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

Kai’s was the first face I saw the last time I was Reborn.

It was a face with dark fish-like eyes and skin that pulsated as though tiny maggots were wriggling just under the surface. I cringed and tried to move away but there was nowhere to go. My back was against a steel wall.

The skin around thir eyes contracted and expanded again, an alien expression I did not understand. Thie backed up, giving me some space.

Slowly, I sat up and looked around. I was on a narrow steel slab attached to the wall of a tiny cell. The lights were too bright. I felt nauseated. I closed my eyes.

And a tsunami of images came to me that I could not process. Faces, voices, events in fast motion. I opened my mouth to scream.

And Kai was upon me in a second. Thie wrapped thir primary arms around my head, forcing me to stay still. A mixture of floral and spicy scents enveloped me, and the memory of it suddenly emerged from the chaos in my mind. The smell of home. I clung to it like a floating plank in a roiling sea.

Thie wrapped thir secondary arms around me, patting my back, seeking an opening. I felt them push through a hole over my spine, a wound that I did not know was there, and I wanted to cry out in pain—

—and the chaos in my mind subsided. I was looking at the world through thir eyes and mind: my own naked body, trembling.

Let me help you.

I struggled for a bit, but thie was too strong, and I gave in.

What happened?

You’re aboard the Judgment Ship. The old Josh Rennon did something very bad and had to be punished.

I tried to remember what it was that I had done, but could recall nothing.

He is gone. We had to cut him out of this body to rescue you.

Another memory floated to the surface of my mind, gently guided by the currents of Kai’s thoughts.

I am sitting in a classroom, the front row. Sunlight coming in from the windows along the western wall makes clean parallelograms on the ground. Kai paces slowly back and forth in front of us.

“Each of us is composed of many groupings of memories, many personalities, many coherent patterns of thoughts.” The voice comes from a black box Kai wears around thir neck. It’s slightly mechanical, but melodious and clear.

“Do you not alter your behavior, your expressions, even your speech when you’re with your childhood friends from your hometown compared to when you’re with your new friends from the big city? Do you not laugh differently, cry differently, even become angry differently when you’re with your family than when you’re with me?

The students around me laugh a little at this, as do I. As Kai reaches the other side of the classroom, thie turns around and our eyes meet. The skin around thir eyes pulls back, making them seem even bigger, and my face grows warm.

“The unified individual is a fallacy of traditional human philosophy. It is, in fact, the foundation of many unenlightened, old customs. A criminal, for example, is but one person inhabiting a shared body with many others. A man who murders may still be a good father, husband, brother, son, and he is a different man when he plots death than when he bathes his daughter, kisses his wife, comforts his sister, and cares for his mother. Yet the old human criminal justice system would punish all of these men together indiscriminately, would judge them together, imprison them together, even kill them together. Collective punishment. How barbaric! How cruel!”

I imagine my mind the way Kai describes it: partitioned into pieces, an individual divided. There may be no human institution that the Tawnin despise more than our justice system. Their contempt makes perfect sense when considered in the context of their mind-to-mind communication. The Tawnin have no secrets from each other and share an intimacy we can only dream of. The idea of a justice system so limited by the opacity of the individual that it must resort to ritualized adversarial combat rather than direct access to the truth of the mind must seem to them a barbarity.

Kai glances at me, as though thie could hear my thoughts, though I know that is not possible without my being ported. But the thought brings pleasure to me. I am Kai’s favorite student.

I placed my arms around Kai.

My teacher, my lover, my spouse. I was once adrift, and now I have come home. I am beginning to remember.

I felt the scar on the back of thir head. Thie trembled.

What happened here?

I don’t remember. Don’t worry about it.

I carefully caressed thim, avoiding the scar.

The Rebirth is a painful process. Your biology did not evolve as ours, and the parts of your mind are harder to tease apart, to separate out the different persons. It will take some time for the memories to settle. You have to re-remember, relearn the pathways needed to make sense of them again, to reconstruct yourself again. But you’re now a better person, free from the diseased parts we had to cut out.

I hung onto Kai, and we picked up the pieces of myself together.

Ishow Claire the mask, and the too-perfect electronic profile. “To get access to this kind of equipment and to create an alias with an electronic trail this convincing requires someone with a lot of power and access. Maybe even someone inside the Bureau, since we need to scrub electronic databases to cleanse the records of the Reborn.”

Claire bites her bottom lip as she glances at the display on my phone and regards the mask with skepticism. “That seems really unlikely. All the Bureau employees are ported and are regularly probed. I don’t see how a mole among us can stay hidden.”

“Yet it’s the only explanation.”

“We’ll know soon enough,” Claire tells me. “Adam has been ported. Tau is doing the probe now. Should be done in half an hour.”

I practically fall into the chair next to her. Exhaustion over the last two days settles over me like a heavy blanket. I have been avoiding Kai’s touch, for reasons that I cannot even explain. I feel divided from myself.

I tell myself to stay awake, just a little longer.

Kai and I are sitting on the leather loveseat. Thir big frame means that we are squeezed in tightly. The fireplace is behind us and I can feel the gentle heat against the back of my neck. Thir left arms gently stroke my back. I’m tense.

My parents are on the white couch across from us.

“I’ve never seen Josh this happy,” my mother says. And her smile is such a relief that I want to hug her.

“I’m glad you feel that way,” says Kai, with thir black voice box. “I think Josh was worried about how you might feel about me—about us.”

“There are always going to be Xenophobes,” my father says. He sounds a little out of breath. I know that one day I will recognize this as the beginning of his sickness. A tinge of sorrow tints my happy memory.

“Terrible things were done,” Kai says. “We do know that. But we always want to look to the future.”

“So do we,” my father says. “But some people are trapped in the past. They can’t let the dead lie buried.”

I look around the room and notice how neat the house is. The carpet is immaculate, the end tables free of clutter. The white couch my parents are sitting on is spotless. The glass coffee table between us is empty save for a stack of artfully arranged magazines.