Mike Resnick - I, Alien

The creature reached out for the fruiting body, plucked it from my substance, put it in its mouth where it dissolved into the pith and filament I needed to propagate my substance throughout its body. I waited. There was nothing. The fruit failed. The moisture in the creature’s mouth, was it too unfriendly to my fruit?

The creature lay down in the tree-floor, then, and was quiet.

I scouted it carefully, wondering what was going on, trying to understand what was happening. The creature had not stopped breathing; I made a net over its face to capture its moisture, so that it would not go to waste. I tried to comprehend the dead leaf covering, the hair covering, sending my processes into every aperture I could find; just as I was about to give up hope… I found it.

The creature’s rind was broken in several places, not large places, and most of the breaks had a shield over them so that I could sense the aperture but not get to it; but some of them were still building their shields, new breaks perhaps, and I could get in.

Oh. I cannot describe the wonder of the experience. I had only been inside a dead thing ever before; this one was still alive. Its body did things when it recognized that I was other than itself, so I took its chemistry, I borrowed its moisture, I adjusted my processes until its body could no longer tell that I was not the same as it was; and then I learned and fed and fed and learned, and when the dayblink came I covered it up with leaf-Utter and mold and continued to learn and feed as it lay on the tree-floor. It breathed quietly and slowly for the entire bright before it died.

It would have been too much for me to process, but with the strength I gained from the nourishment and moisture it provided I sent substance back across the tree-floor floor where I had walked and traveled; that absorbed substantial excess nourishment, and when I touched the skirts of the aware one in the place of my origin—the aware one fed through me with the hunger of the almost desiccated.

I hadn’t understood how close the aware one had been to discontinuity. It troubled me; but I was more pleased than troubled, because I was there, I was entirely the consumer of this wonderfully succulent creature, and I was the one who had saved the aware one from discontinuity. I was the one. I am of the aware one, but there were parts of the aware one that were not me, and I hadn’t truly understood that before then.

The aware one wanted more. Needed more. From the first taste of the moisture I sent back I knew the thirst of my siblings, the seeking along my path. When the bright dimmed, I could feel the drawing from me quicken; I was first, but many were coming. It was frightening, because I wasn’t ready to fruit and didn’t want to be absorbed in the aware one. This was my accomplishment, the acquisition of nourishment; I didn’t want to stop there and be content, because this one had come from the direction of the wet wind, and there had been more of them.

I gathered up the leaves that the animal had used to cover itself. I gathered up the nourishment that I had not fully absorbed, I arranged it in its original pattern, I stood up in the manner of the creature and walked into the wet wind. There was something so rich and promising in that breeze that I could hardly grasp it, more nourishment than seemed to be possible.

When the bright came, I sank back into the tree-floor to rest and feed. Creatures came through the forest, many twos and twos and twos of them, but I kept quiet and fed from the hard long and bony parts of the one I already had. I made an error in judgment; I used too much, drunk with moisture and replete with food. The hard bony parts would no longer support the weight of the water in my substance when I stood up to walk, but crumbled.

I needed another. I knew how to get one. I left the pieces of the animal where one of my siblings could find it in a dayblink or two, and went on. When I felt some of the creatures coming in the dark, I spread myself, as I had done before, and set my lures glowing in the dim light.

These were new creatures, it seemed, because they seemed wary or unsure, and kept to the outside of the field that I made for them. I waited. One came, finally, to take up the fruit I offered; this time I tasted the air all around it, quickly, and found where its rind was recently broken, and went there.

The creature didn’t try to eat the fruit I made for it, but it didn’t matter. I was there. I was in. I sealed the place where the rind was broken and went out into the creature’s body, remembering what I had learned from the last one about hiding from its internal defenses, reveling in nourishment.

I didn’t want to make the same mistake that I had made before. I didn’t harvest the creature; I merely fed, quietly, and only enough to keep my awareness. For my reward the creature stooped down and picked up the fruit I had made for it, and took it in a container of clear leaves; turned around and signaled to the other—and started walking back.

Terror paralyzed me as the creature stepped past the field that I had made, and carried me past the forward edge of my knowing. The aware one had never been here. There was no connection anymore between me and the aware one; and yet I was still aware. What was going to happen to me? Had I become lost? Could I ever get back?

I was alone. There was no aware one. There was only me, and the creature, and the creature’s companion. It walked vigorously with confidence, it moved so much more efficiently than I had moved the remnants of the last one, and with every step it took we traveled farther into the wet wind.

Through the forest. Out onto a hard place in the forest, something wide and stony with very strong substances in its composition, chemistries I had never sensed before; there was no way for me to send back the news to the aware one, we were severed from each other, so I didn’t know if the aware one had ever encountered anything like this in our life.

The creature had a fir-cone on the hard place, something that was in a way similar to a fir-cone, something that would carry its weight and could be moved over the surface; a very large fir-cone, and with little that was forestlike in it, but much more of the very strong chemistries all around. It sat in the fir-cone, its companion sat inside the fir-cone with it, and the fir-cone started to travel very quickly across the hard place, still into the wet wind.

I couldn’t tell where we were going. It was going too fast, and the messages in the wind were gone before I had a chance to truly taste them. I recovered from the paralysis of fear; I had to know, and my desire was stronger than my fear, but I didn’t know how I could slow the progress of the fir-cone.

The creature’s body protected one part of it more than any other; that is where I went. I didn’t care any longer about concealing my presence from its body. I went into the protected place; it was where all of the sharp brightness of warm life was concentrated, all of the quickness of the creature. I had to stop the fircone. I exerted myself, I infiltrated its brightpaths, I slowed the quick bright sharpness of its messages.

The creature fell forward in the fir-cone, and its companion became agitated, but the fir-cone stopped. It stopped very suddenly. The creatures were both damaged, but I was not damaged within the creature. It was a shame that the creatures had been damaged. They were interesting creatures. Was there something I could do to restore them? I had caused the damage, after all, in some sense.

I went carefully across the surface of the strong and very bitter chemistries to the other creature and crept in, since there was no lack of places where the rind had been broken. This creature had not been as badly damaged as the one I occupied. I used the nourishment of the one to try to repair the other, encouraging its body, transferring fuel; after a while the other moved its body, shifted itself out of the fir-cone, and stepped onto the hard surface.