This story originally appeared in Alien Dimensions #12
They look like us. This is what is so hard to accept.
I spent last night in my cabin watching old movies: War of the Worlds, Independence Day, Solaris. Whether the aliens are evil or simply incomprehensible, you can see the filmmakers’ imagination battering against the walls of their humanity. Trying to visualize something different. Chitin and tentacles are popular, standing in for the mechanical blankness of an insect’s eyes or the creepy grace of a cephalopod. Multiple legs, skitter and slide, the pounding surf of a living ocean… And the ending in which the monster is dispatched and humanity is given a reluctant nod of approval to remain just as it is – until the next movie.
And all of it unnecessary. We have found the aliens, and they are us.
Xiaowei walked up to me while I was getting my breakfast from the dispenser. Hers consisted of a bowl full of something slimy with bits and pieces in it.
“Congee,” she said, catching my disapproving glance.
I prefer to eat alone but it’s hardly possible in the dome. We sat by the curving window, watching the pink twilight pour scarlet shadows into the hollows between the dunes. The desert looked dipped in blood. Long chains of pearly ovoids linked by strands of raw tissue dotted the sand. The landscape was alien enough. It was the inhabitants who were the problem.
“Tanya and Greg are coming,” she said.
I winced. These stupid names were given to them by our so-called Captain. That was the one thing that made them at least mildly interesting: they refused to tell us their names even though they had no problem being called by the names we assigned to them. Otherwise their language was simplicity itself, comparable to Putonghua in its straightforward grammar but without the maddening tones. Xiaowei had learned it in a couple of hours and designed the software that assisted our communication. Now all five of us spoke it quite fluently, with only occasional help from the Prometheus’ AI.
Prometheus – what a joke! Another attempt to make our corporately-funded “expedition” live up to the heroic images of the past. Exploding shuttles, devouring black holes, laser beams, battles in space…All we needed was to load our equipment into a capsule the size of a big trailer and strap ourselves in, fighting motion sickness and exchanging stupid jokes as the capsule shot through the curving funnels of the X-web.
The thought of its unknown makers perked me up a little: they might still be out there. Waiting and watching as we scurry through their cunningly laid shortcuts in spacetime. Somebody truly alien. Not like Greg.
And Tanya…well. I refilled my coffee and dawdled by the window. Xiaowei stayed for a while but eventually my monosyllabic replies drove her away. I watched her black hair swish around her cheongsam-clad shoulders and wondered why she bothered.
The ovoids twitched in the sand, washed with carmine. They looked like a handful of necklaces half-buried in the desert. A giant’s hoard. But these necklaces were strung on bleeding guts. I should ask Marco, our biologist, about the strange incongruity between the bodies of these colonial creatures and the tissue – was it neural? – that connected them. But as I was trying to muster some interest in the bottom of Ross154b’s ecological system, voices in the conference room alerted me to the fact that representatives of its top layer had arrived.
#
Marco and Xiaowei were already chatting with Greg despite the Captain’s orders that “negotiations” should only be conducted in his presence. Like all petty tyrants, he had an exaggerated view of his own significance. SpaceCom, the company that owned the Prometheus, was only a bit player in the game of exploration. The fact that we lucked out did not change this fact.
And did we luck out? Of course we did. Humanity was crawling, like ants in a computer, through the intangible architecture of the X-web, drawn by the sugar bait of minerals and biologicals. So far, it had found a lot of life and no minds. These were the first intelligent aliens – not counting the unknown makers of the X-web. But it was hard to be enthusiastic, seeing the tight knot of people at the table. If I did not know who my shipmates were, I would have a hard time distinguishing them from the aliens.
Tanya sat close to her husband but did not participate in the conversation. I offered her a sandwich. She smiled as I scanned her face for differences, no matter how subtle. What kind of an anthropologist was I if I could not tell a bona fide alien being from a bar pickup? But I was distracted from my scientific concerns by her gray eyes, her short silky blond hair, and the delicate curve of her neck.
I found myself smiling back.
“So, when can we visit your home?” Xiaowei asked. I did not know the word she used but our AI provided a translation that blinked in red cursive on my retinas. Our satellite had taken pictures of clusters of artificial structures like crumpled tents around the thin sheets of water that pass for lakes on the habitable side of Ross. The planet is tidally locked, facing its red dwarf sun. The night side is probably devoid of life; certainly no artificial lights winked at our satellite from its darkness.
I turned back to Tanya.
