Mike Resnick - I, Alien

He throws his perception but a short way.

“Where?” I ask, seeing only our neighbor, the odd one. Mostly we just ignore him, but I hear he has been highly successful in his field, something to do with confections, nothing healthy that I would consume, but many a galaxy likes a bit of sweet nebulosity now and again.

“Him? You’re kidding!”

“Yep, yep, yep, no, no, no,” Quarble affirmed.

I sighed. Never ask Quarble more than one question at a time.

As to the neighbor, I’ve never liked the guy, never had much to do with him. But a patient’s a patient and I did swear an oath of healing so very long ago. I projected a smiling and confident perception to him. Better I should have turned and expanded away at best speed. But how was I to know the extent of the infection that still racks his body?

“May I help you?” I ask.

He replied with a torrent of ailments and symptoms, a few of which I sensed as legitimate and… disconcerting. Especially the constant migraines he was now suffering. It was all too familiar and all too ominous.

“Say ‘ahh,’” I said, pushing a quick view field into his mass.

“Ugh!” escaped from me involuntarily. Not the most reassuring manner for a healer to project, but I had never seen an infestation so horribly progressed as showed on my instrument. Inside him swarmed, teemed, slid, slithered Life in incredible numbers. Only a blur of activity on the rudimentary examination device I was using, but enough to cause me great concern.

I swatted Quarble’s nosy perception away and reached out to assemble more powerful diagnostic and treatment fields. No time to waste in an emergency case like this! The guy should have come to me sooner, a LOT sooner. Well, it was going to be nasty, but I always won.… At least, at one time, I always won. Cursed LIFE!

As my talented and nimble manipulative fields prepared the drastic but necessary medical procedures, I examined the patient visually. From the outside, he looks healthy enough, a handsome enough spiral galaxy. No signs of the rot within. He’s larger than normal, almost a giant. In fact, almost as large as I am and I’m the largest galaxy in this neighborhood.

I spared a glance to one of my instruments. Yes, a healthy male, about 15 billion years old. Good star count—somewhere around 200 billion to 400 billion at first guess, the instrument will refine that shortly as the processing completes.

“Is he a goner, Doc? Dead? A dead one?”

“SHUT UP, you idiot!” I said, but the patient is in too much pain to pay attention to Quarble. Quarble has all the finesse of an imploding black hole, but he’s cheaper than hiring a trained nurse.

I pushed my manipulators harder, feeling a real sense of urgency now, but continued the look over. All these observations give a physician the data needed for effective treatment of an infection. Usually they do, anyway.

Hmmm, I noted in my treatment log. The patient has a good distribution of hydrogen clouds, what the Life unit Hubble typed as a Sb or Sc galaxy. Which means he has both a pronounced disk component yet exhibits a spiral structure, and a prominent nuclear region. The latter is part of a notable bulge/halo component.

“What does it mean, Doc? Is he sick, is that what it says?”

I abstractedly brushed Quarble’s perception away from the log and thought about what other descriptive facts to add.

“DOCTOR?” the patient said, moaning.

“Just a moment, I’m preparing a procedure that will help you. Nothing to worry about.”

See, doctors he to patients.

“Will it hurt, Doctor?”

Of course it will, it will hurt like hell. He’s too far gone for anything that would not hurt. “No, not a bit,” I said. See above comment about lies. “Er… you might feel a slight sting, just a tiny bit of discomfort,” I modified, feeling just a little guilty because I was planning on unleashing several hundred supernovas within his body. No half measures when Life is so virulently established. He’s going to be spewing fire from all orifices!

Too bad. Like I’ve already said, he’s not a bad looking guy—not as handsome as me, but so few are. I examine his spiral arms and look inside his body again. A normally hale and hearty mix of interstellar matter, diffuse nebulae, and young stars. Good growth patterns with open star clusters emerging from this matter. But he’s been partaking a bit too much of his own confectionery. His bulge component is rife with old stars and fatty globular clusters; very concentrated toward his center.

I see some supernovae have occurred in the past; spectacular events to Life units, but nothing unusual here in frequency or magnitude—just one of the ways our bodies have of keeping infection down. But… speaking of spectacular… I was planning and preparing to give THESE Life units something to REALLY gawk at. In the few brief moments left to them, that is.

“You sure it won’t hurt?” the patient asked again, nervously.

“No, no—not a bit,” I lied.

The instrumentation had gathered vast amounts of data now, giving me all the information needed to proceed. Even the Life units’ many communications among themselves were analyzed and interpreted and a comprehensive history presented. All absurdly simple— killing infection, after all, is not brain surgery.

Still, this case was very advanced and the patient not at all likely to survive it. “About payment,” I said.

The necessary transaction was concluded, the patient desperate and making no demur at my exorbitant rate. It’s the very best time to ask for your fee—wait until after the cure and they haggle or fail to survive, which is the ultimate negotiating ploy.

Quarble and I continued, perceiving all the data now spread across the perception-rendering screen on one of my force terminals, expanded out to the size of a galaxy itself. Every bit of datum required there for our instant reference. Well, at least I understood it—you never knew with Quarble, but he did surprise me at times.

“Bad, Doc, bad,” he actually whispered. “Worse, the worst I’ve ever seen.

“Yes,” I said just as quietly, “in fact, I’ve only seen or heard of one case with a greater infection.”

“Who? Who?”

“In a body we dissected in medical school. Already long dead, of course, and the Life that caused it, too. But you could see how it ravaged her before she succumbed. Nasty little buggers, Life!”

“Fast, fast, Doc. Hard to stomp them!”

Quarble, as usual, was stating the obvious.

As I flexed my manipulator fields and prepared for surgical entry into the patient, I reflected on the real problem we face in fighting infection, speed! Life is quick. The time scales they operate on are far more compressed than ours… Living for hundreds of billions of their years, we tend to move and think a good deal slower then them. When means Life can explode into existence and become technologically advanced in what to us true beings is little more than a short nap. A mere blink to us is hundreds of years for them. We must be ever vigilant to avoid such infections. My patient was not and is now paying that price.

“My brain is SPLITTING, Doctor!” he moaned. “Do SOMETHING!”

Yes, therein lies the problem Life causes us. When they become sufficiently advanced, they devise methods of traveling and communicating faster than light. This dirty little strain of Life called their FTL radio “Karsen waves”—after its discoverer. But the problem is that the esoteric wavelengths enabling this faster than light communication are the SAME as we think on. Life’s inane and petty garble drives us crazy like— to use one of their own metaphors—a thousand heavy metal bands jamming all at once inside your brain with NO way of turning down the volume.