Not One of Us

by Neil Clarke

Clang! Clang! Clang!

  I jerked awake and bolted upright. The alarm—a very human-sounding alarm—sounded all around me. Dogs barked and howled. Then I realized that it was a human alarm, coming from the Army camp outside the Dome, on the opposite side to the garbage dump. I could see the camp—in outline and faintly, as if through heavy gray fog. The Dome was dissolving.

  “Green—what—no!”

  Above me, transforming the whole top half of what had been the Dome, was the bottom of a solid saucer. Mangy, in her cage, floated upwards and disappeared into a gap in the saucer’s underside. The other grub cages had already disappeared. I glimpsed a flash of metallic color through the gap: Blue. Green was halfway to the opening, drifting lazily upward. Beside me, both Not-Too and Ruff began to rise.

  “No! No!”

  I hung onto Not-Too, who howled and barked. But then my body froze. I couldn’t move anything. My hands opened and Not-Too rose, yowling piteously.

  “No! No!” And then, before I knew I was going to say it, “Take me, too!”

  Green paused in mid-air. I began babbling.

  “Take me! Take me! I can make the dogs behave correctly—I can—you need me! Why are you going? Take me!”

  “Take this human?”

  Not Green but Blue, emerging from the gap. Around me the Dome walls thinned more. Soldiers rushed toward us. Guns fired.

  “Yes! What to do? Take this human! The dogs want this human!”

  Time stood still. Not-Too howled and tried to reach me. Maybe that’s what did it. I rose into the air just as Blue said, “Why the hell not?”

  Inside—inside what?—I was too stunned to do more than grab Not-Too, hang on, and gasp. The gap closed. The saucer rose.

  After a few minutes, I sat up and looked around. Gray room, filled with dogs in their cages, with grubs in theirs, with noise and confusion and the two robots. The sensation of motion ceased. I gasped, “Where . . . where are we going?”

  Blue answered. “Home.”

  “Why?”

  “The humans do not behave correctly.” And then, “What to do now?”

  We were leaving Earth in a flying saucer, and it was asking me?

  Over time—I have no idea how much time—I actually got some answers from Blue. The humans “not behaving correctly” had apparently succeeding in breaching one of the Domes somewhere. They must have used a nuclear bomb, but that I couldn’t verify. Grubs and dogs had both died, and so the aliens had packed up and left Earth. Without, as far as I could tell, retaliating. Maybe.

  If I had stayed, I told myself, the soldiers would have shot me. Or I would have returned to life in the camp, where I would have died of dysentery or violence or cholera or starvation. Or I would have been locked away by whatever government still existed in the cities, a freak who had lived with aliens none of my story believed. I barely believed it myself.

  I am a freak who lives with aliens. Furthermore, I live knowing that at any moment Blue or Green or their “masters” might decide to vaporize me. But that’s really not much different from the uncertainty of life in the camp, and here I actually have some status. Blue produces whatever I ask for, once I get him to understand what that is. I have new clothes, good food, a bed, paper, a sort of pencil.

  And I have the dogs. Mangy still doesn’t like me. Her larva hasn’t as yet done whatever it will do next. Not-Too’s grub grows slowly, and now Ruff has one, too. Their three puppies are adorable and very trainable. I’m not so sure about the other seventeen dogs, some of whom look wilder than ever after their long confinement in small cages. Aliens are not, by definition, humane.

  I don’t know what it will take to survive when, and if, we reach “home” and I meet the alien adults. All I can do is rely on Jill’s Five Laws of Survival:

  #1: Take what you can get.

  #2: Show no fear.

  #3: Never volunteer.

  #4: Notice everything.

  But the Fifth Law has changed. As I lie beside Not-Too and Ruff, their sweet warmth and doggie-odor, I know that my first formulation was wrong. “Feel nothing”—that can take you some ways toward survival, but not very far. Not really.

  Law #5: Take the risk. Love something.

  The dogs whuff contentedly and we speed toward the stars.

