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

“What the hell is going on here?” said Colonel Weber.

Gary walked up to the looking glass, and then around it to the other side. He touched the rear surface with one hand; I could see the pale ovals where his fingertips made contact with the looking glass. “I think,” he said, “we just saw a demonstration of transmutation at a distance.”

I heard the sounds of heavy footfalls on dry grass. A soldier came in through the tent door, short of breath from sprinting, holding an oversize walkie-talkie. “Colonel, message from—”

Weber grabbed the walkie-talkie from him.

Iremember what it’ll be like watching you when you are a day old. Your father will have gone for a quick visit to the hospital cafeteria, and you’ll be lying in your bassinet, and I’ll be leaning over you.

So soon after the delivery, I will still be feeling like a wrung-out towel. You will seem incongruously tiny, given how enormous I felt during the pregnancy; I could swear there was room for someone much larger and more robust than you in there. Your hands and feet will be long and thin, not chubby yet. Your face will still be all red and pinched, puffy eyelids squeezed shut, the gnomelike phase that precedes the cherubic.

I’ll run a finger over your belly, marveling at the uncanny softness of your skin, wondering if silk would abrade your body like burlap. Then you’ll writhe, twisting your body while poking out your legs one at a time, and I’ll recognize the gesture as one I had felt you do inside me, many times. So that’s what it looks like.

I’ll feel elated at this evidence of a unique mother-child bond, this certitude that you’re the one I carried. Even if I had never laid eyes on you before, I’d be able to pick you out from a sea of babies: Not that one. No, not her either. Wait, that one over there.

Yes, that’s her. She’s mine.

That final “gift exchange” was the last we ever saw of the heptapods. All at once, all over the world, their looking glasses became transparent and their ships left orbit. Subsequent analysis of the looking glasses revealed them to be nothing more than sheets of fused silica, completely inert. The information from the final exchange session described a new class of superconducting materials, but it later proved to duplicate the results of research just completed in Japan: nothing that humans didn’t already know.

We never did learn why the heptapods left, any more than we learned what brought them here, or why they acted the way they did. My own new awareness didn’t provide that type of knowledge; the heptapods’ behavior was presumably explicable from a sequential point of view, but we never found that explanation.

I would have liked to experience more of the heptapods’ worldview, to feel the way they feel. Then, perhaps I could immerse myself fully in the necessity of events, as they must, instead of merely wading in its surf for the rest of my life. But that will never come to pass. I will continue to practice the heptapod languages, as will the other linguists on the looking-glass teams, but none of us will ever progress any further than we did when the heptapods were here.

Working with the heptapods changed my life. I met your father and learned Heptapod B, both of which make it possible for me to know you now, here on the patio in the moonlight. Eventually, many years from now, I’ll be without your father, and without you. All I will have left from this moment is the heptapod language. So I pay close attention, and note every detail.

From the beginning I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly. But am I working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain? Will I achieve a minimum, or a maximum?

These questions are in my mind when your father asks me, “Do you want to make a baby?” And I smile and answer, “Yes,” and I unwrap his arms from around me, and we hold hands as we walk inside to make love, to make you.

“Dark Heaven” by Gregory Benford. © 2007 by Gregory Benford. Originally published in Alien Crimes , edited by Mike Resnick. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Fear Gun” by Judith Berman. © 2004 by Judith Berman. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction , July 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, copyright © 1998 by Ted Chiang. Originally published in Starlight 2, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Used by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

“Taking Care of God” by Cixin Liu. © 2012 by Cixin Liu. Originally published in English in Pathlight Magazine , Issue 2. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Time of the Snake” by A.M. Dellamonica. © 2007 by A.M. Dellamonica. Originally published in Fast Forward , edited by Lou Anders. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Touring with the Alien” by Carolyn Ives Gilman. © 2016 by Carolyn Ives Gilman. Originally published in Clarkesworld , April 2016. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“They Shall Salt the Earth with Seeds of Glass” by Alaya Dawn Johnson. © 2013 by Alaya Dawn Johnson. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction , January 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“And Never Mind the Watching Ones” by Keffy R. M. Kehrli. © 2015 by Keffy R. M. Kehrli. Originally published in Uncanny , September/October 2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Men are Trouble” by James Patrick Kelly. © 2004 by James Patrick Kelly. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction , June 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Laws of Survival” by Nancy Kress. © 2007 by Nancy Kress. Originally published in Jim Baen’s Universe , December 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Bits” by Naomi Kritzer. © 2013 by Naomi Kritzer. Originally published in Clarkesworld , October 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Water Scorpions” by Rich Larson. © 2016 by Rich Larson. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction , October/November 2016. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Reborn” by Ken Liu. © 2014 by Ken Liu. Originally published in Tor.com, January 2014. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Choice” by Paul McAuley. © 2011 by Paul McAuley. Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction , February 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Tendeléo’s Story” by Ian McDonald. © 2000 by Ian McDonald. Originally published by PS Publishing. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Ants of Flanders” by Robert Reed. © 2011 by Robert Reed. Originally published in Fantasy & Science Fiction , July/August 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill” by Kelly Robson. © 2015 by Kelly Robson. Originally published in Clarkesworld , February 2015. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Passage of Earth” by Michael Swanwick. © 2014 by Michael Swanwick. Originally published in Clarkesworld , April 2014. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Nine-Tenths of the Law” by Molly Tanzer. © 2017 by Molly Tanzer. Originally published in Lightspeed , January 2017. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“At Play in the Fields” by Steve Rasnic Tem. © 2011 by Steve Rasnic Tem. Originally published in Solaris Rising , edited by Ian Whates. Reprinted by permission of the author.