“Can I ask you something?” I decided it was time to do some research. Even if the aliens had failed to satisfy my desire for strangeness, they may still restart my stalled academic career.
“Yes.” Her teeth were dazzlingly white. Xiaowei covered her mouth with her hand when she smiled, an Asian custom; but this alien was as generous with her dimples as an old-time movie star.
“Is Greg,” I pointed at him, hoping she would correct me and betray his real name but she did not, “is he your only husband?”
Start with the structure of the family, the kinship system. Anthropology 101.
Her eyes grew enormous.
“Of course!”
Monogamy, then. How boring!
I was going to ask about her parents but then the Captain stomped in. Vassily Evgenyevich Rostov, a bearded barrel of a man with the temper of a pissed-off badger. Fortunately, his role was largely clerical: collation of information received from censors and satellites and compilation of the final report. The X-web works on its own and requires no piloting beyond the unlocking of its portals, each of which leads to one destination only. Rostov had been in the Russian Kosmoflot before being peremptorily discharged. Now he was sliding back into his martinet role.
“Eve!” his bass literally made the glasses on the table vibrate. “Come here, you lazybones!”
John Macready, out geologist, snickered. Being from the backward North American Union, he enjoyed Rostov’s mangling of my name, which I found highly irritating. My parents had not designed a daughter or an inter-sex. “Evelyn” is an old and respectable British man’s name.
“What?” I hissed at him, while Greg and the rest stared.
“Where is their government? Their capital? Who is in charge here?”
The aliens did not understand his accented English but Greg’s round face bore a smirk – an approval from a bully who recognizes a kindred spirit.
“Why don’t you ask them yourself?”
“Because it’s your job, that’s why!”
Unfortunately, he was right: SpaceCom paid the salary that UCL could no longer afford.
I demonstratively turned away from him and addressed Greg in his own language, helped by the script running on my retinas.
“We would like to invite more of your people to visit us here,” I said. “And we would like to visit you as well.”
Exchange; no human society exists without it.
Greg’s eyes swept through the room as if counting. All five of us were in.
“How many would you like to come here?” he asked.
I shrugged.
“As many as you wish.”
I immediately knew I had made a mistake. Greg’s smirk did not change but Tanya, still by her husband’s side, made an almost imperceptible movement that I took for negation.
But what could he do? Bring an army? Much else about them remained murky but we had established that the aliens had no technology comparable to ours. They knew electricity – at least, they did not appear to be surprised by it – but there were no signs of large-scale industrial complexes or mining operations.
“Six of us will come,” he declared. “In…” a clutch of sounds that the AI translated as “six hours.” Of course, they knew no day or night but they did have a system for measuring time. Did they sleep? I realized my vocabulary had no word for “sleep” or “dream” and made a mental note to ask Xiaowei if it existed. Dreamtime is basic to all human cultures; if theirs did not have it, perhaps there was a hint of real difference?
Greg and Tanya said goodbye and walked to the exit. As she passed me, her hand brushed mine, so fleetingly as to be almost an accident. Her other hand was clutching her husband’s.
I felt someone’s eyes on the back of my head. Xiaowei was staring but the moment I looked back, she turned away.
#
I spent the time before their arrival walking in the dunes. The sand was talcum-fine, getting into my eyes and clogging my nose until I had to wind a scarf around my face like a Bedouin in the old illustrated edition of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom that I had found in my parents’ basement. I suppose these pinkish dunes came as close to his exotic and mysterious East as anything in our age. But there was not much to see. There was no vegetation. The ovoids scattered on the windblown ridges were dark and shriveled. I picked one and it was as hollow as a pricked balloon. Another one was moist with life but when I tried to lift it, it turned out to be attached to an extensive root system composed of tough reddish filaments that extended to other nodes. The more I pulled, the more of it came up until the sand under my feet shifted and I felt like an ant sliding into the pit of a hidden antlion. I let it drop and returned to the Prometheus.
On the way back I ran into Marco. He was the oldest of us, a grumpy Croatian who used to teach at some university I had never heard about. We were almost friends: ex-academics and loners, both of us.
He grunted a greeting and walked by but I stopped him.
“Hey, Marco,” I asked. “What did you get off that glass?”
He smiled crookedly at me.
“So, you saw…”
I did. I saw him lift one of the glasses our visitors had drunk from and slip it into his pocket.
“Rostov won’t let me ask them for DNA samples,” he said. No surprise. The “Captain” had some misguided notions of interstellar diplomacy.
“So how similar is it to ours?”
