by Chogan Swan
“Your nose tells you that too?”
“No, she said so.”
Kest took a deep breath.
Might as well make the plunge.
“Is this your way of telling me without telling me?”
“Hang on a second. Let me check my phone,” she said, reaching in her pocket. The phone seemed ordinary enough, but Kest didn’t see a company logo on it anywhere. After tapping the screen for a few moments she looked up at him again.
“If you're worried I'm recording this, I’m not,” Kest said. “But, I just woke up... from very strange dreams.”
“You humans have such hyper-advanced pattern recognition reflexes you often jump to conclusions,” she said with a soft smile.
“You... humans?”
Ayleana nodded.
“Would it be rude of me to hide behind my bed?”
“Very rude, and ineffective too,” she said, glancing at the high posts of his loft bed.
“Where are you from?”
“In one sense, I’ve lived here all my life, Kest.”
“What happened in Maryland? Were you involved?”
“Not in any way involved on either side of that event. What happened—from what I’ve heard—is a long story, and you'd do better asking my aunt Tiana.”
Kest shook his head, puzzled. “Why aren’t you evading this? When I started out, I was just fishing, but now I’m sure. You could’ve just laughed it off and I might have believed you. Aren’t you afraid I’ll run tell someone?”
“Meh, not your style, and I was planning on telling you today anyhow. But when I came in, I could smell that you were almost afraid of me, so I guessed you’d figured it out.... In your sleep, you say? Nice.”
“So your aunt... also a... what, exactly?”
“My aunt... wait, let’s go with older sister, it’s more accurate. One of my older sisters—which one still isn’t clear to me—is the Nii Confederacy’s ambassador to the United States. She was granted that status in 1860 something, but the current administration hasn’t kept up with her status. Come to that, neither did the last twenty-five. But then, Abraham Lincoln didn’t keep a record of the appointment, for obvious reasons.”
“And how many are there of you in town?”
“At last count, including myself, there were three. Well, three and a half if you count ShwydH, and that’s being generous in my opinion.”
“So, three sisters and then...?”
“ShwydH.”
“That name sounds Welsh.”
“It does sound Welsh doesn’t it! Do you speak Welsh? That wasn’t in the dossier.”
“No. Not yet.”
“Look, Kest. It would be much easier if you let me tell you all this in order from a convenient starting point. Why don’t you come to my place for breakfast and we’ll talk? If this was an alien abduction, wouldn't I have done it yesterday when I had you in my clutches? You see that, right?”
Kest considered. In a sense, he’d felt like an alien all his life. His mother—from a people shunned and persecuted in the land they’d inhabited for centuries—had fled Iraq. His father—a Native American—had helped her run to a land where his people had also been robbed of land and heritage. She’d fled to a country slowly losing its own freedoms.
Kest laughed as his perception changed, moving from human versus alien to two sentients—both alien—on the same world. From last night, it was clear they had common interests, perhaps even common goals. “Why don’t you charm my mom a little more while I change,” he said.
“There is nothing I would like more,” Ayleana said and opened the door.
~~~{}~~~
“So what do you want for breakfast?” Ayleana asked as Daniels backed out of the driveway. “We’ll pick it up on the way.”
“Waffles would be nice,” Kest said. “With peanut butter and strawberry jam.”
Ayleana called his order in to the restaurant next to her place then turned to face him. “Okay, here goes. When I woke up three years ago—days after the events in Maryland—my body was the equivalent of about thirteen years old. The first nine years of my life was all I remembered. At first, I was unaware how much time had passed since my last memory, but I learned it was almost two thousand years. One of my elder branches was there when I woke. A male human was also with her. They were both unknown to me which let them know I had a memory gap. This disconcerted them a great deal.”
As Ayleana talked, she alternated between checking her phone and focusing on Kest.
