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

“Audrey?”

“ The Little Shop of Horrors? ‘Feed me!’? That giant man-eating plant? Did you ever see it? There was a revival, very popular when I died, if you’ll excuse the expression.”

“That must have been after my time. When I—died—the refugees were just crossing into Arizona, Texas.”

“They’d made it to St. Louis by the time I passed. By that time it made no difference—if they were from California, Arizona, Mexico or Latin American—they were all refugees. Starving, desperate, disease-ridden human beings. What were the rest of us supposed to do?”

Tom had no answer, and did not want to know what Franklin might have participated in. They both stood quietly looking around at the natives, as if anything but silence would be somehow disrespectful, and it occurred to Tom that this might offer another explanation for the aliens’ long non-responsive silences. An alien drifted slowly by, several natives trailing excitedly. Franklin gazed after them, looking troubled.

“Have you tried to talk with one of them?” Tom asked. “A native?”

“Only at first. How much do you know about them?”

“Very little—they hardly ever speak, and when they do I can’t understand them. But they’re what’s left of us.”

“No, we’re what’s left of us—the ones from another time, the ones that were suspended. That’s who we are, the survivors from that time. These people, they’re from this time, and this, my friend, is a whole other world. You know they hate us, don’t you? At least the ones who understand enough.”

“No, I don’t,” Tom said firmly. “Why would they hate us?”

“Because we got to miss the worst of it. They don’t look like much, but they’re not dumb—it takes some smarts to survive this long in this environment. And we got to skip what they went through, and what their fathers and mothers went through, and who knows how many generations back, and now we’re helping their invaders.”

“They’re hardly invaders, Franklin.”

Franklin looked at Tom for a moment as if he felt sorry for him. “Then tell me, Tom. Who’s in charge here?”

During the next few months Tom became obsessed with the complexities of reconstituting a vanished world from its pieces—his world, and that world which had evolved into being while he slept. A thick but feather weight oval so transparent it might be invisible proved to be a lamp. Nearby he found a piece of rainbow—he held the iridescent fragment against the sun and it began to vibrate with colors that filled the air. Alarmed, he dropped it, and heard a nearby laugh. When his eyes readjusted he saw Franklin a few yards away, scraping busily at the ground but sparing a glimpse Tom’s way.

“Happened to me, too. It’s a piece of something they were developing for energy storage. A lot of innovation was going on during my time, desperate attempts to save us all. I doubt that thing, or that lamp you found earlier, were ever finished. Least I never saw them. We were so clever , you know? Hard to understand how we failed so catastrophically.”

Perhaps it was this, or Tom’s growing fatigue over the futility of attempting to reclaim a lost world while not really living in this one, that made the day feel endless. Tom looked at his companion with growing suspicion. The creature’s silences, his awful impenetrability. His invasion of Tom’s life. The alien was in charge of him—he set the pace and the daily priorities.

And yet Tom would have no purpose at all if they had not brought him back from the darkness. They might be occupiers, but they kept him occupied.

At the end of that long day Franklin came to Tom and dropped a battered coin into his hand. It was inscribed The Day of the Triffids . “Just scan it with the lab recorder,” he said. “It’ll start playing on the monitor. It’s a classic—and you may find it amusing.”

As Tom watched the movie back at the lab he decided it was clumsy, but when an actor told an actress, “Keep behind me. There’s no sense in getting killed by a plant,” he laughed out loud.

“This amuses you,” the companion said, behind him. Tom jumped up, alarmed.

“Some of the lines, yes, they made me laugh.” Then, “but it’s just a silly movie,” he said unnecessarily.

“Cannot translate.” Then a bit later, “You are uncomfortable.”

“Yes. Just a bit. I didn’t know you were there.”

“You may always ask questions if you are uncomfortable.”

“Yes, I know.” Tom hesitated. “I wanted to ask you if you had considered that—that we might not welcome your help here?”

Again the awkward silence. And a few “Cannot translate” statements followed by a series of untranslatable sounds before the companion began to speak. “I—apologize. You have been—influenced—so you will not harm us. There has been—debate.”

“You mean whatever you’ve done to us wouldn’t let us try.”

“Cannot translate. It would not. Cannot translate.”

It made Tom uncomfortable that he’d never known where to look when he spoke to the companion. He didn’t know where the eyes—or whatever the alien used for visual input—were located. He’d looked in numerous places for them. Today he simply looked away. “It is our world.”

“You look out at the world, the sky, and you think that you see yourselves,” the companion replied. “You do not. Cannot translate. You witness our silences, our—soft—pauses between the efforts to communicate with you, and you think that they are about you. Cannot translate. They are not.”

There was something different about the companion. He moved more slowly across the ragged ridge, pausing now and then with his filaments trembling. Sometimes he stood for half an hour or more, fully exposed to the hot afternoon sun. The group of natives who normally followed the companion avoided him.

Tom discovered the door lying flat on the hillside under a thin layer of broken concrete. The companion paused but passed quickly. It was just a door, and they had examined many doors. Tom pried it up and verified that it was attached to nothing, like opening a door in the ground to more ground.

He lingered over it, brushing at it, touching it with his palms. The paint was worn, but still apparent. Blue. It was a sky-blue door. After a lengthy brushing, the scratches on its surface became legible:

The Collier family lived here 200 years. It sheltered & nourished us. God bless our home.

Tom loaded the door into their van to take back to the lab. He’d started back to the fields when Franklin ran up to him.

“Audrey died!”

“I—” He didn’t know what to say. “I imagined they had a very long lifespan. Was there an accident?”

“No. I’d noticed some color changes, some fading, and the tips of the appendages? I’d been seeing some transparency there the past few months. Then one evening last week Audrey was silent and still for a very long time, and the next morning I found him in that same position, as if he’d just been switched off.”

Tom saw some aliens off in the distance, their filaments floating gently back and forth, pushed by the breeze, natives running between them like children playing among trees. “I’m sorry, Franklin. What did you do?”

“I couldn’t even get out of the lab—all the security was keyed to Audrey. But the next morning a group of them arrived with Audrey’s replacement. You know, I’ve been noticing the differences since I first met you. Audrey’s coloring was a little different, a little more orange. This new one acts differently, moves differently, I don’t know, I’m thinking I may not like this one as much.”