Robert Sawyer: Illegal Alien

It wasn’t cryonics—the kind of freezing for suspended animation humans had long dreamed off. Yes, this was cold—well below zero Celsius—but it was nowhere near absolute zero. The Tosoks seemed to have a natural ability to hibernate, just as many Earth animals did.

Clete was wearing blue jeans and a denim jacket; neither provided quite enough insulation against the cold. He looked around the room, still relishing the weightlessness. He found every detail of Tosok engineering fascinating. The only places he saw actual fasteners were where they were clearly meant to be undone for maintenance, like the bolts that secured the chair supports in the lander. Everything else seemed to have been molded in a single piece, mostly from ceramic, although there were a few places where metal was visible.

“They can hibernate for centuries without aid of equipment or drugs?” asked Clete.

“Yes.”

Clete shook his head. “Y’know, before humans went into space we weren’t even sure we could survive there. After all, we’d always lived under Earth’s gravity—seemed reasonable that nature might’ve made some use of gravity feed, whether in our circulatory systems, our digestive systems, or somewheres else. But it didn’t. We can live just fine in zero gravity. The one part of us that does rely on gravity—the sense of balance, which is controlled by fluids in our inner ears—simply shuts down under zero-g. Dreamers like me, we thought this meant that as a race we were intended to go into space.”

Hask’s translator had beeped a few times at unfamiliar words during Clete’s comments, but the alien clearly got the gist of what the human had been saying. “Interesting thought,” he replied.

“But you guys,” said Clete, “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 nave been destined to sail between the stars.”

“Many of our philosophers would agree with that statement,” said Hask. He paused. “But not all, of course.” There was silence between them for several moments. “I am hungry,” said the Tosok. That didn’t surprise Clete in the least; as far as he could tell, Hask hadn’t eaten since his lander had splashed down. “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.”

Clete and Hask killed time eating and talking. Clete found the Tosok approach to food utterly fascinating—not to mention disgusting—and he recorded it all on videotape. Eventually, the other Tosoks were revived enough to leave the hibernation chamber, and Clete heard the Tosok language for the first time as they spoke to each other. Although it contained many English-like sounds, it also included a snapping, a pinging, and something like two wooden sticks being clacked together. Clete doubted that a human could speak it without mechanical aids.

There was a lot of variation in skin color among the Tosoks. Hask’s skin was blue-gray. One of the others had a taupe hide, another a neutral gray.

Two had cyan skin. One was navy blue. Kelkad’s was a bit lighter than that.

Eye color seemed to vary widely; only one of the Tosoks had all four eyes the same color. They chattered endlessly, and one of the aliens took great interest in Clete, poking him in the ribs, feeling his skin and the hair on his head, and staring with two round eyes directly into Clete’s face from only inches away.

Hask seemed to be briefing the others. As far as Clete could tell, hand gestures didn’t play any significant role in Tosok communication but the tufts on the tops of each one’s head waved in complex patterns that seemed to add nuance to the spoken words. Hask’s monologue contained several instances of a word that sounded like kash-boom! Clete wondered if it was onomatopoeic, referring to the explosion that must have accompanied the collision in the Kuiper belt; apparently only Hask and the now-deceased Tosok had been revived during that.

It was difficult to tell, but Captain Kelkad seemed displeased with Hask—his voice rose higher than was normal as his sentences progressed and his tuft moved with great agitation. Perhaps, thought Clete, the alien captain felt Hask had exceeded his authority by making first contact before reviving the others, or maybe he was angry over the death of one of his crew.

At last, Kelkad turned to look at Clete. He spoke a few words, and Hask translated. “Kelkad says he will meet with your leaders now. We are ready to fly back down.”

The Tosok landing craft skimmed above the surface of New York’s East River until it came to Turtle Bay, site of the United Nations. It zoomed over the low, concave-sided, dome-roofed General Assembly building, then did three loops around the thirty-nine-story slab of the Secretariat, before settling in the wide driveway in front of the General Assembly. No doubt about it—the Tosoks had a flare for the dramatic. Almost two billion people were watching the event live, and it seemed as though half of New York had been out on the streets, looking up.

The UN had been cordoned off. New York’s finest on one side of the barrier and gray-uniformed United Nations guards on the other were carefully controlling who got access. Frank Nobilio hoped the precautions were sufficient. He’d spent hours poring over the photographs of the alien mothership taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (which had passed within line of sight of it repeatedly now). The guys at NASA/Ames said the ship appeared to be fusion-powered—and a fusion exhaust aimed at Earth could do enormous damage. Frank was terrified of the consequences if one of the Tosoks were assassinated.

Still, there was always something about being here at the UN that moved him deeply. Oh, sure, over its history, the United Nations had probably had more failures than successes, but it still represented the loftiest of human ideals, and that meant something to Frank, who in his early twenties had spent a year in the Peace Corps, and who, as a grad student at Berkeley, had been involved in protests against the Vietnam War.

“We, the People of the United States” were indeed great words, and even decades in Washington hadn’t dulled Frank’s faith in them. But “We the Peoples of the United Nations” were even greater words, he thought as he looked up at the giant plaque outside the General Assembly:

WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED TO SAVE SUCCEEDING GENERATIONS FROM THE SCOURGE OF WAR, WHICH TWICE IN OUR LIFETIME HAS BROUGHT UNTOLD SORROW TO MANKIND, AND TO REAFFIRM FAITH IN FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHTS, IN THE DIGNITY AND WORTH OF THE HUMAN PERSON, IN THE RIGHTS OF MEN AND WOMEN AND OF NATIONS LARGE AND SMALL…

Those were words the whole planet could be proud of. As everyone in the crowd waited for the air lock on the Tosok lander to open, Frank smiled to himself. Its critics notwithstanding, he was glad there was a place like this for the aliens to land.

The air lock did open—and out came Cletus Calhoun. The crowd, which normally would have been delighted to catch a glimpse of a celebrity, reacted with disappointment. A UN guard hurried over with a microphone stand, and Clete stepped up to it.

“Take me to your leader,” he said, in harsh, mechanical tones.

The crowd laughed. Clete’s face split in a toothy grin. “I suppose y’all are wondering why I called y’all here today.”