The Alien Chronicles

by Hugh Howey

  We were standing around, drunk off our butts already, we men eyeing the women with more rivalry than intent, when that dork Boris piped up above the general din: “Hey! People! Let’s everybody tell a story about the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to us!”

  Yeah, right. That sounded like a great way to ensure that none of us would ever get laid again. Let’s put our very best story right out there, spill all the garbanzo beans. That way, everything we say will be all downhill after that.

  Great plan, Einstein.

  Besides, I had zilch. I’ve never raised baby kittens with an eyedropper. I’ve never been outside the solar system. I’ve never won anything bigger than a club swimming heat. My sheltered Earthbound life had given me no stories to tell.

  Well, it wasn’t like I was going to make the beast with two backs with some pretty girl that night, anyway. Compared to all the cosmetically enhanced spacer men in the room, my face looked like it had been taken apart and put back together with an ice cream scoop. Some of the spacers were replicas of movie stars. Some had shimmering variegated coloration. One guy had a hologram on his cheek that displayed his up-to-the-second net worth. We Old-Money Earthlings still thought plastic surgery and enhancement doodads were nouveau-riche gauche. My parents would have shuddered with disdain if I had ever undergone the knife for pretty special effects.

  “Come on!” Boris said. “Everybody has something interesting that’s happened to them!”

  Nope, not me.

  I turned away with a negating hand flap of derision, but Victoria caught my arm. “Come on, Wellington. Tell us anything. Just play along.”

  My hand holding my glass shook and sloshed punch on my pale skin, soaking a fuchsia stain into the white sleeve. Victoria’s punch was so strong that it might dye my wiry, black arm hairs pink or eat my skin off.

  Blake was quietly tipsy, lounging in an overstuffed chair and talking to a redheaded guy who was practically draped over the arm of his own chair and shouting, “Oh my gods!” at everything she said.

  Lovely Blake. I shied away, inching toward the diamond windows that separated me from the hurricanes and gravity well of Jupiter.

  I’d met Blake in a sophomore sociology class a few years ago. She got the highest grade. I had the second-highest.

  I was Mr. Second: second in my graduating class of five thousand, second in a planetary-wide poetry contest, first alternate for my district’s science competition, and runner-up in an all-state drum competition. My disgusted parents said that I had a mental block that kept me from winning.

  Blake laughed uproariously in her chair, slapping her thin thigh, and waved her beer, nearly spilling it, as she started talking again and waving her hands. She wasn’t perky. No, that word doesn’t convey the depths of her complex sunniness. She was effervescent. Her shimmering bubbles of laughter sparkled.

  She saw me looking at her and smiled. On another woman, such a secret-sharing smile would have been coy. On her, the universe focused on the kind curve of her lips.

  Even from across the small room and on the other side of the circle, I swore that I could smell her. She smelled like herbs, maybe rosemary, clean and succulent among the musty spacers on a station where water was heavily taxed.

  “I’ll tell my best story!” one Asian-ish jock announced. His lush black mustache must have been growing since he was two. “I’ll go! I won my high school chess tournament by tricking the first seed into opening a check!”

  Precious, a scrawny black woman who was too nerdy to be at this party, said, “I’m an Interplanetary Merit Scholar.”

  Everyone groaned. Precious was such a grind.

  Georgie, who had flashing LED tattoos on his face and up both arms, said, “I climbed the Eiffel Tower, on the outside, wearing nothing but a harness.”

  Everyone laughed. We had all heard Georgie’s extreme streaking stories. It was rumored that he’d uploaded pictures of them with his college application and that’s how he snuck into the University of Jupiter, which is very highly selective. Acceptance includes a bus ticket off the cold, slimy sponge of Earth. You either need a stellar GPA and scores or a great story: a sob story or an inspirational tale. Or you need a whole hell of a lot of money.

  The University of Jupiter had been my second choice when they accepted my whole hell of a lot of money. Harvard didn’t want me.

  From outside the circle, Blake piped up, “I hung out with the Chitterers’ Liberation Force for a couple months.”

