Грегори Бенфорд - Not One of Us - Stories of Aliens on Earth

My name is Sean. It’s an Irish name. I’m not Irish. No bit of Irish in me, as you can probably see. My mum liked the name. Irish stuff was fashionable, thirty years ago. My telling probably won’t do justice to Tendeléo’s story; I apologize. My gift’s numbers. Allegedly. I’m a reluctant accountant. I do what I do well, I just don’t have a gut feel for it. That’s why my company gave me all the odd jobs. One of them was this African-Caribbean-World restaurant just off Canal Street. It was called I-Nation—the menu changed every week, the ambience was great, and the music was mighty. The first time I wore a suit there, Wynton the owner took the piss so much I never dressed up for them again. I’d sit at a table and poke at his VAT returns and find myself nodding to the drum and bass. Wynton would try out new grooves on me and I’d give them thumbs up or thumbs down. Then he’d fix me coffee with this liqueur he imported from Jamaica and that was the afternoon gone. It seemed a shame to invoice him.

One day Wynton said to me, “You should come to our evening sessions. Good music. Not this fucking bang bang bang. Not fucking deejays. Real music. Live music.”

However, my mates liked fucking deejays and bang bang bang so I went to I-Nation on my own. There was a queue but the door staff nodded me right in. I got a seat at the bar and a Special Coffee, compliments of the house. The set had already begun, the floor was heaving. That band knew how to get a place moving. After the dance set ended, the lead guitarist gestured offstage. A girl got up behind the mic. I recognized her—she waitressed in the afternoons. She was a small, quiet girl, kind of unnoticeable, apart from her hair which stuck out in spikes like it was growing back after a Number Nought cut with the razor.

She got up behind that mic and smiled apologetically. Then she began to sing, and I wondered how I had never thought her unnoticeable. It was a slow, quiet song. I couldn’t understand the language. I didn’t need to, her voice said it all: loss and hurt and lost love. Bass and rhythm felt out the depth and damage in every syllable. She was five foot nothing and looked like she would break in half if you blew on her, but her voice had a stone edge that said, I’ve been where I’m singing about. Time stopped; she held a note then gently let it go. I-Nation was silent for a moment. Then it exploded. The girl bobbed shyly and went down through the cheering and whistling. Two minutes later she was back at work, clearing glasses. I could not take my eyes off her. You can fall in love in five minutes. It’s not hard at all.

When she came to take my glass, all I could say was, “That was… great.”

“Thank you.”

And that was it. How I met Ten, said three shit words to her, and fell in love.

I never could pronounce her name. On the afternoons when the bar was quiet and we talked over my table she would shake her head at my mangling the vowel sounds.

“Eh-yo.”

“Ay-oh?”

The soft spikes of hair would shake again. Then, she never could pronounce my name either. Shan, she would say.

“No, Shawn.”

“Shone…”

So I called her Ten, which for me meant Il Primo, Top of the Heap, King of the Hill, A-Number-One. And she called me Shone. Like the sun. One afternoon when she was off shift, I asked Boss Wynton what kind of name Tendeléo was.

“I mean, I know it’s African, I can tell by the accent, but it’s a big continent.”

“It is that. She not told you?”

“Not yet.”

“She will when she’s ready. And Mr. Accountant, you fucking respect her.”

Two weeks later she came to my table and laid a series of forms before me like tarot cards. They were Social Security applications, Income Support, Housing Benefit.

“They say you’re good with numbers.”

“This isn’t really my thing, but I’ll take a look.” I flipped through the forms. “You’re working too many hours… they’re trying to cut your benefits. It’s the classic welfare trap. It doesn’t pay you to work.”

“I need to work,” Ten said.

Last in line was a Home Office Asylum Seeker’s form. She watched me pick it up and open it. She must have seen my eyes widen.

“Gichichi, in Kenya.”

“Yes.”

I read more.

“God. You got out of Nairobi.”

“I got out of Nairobi, yes.”

I hesitated before asking, “Was it bad?”

“Yes,” she said. “I was very bad.”

“I?” I said.

“What?”

“You said ‘I.’ I was very bad.”

“I meant it, it was very bad.”

The silence could have been uncomfortable, fatal even. The thing I had wanted to say for weeks rushed into the vacuum.

“Can I take you somewhere? Now? Today? When you finish? Would you like to eat?”

“I’d like that very much,” she said.

Wynton sent her off early. I took her to a great restaurant in Chinatown where the waiters ask you before you go in how much you’d like to spend.

“I don’t know what this is,” she said as the first of the courses arrived.

“Eat it. You’ll like it.”

She toyed with her wontons and chopsticks.

“Is something wrong with it?”

“I will tell you about Nairobi now,” she said. The food was expensive and lavish and exquisitely presented and we hardly touched it. Course after course went back to the kitchen barely picked over as Ten told me the story of her life, the church in Gichichi, the camps in Nairobi, the career as a posse girl, and of the Chaga that destroyed her family, her career, her hopes, her home, and almost her life. I had seen the coming of the Chaga on the television. Like most people, I had tuned it down to background muzak in my life; oh, wow, there’s an alien life-form taking over the southern hemisphere. Well, it’s bad for the safari holidays and carnival in Rio is fucked and you won’t be getting the Brazilians in the next World Cup, but the Cooperage account’s due next week and we’re pitching for the Maine Road job and interest rates have gone up again. Aliens schmaliens. Another humanitarian crisis. I had followed the fall of Nairobi, the first of the really big cities to go, trying to make myself believe that this was not Hollywood, this was not Bruce Willis versus the CGI. This was twelve million people being swallowed by the dark. Unlike most of my friends and work mates. I had felt something move painfully inside me when I saw the walls of the Chaga close on the towers of downtown Nairobi. It was like a kick in my heart. For a moment I had gone behind the pictures that are all we are allowed to know of our world, to the true lives. And now the dark had spat one of these true lives up onto the streets of Manchester. We were on the last candle at the last table by the time Ten got around to telling me how she had been dumped out with the other Kenyans at Charles de Gaulle and shuffled for months through EU refugee quotas until she arrived, jet-lagged, culture-shocked, and poor as shit, in the gray and damp of an English summer.

Afterward, I was quiet for some time. Nothing I could have said was adequate to what I had heard. Then I said, “Would you like to come home with me for a drink, or a coffee, or something?”

“Yes,” she said. Her voice was husky from much talking, and low, and unbearably attractive. “I would, very much.”

I left the staff a big tip for above-and-beyondness.

Ten loved my house. The space astonished her. I left her curled up on my sofa savoring the space as I went to open wine.