“There is no DNA,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Ništa.“
“Did Greg wipe his glass?” I asked. This would presuppose a much greater level of technological sophistication than we gave them credit for.
Marco shook his head.
“No. There was saliva on the glass. Enzymes. But no DNA at all.”
#
The guests flooded our conference room. The entire dome suddenly felt cramped. I don’t do well in human crowds; and this crowd was, to all intents and purposes, human.
To be fair, there were some things I did not understand. Family structure, for example. The guests were evenly divided between men and women, and couples stuck together. Men were more vocal but if women were subordinate in this culture, it was not expressed in segregation or concealing clothing. Men and women wore identical one-piece garments in drab colors with no ornamentation or insignia. In comparison, our own efforts to dress up – Xiaowei sported another one of her cheongsams – were positively garish.
Our AI was strained to its limited capacity and the red lines of translation on my retinas flickered until I got a headache. I was about to excuse myself and go to my own cabin when a hand was laid on my shoulder.
Tanya! In the blurred melee of faces, hers stood out as clear as cut glass. Smiling shyly, almost familiar – and yet, and yet…Weren’t her lashes a tad too thick, her lips too pale, her skin too flawless? I realized I was staring but could not look away.
She took my hand, as easily and unselfconsciously as a child. I had already noticed that their interpersonal space was much narrower than ours. They clumped together and did not mind casual touching.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” I asked inanely. She nodded. There was a faint smoky scent wafting off her hair – like embers and cinnamon. Perfume? It would be the first sign of adornment I had seen.
“Yes. You are…” she hesitated. “Strange.”
I did not know the word but the running script of translation almost blinded me with synonyms: “exotic”, “alien”, “different.” “Exotic” again.
“And you like…strange?”
“Yes. Our…city…we all know each other. Family. Small. Too small.”
I was getting somewhere! The AI, though, was malfunctioning because the word that subsided into “city” went through several weird permutations: “household”, “commune”, even, inexplicably, “kitchen garden”.
“Are you and Greg family?”
“Husband and wife. He is my husband.”
That was family all right but not in the sense I was aiming at. What if they were all related? Endogamy carried to the extreme.
“Do you have a family?” she asked.
“Mum and Dad.” There had also been Selena but it was over and done with. She nodded and I hesitated, unsure how to formulate my next question, unsure even whether I wanted to probe for more information, when Rostov pushed by, a stray piece of cake in his beard, and winked lewdly at me, as if to say: Finally, you are earning your keep!
I turned to Tanya.
“Would you like to see their pictures?” I led her to my cabin. It was so small we had to sit shoulder to shoulder on the bunk but she did not seem to mind and neither did I.
I showed her my parents’ vid in their garden in Wiltshire. She was fascinated by the green of the apple trees and I remembered Marco telling us that the local vegetation – basically pink scum on the surface of the lakes – utilized something other than chlorophyll. My Dad’s arm was around Mum’s shoulders.
Tanya nested closer to me, the smoky scent of her hair bringing back memories of bonfires on Guy Fawkes Night.
“What is this?” she asked, pointing to a window playing in the background.
“A movie.” The AI just sputtered on that but Tanya required no explanation. A touch brought it into the foreground and she studied the heaving ocean of Solaris intently, the perfect smoothness of her face untouched by wrinkles of concentration, only her alien lashes fluttering slightly, like a butterfly wing.
“You must be very smart,” was all she said but it did not matter at this point, nothing mattered, only her face so close to mine, and the smoky scent, both strange and familiar, uncanny…
She was lying in my arms, the two of us nesting on that narrow bunk, our bodies so perfectly fitting together that it was beginning to feel suffocating but I did not want to move, not yet. Her anatomy was perfectly human for all I could tell, though more streamlined somehow. Or maybe it was just because it had been so long…
The door to my cabin flew open – I had forgotten to lock it – and the irate face of Captain Rostov loomed like an apoplectic moon. And above his shoulder – the impassive face of Xiaowei. Greg was standing slightly behind them, inconspicuous in the shadowed corridor.
It was all hushed up, of course.
Our guests departed with gifts: not beads and trinkets but vacuum-packed nutritional bars which they, inexplicably, loved. The invitation to visit their city was not formally issued but it was hinted it would be forthcoming. Soon. Tanya and Greg walked out of the dome hand in hand like all the other couples. And it was just that last glance, over her shoulder, as she stepped out into the rosy murk – a plea for help? Despair? Challenge? Greg’s hand was wrapped so tightly around hers that the knuckles stood out like white stones.