  Steve Rasnic Tem is a past winner of the World Fantasy, Bram Stoker, and British Fantasy awards. He has published over four hundred and thirty short stories. Some of his best stories are collected in Figures Unseen: Selected Stories, published in April 2018 by Valancourt Books. The Mask Shop of Doctor Blaack, a middle grade novel about Halloween, will appear Fall 2018 from Hex Publishers. A handbook on writing, Yours To Tell: Dialogues on the Art & Practice of Writing, written with his late wife Melanie, appeared from Apex Books last year. Also appearing last year was his science fiction horror novel Ubo (Solaris Books), a finalist for the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards.

  At Play in the Fields

  STEVE RASNIC TEM

  After years of repetition, waking up in some altered state had become the expected outcome of long, uninterrupted slumber. Since childhood, Tom had come to think of sleep as practically a means of transportation. If ill or depressed he’d take to his bed for that healing power of sleep, reviving at some point forward in time, in a better place, a healthier frame of mind.

  So when he regained consciousness this time in a brilliant haze of light he was not extremely concerned, even when he saw an enormous plant maybe eight feet tall—some sort of succulent bromeliad, he believed— moving about in the room, its long fleshy leaves touching tables and racks, picking up bottles and tools, its flexible stamen waving. Near the top of the plant the leaves had widened into shoulders, where some sort of brightly lit chandelier was mounted.

  Clearly he should have screamed, or been overwhelmed by anxiety, and in some compartment of his mind he was. But the trauma was muted, the terror inaccessible.

  The plant waved a cluster of long filaments in Tom’s direction, emitting a high-pitched, scraping sound. Now feeling the beginnings of concern, he attempted to escape. But he appeared to be paralyzed, his limbs oblivious to urgent commands. He wasn’t strong enough to even cover his ears.

  The scraping ceased. “I apologize,” said a voice inside his head. “I had not activated your implant.”

  Tom managed to twist his neck slightly in order to find the source of the voice, whether a presence or some visible speaker grille. He found nothing, but noticed that the handles on the tools, the vessels on the tables, were distorted, as if melted. He was hallucinating, then. Maybe he’d eaten something toxic.

  The plant moved with unbelievable rapidity, as an octopus had moved across the ocean floor in a nature documentary he’d seen recently, and now leaned over him. “I will help you into a sitting position,” it—the voice inside his head—said.

  The leaves were cool and firm against his skin. One curled its tip around his shoulder and pulled, while another supported his back, and yet another pressed against his forehead as if to prevent his skull from flopping forward, which seemed unnecessary until he was actually upright and felt the heaviness. He noticed among the fleshy leaves numerous strands of wire or cable of varying thickness, some lit with flickering arrays, some ribbed, some featureless. Whatever they were, these additional appendages were not organic.

  Now Tom was unsettled. But something was obviously working in his system to suppress the panic.

  “Please maintain a state of calm. I will ask you questions. There are no right or wrong answers. I will help you make a safe transition into your next phase. You are feeling some anxiety. For your safety we treated your systems to decrease your level of anxiety. These treatments did not affect your cognitive abilities in any way.”

  Tom was now very clear about one thing—the voice was coming from inside this gigantic plant. “I will begin. What is the last thing you remember before you . . .” There was a pause, and a little bit of that scraping noise bled through. “Before you entered your sleep phase.
”

  Tom used to exercise to help him sleep. Sometimes he tried heated milk, medications. But not the last time. The last time he’d been lying on a bed before surgery. “I was hooked up to an IV. They were going to do something with my inner ear. The right, no, the left side. I had been losing my balance for a very long time. That last month it had gotten much, much worse—just sitting up made me ill. The surgery was supposed to be . . . um.” He swallowed. His mouth was like a cloth pocket containing a dried-out, forgotten tongue. The plant inserted a long straw into his mouth. He searched apprehensively for the other end of the straw, but could not find it. His mouth filled with cool liquid. “The surgery was supposed to be a simple procedure. Later, I woke up, but I didn’t really wake up. Everything was so hazy, and the room seemed to be full of people—at least I could hear their . . . distorted echoes—but I couldn’t see anyone.” He could feel that distant fear approaching. It would arrive very soon now.

