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

“Maybe they’re more complex than you thought.”

Franklin nodded, a bit wide-eyed, but Tom wasn’t convinced he was actually listening. “Hey, have you seen the hands?”

“The hands?”

“Well, obviously you haven’t. The natives built them, fairly recently, I think.”

Tom followed Franklin down the slope and through labyrinthine mounds of debris until they reached a small clearing on the edge of the dig. A few natives working on something scattered as the two men approached.

He couldn’t quite tell what he was looking at until he shifted angles.In the middle of the clearing it appeared the natives had built several tall, narrow mounds of refuse. But as he moved sideways the constructions became clear: eight or nine giant hands rising out of these fields of destruction.

Tom and Franklin approached as closely as they dared. It was obvious that whatever held these sculptures together was nothing more than a complex interlocking and placement of parts. They were meant to be temporary, and might dissolve at any moment into the rubble field they’d come from.

“Look at the way the palms are curved,” Tom said. “There’s no tension in them—no matter how tightly they were put together, those palms are relaxed, ready to accept whatever might fall into them. These aren’t the desperate hands of someone needing rescue, or begging. They’re just hands that have been raised, hands that are showing themselves.”

“Do they make you feel guilty?” Franklin asked nervously. “These hands make me feel guilty. Not so much for surviving—these people survived. But for missing the worst of it. I don’t know what to do about that.”

Tom nodded. “I think you just do your work, continue to piece things back together. Sometimes the best thing is just doing the only thing that’s left.”

Franklin was silent for quite some time, then said, “They told me Audrey had lived a very long time. They said that most of the ones who come here to explore what’s been left of us were at the very end of those long lives. They won’t be seeing their homes again, Tom. They’re spending their final days with us.”

The companion had not taken him out to the St. Louis fields in several weeks. Tom was glad to be able to catch up on his research, his endless cataloging, but he was worried.

The companion had been standing beside him for days, as if unable to leave his side. Had he moved at all? When he could detect even the slightest of movements he would return to his labor, satisfied. There was increased transparency in the leaves, the filaments, even the mechanical threads, even in that chandelier-looking device whose function Tom had never determined. The companion had remained silent. Even a “cannot translate” would have been welcomed.

The transparent tips of the leaves were frayed, and their ragged failure seemed like movement, but Tom doubted it really was. They looked like jewelry in the hazy bright light of the lab.

Tom propped the blue door up against the lab wall to get a good view of it. The companion would be able to see it also, if the companion was seeing anything now. Then Tom began to speak, adding to the hundreds of hours of testimony he’d already made.

“My father believed every human being deserved two things—meaningful work and a home to live in or come back to when the world felt unsafe. My mother tended to agree but her practical nature told her that not everyone got what they deserved, and when survival was at stake self-fulfillment was a luxury.

“The fact that they never managed to own their own home caused my father great shame. He was a smart man but not formally educated. He read in libraries and watched educational shows and devoured the newspaper.

“He worked a lot of jobs and some were more interesting than others but he never found one that brought him joy. Mother always said his standards were too high and there wasn’t a job invented that would make him happy.

“But he was determined that one day we would have a house of our own and toward that end he found what he thought was the perfect front door. On a demolition job he discovered this thick door with carved panels and an elaborate brass doorknob. He took it home to our little rented duplex, leaned it against the wall, and announced to the family that we were going to have a great house someday and that this would be the front door.

“The next morning he replaced the door to the duplex with this new one. It didn’t quite fit and he had to trim it and make some adjustments to the frame. He had an extra key made and gave it to the owner because, of course, it was actually his house. The owner wasn’t very happy but my dad could be pretty charming.

“From then on, wherever we moved my father carried that door. Sometimes he had to cut it to fit a smaller opening and sometimes he had to add lumber to one end to widen it or make it taller. After a few years with all those alterations it didn’t look so elegant, but it was still strong, and it was our door. I’m sure we were evicted more than once because of it, but he was stubborn. I think the uglier it became, the more he liked it.

“Dad used to tell me stories about early civilizations, about the night watch, and how people would lock themselves in at night behind a good door to protect themselves from wild animals and thieves. I think those stories are one reason I became a history teacher. He said the world wasn’t like that anymore, that you didn’t have to be so afraid. But by the time I was an adult it was obvious those times of the nightly lock-in had come again.

“My father desperately wanted to make his mark but didn’t know how. He said we should leave behind more than a few scattered bones in a field, that we all deserved better. He thought you should feel that your limited time here mattered. That you had opened doors.

“For me the worst thing about those last few years of my old life was that mattering didn’t seem possible anymore. It appeared to be too late to make a difference. Has that changed? Can you tell me that?”

For a long time Tom waited there by that beautiful, unknowable alien thing. The answer finally came, faintly, as if across some vast distance.

Cannot translate.

Robert Reed is a prolific author with a fondness for the novella. Among Reed’s recent projects is polishing his past catalog, then publishing those stories on Kindle, using his daughter’s sketches for the covers. His novella, “A Billion Eves,” won the Hugo for Best Novella in 2007. His latest novel is The Dragons of Marrow .

The mass of a comet was pressed into a long dense needle. Dressed with carbon weaves and metametals, the needle showed nothing extraneous to the universe. The frigid black hull looked like space itself, and it carried nothing that could leak or glimmer or produce the tiniest electronic fart—a trillion tons of totipotent matter stripped of engines but charging ahead at nine percent light speed. No sun or known world would claim ownership. No analysis of its workings or past trajectory would mark any culpable builder. Great wealth and ferocious genius had been invested in a device that was nearly invisible, inert as a bullet, and flying by time, aimed at a forbidden, heavily protected region.

The yellow-white sun brightened while space grew increasingly dirty. Stray ions and every twist of dust was a hazard. The damage of the inevitable impacts could be ignored, but there would always be a flash of radiant light. A million hidden eyes lay before it, each linked to paranoid minds doing nothing but marking every unexpected event. Security networks were hunting for patterns, for random noise and vast conspiracies. This was why secrecy had to be maintained as long as possible. This was why the needle fell to thirty AU before the long stasis ended. A temporary mind was grown on the hull. Absorbed starlight powered thought and allowed a platoon of eyes to sprout. Thousands of worlds offered themselves. Most were barren, but the largest few bore atmospheres and rich climates. This was wilderness, and the wilderness was gorgeous. Several planets tempted the newborn pilot, but the primary target still had its charms—a radio-bright knob of water and oxygen, silicates and slow green life.