Peter Cawdron - Xenophobia

“So,” Elvis began. “What about Stella? How do we get her to come with us?”

“Stella?” Bower asked in surprise. She knew who he meant, she was surprised by his choice of name.

“She needs a name,” he replied

“And that name is Stella?”

“It means star.”

“I know what it means,” Bower said gently. She shook her head. In a serious tone, she added, “Just remember, cute and cuddly Stella can rip your arms out of their sockets. She can flay your flesh quicker than a Great White Shark. Were she to come up against a full-grown African lion or a thirty-foot crocodile, my money would be on her walking away without a scratch.”

“And yet she didn’t hurt me,” he protested. “She saved my life.”

“You’ve seen her in action. Remember, she no more identifies with you than you do with a wild Bengal tiger or an Arctic polar bear.”

“But this is different. She’s intelligent,” Elvis protested. “You saw the way she treated us in the kitchenette.”

Oh, what a turn of events, thought Bower. Previously, the appeal to reason had been her position during the truck ride. Back then it had been Elvis that had been warning of danger, now the roles were reversed. Thinking about it, she figured, having your arm rebuilt at a molecular level would probably melt your heart as well.

“Look, I think she’s intelligent too, but we need to be careful we don’t read our own thoughts and feelings into her actions or the consequences could be disastrous.”

Elvis pursed his lips in the soft light. Bower could see he was thinking carefully about his words, choosing his terms with precision. “She could have left me to die, but she didn’t. I think we owe her the benefit of doubt. We can’t leave her to die. I owe her my life.”

“I know,” Bower replied. “Believe me, I know. We’re all in this lifeboat together, fighting against the storm around us, but when that door opens, our world will change. She may come with us, but then again, she may not. She may not trust us. She might choose to strike out on her own. When that door opens, all bets are off.

“Like you, I’d like to see her come with us in the truck, but, honestly, I doubt she’ll go for it. You can lead a horse to water, you cannot make it drink.”

Elvis looked hurt. For all his tough exterior, he seemed fragile.

“There’s a gulf between us,” she said, clarifying her thinking further. “A void as big as that distance that separates our planets. It’s all too easy for us to interpret her actions as those of a human, but they’re not. Listen, I want her to be one of us, to be a good guy or whatever, but she’s not, she never will be. When she speaks she uses my voice but there’s no conversation. She’s mimicking me, that’s all, copying me like a parrot.”

Tears rolled down his cheeks.

“She’s smarter than a parrot,” Elvis said in rebuttal.

“I know. But just like a parrot, her physiology reinforces the differences between us. There’s a chasm separating us, an impassible ocean. She can no more understand what it means to be human than we can understand what it means to be alien.”

The tone in his voice stiffened.

“You’re wrong, Doc. Maybe I can’t describe what I’m feeling in scientific terms, maybe I am projecting my own feelings on her, but I never asked her to save my life. She did that herself. She chose to do good. I’ve got to believe there’s more to her than some wild animal. You said it yourself in the truck, there’s an intelligence there. And that’s more than having the smarts to know two plus two is four or to fly between stars. She cares.”

Bower breathed deeply, unsure how to respond to his emotive plea.

As if on cue, the alien creature rolled softly into view. Bower wondered what the alien had heard and how much it understood.

Elvis walked fearlessly toward the creature. There was a mutual affinity between them. They both reached out for each other. Bower watched as his fingers touched at the waving fronds. His hand skimmed across the tips as though he were running his fingers over a field of wheat.

The pulsating core of the creature hummed like an electrical substation. Bower was in two minds as to the alien’s composition. It moved and acted so fluidly, as though it were an individual, and yet the tiny creatures at its heart suggested otherwise. She couldn’t figure out which it was, but then, she realized, perhaps both models were wrong. Perhaps some other alien rationale held true and the creature, as she saw it, was more of a symbiotic whole.

The creature dwarfed Elvis, but that didn’t appear to bother him. They both seemed to relish the soft touch.

The strength latent in the fronds was apparent. Being spherical, there were fronds drifting through the air above and beside the big man, but he held no fear of the creature.

“We’re going to help her, right?”

At that point, Bower didn’t feel she had any choice in the matter, regardless of how uneasy she felt. She was alarmed by the relationship between Elvis and the alien. As docile as tigers could be in captivity, there was always a very real danger of them turning on their trainers, regardless of how long a pair had worked together, and she felt his disregard for prudence was reckless. The possibility of a reactionary temperament hadn’t occurred to him. Stella had dismembered Bosco with ruthless efficiency. She could turn on either of them without warning, without any humanly intelligible reason. She could be using them, playing them. They could be a novelty, nothing more than a pet in this alien’s mind.

Every instinct within Bower cried out, no, but she said, “Yes… We’ll help her phone home.”

Bower watched as the creature pulled Elvis closer, its dark, scarlet tentacles wrapping around his arm, enveloping him. He wasn’t afraid, he was receptive, perhaps even enjoying the encounter. The alien towered several feet above him as its fronds enclosed his arm, reaching his shoulder, and yet still he showed no fear.

“Phone home?” Elvis said. “Do you understand? Home? Come with us. We’ll help you get home.”

“Home,” the creature replied, but it hadn’t mimicked his voice. The alien had retained Bower’s distinct tone, duplicating both her soft pronunciation and her British accent. Bower found that even more perplexing. As long as she’d been the only one communicating with the creature it made sense that it duplicated her voice. But now, when it was clearly comfortable with Elvis, it still chose to retain her vocal persona. There was a complex dynamic at work, one Bower didn’t understand, and that frightened her.

Bower recalled the term ‘home’ being used three times in his sentence, four times if she counted her initial use of the concept. The alien had simply repeated the most commonly used word back at them in mimicry. There was an assumption at play. How could they know what the creature had actually understood? Words were only ever meaningful in their context.

When Europeans first encountered primitive cultures, translating languages had been a painfully slow exercise, relying heavily on visual clues and comparisons. Translation efforts went on for years. None of that had happened with the alien. This could all be guesswork on the creature’s part, nothing more than an intelligent guess as if playing along with the curious chimps. When the factory door opened, Bower thought the alien would bolt into the distance.

The creature released Elvis. Bower was curious as to who had initiated the separation, had Elvis pulled away or had the alien let go?

“Home, Stella,” he said as the alien moved back into the shadows, staying just on the edge of their vision. “We’re going to get you home.”

Bower didn’t even want to ask how Elvis proposed to do that. For now it was enough to escape their dungeon.