  Her voice was sunny, like that was a huge joke, like she was talking about riding roller coasters or living in a dolphins’ commune.

  Everyone near enough to hear her inhaled like they’d had nitrogen ice dropped down their spines—everyone except me. I couldn’t breathe. The windows seemed to crack and suck the air out into infinite space. No one thought it was funny.

  If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.

  Chess Jock said, “What do you mean, you ‘hung out’ with the CLF?”

  Blake said, “We went spelunking in the Chitterers’ caves, and we kind of dropped in on them, and we stayed as their guests for a while.”

  Everyone around us was quiet. Certainly no one offered any more of their piddly little stories about chess or grades or not quite falling off the Eiffel Tower.

  Precious swallowed hard and said in a cold voice, “The CLF killed my cousin Leena. She was sampling on Titan, and they dragged her into one of their caves, held her hostage for a week, and then tossed her out an airlock, in pieces.”

  A woman behind me asked, “Why didn’t they kill you?”

  Blake shrugged, almost spilling her drink from her scrawny fingers. “I have no idea.”

  Chess Jock asked, “Why would you hang out with terrorists?”

  The pale skin around Blake’s eyes crinkled softly as she smiled. “Well, they insisted that we stay. It really wasn’t our idea.”

  That’s when we realized that this wasn’t a drunken debauchery story. Blake was telling us a hostage and survival story, but she was telling it like the best of bar stories: a rollicking, drunken good time had by all.

  Because that’s who she was, and that’s how she dealt with it.

  “We?” I asked. My voice was tight in my throat. “Who is we?”

  “Me and Ellis,” she said, her voice as bright as the marigold light streaming off the planet below.

  The CLF were a renegade ethnic group of Chitterers. We—meaning we humans, not we at the party—had discovered the Chitterers while they were mining silicates and hydrocarbon ice on Titan when we landed there the first time. They looked like giant ladybugs. Their air is about thirty-five percent oxygen, like on Earth during the Carboniferous period, when two-meter-long scorpions stung things to death. I guess we were lucky that the Chitterers were merely beetle-like.

  After the scientists finally set up a Rosetta application to translate their clicky language, the first official statement from the Chitterers—our very first contact with an extraterrestrial star-faring sentient alien species—was:

  “Well, this is awkward.”

  Seems that they had checked on us about three hundred years ago, just as we were entering our steampunk phase of the Industrial Revolution, so they’d cheerfully strip-mined a couple of the moons on our outer planets, like Britain was doing to India at the time, thinking we probably wouldn’t mind. They had been meaning to observe us again, but things were just so busy in the mines, what with the hydrofracking and tunnel-mining and, well, they hadn’t even been up to the surface in over a century, let alone taken a look at Earth.

  So they’d been caught poaching elements in someone else’s solar system.

  Oops.

  Awkward.

  So our first official conversation with our First Contact Alien Species was filled with long, embarrassed pauses, self-justification, and blame-passing.

  We could have just tossed them out of our solar system on their exoskeletal butts and reverse-engineered their FTL drives, but saner heads
prevailed after much discussion about how the discovered savages usually got the short end of the electric cattle prod—and humans were definitely the bead-wearing primitives here. So instead, we negotiated with them and signed treaties, allowing them to mine some more. We got access to their wikipedia.

  The problem was: we negotiated with some of them.

  We didn’t realize that they had all sorts of NGOs that were also mining oxides and silicates on Titan. We also didn’t realize that the Chitterers squabbled like, well, us.

  Like Burma, ever since it declared independence centuries ago in 1948.

  Like the Israelis and the PLO, Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Army of Islam, and the rest of them.

  Like most of Africa with their insurgent rebel armies.

  When the Chitterers said they were busy, we didn’t realize that they were busy fighting each other in a free-for-all civil war.

  And we walked right into the middle of it.

  So we covered our collective human eyes and wished them all away. We said, in effect, “All you giant ladybugs look alike to us. We negotiated. You accepted. We’re done. Deal with this yourselves.”

  So the Chitterers went back to killing each other as if we humans didn’t exist, just as long as we stayed out of their creepy, crawly way.

