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

“You react to me. You communicate. He can’t.”

“Yes, he can.”

“How? If I touched him—“

“No!” Lionel said quickly. “Don’t touch him. You’d see, he would react. It wouldn’t be malice, just a reflex.”

“Then how do you… ?”

Reluctantly, Lionel said, “He has to touch you. It’s the only way to exchange neurotransmitters.” He paused, as if debating something internally. She watched the conflict play across his face. At last, reluctantly, he said, “I think he would be willing to communicate with you.”

It was what she had wanted, some reassurance of the alien’s intentions. But now it was offered, her instincts were unwilling. “No thanks,” she said.

Lionel looked relieved. She realized he hadn’t wanted to give up his unique relationship with Mr. Burbage.

“Thanks anyway,” she said, for the generosity of the offer he hadn’t wanted to make.

And yet, it left her unsure. She had only Lionel’s word that the alien was friendly. After tonight, that wasn’t enough.

Neither of them could sleep, so as soon as day came they set out again. Heading west, Avery knew they were going deeper and deeper into isolationist territory, where even human strangers were unwelcome, never mind aliens. This was the land where she had grown up, and she knew it well. From here, the world outside looked like a violent, threatening place full of impoverished hordes who envied and hated the good life in America. Here, even the churches preached self-satisfaction, and discontent was the fault of those who hated freedom—like college professors, homosexuals, and immigrants.

Growing up, she had expected to spend her life in this country. She had done everything right—married just out of high school, worked as a waitress, gotten pregnant at 19. Her life had been mapped out in front of her.

She couldn’t even imagine it now.

This morning, Lionel seemed to want to talk. He sat beside her in the co-pilot seat, watching the road and answering her questions.

“What does it feel like, when he communicates with you?”

He reflected. “It feels like a mood, or a hunch. Or I act on impulse.”

“How do you know it’s him, and not your own subconscious?”

“I don’t. It doesn’t matter.”

Avery shook her head. “I wouldn’t want to go through life acting on hunches.”

“Why not?”

“Your unconscious… it’s unreliable. You can’t control it. It can lead you wrong.”

“That’s absurd,” he said. “It’s not some outside entity; it’s you . It’s your conscious mind that’s the slave master, always worrying about control. Your unconscious only wants to preserve you.”

“Not if there’s an alien messing around with it.”

“He’s not like that. This drive to dominate—that’s a conscious thing. He doesn’t have that slave master part of the brain.”

“Do you know that for a fact, or are you just guessing?”

“Guessing is what your unconscious tells you. Knowing is a conscious thing. They’re only in conflict if your mind is fighting itself.”

“Sounds like the human condition to me,” Avery said. This had to be the weirdest conversation in her life.

“Is he here now?” she asked.

“Of course he is.”

“Don’t you ever want to get away from him?”

Puzzled, he said, “Why should I?”

“Privacy. To be by yourself.”

“I don’t want to be by myself.”

Something in his voice told her he was thinking ahead, to the death of his lifelong companion. Abruptly, he rose and walked back into the bus.

Actually, she had lied to him. She had gone through life acting on hunches. Go with your gut had been her motto, because she had trusted her gut. But of course it had nothing to do with gut, or heart—it was her unconscious mind she had been following. Her unconscious was why she took this road rather than that, or preferred Raisin Bran to Corn Flakes. It was why she found certain tunes achingly beautiful, and why she was fond of this strange young man, against all rational evidence.

As the road led them nearer to southern Illinois, Avery found memories surfacing. They came with a tug of regret, like a choking rope pulling her back toward the person she hadn’t become. She thought of the cascade of non-decisions that had led her to become the rootless, disconnected person she was, as much a stranger to the human race as Lionel was, in her way.

What good has consciousness ever done me? she thought. It only made her aware that she could never truly connect with another human being, deep down. And on that day when her cells would dissolve into the soil, there would be no trace her consciousness had ever existed.

That night they camped at a freeway rest stop a day’s drive from St. Louis. Lionel was moody and anxious. Avery’s attempt to interest him in a trashy novel was fruitless. At last she asked what was wrong. Fighting to find the words, he said, “He’s very ill. This trip was a bad idea. All the stimulation has made him worse.”

Tentatively, she said, “Should we head for one of the domes?”

Lionel shook his head. “They can’t cure this… this addiction to consciousness. If they could, I don’t think he’d take it.”

“Do the others—his own people—know what’s wrong with him?”

Lionel nodded wordlessly.

She didn’t know what comfort to offer. “Well,” she said at last, “it was his choice to come.”

“A selfish choice,” Lionel said angrily.

She couldn’t help noticing that he was speaking for himself, Lionel, as distinct from Mr. Burbage. Thoughtfully, she said, “Maybe they can’t love us as much as we can love them.”

He looked at her as if the word “love” had never entered his vocabulary. “Don’t say us ,” he said. “I’m not one of you.”

She didn’t believe it for a second, but she just said, “Suit yourself,” and turned back to her novel. After a few moments, he went into the back of the bus and closed the door.

She lay there trying to read for a while, but the story couldn’t hold her attention. She kept listening for some sound from beyond the door, some indication of how they were doing. At last she got up quietly and went to listen. Hearing nothing, she tried the door and found it unlocked. Softly, she cracked it open to look inside.

Lionel was not asleep. He was lying on the bed, his head next to the alien’s tank. But the alien was no longer in the tank; it was on the pillow. It had extruded a mass of long, cordlike tentacles that gripped Lionel’s head in a medusa embrace, snaking into every opening. One had entered an ear, another a nostril. A third had nudged aside an eyeball in order to enter the eye socket. Fluid coursed along the translucent vessels connecting man and creature.

Avery wavered on the edge of horror. Her first instinct was to intervene, to defend Lionel from what looked like an attack. But the expression on his face was not of terror, but peace. All his vague references to exchanging neurotransmitters came back to her now: this was what he had meant. The alien communicated by drinking cerebrospinal fluid, its drug of choice, and injecting its own.

Shaken, she eased the door shut again. Unable to get the image out of her mind, she went outside to walk around the bus to calm her nerves. After three circuits she leaned back against the cold metal, wishing she had a cigarette for the first time in years. Above her, the stars were cold and bright. What was this relationship she had landed in the middle of—predator and prey? father and son? pusher and addict? master and slave? Or some strange combination of all? Had she just witnessed an alien learning about love?