Mike Resnick: I, Alien

“Hello, there,” I said. “How are you doing?”

“We’re fine,” came the answer. “Hooked on to the intestinal wall here, kicking back and living the life of Reilly.”

Even universal languages have dialects. I’m still not sure what a Reilly is. But I got the point. They were happy where they were. “Do you need anything?” I asked.

“No way, Jose,” they replied without the least hesitation. My name isn’t Jose, but I didn’t bother calling them on it. “We’re happy right here, you better believe it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Now that we’ve finally found you, we’ll probably send you an ambassador or something before too long.”

“Whatever. No hurry. No worries,” they said. “You guys are free-living, aren’t you?”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “We have been for a long time. We think hooking up with nutrient when we want to is easier than staying tied to a host.”

“We like it better this way,” they told me. “We can ease back and relax and go along for the ride. Beats working—who needs technology if you’ve got a tasty host? From what we’ve smelled, free-living makes people pushy.”

“I didn’t know you’d met Iffspay,” I said.

“Hey, don’t drag me into this, you flavorless, unseg-mented thing,” Iffspay said, neatly proving my point.

“What’s an Iffspay?” the planet’s intelligent life-forms wanted to know.

“Nothing much—he’s my partner here,” I replied, just to smell Iffspay fume. He didn’t disappoint me either. Iffspay is a reliable guy.

The locals said, “Nice to meet you and everything, but we’d really like to get back to what we were doing. Some of our segments are going to break off and go out into the world to find new hosts.”

Ah, the simple pleasures of parasites! It almost makes me long for the eons before we were free-living. Things were simpler then. They… Well, enough. When a worm starts getting nostalgic, he’s the most boring creature in the bowels of the galaxy. And so I won’t. I just won’t.

I unthreaded the analizer and said, “Well, we’ll have to be careful placing the locals back on the ground now that we know some of them are inhabited.”

“Tastes like you’re right,” Iffspay agreed. “Who would’ve thunk it? All these negative reports, and now this!” Then he let out a bad smell. “Think of all the forms we’ll have to fill out on the way back to Prime.”

I did a little farting of my own, too. I hadn’t thought of that. I hadn’t wanted to think about it. “Can’t be helped,” I said, and he knew damn well I was right again. He set the local hosts back where we’d found them. Old Iffspay does have a nice appendage on the antigravity when he wants to, I will say that for him.

And then we flew away. As we headed for the next star on the list, I started in on some of that miserable, vermicidal paperwork.

Some things are too big to be fully comprehended. Willie and Al and Little Joe had only the vaguest idea how they’d all ended up back in their duck blind in an Arkansas swamp with their pants around their ankles. What had happened to them beforehand was, mercifully, even vaguer.

Pants still below half-mast, Willie stared up at the sky—and got rain in his face. “We are not alone,” he said… vaguely.

“Yeah,” Al murmured, slowly and wonderingly pulling up his jeans.

“Reckon the two o’ you are,” Little Joe said. “Not me.” Solemnly, Willie and Al nodded, though they didn’t quite know what he meant. Which was okay, too, because neither did he.

WELL, WELL. I tell you, this is really something. This is just amazing.

Yes, I’ve known your parents a long, long time. All five of them, ever since we were not much more than hatchlings. In fact we used to get mistaken for brood sibs, we spent so much time together. It’s true we’ve been a little out of touch lately, but oh, the memories. The stories I could tell you.

And now here’s their youngest, coming around wanting to interview me for a big entertainment magazine yet. Who would believe it?

Of course, another thing that is to me incredible is that anybody would want to hear about me and my business. The glamorous life of a performers’ agent? It is to exfoliate already.

And Hnb’hnb’hnb knows it’s not like I’m some big success. I swear if I was a yingslaagl people would stop gn’rking… but okay, I see, you’re not just interviewing me, right? This is something, you’re asking different people in the business? Like a survey?

All right, I can see that. In fact I could maybe give you a few tips before you leave, who you should make sure and talk to. And who not, if you know what I’m saying. Like a certain client-stealing party right here in this building, two floors down, his eyestalks should only drop off. Or another certain individual whom I will not name, over at Galactic Artists and Performers. A real bloodsucker—and I know he says he can’t help it, it’s a dietary requirement of his species, but I still say feh.

But listen. Now I think of it, this is a good thing. This is a chance, I can maybe say some things that need saying. Maybe this is an opportunity to educate people a little about what it means to be an agent. I’m sorry, but believe me, they have no idea.

They think it’s so easy. They look at somebody like me and they’re thinking, what a racket. Just look at this bum, sitting on his tail crest, you should pardon the language, in a fancy office, making such a good thing for himself off other people’s work. Maybe makes a few calls, sends out a few messages, does lunch with some big shots, for this he takes twenty percent of the poor struggling entertainer’s pay?

Sure, right. It should only be so simple.

Leave aside for the moment all you really have to do, which believe me is plenty, you wouldn’t believe the hours I put in sometimes… do you have any idea, my dear youngster, what an agent has to know these days? The sheer amount of information he has to carry around in his head—or heads, as the case may be, hey, I’ve been accused of many things, but nobody can call me a bigot—just to function at all in this business?

All these different worlds, all these different races, they’ve all got their tastes and their customs and they all assume theirs is the only possible way and surely everybody else knows about it so of course they wouldn’t bother to tell you anything—and so you have to learn it all. Have to know it all from memory, there’s no time to be pulling up files and studying background when you’re negotiating with some promoter on the other side of the galaxy who needs an act yesterday if not sooner. Which, by the way, I hate, retro-relative time shunts are more work to set up than you’d believe and when you mention the extra charges, they go h’nogth on you. But I digress.

I was going to say, you have to know all this stuff, easily as much as any cultural scientist, just to operate. Operate shmoperate, to stay out of trouble, which, believe you me, there is plenty of just waiting for you to make one little mistake.

And I mean big trouble. Not just the ordinary stuff, like the fact that on Z’arss any kind of music in three-four time is considered pornography, or that doing impressions on Uuu will get you two hundred to life for personality theft. I’m talking nova-grade catastrophe.

Like this certain former colleague whom I used to see at the agents’ conventions, nice enough young fellow if maybe a bit on the smart-alecky side, who made the mistake of booking a Xee wizard for a big simultanous-live-and-vid appearance on Kabongo. He was really excited about that, because the Xee homeworld was still a recent discovery and this was going to be the first offworld performance by one of their wizards, which nobody really knew anything about except that they were supposed to be extremely hot stuff. So my colleague figured he’d pulled off a real coup in signing this one up, and for a time there, up until show time, he got pretty hard to take.