I stayed in my cabin for a while and when I came out, late at “night” with the lights in the dome turned low, I ran into Xiaowei.
I was not sure what I was going to do when I found myself advancing toward her, her face strangely blank as she backed off.
And then the AI issued an alert, a handful of blinking red in my eyes, and for good measure, Rostov’s booming voice over the never-used comm system, requesting everybody’s immediate presence in the conference room. He, and Marco, and Macready were already there when Xiaowei and I walked in. Macready gave us a startled glance – Rostov must have told him – but Marco was glued to the vid screen. It was the feed from a sensor I did not know we had. It must have positioned somewhere close to the “city”: that huddle of undulating structures like a rumpled cloth, thirty clicks away on the shore of a large pink puddle. The picture was weirdly tilted and ran with interference.
There was a mob converging on the “city”.
They were pretty well-behaved as far as mobs are concerned. There was no shouting, shaken fists or overt violence. But that was not an army or a march: just an unstructured mass of people moving toward a goal with the slow surety of an amoeba. They all blended together, dissolved into an undifferentiated tide of flesh by that never-changing incarnadine light.
“More are coming,” Rostov said. “Some from as far as the terminus. The satellite is picking movement all over the lighted side.”
Hunched over, he stared at the screen. His beard was still disheveled but he sounded businesslike.
“How many?” Macready asked.
“Thousands. Maybe more. Looks like half the population are on the move.”
He turned around and looked at me. His eyes were rimmed in red.
“Evelyn,” he said, “is it war?”
I came closer, peered at the screen. The picture was breaking up.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “No weapons. No organization. No flags or war-paint. No leaders.”
“Maybe they want to avenge the insult to their honor,” Xiaowei said. Rostov’s eyes never left my face.
“Is it possible?” he asked, again addressing only me.
I shrugged.
“Possible,” I said, “but unlikely. In patriarchal cultures, the…injured party would probably fight the rival alone or with his closest male relatives. But this…it can’t be a single family or even a tribe. And there are men and women together.”
“Maybe their families are bigger,” Macready said.
“Much bigger,” it was Marco’s voice.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
The Croatian stood up, the flickering from the screen turning his craggy face into a pitted mask.
“I was going to submit a formal report,” he said, “but this is as good a time as any. These things,” he pointed to the screen, “are not people. Not individuals.”
“What are they?” this from Xiaowei.
“Fruiting bodies, I think. You know how you find mushrooms in a forest clearing and there are a lot of them together. You think: why so many? But in fact, there is only one. A mycelium, an underground network of filaments. Some of them stretch out for miles. And what you think are individual mushrooms are just temporary extrusions from that one underlying body.”
“Are you saying these people are like mushrooms?” Macready asked incredulously. Marco shrugged.
“It’s just an analogy. Clearly, they are not physically connected. But this is what the rest of life is, here – not that there is much of it. Underground networks, running under the sand, pumping water and chemicals around. And one sure thing: they don’t have individual DNA.”
“No!” I said. “They are individuals! As much as we are!”
“Speaking from experience?” Xiaowei asked tonelessly.
“Speaking as an anthropologist.”
Marco and Macready protested at once and Rostov lifted his meaty arm. Silence fell.
“I hate to do it,” he said, “but we are not equipped to deal with this. I have already sent a report to SpaceCom. They’ll notify the UN. We have to leave.”
SpaceCom was only interested in exploitable resources –biologicals, preferably. The UN…what a joke! This would disappear into the bureaucratic mills that grind exceedingly slowly and produce nothing but dust. And if China or the NAU decided to send another expedition, I won’t be in it.
I opened my mouth, astonished at what was to come out, when Marco turned back to the vid screen.
“What’s going on?” he yelled, poking it with a gnarled finger.
The picture did not seem to change: a sluggish flood of people pouring into the low buildings. And then it clicked: how could there be room inside for so many?
“Underground tunnels?” Macready suggested uncertainly.
“In the sand?”
And then I knew. I turned around and ran.
I was out of the dome in seconds, stumbling into the sweep of the dunes that lay mauve and rose under the crimson sky. Suddenly their alien beauty pierced me as if seen for the first time – as, in a way, it was.
But I had no time for aesthetics. I was wading through the fine sand that seemed to clutch at me with innumerable fingers. I fell a couple of times but it was like falling in a dream.
Something dark skittered over the ridge of the next dune. My eyes burning with dust, I squinted into the gloaming. It looked like a four-legged animal but there are no animals that large on Ross.
It slid down the dune toward me and I saw what it was.