“As it turned out,” she continued. “My other older branch had told them to waken me before my body was mature enough to process all the memory loaded into the memory crystal. The crystal contained two thousand years of continuous memory, and it overloaded my young synapses’ ability to process so much knowledge that fast. It wasn’t her fault. Since the time my people learned to pass on their memories, they’d never dealt with that much memory moving to a young body. So, instead of having a wealth of knowledge, I had to start almost from scratch. It was confusing and traumatic, but I’m learning to adapt.”
Kest held up a hand. “Ok, wait. That all makes perfect sense, but... two questions.... Where were you before you woke up three years ago? And, what are elder branches?”
Ayleana grimaced. “Sorry, this is new for me too, since I’ve never told anyone my story that didn’t already know most of it. My people learned to reproduce parthogenetically— “
“Wait, I read somewhere that wasn’t possible for mammals. You are a mammal aren’t you?”
Ayleana huffed as if insulted and stuck out her chest. Since it was covered by her hoodie, it did little to emphasize the attributes there. “Yes, and for one of my kind and age, my breasts would be considered nicely developed, also humanoid—by the way—not all that different from you genetically.”
She waved her hand. “Back to your question though. It’s more like cloning for us. We reproduce sexually, but branching is what we developed to make copies of our own bodies—sometimes with a slightly differing genetic makeup—to which we transfer our memories. To grow those bodies, we build what we call a crèche in your language... languages, I guess, since that’s from the French.
Some parts of the crèche we grow from our own cells, others are mechanical. My oldest branch started this body growing sixteen years ago. For us, it’s sort of an insurance policy. Our missions can continue even after one body dies. My branch sisters were operating on active duty wartime guidelines, so my oldest branch made me so that, if she were to die, I could carry on. Her memories were mapped in crystals that she charged with everything that had happened to her for her entire life.”
“So she died then?” said Kest. “You spoke of her earlier as though she were still alive.”
“No, she didn’t die,” Ayleana said, hesitating. “Something happened during the event in Maryland. She was in a fight with an enemy she’d been chasing for over two hundred years and the enemy ended up dead. But, what happened during the fight damaged her memory to the point where she no longer wanted to foster any branches after me. Several years of her life were ripped away, and... things were added. So—in essence—she opted out of living longer than she had to with the damage. It must have been... traumatic.”
She stared out the window.
Kest groped for a response. Her sister was choosing to die. What do you say to anyone under those circumstances? He swallowed to clear his throat. “So she won’t be around much longer then?”
“No, only about three hundred more years if she doesn’t get killed sooner, and she's become a bit... reckless.”
Kest kept his mouth closed, knowing he had no referent for saying anything helpful. His own lifetime expectations would be too much in the way.
Ayleana sighed. “It’s strange, all my life—that I remember so far—I’ve always assumed I would live forever, and that was before crèche technology. Now, I’m watching one of the people an earlier me became who is choosing to die. I don’t know what to think a
bout that.”
Kest sat quiet, watching her stare out the window while Daniels backed into the space in the parking lot for the restaurant’s carryout customers. “I’m locking the door while I get the food,” Daniels said.
“Thanks,” Kest said, not used to people doing things for him.
He turned back to Ayleana and touched her arm. “Your sisters must have had a lot of experience that could have been helpful.”
“Yeah, now that’s a funny thing,” Ayleana said. “What I discovered was that almost every time I woke up from a long sleep, I would remember more. At first, I would pick up one day of memories every time I slept. Now it’s usually two days; once it was three, but sometimes it goes back to one. All of them sequential so far, thank the Ordering Principle. You know the saying about someone leading a double life? For me it really feels that way. I just hope it keeps speeding up and I start learning something interesting. I like getting the memories, so far, but I was pretty naïve two thousand years ago.”
Kest grinned. “Hmm, I suspect your sisters filled you in on some stuff, right? That must take some of the mystery away when you keep getting spoilers. Could be you should tell them to let you find out for yourself. Just get the highlights and the useful stuff, to make sure you don’t spend time learning something like a math subject twice.”
