Harry Turtledove: Reincarnations

The four guys in the alien suits (Mort thought of them as John, Paul, George, and Ringo, which does a good job of dating him) didn’t answer. One of them- -George-started walking up toward the ceiling. There weren’t any steps, but that didn’t bother him. He just went up and up, as if the air were solid beneath his feet.

A couple of people broke into applause. "Hell of a special effect," someone called.

Mort gaped along with everybody else. It was a hell of a special effect. He would have been impressed seeing it on a movie screen. Seeing it for real, live and in person, was… unbelievable. You could put somebody in a suit that made him look like a freeway emergency light, yeah, but Mort knew for a fact that the ceiling didn’t have any wires in it. Which left-what? Antigravity?

"Holy Jesus," he said hoarsely. "Maybe they are aliens."

The chorus of derision that brought down on his head couldn’t have been louder or more scornful at an Air Force UFO debunking unit. People who worked for the Intelligencer wrote about aliens, sure, but they weren’t dumb enough to believe in them. That was for the yahoos who bought the paper.

Then the fellow in the suit up by the ceiling pointed an (inhumanly?) long finger at Katie Nelligan. He didn’t keep a flashlight in his fingernail, а la ET, but, with a startled squawk, Katie floated slowly off the floor and up toward him. "Somebody do something!" she yelped.

Mort sprang up, sprinted down the aisle, and grabbed her around the waist (he’d fantasized doing things like that, but not under these circumstances). He tried to pull her back down to mother earth. Instead, she rose higher and higher-and so did he.

He let go of Katie as soon as his feet left the ground, but that was too late. Up he went anyhow, toward the-well, if he wasn’t an alien, he’d do until somebody showed up with Mars license plates.

About halfway to the ceiling, Mort remembered that once upon a time he’d been a pretty good reporter, and here he was, floating up to the biggest story in the history of mankind. "Get a camera!" he yelled at the top of his lungs. "We’ve got to have pictures!"

"Oh, good for you, Mort," Katie exclaimed. "God, we’ll sell fifty million copies and we won’t even have to make anything up." No matter that she’d been captured by aliens and was probably heading for a fate worse than taxes-she worried about the Intelligencers circulation ahead of her own.

Down on the ground, first one flash camera and then another started going off, strobing away until the office reminded Mort of nothing so much as a psychedelic ‘60s dance. Had the aliens smelled like pot smoke, the illusion would have been perfect, but they didn’t smell like anything.

Only after he shouted for a camera did Mort stop to wonder whether the aliens would mind having their images immortalized in the Intelligencer. If they had minded, things might have turned decidedly unpleasant for the person on the wrong end of the Nikon. But they didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

Then he wondered if anybody kept a gun in his desk or her purse. He didn’t think the aliens would be able to ignore bullets like flash photography. If anybody was toting a piece, though, he didn’t open up. That removed one of Mort’s worries.

A bigger, more urgent one remained: now that the aliens had Katie and him, what would they do with them? The beings the Intelligencer featured were always looking out for humanity’s best interests, but how likely was that really? Was a species that could invent pasteurized cheese food product worth saving anyhow? Mort had his doubts. Which left-what?

The first thing that sprang to mind was experimental specimen. That was a long walk off a short pier. Number two was zoo specimen. That might have its moments if they tried to establish a breeding population with him and Katie Nelligan, but in the long run it wasn’t much better than number one: medium- to long-term insanity as opposed to instant anguish.

He flapped his arms and kicked his legs in midair, none of which changed his trajectory a bit. Whatever the aliens were going to do to him, he couldn’t stop them.

His feet were still within grabbing distance of the ground, but when somebody-he didn’t see who-made the same sort of run at him as he’d made at Katie, one of the aliens who’d remained by the doorway held up a hand like a traffic cop and his would-be rescuer bounced off an invisible wall. Pictures the aliens didn’t mind; they wouldn’t put up with anything more.

The one floating up by the ceiling-George-made a come-hither gesture to Mort and Katie, who duly went thither. The closer Mort looked at George, the less he looked like a human being, or even a Star Trek makeup job. For one thing, his head was too small. Making a head look bigger than it really is wasn’t any great trick, but how did you go about shrinking one unless you were a South American Indian?

Nose, ears, mouth-details were all wrong: nothing you couldn’t manage with makeup on any of them, maybe, but why would you? Besides those come-hither qualities, George’s fingers had a couple of extra joints apiece. He had no nipples, further down… well, Mort was damned if he’d let a makeup man do that sort of thing to his family jewels.

And if George wasn’t an alien, what was he doing up here by the ceiling, and how had he got Katie and Mort up here with him? Mort’s gut had needed a little while to catch up with his brain, but now he believed all over.

The alien extended the middle finger of his left hand toward him, the middle finger of his right toward Katie. Mort wanted to flip him off right back, but didn’t have the nerve. George’s finger touched the center of his forehead. He’d expected blazing heat. Instead, it was cool.

After that-the only person who understood what happened to him after that was Katie Nelligan, and only because it happened:o her, too. He felt his brains getting systematically emptied and copied, as if he were a floppy being backed up onto an enormous hard disk. Everything he remembered, from the Pythagorean theorem to losing his cherry under the football stands in high school, got sucked up and flowed out through the alien’s finger.

So did things he’d never imagined his brain retained: what he’d had for breakfast five years ago last Tuesday (two eggs over medium, wheat toast, grape jam, weak coffee); what his father had said when, sometime under the age of one, Mort spat up on the old man’s best suit (not to be repeated here, but prime, believe me). Amazing, he thought, and hoped he’d keep one percent of what the alien was getting.

Even more amazing, though, was the backwash he got, as if a few random little documents from the hard disk snuck onto the floppy while the floppy played out onto the hard disk. Some of them came from Katie: the smell of her corsage on prom night, a sixth-grade spelling test where she’d missed the word revolutionary, what cramps felt like, and a long-distance call to her sister in Baltimore the spring before.

And some of those little documents had to come from George the alien: using those peculiar private parts in the manner for which they were intended, what felt like a college course on how flying saucers or whatever they were worked (which would have been worth a mint, and not a chocolate one, if Mort had understood the concepts), the taste of fancy alien food (by comparison, that ever-so-ordinary breakfast seemed nectar and ambrosia).

Mort also picked up a few impressions about what George thought of mankind. In two words, not much. He went about his job with all the enthusiasm of an Animal Regulations officer counting stray dogs around the city dump, except an Animal Regulations officer might actually like dogs.

The alien didn’t like humans. Mort could think of a lot of reasons why benevolent aliens wouldn’t like humans: they were busy polluting their planet; they fought wars; they discriminated on the basis of color, gender, sexual preference, and the size of your bankroll. If any of that had been in the backwash from George, Mort would have been chastened but not surprised.