Robert Sawyer - Illegal Alien

“But you guys,” Clete was saying in that rich Tennessee accent, “being able to shut down for centuries, having that ability built right into y’all. You can fake gravity in space, ’course, through centrifugal force or constant acceleration. But there ain’t nothing you can do about the time it takes for interstellar travel. With a natural suspended-animation ability, y’all sure got us beat. We might have been destined to go into planetary orbit, but your race seems to have been destined to sail between the stars.”

“Many of our philosophers would agree with that statement,” remarked Hask. Then, after a second: “But not all, of course.” They were both quiet for a time. “I am hungry,” said Hask. “It will take several hours for the others to revive. Do you require food?”

“I brought some with me,” said Clete. “Navy rations. Hardly gourmet vittles, but they’ll do.”

“Come with me,” said Hask. The alien folded his three-part legs against a bulkhead and kicked off. Clete started off with a hand push—his long arm darted into the shot for a moment—but then apparently kicked off the wall as well. They floated down another corridor, large yellow lights overhead alternating with small orange ones.

Soon they came to a door, which slid aside for Hask. They floated into the room. As they did so more lights came on overhead.

There was a sound of Clete sucking in his breath. No way to know what he’d been thinking, but Dale Rice always felt like vomiting when he saw this part of the tape. In the dimmed light of the courtroom, he could see several jurors wincing.

There was a great bloody mass in the middle of the picture. It took several seconds for the shape of the thing to register as Clete panned the camera.

It seemed to be an enormously long tube of raw meat, its surface glistening with pinkish-red blood. The tube wound around itself like a pile of spilled intestines. Its diameter was about five inches, and its length—well, if it were all stretched out, instead of coiled up, it might have run to fifty feet, a great, gory anaconda stripped of its hide. One end was plugged into one of the room’s walls; the other end, which terminated in a flat circular cross section, was propped up by a Y-shaped ceramic support.

“God a’mighty!” said Clete voice. “What is it?”

“It is food,” said Hask.

“It’s meat?”

“Yes. Would you like some?”

“Ah—no. No, thanks.”

Hask floated over to the tube’s free end. He reached into one of the pouches on his dun-colored vest and removed a small blue cylinder about ten inches long and two inches in diameter. He took one end of it in the fingers of his front arm and the other in his back arm, then bent it. It split down the middle into two five-inch cylinders. He then moved his hands as if he were drawing an invisible loop of string stretched between the two cylinders around the great tube of meat, about four inches from its end. He pulled the two blue handles away from each other, and to the jury’s amazement, the last four inches of the great meat sausage separated from the rest. It just floated there, but the picture clearly showed a receptacle attached to the Y-shaped support that obviously would have caught it had the ship been undergoing acceleration.

“How did you do that?” said Clete, off camera.

Hask looked at him, puzzled. Then he seemed to realize. “You mean my carving tool? There is a single, long, flexible molecular chain connecting the two handles. The chain cannot be broken, but because of its thinness, it cuts easily through almost anything.”

Clete’s voice could be heard to say, “It slices! It dices!”

“Pardon?” said Hask.

“A line from an old TV commercial—for the Ronco Veg-O-Matic. ‘It slices! It dices!’ ” Clete sounded impressed. “Purty neat device. But if you can’t see the thread, isn’t it dangerous?”

Hask grabbed the two parts of the handle and pulled them as far apart as he could. Every fifteen inches or so, a large blue bead appeared along the otherwise invisible filament. “The beads enable you to see the filament,” said Hask, “as well as letting you handle it safely. They are lined on the inside with a monomolecular weave that the filament cannot cut through, so you can slide the beads along the filament if they get in the way.”

Hask’s tuft moved in a shrug. “It is a general-purpose tool, not just for carving meat; nothing sticks to the monofilament, so you do not have to worry about keeping it clean.”

Dale had his eyes glued to the jurors. First one got it, and then another, and soon they all had reacted with either widened eyes or noddings of their heads: they had just seen what could very likely have been the murder weapon.

Hask brought the two handles together—the molecular chain and its beads were reeled in as he did so—and he placed the unit back in a pocket. He then reached out with his front hand and plucked the floating disk of meat out of the air. Very little blood had been shed—a few circular drops had come free as the molecular chain went through the meat, but something—a vacuum cleaner, perhaps—had sucked them down into the Y-shaped support.

“What kind of critter is that?” said Clete. His arm was visible again, pointing at the skinless snake.

“It is not an animal,” said Hask. “It is meat.” The image bounced as Clete pushed off the wall to have a closer look at what Hask was holding. Clete apparently wasn’t good at maneuvering while weightless; Hask had to reach out with a leg—which bent in a way that would have snapped the joint had Hask been human—to stop Clete’s movement. Clete thanked Hask, then took a close-up shot of the piece of meat. It was clear now that it did have a skin, made up of diamond-shaped plates just like Hask’s own hide. But the skin on the meat was thin and crystal clear.

“Meat, but not an animal?” said Clete’s voice. He sounded perplexed.

“It is just meat,” Hask said. “It is not an animal. Rather, it is a product of genetic engineering. It has only what nervous system is required to support its circulatory system, and its circulatory system is simplicity itself. It is not alive; it feels no pain. It is simply a chemical factory, converting raw materials fed to it through the wall receptacle into edible flesh, balanced perfectly for our nutritional needs. Of course, it is not all we eat—we are omnivores, as you are.”

“Ah,” said Clete. “Y’all couldn’t bring animals on your long space voyage, but this lets y’all enjoy the taste.”

Hask’s front eyes blinked repeatedly. “We do not eat animals on our world,” he said. “At least, not anymore.”

“Oh,” said Clete. “Well, we don’t have the ability to create meat. We kill animals for their flesh.”

Hask’s tuft waggled as he considered this. “Since we do not have to kill for food, we no longer do so. Some say we have sacrificed too much—that killing one’s own food is a release, the outlet nature intended for violent urges.”

“Well, I’m an old country boy,” said Clete. “I’ve done my share o’ huntin’. But most people today, they get their meat prepackaged at a store. They don’t ever see the animal, and have no hand in the kill.”

“But you say you have killed?” said Hask.

“Well, yes.”

“What is it like—to kill for food?”

The camera bounced; Clete was apparently shrugging as he held it. “It can be very satisfying. Nothing quite so delicious as a meal you tracked and bagged yourself.”

“Intriguing,” said Hask. He looked at his disk of meat, as though it were somehow no longer all that appetizing. Still, he brought it to his front mouth, the outer horizontal and inner vertical openings forming a square hole. His rust-colored dental plates sliced a piece off the edge of the meat disk, and to the jury’s evident surprise, two long flat tongues popped out of the mouth after each bite, wiping what little blood there was from Hask’s face.