Ayleana laughed.
It was the first time she’d laughed since Kest had discovered she was an alien. He listened to the sound to see how it compared to human laughter.
Hmmm.
“You laugh exactly like a human. Is that normal for your people too?”
“Normal? It probably should be, but my sister, Tiana, taught me, and you know.... Wouldn’t you think an entire society would have figured out it was a cool thing to do? We work so hard to get the same emotional and physical benefits by learning to control our glands and organs. Who knew we could have managed a good seven percent boost just by laughing once in a while? But then, the body controls are also useful in a multi-purpose way, so maybe it’s all for the best.”
“Really? What can you do with those?”
“Well, not nearly all Tiana can do, but she’s teaching me newer stuff that our people didn’t come up with for centuries. She didn’t think it would be smart not to know how to heal myself from a severed artery for example.”
Daniels came out of the restaurant with a hefty bag that he slid into the seat next to him before starting the SUV and pulling into traffic again.
“He won’t let anyone eat in the car unless Amber or Tiana make him,” Ayleana whispered in Kest’s ear. Her breath smelled of orange and cinnamon.
“Do you eat what we eat?” he asked.
“Some things, but we don’t eat meat.”
“Your teeth look like mine—a little sharper. That would show you could eat meat, so that’s a choice, right?”
“Yeah, but it’s kind of a big deal for us. I’ll fill you in later. Let’s go inside, so you can eat your gluten and sugar death cakes.”
Kest laughed. “You make them sound irresistible.”
~~~{}~~~
Inside the condo, a jazz classic, Thelonius Monk’s Straight No Chaser sifted through the great room. Kest took another bite of his crispy, golden waffle smeared with crunchy peanut butter and dripping with strawberry preserves. Ayleana opened the refrigerator and filled a shot glass from a Bota Box. At first he assumed it was wine, a dark red one, but the liquid was opaque and thicker than wine.
“Is that what it looks like?” he said.
“Yes,” she said, returning to the table. “And you can’t have any. I had to babysit Jerry and Wendy’s triplets for seven hours to get one pint.”
“Jerry and Wendy?”
“Jerry is a doctor who works with Tiana, and Wendy is, of course, a full-time mom.”
“So he makes a withdrawal from... the bank?”
“OP, no! It’s his... straight up O neg. Taking it from a donor would be a breach of both his ethical vows and mine.”
“Easy! I was just asking. So it’s like the Masai relationship with their cattle?”
Ayleana frowned and licked the inside of the shot glass clean with a circular swipe of her tongue. “I’m positive that if you thought about it for a... second, you would realize the similarities are superficial. For one, the exchange with Jerry was consensual. Not that I’m judging the Masai, but they do, occasionally, eat steak, though bovines are not sentient. For another, Jerry and Wendy received damned good value for a pint that Jerry needed to get rid of to balance the iron in his blood anyway. I’ve never eaten a bite of meat in my life—except for accidentally ingesting bugs a few times while I was riding a bike or running. But, I’m not losing any sleep over a few mosquitos. I’d have killed those on principle.”
Kest flashed back to an image of the fight with the gunman yesterday when he’d glimpsed what looked like Ayleana biting the attacker on the neck.
Ayleana’s eyes narrowed. “Okay, Kest. What is it? Something’s bothering you.”
“Your nose again?”
She nodded once.
“It’s just that I remembered you biting that guy yesterday during the fight. Are you like a vampire?”
“Not a vampire.” Her eyes narrowed and her lips pulled back from her teeth. “It IS possible that the vampire mythos had seeds from a renegade element of my race who found this planet centuries ago. But to the best of my knowledge, my branch sisters were successful in exterminating them. I bit him to knock him out, so I didn’t have to kill him too.”
Ayleana’s voice turned carefully neutral. “We needed him for information, so retaining a prisoner was indicated. I took nothing from him, though it’s acceptable to take blood from an enemy when you are in a battle, in an emergency.”
