'd reported the stranger as I should have done, I wouldn't be a prisoner. And the life of every shifter wouldn't be in danger. My belly burned, as though the serum ate at my insides like a serpent to keep me from ever becoming tiger again. Tears welled but I wouldn't let them fall. The handsome stranger mustn't see my fear.

  He licked his fingers and sucked berry juice off his thick thumb. Tingles went through me right where I touched myself at night thinking of Garhan. I sat upright, licking my fingers, following the teaching to mimic my hosts when our family visited other kinds of shifters. Manners vary from kind to kind. My parents believed that knowledge, understanding and communication overcame prejudice. Yet they always supported the elders' rulings. Had they lived, they would have disowned Lida for her choice of mate. I shook the thoughts away. They hadn't haunted me so much in a long time. My present guilt recalled the past, the part I played in their deaths. No one else must die because of me.

  While I lived, I had a duty to perform. I might yet make up for my mistake. I had more questions about the aliens, these invaders of my world. A rule not to kill animals didn't guarantee all of them followed it. I imagined a guard with bloody hands, a skinned doe at his feet. He stood puff-chested with pride for killing her. This attractive stranger, for all his seeming earnestness, might be lying. How could I trust him? But his body. His body drew me like no other. Garhan seemed small by comparison.

  I stole glances and blushed. His musculature amazed me. Dropping my fear, I looked at him full-on. He wasn't a sun, he couldn't burn me. Oh, but he could. His proud chest expanded with each breath he took. The play of light and shadows over his nipples, his silvery skin, his flat belly leading to his-- my skin heated.

  He didn't seem to mind gazing at me, either. His glowing eyes drank me in; his jaw slackened as though drunk from the sight of me. He shook his head.

  "You look uncomfortable. Here, come with me." He gestured to the platform piled with cushions. I blushed, realizing it was where he slept. But the tent held no other place to sit in comfort.

  "Forgive the familiarity. None of us is accustomed to making f
urniture. Most of us incline to research and navigating by the stars." He pointed upwards again, as if the differences between us meant I must be slow, "And other skills of limited use in these conditions."

  "But--." I gestured to his body, uncertain how to phrase my question. The life he described didn't require a hulking physique such as that.

  He smiled, his thin lips making his face somehow more like mine, more attractive, and for that, more frightening.

  "I'm glad my shape pleases you. You shifters aren't the soles beings in the universe who transform. We watched you for days before concluding you each have one other form. That's right, isn't it?"

  "Yes."

  "We morph to suit our circumstances. We arrived in forms more suited to space travel, lean and far less muscled, with lower mass and far lower fuel needs. This mass," he gestured to his chiseled abdominal muscles and bulging thighs, requires large meals and heavy physical activities to maintain. But as my work rearranging boulders and building drains to keep the water clean shows, its power is worth the maintenance."

  I padded across the resilient floor and sat down. The platform gave more comfort than I expected. I looked down at my feet, letting my hair fall over my face to hide my confusion, my reaction to his beauty and the small, functional thing it was to him. It wasn't real, it wasn't him. He might look like a fish or a hairless mole. That alluring body was one of countless shapes for him, unlike my two, which were me. It was like falling in love with an illustration in a scroll. I couldn't be feeling anything for the alien, no.

  He handed me a blanket. The courtesy and the comfort of it calmed me. Maybe he hadn't brought me to his tent to mate with me against my will.