  “We have repaired . . . your condition,” it said. “I will answer those questions I have answers for. But please answer these first.”

  Tom took a deep breath and looked around. The room appeared sterile, and there were recognizable tubes, containers, liquids, instruments— with handles and other attachments distorted and unlike anything he’d ever seen before. But they made a kind of sense, given the nature of the creature before him, who gave an impression of floating on a mop of fine roots. He understood now that this plant-thing was in constant, subtle movement—its leaves, stems—gently flowing, changing shape in a way that emphasized this impression of floating. He also saw that a thin layer of greenish liquid coated the floor, streaked and shiny like some sort of lubricant.

  There were objects on tables around the room. Tom thought he recognized the shell of an old toaster, some random auto parts, maybe a radio, what might have been a fragment of toilet bowl—all so stained and rusty, so worn that they might have been dredged out of the ocean mud.

  “You were suspended.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “You were placed in a state . . . cannot translate . . . cannot translate. You were placed in a condition of suspended animation. The technology was primitive then, but there have been . . . cannot translate. There have been survivors. Cannot translate. Did they make promises to you concerning the eventual outcome?”

  “What? No . . . I told you. It was just supposed to be a simple procedure. No one said anything about suspended animation or anything like that. I didn’t agree to anything but my ear operation!”

  There was a very long pause. Tom felt increasingly uncomfortable, but periodic waves of cold moving through his body calmed him. Finally the plant spoke again. “Many of the records from this facility . . . cannot translate. Incomplete. Your record is incomplete. But they indicate that a mishap occurred. An anomalous event. An error was made during surgery. You could not be revived. Subsequently an agreement was reached.”

  “An agreement with whom? I told you I didn’t agree to anything.”

  Another long, uncomfortable silence. “The agreement was signed by a Richard Johnston.”

  “My dad. He was my next of kin.”

  “He was told, according to the fragment remaining, that your life might not end. Your body would be suspended, until your condition could be rectified.”

  “He always believed in that sort of thing. They probably offered him all kinds of money, but he asked for this instead. He couldn’t fix me, so he had them send me into the future. That’s the way he thought about things.”

  “Are you stating that you would not have chosen this for yourself ?”

  “No, never. I am, was, a fatalist. There were so many diseases then. If it hadn’t been a botched surgery, it would have probably been some terrible plague. Dying in your sleep would be so much better. Those last forty years, epidemics killed so many. And maybe that was actually a blessing.”

  “A blessing?”

  “I know that sounds harsh, but sometimes you have to step back, view history with a bit of perspective. That’s what I used to do—I taught high school history. There were too many people, and with the droughts, the infestations, many crops were lost. People came up from Latin America looking for food—Mexico was just a rest stop. Refugees were pouring out of Asia into Europe, away from flooded coastal cities everywhere. No way could all those people be fed. The fields were empty, and then the fields were filled with bodies. They deserved better. My father would have agreed with that much. People deserve better.”

  “Your father thought you deserved better. So he sent you forward—”

  “To where?” Anxiety was beginning to fill him. “To when? When is this?”

  “Cannot translate. Cannot translate,” the plant’s heavy leaves rose and fell, rhythmic and graceful as some deep jungle ballerina. “To here. To now.”

  It was easier just to imagine yourself a new person than to attempt to adjust, carrying around the old self ’s vague memories, as if you’d read them in a book. “Therapy has been performed,” according to the implanted translator, but details were untranslatable, answered instead by a series of random sounds. It bothered him, certainly, to have been tampered with, and to wake up owing someone for his revival. But it was all the life he had.

  Loss and displacement aside, the most difficult thing that first year was coping with the apparent limits of the translator. Although the quality improved, there were always gaps where a lengthy period of attempted communication resulted in a disappointingly blunt “cannot translate,” or worse, absolute silence.

