Rajnar Vajra - Doctor Alien’s Five Empty Boxes

“Will she be okay?”

“She assured me so, but mentioned it would require some ten Earth hours and two meals before she could normalize.”

“Good enough.” I moved closer to L and lowered my voice. “In fact, her absence may come in handy. Have you seen Tad or Gara today?”

“Both. Is there purpose in your question?”

“I think they were avoiding Deal yesterday, and want to know why. At one point, our favorite Vithy was impersonating my shadow.”

“She does that well.”

I nodded my agreement. “Have you canceled any cancellations for today?”

“I have not commenced rescheduling.”

“Then I’ll try to see where Gara’s hiding.”

L extruded a thin limb and used it as a pointer. “Her office might be an appropriate location to begin your search.”

Taking his galactic wisdom to heart, I headed to my PT’s room and softly tapped on the door. Vithy lack eyes of any sort but come factory-equipped with a fantastically acute sense combining hearing and touch.

After the clinic had opened, I’d asked my employers to add a physical therapist and an analytical physiologist to my staff in case any alien patient proved to have physical problems. They brought me Gara, qualified on both counts.

“Come in, Al,” she said in the contralto voice she always adopted when we were alone. No doubt she’d known who was knocking from the sound of my footsteps. Being sightless, she didn’t turn when I entered, but I felt a delicate breeze on my face, which implied she’d used her multi-band sonar to check on my facial expression, muscular tension, and blood flow.

Gara was… positioned behind her acoustic DM, her tenebrous body extended into a rectangular, paper-thin diaphragm about my height and four feet wide. Her data manager was entirely external and a piece of technology that gave me goosebumps. It resembled a shallow circular tar pit suspended vertically in midair, a computer monitor as designed by Hewlett Packard Lovecraft. From the crisscrossing web of ripples in this oily pool, I knew that Gara was making sounds inaudible to humans and sensing her DM’s response in air movements too subtle to disturb a gnat.

“I’m so sorry,” she murmured, “that events recent have left you apprehensive. But I am grateful you are uninjured.”

“Thanks.” As usual when in Gara’s presence, I felt myself relaxing. She spoke by vibrating sections of herself, which allowed her to… heterodyne her own kind of tranquillizing entrainment into her speech. That’s one reason my human patients take to her with all the enthusiasm they never show for L and Tad. Lucky, because with the paucity of alien patients that have come our way, most of Gara’s work has involved traumatized humans needing physical as well as mental therapy.

Vithy don’t fit into your classic categories of animal, vegetable, mineral, or fungal. But if you had to choose one of the above, you might go for vegetable because they use photosynthesis to fulfill most of their energy requirements—only they process various sulfur compounds rather than carbon dioxide. Our atmosphere neither harms nor helps them, but their unique bodies can retain enough needed gasses to keep them fit for days at a time, and without even stinking up the place. Since any of my clinic’s controllable environments can duplicate the repulsive atmosphere of your choice, and since Gara’s office has plenty of south-facing windows, she can recharge at will.

What does she look like? That’s a hard one. Her body is essentially a collection of shapeable, elastic, purple nanotubes dark enough to appear black except in direct sunlight. Each tube is equivalent to one of our cells and L, who’s an encyclopedia about Tsf trading partners, tells me that the Vithy evolved as a gradual collaboration between individual tubes. L also mentioned, in the faintest whisper while Gara was helping a human patient in our smaller building, that some Pokaroll scientists consider Vithy to be colony creatures rather than individuals.

In a nutshell, they’re dark, very few molecules short of being two-dimensional when lying flat, and can take almost any shape. When it comes to making noises, they’ve got talent, even more so than L’s people. They can vibrate their bodies to produce sonic massages, ultrasound waves, or just to sing hello in six-part harmony.

I decided to be straightforward. “Gara, why were you avoiding Deal-of-ten-lifetimes yesterday?”

She curled into a semicircle. “My people have had much experience with Traders. We have found some to be untrustworthy rather.”

“I don’t get it. We’ve had a dozen Traders here since you arrived, but this is the first time you’ve… kept such a low profile.”

“This is the time first you have been exploded nearly.”

I could feel a developing furrow between my eyebrows despite Gara’s soothing influence. “What does that have to do with Deal?”

“A question excellent most. I am suspicious always of coincidences.”

I shivered involuntarily. “But they do happen.”

“Inarguably.”

“We humans have a saying,” I pointed out. “Correlation doesn’t imply causation.”

“Nor does lack of causation negate correlation. You may wish to know that this Deal has departed now her room.”

“You can hear her door open from here?”

“Easily.”

I left Gara’s office more troubled than when I’d entered—a first. And when I glanced down at the floor, my shadow was darker and more distinct than it should’ve been.

“With your incredible hearing,” I murmured, “why do you need to, um, shadow me?”

The darkness at my feet rippled. “It is one thing to hear, another to act if necessary.”

Gara’s office and the room Deal had commandeered were in separate corridors. Tsf can hustle when they want to, but Deal must’ve been feeling lazy this morning; she and I reached the reception area in a dead heat, just in time for us to get a glimpse of Tad’s back vanishing into the third corridor. But even without Tad, we had plenty of company.

A tall, heavyset man in a business suit that was the opposite of off-the-rack stood a respectful distance from L’s desk. A large leather briefcase dangled from his left hand. I’d never seen him before, but his two outriggers were my uniformed guardians Phillips and Braun. They didn’t look joyous.

Paying no attention to the aliens in the room, a trick tantamount to ignoring the proverbial elephant, the man turned toward me with a kind of slow pomp, his posture and the set of his face declaring a vast self-importance. “Doctor Morganson? My name is Skyler Penwarden, Jr. I am an attorney representing an association of your neighbors.” Staring at me with blue eyes obviously trying to be steely, he deigned to hold a hand out for a shake. His palm was so dry that he probably sprayed it with antiperspirant. I made a mental note to disinfect my own paw afterward. “May I DM you my business card?” he added.

“Why not?” I subvocally gave my DM permission to add his card to the stack but to accept no other transmissions from him. “How can I help you, Mr. Penwarden?”

He released my hand, opened his briefcase, and pulled out a ream of paper. “At the behest of my clients, I am prepared to initiate a civil suit against you. The particulars are contained in this brief, and I’d advise you to familiarize yourself with it immediately. After you do so, I would be willing to sit down with you, or with you and your attorney if you’d prefer, to discuss the possibility of settling this matter out of court.”

Had I ever heard anyone else use the word “behest” in real life? The lawyer handed over the so-called brief, and I gave him my finest sardonic look. “I assume this is Bradley S. Pearson’s doing?”