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

“But they must’ve seen those from space, coming in. Continents and all.”

“Not the same, close up.”

“So maybe they’re thinking to move inland, explore?”

“I doubt it. They got to stick close to warm, salty water.”

McKenna wondered if they had any global warming there and then said, “They got no oil, I guess. No place for all those ferns to grow, so long ago.”

Herb blinked. “Hadn’t figured that. S’pose so. But they say they got hurricanes alla time, just the way we do now.”

McKenna poked a finger up and got them another glass of the Chianti. Herb needed fueling.

“It’s cloudy alla time there, the astro boys say. They can never see through the clouds. Imagine, not knowing for thousands of years that there are stars.”

McKenna imagined never having a sunny day. “So how’d they ever get a space program going?”

“Slow and steady. Their civilization is way old, y’know, millions of years. They say their spaceships are electric, somehow.”

McKenna couldn’t imagine electric rockets. “And they’ve got our kind of DNA.”

Herb brightened. “Yeah, what a surprise. Spores brought it here, Scientific American figures.”

“Amazing. What sort of biology do amphibians have?”

Herb shrugged and pushed a hush puppy into his mouth, then chewed thoughtfully. The fish fry was a babble all around them and McKenna had to concentrate. “Dunno. There’s nothing in the science press about that. Y’know, Centauris are mighty private about that stuff.”

“They give away plenty of technology, the financial pages say.”

“You bet, whole new products. Funny electrical gadgets, easy to market.”

“So why are they here? Not to give us gifts.” Might as well come out and say it.

“Just like Carl Sagan said, right? Exchange cultures and all. A great adventure, and we get it without spending for starships or anything.”

“So they’re tourists? Who pay with gadgets?”

Herb knocked back the rest of his Chianti. “Way I see it, they’re lonely. They heard our radio a century back and started working on a ship to get here.”

“Just like us, you think about it. Why else do we make up ghosts and angels and the like? Somebody to talk to.”

“Only they can’t talk.”

“At least they write.”

“Translation’s hard, though. The Feds are releasing a little of it, but there’ll be more later. You see those Centauri poems?”

He vaguely recalled some on the front page of the paper. “I couldn’t make sense of it.”

Herb grinned brightly. “Me either, but it’s fascinating. All about the twin suns. Imagine!”

When he got home he showered, letting the steam envelop him and ease away the day. His mind had too much in it, tired from the day. Thinking about sleep, when he often got his best ideas, he toweled off.

The shock came when he wiped the steam from the mirror and saw a smeary old man, blotchy skin, gray hair pasted to the skull, ashen whiskers sprouting from deep pores. He had apparently gone a decade or two without paying attention to mirrors.

Fair enough, if they insult you this deeply. He slapped some cream on the wrinkles hemming in his eyes, dressed, sucked in his belly, and refused to check himself out in the mirror again. Insults enough, for one day. Growing older he couldn’t do much about, but Buddy Johnson was another matter.

At dawn he quite deliberately went fishing. He needed to think.

He sat on his own wharf and sipped orange juice. He had to wash off the reels with the hose from the freshwater tank as waves came rolling in and burst in sprays against the creaking pilings. He smelled the salty tang of bait fish in his bucket and, as if to tantalize him, a speckled fish broke from a curling wave, plunging headfirst into the foam. He had never seen a fish do that and it proved yet again that the world was big and strange and always changing. Other worlds, too.

He sat at his desk and shuffled paper for the first hour of the morning shift. He knew he didn’t have long before the Ethan Anselmo case hit a dead end. Usually a homicide not wrapped up in two weeks had a less-than-even chance of ever getting solved at all. After two weeks the case became an unclaimed corpse in the files, sitting there in the dark chill of neglect.

Beyond the autopsy you go to the evidence analysis reports. Computer printouts, since most detectives still worked with paper. Tech addenda and photos. All this under a time and cost constraint, the clock and budget always ticking along. “Investigative prioritizing,” the memos called it. Don’t do anything expensive without your supe’s nod.

So he went to see his supe, a black guy two months in from Vice, still learning the ropes. And got nothing back.

“The Feds, you let them know about the Centauri connection, right?” the supe asked.

“Sure. There’s a funnel to them through the Mobile FBI office.”

Raised eyebrows. “And?”

“Nothing so far.”

“Then we wait. They want to investigate, they will.”

“Not like they don’t know the Centauris are going out on civilian boats.” McKenna was fishing to see if his supe knew anything more but the man’s eyes betrayed nothing.

The supe said, “Maybe the Centauris want it this way. But why?”

“Could be they want to see how ordinary people work the sea?”

“We gotta remember they’re aliens. Can’t think of them as like people.”

McKenna couldn’t think of how that idea could help so he sat and waited. When the supe said nothing more, McKenna put in, “I’m gonna get a call from the Anselmo widow.”

“Just tell her we’re working on it. When’s your partner get back?”

“Next week. But I don’t want a stand-in.”

A shrug. “Okay, fine. Just don’t wait for the Feds to tell you anything. They’re just like the damn FBI over there.”

McKenna was in a meeting about new arrest procedures when the watch officer came into the room and looked at him significantly.

The guy droning on in front was a city government lawyer and most of his audience was nodding off. It was midafternoon and the coffee had long run out but not the lawyer.

McKenna ducked outside and the watch officer said, “You got another, looks like. Down in autopsy.”

It had washed up on Orange Beach near the Florida line, so Baldwin County Homicide had done the honors. Nobody knew who it was and the fingerprints went nowhere. It had on jeans and no underwear, McKenna read in the Baldwin County report.

When the Baldwin County sheriff saw on the Internet cross-correlation index that it was similar to McKenna’s case they sent it over for the Mobile ME. That had taken a day, so the corpse was a bit more rotted. It was already gutted and probed, and the ME had been expecting him.

“Same as your guy,” the ME said. “More of those raised marks, all over the body.”

Suited up and wearing masks, they went over the swollen carcass. The rot and swarming stink caught in McKenna’s throat but he forced down the impulse to vomit. He had never been good at this clinical stuff. He made himself focus on what the ME was pointing out, oblivious to McKenna’s rigidity.

Long ridges of reddened, puckering flesh laced around the trunk and down the right leg. A foot was missing. The leg was drained white, and the ME said it looked like a shark bite. Something had nibbled at the genitals. “Most likely a turtle,” the ME said. “They go for the delicacies.”

McKenna let this remark pass by and studied the face. Black eyes, broad nose, weathered brown skin. “Any punctures?”

“Five, on top of the ridges. Not made by teeth or anything I know.”