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

“For just a little while,” his mother said, smile already moving to slip away.

Noel couldn’t say no.

Noel and Danny are swimming circles around the bobbing, plastic-coated lifeguard, making it spin in place like a sprinkler. No matter how hard Noel kicks, Danny is still quicker. They don’t notice the weather turning until the stacks of rust-red cloud wall off the sun. Noel comes up for air in a sudden dusk and the smell of cool wet dirt itches inside his nose. The deserted pool deck is strangely still. Then all at once the trees frenzy, a ripple of whipping branches, and the dust storm the weather probes missed sweeps down over them.

Noel barely has time to pull up his goggles before the stinging sand slaps across his face. He throws out a hand for the lifeguard’s orange floaters but finds Danny’s slick hard skin instead and flinches away. But Danny’s hands clamp to him, and then his legs, and Noel’s chest seizes with a sudden panic: Danny is drowning him. Then Danny vanishes, slides past, and Noel thrashes blindly after him until he rams against the metal bar of the edge.

Someone heaves him up and out of the water; sand pelts his bare back and shoulders. “Inside, vas-y,” Jean’s voice booms in his ear. The big man has already draped a protective beach towel over Danny’s head, and now grips Noel’s arm.

“My tab,” Noel says automatically, looking to where the table should have been visible, not looking at Danny.

“I have it. Dépêche-toi, hein?”

Jean ushers them back across the slippery deck, through a battering cloud of red dust, into the clubhouse. He puts his shoulder into the door to close it behind them. Noel claws sand out of his hair while Danny struggles out of the orange towel. The barrage has left small red welts on his gray skin.

“Wash out your eyes at the sink,” Jean says, pointing to the concrete basin back behind the bar. The clubhouse is dark except for one flickering fluorescent tube in the ceiling and the glow of a plasma screen hooked to the wall. The few UN workers who didn’t leave earlier now slouch to the sunken couches, mumbling bitterly about cell signals lost, windows left wide open, faulty weather probes.

“I had my goggles,” Noel says, tapping one lens.

“Wash the rest of you,” Jean says curtly. “Then help the stork.”

Noel goes to the basin and splashes cold chemical-tanged water over his skinny arms, his chest, his face, rinsing away the dust stuck to his wet skin. When he straightens up, Danny is standing directly behind him. The sight jolts him.

“Don’t do that,” Noel hisses.

Danny says nothing, washing himself in silence. Someone brings two bottles of wine from the kitchen, and someone else finds a preset film on the television, something with arctic explorers on shifting glaciers, and everyone settles in to wait out the storm. Jean clears Noel a space on the far end of the couch, pulls his unharmed tab out of his pocket.

Noel keeps his head bent over the small screen when Danny slips away to the kitchen, but he still sees it happen.

Danny had lived with them for a week when Noel tried to show him Maya’s picture. He took the Polaroid from his mother’s closet, where she kept an album in case digital storage somehow disappeared, which to Noel sounded like the sun somehow going out. It showed Maya’s small face in black-and-white, the face he remembered as scrunched and dead purple.

With the photo clutched to his chest, Noel went to the living room where Danny was playing. Their mother called it playing, but Danny mostly stared at the old die-cast Hot Wheels and Lego kits, except for the time Noel left and came back to find the plastic blocks built into a twisting Fibonacci spire. Now, Danny was crouched on the rug, holding a chewed yellow Mack truck in his spidery hands.

“This is the sister Mom lost,” Noel said, extending the photo. “We lost. The one I told you about.”

Danny gave him a gleaming black stare.

Noel had tried to teach him words, in English, in French, sometimes in the Arabic he picked up from the response center guard. Car. Voiture. Sayara. He’d guided Danny to the porch one morning to warble a near-indiscernible “I love you” to their mother. That had made her happy for an entire day.

“This is Maya,” Noel said, shaking the photo slightly between his fingers.

Danny took it, gently, then eased upright, clicking and clacking, and walked away. Noel blinked. He followed Danny into the kitchen, past the fridge where he’d scrawled Bienvenue Danyal and then Welcome Danny the day Noel’s mother brought him back from the response center, savoring the static crackle under his fingertip and the electricity of anticipation.

Danny opened the sink cupboard, looked back at him, and slipped the photo neatly into the garbage. As his new brother walked back out of the kitchen, Noel wanted desperately to hit him, to stop him, to make him understand, but he just stood digging crescents in his palms with the ragged edges of his nails.

He realized that he hated Danny. Danny, who was here because Noel’s sister was not, who secreted his strange fluids on the concrete floor, who made a low keening screech in the night, who’d shredded Noel’s book. Maybe his sister was not because Danny was here .

As soon as he’d fished Maya’s photo out of the trash and put it back in its album, Noel went to his tab. It only took a simple question: are storks bad. The nets were inundated with vitriolic conspiracy rants and he read them now, one after another, even though he didn’t understand some words. He read how the stork babies secreted a mind-altering pheromone like the ones that bonded pregnant mothers to their newborns.

“There is no pheromone, Noel,” his mother told him that night, when he said, voice shaking, that they needed to wear masks around Danny. “Is that what’s upset you? It’s just a myth.”

Noel knew better. Danny was making her forget.

On the screen, an explorer stuck in an ice crevasse takes the pickaxe to his trapped arm. The adults groan or stammer laughs, gesticulating with tumblers of sloshing wine. Noel makes himself watch the axe thwack, the blood trickle and steam, until the man’s arm tears away. Then he slides from the couch into his chunky plastic flip-flops, and goes to the kitchen to find a Fanta.

He expects Danny to be there, because Danny doesn’t like crowds of people unless their mother is nearby, but the kitchen is empty. A forgotten pot of coagulating spaghetti bubbles on the burner. The lime green radio built into the counter stutters static from the storm. Noel looks to the heavy back door and sees a wash of red sand around it.

Danny is outside. Noel finds a crate of lukewarm Fanta in the corner and tugs one free, replaces it with a handful of francs. He searches slowly for a bottle opener while he thinks of what might happen. Danny’s skin is soft. Danny doesn’t breathe well in Harmattan season. Stupid of him, to go out in the storm.

Noel knows in his hot angry gut that his mother will blame him if Danny is hurt. He could tell Jean to go look, but Jean would pick him up and bring him back without a flicker of irritation on his face. If Noel finds him alone, he can punish him for being so stupid, so selfish. Nobody will notice bruises among the welts.

Noel has never hit Danny before. The thought of it unsettles his stomach, but he loops it through his head as he sets the Fanta aside, pulls someone’s track jacket from the hooks on the wall. By the time he wrestles his way out of the door, a brief shriek of wind that the adults won’t notice with the volume up, he thinks he knows how it will feel.