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

Noel and Danny pass under a stucco arch, and the concrete becomes the courtyard’s chipped mosaic tile, hot on Noel’s feet. He does not know if it is hot on Danny’s feet; Danny never jerks away from scalding sand or half-buried thorns. Not even when Noel has him walk over a spread of prickly goatheads.

Pungent eucalyptus overtakes the smell of chlorine and greasy samosas. The silvery-gray trees line a long open-air entryway. Noel leads Danny all the way to the end, into the red dust of the parking lot where the pool sounds of splashing and satellite radio and voices are muted. Danny’s neck pops and swivels toward the family car where it gleams hot white in the sunlight.

“Look at this, Danny,” Noel says, lifting the water scorpion from his pocket. “Watch this.”

“Watch this,” comes the wavery echo. He crouches obediently as Noel drops the creature into the warm sand. It makes a skittering circle, claws waving, then tries to dart away. Noel meets it with a wave of sand kicked up by the blade of his hand. The water scorpion flails and shies off, scuttles in the other direction. Noel tosses another fistful of sand.

Danny keeps watching, stone still, as Noel pours scoop after scoop of sand onto the panicking scorpion, sucking the moisture from the cracks in its keratin, battering down on its carapace, until the creature turns sluggish and can only slowly kick its legs in place.

“That’s like you, if Mom didn’t bring you to the pool all the time,” Noel says softly. “You’d cook. You’d get all dried up and die, and after a while she’d forget you ever existed. Just like she forgot Maya.”

Danny looks up at him with all of his black beetle eyes. Danny never blinks. He never smiles and never cries. He doesn’t understand, not a single thing.

Noel covers the water scorpion over, heaping a burial mound. With his eyes on his work, he whispers, “I hate you.”

“I hate you,” Danny trills softly back.

The stork ship came down on the day Noel’s sister died. He was sitting in the waiting room, watching red balloons in animated smartpaint drift across the peeling green walls, reminding him his tenth birthday wasn’t far away, when the news feed sliced onto every screen in the hospital. A crumbling castle of pitted alloy and crystalline spars, falling from the sky. When the ship crash landed in the Sahara, an ocean away, an orderly gasped and bit the skin between her thumb and finger.

Noel understood it was something his xenobiologist mother would need to know about, something as important as the baby in her belly, so when she came from the examination room with her shoulders shaking, he rushed to show her the screen. She watched the crash calmly, nodded to herself as if it made perfect sense. Her eyes were shot through with pink.

Later, on the metro, she explained in her doctor voice that Maya’s umbilical cord had shrunk too thin, and she’d starved, but they would still have to go back to the hospital the next day for induced labor.

“If she died, then how can you give birth to her?” Noel asked, feeling a wave of confusion, a panic aching his throat.

His mother wept then, a raw rusty sound that made other people watch her in the subway windows. Noel buried his face in the crook of her arm. The woman in front of them played the news feed at full volume on her tab, about the UN seeking to assemble a response party, to drown out the noise.

Back poolside, their mother has migrated back under the gazebo, rolling up her work screen. Noel and Danny join her in the straw shade for samosas. Iridescent green and purple swirls over Danny’s body, as it always does around their mother. Noel leans back against a rust-flaking pole of the gazebo while Danny hurries to her. She strokes his jaws, an approved contact from the stork instructional transmissions, but can’t resist giving a human squeeze at the end. When she motions the same for Noel he digs back against the pole, feeling it on the nodes of his spine.

“Have you been playing Marco Polo today?” she asks helplessly, trying to drop her open arms naturally to the tabletop.

“We’re killing water scorpions,” Noel says, just to watch her smile cloud over. “They’re pests,” he adds, because the clouding still hurts. “Jean says so. Says we can.”

“Eat now,” his mother says. “Stay in the shade for a while. You’ll burn.”

“Danny’ll burn, you mean,” Noel says. In the year since they came to Africa, leaving the flat in Montreal with the empty baby room, he’s baked dark. He never burns anymore.

They eat the samosas without speaking. Noel hides the gristle with ketchup. Danny cakes them with the nutrient powder from their mother’s Tupperware, which is better than when he covers them in sand. Danny can eat anything. Once, he ate half the pages from Noel’s favorite paperbook comic, slow and deliberate, back when Noel was scared to put his fingers near Danny’s teeth. Their mother thought he confused it with the paper-wrapped spearmint gum she’d given him a day before.

“I have to go back on-site for a few hours,” she says, zipping her swim bag. “Will the pair of you be all right until supper? Jean is in the clubhouse.”

“Jean is in the clubhouse,” Danny echoes, a high sweet distortion of their mother’s voice. His bony head swivels toward the stucco entrance.

She smiles. “That’s right. Noel, watch out for your brother.”

She gives them francs so they can buy Fanta and credit for Noel’s tab so he can play netgames. When she leaves, Danny’s skin fades back to slippery gray.

They’d been in Chad for three months already when Noel’s mother told him about Danny. He’d spent the day, like most, climbing trees, hurling a mangy tennis ball against the concrete wall of the house, and watching procedurally generated cartoons instead of doing Skype school.

The first weeks had been the exciting ones, with his mother coming home with stories each night about the team cleaving their way inside the ship to find the stork adults (Gliese-876s, back then, after their star system) dead and decaying, bonded by bone and neurocable to the ship’s navigation equipment, rot seeping slowly outward. Noel had liked hearing about the low keening sound that made some of the other xenobiologists and one of the soldiers vomit, about the dissolving corpses in the dark swampy corridors.

He’d even liked hearing about the warm red amniotic pool where they found the babies who’d been remade, as best the storks’ genelabs could achieve, in humanity’s image, swapping vestigial wings and spiny shells for bipedalism and articulated necks. Babies who grew to child size with slender limbs and overlarge heads, features vaguely neotenized either by chance, a side-effect of the gene alterations that saved them from the ship-wide plague, or by design, like a cuckoo trying to slip its eggs in.

But now his mother wanted to bring one home.

“Danyal,” she said, pulling herself up to the Formica countertop beside him. “The government still wants them all to have Arabic names. But we call him Danny.”

Noel spooned yogurt into his ceramic bowl, listening to a breathless story about the one stork baby who wouldn’t socialize with his siblings, who aced cognition tests and mimicked speech and followed her tirelessly through the lab.

“He’s sort of imprinted,” she said, with the fragile smile Noel had learned to cherish these past three months, learned to cup in his hands like a brittle bird. He felt the question coming before it reached her lips.

“What if he stays with us?” she asked. “He’s not doing well at the center. And you always wanted a brother.”

The word felt like a glass shard in his gut, but he kept his face blank, how he’d learned from watching her. Noel had wanted a brother. It was true. It gnawed at him. Maybe if he’d wanted a sister more, she wouldn’t have died. They wouldn’t have had to cut her out of his mother’s belly. Maybe he hadn’t wished hard enough.