Tanya’s blond hair looked bloodied but it was only sand and mud. There were fresh scratches on her face, however. They looked as if they were inflicted by her own nails as she lifted her hand off the sand and plowed her cheeks, before dropping it back and continuing her crawl. Her garment was reduced to rags fluttering around her body. Occasionally she would stop and tug at it, trying to remove the irritation, as if she had forgotten how to undress. And then she would resume her creeping. She skittered toward me on all-fours like a baby who hasn’t learned to walk yet.
I tried to lift her up. She bit my hand and crawled away.
I circled around the dome and tried to pinpoint the location of the entrance to the X-web. We did not advertise it by a marker. In any case, it was impossible to see or unlock it without specialized instruments. Humanity had apparently coexisted with several portals scattered around Earth for a long time without being any wiser.
But I suspected it would be different here. And indeed, a portion of a dune to the left of me collapsed with a soft sigh, small avalanches of sand streaming into a funnel-shaped pit. The ground under my feet shifted. I remembered my fantasy of a giant antlion.
But what came out of the hole was a pair of hands, and then arms, and then a body vaulting over the lip of the pit and breaking through the fringe of pebbles that remained miraculously suspended in the air. The X-web has its own physical laws.
Greg fastidiously brushed sand off his clothes. He was not alone, of course. A cluster of pale faces filled the murky hollow below that extended deep into the guts of the planet – or perhaps, a planet, somewhere half-way across the universe.
“War?” I asked. He shook his head.
“Just trying to understand you.”
I knew I should hate him but was there any “him” to hate?
“Do you share personalities?” I asked.
He recoiled.
“Of course not! We are individuals!”
This was what I had said only minutes ago myself but I no longer believed it.
“If you injure one of us,” Greg added, “your problem is with them alone.”
Well, clear enough. But what would he do, this cuckolded alien husband, challenge me to a duel?
“But you do share…”
And then I saw it.
“Intelligence,” I said. “Intelligence is a collective feature. If you are separated from the rest, you lose it.”
“You are only five,” Greg said. “We thought you were harmless.”
“How many do you need?”
“Two can sustain it – for a while. But the more of us together, the greater the intelligence of each. A singleton has no mind.”
I thought about Tanya, crawling in the sand.
“Will you take her back?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Once lost, a mind cannot be regained. Shock.”
So, he had killed his wife – or worse than killed. For the oldest and most familiar reason of all. Othello and the green-eyed monster of jealousy.
I looked into the maw of the X-web where more of the aliens crowded every second. How blind we had been! We had thought it was just a lucky find, an abandoned artefact. We imagined its creators to have been godlike or demonic; incomprehensible in their superiority. And they turned out to be as similar, and as different, to us as we are to ourselves.
Greg reached out and yanked my arm. I stepped back but the shifting sand under my feet gave me no purchase to resist. I floundered, sinking into the loose drifts.
“You come with us to…” some incomprehensible word and no AI to help, “to decide how to deal with…” another garble but it was not hard to get the gist of it. If intelligence was proportionate to the number of people in a gathering, they were on their way to some forum whose combined wisdom would bring about the assured eradication of the threat posed by humanity. Antlions of the universe, creeping through their space-funnels, ready to ensnare the scurrying human ants.
And even if this collective intelligence was dispassionate, its constituents were not. Nations fought bloody wars to avenge their besmirched honor; Troy fell because of Helen’s dalliance with Paris.
The two of us grappled, raising clouds of fine dust, as undignified as toddlers squabbling in a sandbox. It was only his individual strength against mine but I lost my footing and was dragged, kicking, toward the opening supported by invisible struts when a dull noise like a distant clap of thunder reverberated in my ears. Greg’s hold suddenly slipping, I scrambled to my feet.
The X-web’s opening was collapsing, sand flowing like muddy streams toward the hole filled with gaping faces, the entire surface of the planet juddering and sliding. For a moment, I was floundering in the liquid sand. And then a hand closed on my arm and pulled me away.
Xiaowei held a boxlike device. I did not know we had a portable version of the X-web key that was installed in the capsule that had brought us here. Rostov must have kept it secret – but then, he must have given it to her. To save me? Why? And why did she betray me first and then run out to protect me?
I shrugged and muttered something that should have been thanks but was not. I walked back to the dome, while she stayed in place, watching me, unknown thoughts skittering like ants in her opaque mind.
__
Elana Gomel is the author of the seminal work:
Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism: Beyond the Golden Rule
An academic text that will change your mind on what ‘alien’ really means.