  Despite his plant-like appearance, it soon became apparent that the alien was not botanical in nature, nor bird, reptile, fish, or mammal or anything else he could compare it to on Earth. Obviously there was a cybernetic component, whether attached or integrated Tom couldn’t say.

  Of more practical concern was that Tom had nothing to call him—and he didn’t want to use some disrespectful coinage or ‘pet’ name. Nor could he determine where the alien was from, or even the name of the van-like contraption they used to travel around together on the surface of a transformed Earth.

  Tom understood that he was still in St. Louis, Missouri, but nothing was recognizable. Quakes and floods had distorted the town’s profile, and the fact that the suspension facility where he’d been found had been relatively intact was, in the translator’s terms, “an unlikely reality.” The alien said the area was “architecture in recombination with landscape,” a complexly ridged, sculptural field of debris and trash split by a narrow stream that was a vastly diminished and relocated Mississippi River.

  The Gateway Arch was gone as well, and the companion had acquired a video so that Tom could watch in awe as the keystone failed and dropped out, the disconnected legs twisting away and falling in opposite directions, the translator narrating the analysis in an annoyingly detached, analytical monotone.

  But at least Tom was finally allowed to drive the van. He stood before the segmented dashboard, his hands on the sections as the companion had demonstrated, maneuvering over the broken landscape. Despite having fewer appendages than the controls had been designed for, he was still able to make turns and stops, in most directions, just more slowly. Each day they returned to a predetermined location the companion picked via some untranslatable criteria.

  As they came over the final rise from the lab, the clean, geometric lines of the excavation fields were clearly distinguishable from the muddle of destruction. It looked like a typical archaeological dig, he supposed, not having ever been on one during his own lifetime. (He’d have to stop thinking that way—it wasn’t as if he’d died.)

  Eight or nine aliens traveled their particular areas of the field, trailed by assistants like himself intent on the debris at their feet—picking things up, examining them, recording the scene, stealing glances at the others, but keeping on task. He supposed a lucky alien might unfreeze an actual archaeologist to assist him. Otherwise he had to settle for, say, a high school history teacher.


  The natives—the people indigenous to this time, smaller than Tom and the other assistants who’d been suspended—looked like children playing in the fields of debris. They climbed up and down the rubble, scrambling frantically over each other in their search for objects for survival or trade. At first he thought they were scavenging for food, but after having sifted through tons of debris himself he discovered there was almost nothing organic left in the ruins of the city.

  A swollen version of the alien vans sped rapidly into the center of the dig. The natives surrounded it in an eye blink. A panel slid aside, disgorging dozens of green and brown packages. A swarm of natives hauled the parcels away like hungry insects. The aliens were feeding them.

  From the patch directly in front of him, he picked up a small metallic jar and was looking at it when broad hands attached to skinny arms snatched it away. He had an impulse to chase after the native, who was now scrambling up a ridge, but thought better of it.

  Angrily, he looked over at his companion for some help. A group of natives circled the alien as if he were some giant corn plant (extinct since Tom’s own era) and they worshippers anticipating his moves, interpreting what he considered worthy of his attentions.

  No alien ever made a move to stop the natives, or even alter their path. Other than supplying food, the aliens ignored them. And Tom had to concede the natives deserved every liberty they could take. Manners had become a luxury.

  He went back to work, picked up a piece of hammer, a bowl, a cupboard door, a jar rattling with something mummified inside. He catalogued, reported, added some objects to the stack they would take back to the lab. He still didn’t really know what they were looking for—the companion’s criteria had been untranslatable, so everything seemed of potential interest. Back at the lab he would study the recordings, flagging anything different from what they had seen before.

  He found a telescoping handle with a bowl-like end closed with some sort of shutter. A visual record sent to the van came back as audio from his implant: “a device used for the capture and inspection of rat corpses. Decontaminated and safe to collect.” It was dated from after his time. The function of most unfamiliar objects he found was easier to guess—these were things made by human beings for human use, after all. People used tools, ate, bathed, and relieved themselves with generally recognizable equipment.