“Wow! You have a system of ethical guidelines I’ve never even considered. Can I ask a personal question?”
“Sure,” she said, sitting back in her chair and picking a dark-green, crispy wafer from the stack on her side of the table.
“How did you feel about killing the other guy?”
Ayleana’s hand paused in the act of moving the wafer to her mouth. She put the wafer back on the plate. “Conflicted. He was an enemy, helping to attack someone I care for. He was also about to attack me, and he was fighting with you. But, he was a dupe, a pawn, and it was my first time killing anyone, so that probably makes it more painful. At the time, I was... in full-on defense mode. My people have a... protective nature that serves us well in battle, but it can get out of control if we aren’t careful—not unlike humans. In retrospect, I believe I did everything right, except I should have noticed him before he went past me.”
She picked up the wafer again and looked at him. “I thought you’d like a complete answer.”
“Thank you,” Kest said. “Good guess.”
Ayleana took a bite of her wafer, crunching it in time to the drum/sax duet. “Do you have any other questions before we do music?”
“Oh, I’m sure I’ll have many, but just two more for now.”
“Ok, shoot.”
“First, what did you mean by ‘oh pea’?”
“Ah, well, that slipped out. It’s the English letters O and P- “
“For ‘ordering principle’ like you said earlier?”
“Yeah, it’s the translation of an exclamation common to my people—’acta vila’ in the original.”
“Maybe you should consider saying, ‘AyVee’ or ‘oi vay’ instead then. Otherwise, people will think you are making a potty reference.”
“Hah, I never thought of that. I guess that’s why Wendy asked me not to say it around her kids. As you can see, I’m still a little unsocialized around folks who don’t know what I am.”
“Nah, you’re doing a lot better than most humans.”
“Aww! That’s sweet! “
Kest smiled. “The other thing is.... In the SST private chat there were references to aliens with...”
“Bonus parts?” she said, smiling.
“You mean like this?”
Kest felt something tug on his leg. He looked down, assuming she had hooked his leg with her ankle—despite what he might have expected considering his question. Instead, he saw a thick, dark brown and red-striped coil around his ankle.
“Shit! “
Ayleana loosed his ankle, breaking into peals of musical laughter. “Sorry,” she choked, “I couldn’t pass up the chance to see that look on your face.”
“You have a twisty sense of humor,” Kest said with a snort and sat back down again to stab his fast-cooling waffles. “How’d—?”
“My pants have a folded slit in the back.”
“Ah. It’s useful then?”
“Especially when babysitting triplets, Ayleana said, grinning.”
“Or making your friends wet their pants?”
She smiled and put her hand on his. “I like the way that sounds,” Ayleana said.
Kest hadn’t even thought about it.
Friends.
He took another bite of waffles, savoring the combinations of flavors. An almost silent text alert sounded from Ayleana’s phone as he swallowed. She picked it up to read the message and squeezed his hand so hard he jerked in surprise.
“It’s a friend of mine who manages bookings for the Rialto. The group that was going to open for Aldeberan tomorrow night can’t make it. Their bus broke down. We have a GIG. Woot! “
“Tomorrow night? That’s- “
“Yeah, I know. Amazing, right?”
“Yeah,” Kest said. “Only what I was really going to say was soon.”
“Don’t sweat it, Kest. The logistics are in place already. Have been for some time. All we need to do is come up with a forty-five minute playlist. Tell me what you think of this lineup.” She tapped her phone and flipped it around where he could see it.
Kest looked it over. “We need to run through it and see how it flows. Too bad Alex can’t play with us.”
“Well of course he’s playing with us,” Ayleana said, raising one eyebrow. “Alex will project an avatar on a screen behind us, complete with drums and all supporting instruments.”
“Then, I think we’d better get to practicing,” Kest said, stuffing the last bite of waffle in his mouth.