  And we tried to stay out of the Chitterers’ way. We had police departments, liaisons, and embassies.

  We had borders, fences, airlocks, checkpoints, and maps.

  And we had language barriers.

  Blake said, “Ellis and I went down to the Chitterers’ consulate on Ganymede and showed them our planned spelunking route on Titan, and we asked them if that was”—her eyes widened and she waggled her hands in a Great Gesture of Imprecision—“okay.”

  Evidently, the Chitterers’ consulate thought Blake and Ellis were asking if it was legal to spelunk in those particular caves.

  Blake said, “So the Chitterers clicked through their Babel app. ‘Sure, it is okay. Go ahead.’ We were actually asking if it was advisable, or a good idea, or safe.” She laughed. “If we had used those words, the Chitterer Policia probably would have vibrated their wings in Righteous Laughter and told us to spelunk on Earth because no one in his right mind went into the caves wherein lurked the Chitternistas, Al Chitterda, and the Chitterer Liberation Force.

  “We packed up our spelunking gear, took passage to Titan, found an airlock, and started rappelling into one of the big chimneys that the Chitterers had drilled through Titan’s ice crust. They had sunk containments through the liquid layer and the high-pressure ice layers to get to the rocky layers below, and that’s where we wanted to go.” Blake noted, “I rappelled down Australian-style, head-first.”

  Of course she did, because she’s fun like that.

  I was probably reading a book when Blake and Ellis dropped their ropes down the huge icy chasm in the side of Titan. Probably non-fiction.

  Blake spread her hands wide. “So we walked down the side of that ice cliff, down into the darkness. We paused to click on our headlamps and place our carabiner clips.”

  They did all that other cave-exploring stuff that Blake knows but that I wouldn’t if I hadn’t read a book on it.

  My mouth was dry just thinking about the height they must have rappelled. Sometimes those entry passages tunnel through the layers of ammoniated liquid water and gas ices for miles before they ever reach an airlock. I sipped Victoria’s potent punch to moisten my panicky mouth.

  Chess Jock elbowed me in my skinny ribs, saying, “Back up, Wellys. You’re crowding me. Leave me some personal space, eh?”

  Blake passed around a picture on her phone of her and Ellis. Both had the lanky, muscular physiques of vegan triathletes. Behind them, striped sandstone jutted toward Earth’s monochrome, clouded sky. Blake’s arm was snaked around Ellis’s wiry waist. Ellis had dark hair and a tapered black beard that was pointy, almost Mephistophelian, and clear blue eyes. She wore a halter; he was shirtless and hairy. They were both shiny with sweat. They were evidently doing something outdoorsy and strenuous.

  I glanced around the party at the thirty or so people now clustered around the photo. No one who looked like Ellis was there. Most people were soft and floppy from extended stays in low gravity, skin drooping on flaccid muscles. The white people among us were crispy brown, and people who were naturally brown or black were really dark, except for Blake.

  Pale Blake shimmered like moonlight.

  “Is this after you guys got away?” Precious asked.

  “No,” Blake said. “This is on Earth, about six months before we went in. After we came home from our stay with the CLF, we were really skinny, but back to the story.”

  They descended for hours, she said, until the icy shaft leveled out and diverged into roads.

  Chitterers carve their houses and towns when their mine tunnels have played out, like Coober Pedy on Earth. Their streets wander and follow the veins of minerals. When a mine has progressed far enough from a settlement that the scuttling commute becomes onerous, everyone packs up and blasts out a new town farther down the mine shaft.

  Blake and Ellis tramped along the abandoned streets of the Chitterer ghost towns, hiding in the empty, icy dugout rooms and jumping out at each other, playing like stoned kittens.

  They found three ghost towns in a row, carved out of the flaky rock like giant hamster habitats. Circles of light from their headlamps revealed holes and ledges on the dark cliffs. A normal person would have seen enough and turned around, but these two went on. They had two months to kill.

  “And by then,” Blake admitted, laughing, “we were hammered. We were so wasted, because the oxygen content of their air mix is so much higher than Earth-normal, like thirty-five percent, that you can drink all the time and never get a hangover.

  “That was our whole plan,” Blake said, “a two-month drunken love party with no hangovers. We hauled hoversleds with food and lots of alcohol, which was pretty easy in Titan’s one-half-ish Earth-relative gravity. We also planned to write poetry, because that’s what you do when you’re constantly buzzed and scruffing like mad minks.

  “We poked around the stone houses, looking at the garbage that the Chitterers had left behind when they moved: broken gadgets with those multi-vid-screens for their compound eyes, pieces of carapace that the kids had shed, cooking stuff, broken mining tools, and guns.

  “But you know, we never thought we’d meet any Chitterers. They’re all supposed to be so far down the mines after three centuries of blasting out the tunnels that, supposedly, you would have to walk and rappel for months to even get close. Ellis and I had only been exploring for about two weeks when we found a little side tunnel that we crawled down and—you won’t believe this—we literally, seriously literally, fell into their camp.”

  The side tunnel was just big enough to crawl through side by side, dragging their hoversleds tethered to their ankles. They were joshing their way down the tunnel, throwing rubble at each other in a drunken game of bonk tag, when the rocky floor gave way.

  “The hoversleds didn’t fit through the hole,” Blake said to us at the college party overlooking the monstrous, glowering eye of Jupiter. “So there we were, the two of us, hanging from one ankle each, swinging about thirty meters above the ground, with big O-mouths on our surprised faces. The light beams from our headlamps slithered over the dark cavern’s walls like air raid searchlights. From below, we must have looked like a Soft-Shell chandelier!”

  At the party, Blake laughed. They all laughed with her, but softer, nervously.

  Later, when were alone and she told me the story again, her laugh was more hollow, studied. “That’s when they swarmed us.” A shiver ran through her pale, wiry body.

  Other than that, she never did lose her sense of humor about being taken prisoner. I saw her tell that story so many more times, each time more hilarious than the last, because that’s how she copes with things: she’s funny and beautiful and shining with good humor.

 
At the party, she continued: “When we fell through the ceiling, the Chitterers stampeded up the walls. With these wicked rock-nipping scissors, they cut the carbon-fiber cables that dangled us. We fell, and we could see the rocks flying up at us in our headlamps’ beams. The gravity was light, so I just sprained my ankle, but Ellis landed with his hands straight out and he broke one of his arms. Then he landed on his face.”

  She flinched. “You should have seen the blood, red on his face and shining on the rocks. Broke his nose. He didn’t even yell. Seriously, he just sat up and said, ‘Ouch.’ Just like that. With a period. ‘Ouch.’ He never talked about how terrible it was or how much they hurt him. He just shoved it all down inside and said, ‘Ouch.’ He was that tough. And maybe that drunk. Yeah, probably that drunk.”

  Everybody at the party laughed.

  “Then they were all around us.” Blake held her arms out, undulating, and showed us how the bugs swarmed them. “I was like, ‘Whoa. We come in peace, kemosabe.’ They chittered at us, and I was just dialing up my Babel app, even though I didn’t think my gadget had Chitterer-English translation on it, because, you know, when do you ever need a Chitterer translator? It’s not like they can breathe our air or walk around our stations.”

  At the party, we were all crowded around her like the Chitterer rebels had clustered around her and Ellis, rapt, listening to her tell the tale. Someone shoved me from behind, trying to get closer to her, and said, “‘Scuse me, Wellys.”

  Blake continued, “The Chitterers lit a chemical flare, plastering us with cold, green light. The cavern was another dug-out town-cave with black holes in the walls that led to more caves and more holes. Luckily, the Chitterers had a Babel app. A big, black Chitterer spoke into his gadget for a second, then turned it toward us.”

  Blake said to the party in a raspy, staccato voice, like an evil bug, “‘Get on ground and perform religious rites.’ And Ellis and I were like, ‘Holy crap!’ Which was not our religious rite, we told them, despite the word ‘holy’ in there.

  “Ellis told them he was Catholic and a priest had to say his Last Rites, or it didn’t count. They all buzzed back and forth, because they respect our religious notions even if they don’t understand them at all.