I, Alien

ANAKOINOSIS by Tobias S. Buckell

DAYS AGO MY AEROKRAT left me at the edge of the forest. Now I ran back toward the break in the thick, tall woods, hoping to find him again. I wanted to return to his safety and bondage.

The sun fell behind the knobby trees, and heavy clouds killed the light. Rain exploded through the leaves, drenching the world in so much darkness and moisture I could hardly breathe.

Before long I fell down, and crawled on my hands and feet, slimy with mud, leaves, and sticks plastered to my thin clumps of fur.

I felt very alone, trying to find my way home. The trees loomed over me, threatening in the darkness. Creaks, snaps, and the sounds of animals skittering around in the darkness scared me.

Stumbling around in the night, I found a burrow in the space between a large root and the moist ground. Dirt caked my hands as I dug in for the night.

Overhead, streams of water cascaded down through large leaves and drooping limbs to soak me.

It would be a shivery night. My fur was only just starting to regrow after the anakoinosis.

I wasn’t sure what to do next. There was no advice, or past memories, to guide me on my path. It would be a shameful, lonely night, devoid of new learning.

When I was born, I broke free of my shell with my own hands. I picked the insides clean until I had a full stomach, and the brittle remains fell apart easily with a few punches and kicks.

I remembered this, as I remembered all things from long ago, and far away.

Many aerokratois stood around me when I broke free. They were pale and twice my height, with disgustingly smooth skin. The only visible fur grew on their heads.

Yet what fascinations they brought!

Until this point all the memories of my parents had swirled around through my body, mixing and intermingling, growing with me as I knit myself from egg.

So I understood what they said when they looked at me. Many of my parents understood their languages, though it had taken fifteen generations of anakoinosis to spread those memories all throughout.

None of my kind could absorb aerokratois memories, not the way our own foreparents’ memories were etched in each of us. The aerokratois defied true understanding because of their alienness. So we observed, watched, and learned to imitate the aerokratois ways.

Maybe, we thought, if we imitated them long enough, we could come to understand them without anakoinosis.

“Bob,” one of the aerokratois pointed at me. “This is your whiffet.”

“My what?”

“It will be your… assistant.”

Bob, I knew from the memories, looked upset.

“Assistant? I don’t want one of your little slaves, I want nothing to do with this.”

Another aerokratois stepped forward. “It is merely indentured servitude. Look, the leaders of the whiffets gave us their young willingly in exchange for the technology we gave them. It’s a fair trade.”

The memory of the aerokratois descending from the sky on a loud wind popped into my mind. They came with gifts: glittering objects, rare metals, strong spear-tips for better hunting, and diagrams for even more interesting machines.

“That doesn’t make it okay,” Bob shouted. “It’s wrong. You know it. Just because they were given to us doesn’t make using them right.”

The conversation, and my new master’s concern made me nervous. I walked forward and grabbed his hand. I formed words.

“I will serve you well, aerokrat. You will teach me all I can absorb.”

Bob’s mouth hung upon.

“How can it learn to speak so soon?”

The other aerokratois made laughter noises and shook themselves.

“They learn in the egg, we think.”

“You think?” Bob shouted. “Why haven’t we thawed out anthropologists yet? This needs to be studied. To be learned.”

I was excited. I would understand new things, things my foreparents had not known. Very few of the aerokratois seemed to care about learning. They had a desperate air about them, and only cared about one thing: the Great Repair.

But this aerokrat seemed different.

“We don’t have time,” the others told Bob. “The repairs must continue if we want to make the launch window. We have to fix the ship first, then we can study the whiffets with whatever time we have left. We can leave the scientists behind.” They made laughs again.

“That would be all right by me,” one of them said.

I stood and watched them all.

That was the day I was bonded to my aerokrat. The cycle of learning new things continued.

Huddled under the root of the tree in the steady rain by myself, I sorted through long buried, and a few recent, happy memories. They comforted me.

More of my fur had grown in by morning. I took a few moments to carefully groom myself with twigs, trying to comb over the few bare patches still left in my fur.

It was the fourth time I’d lost and regrown my fur. I was proud of the memories I imparted to each of my children with every new generation I sired.

The mud hadn’t dried, but it was walkable. Outside the treeline, bare ground stretched for miles and miles. Big yellow machines roved over the roads, driven by aerokratois inside.

The yellow machines shoveled and ate dirt. They burrowed into the ground sniffing for Metal. Then the Metal got taken back to the Hopper, which digested Metal in huge, fiery belches, and created Spare Parts for the Great Repair.

The bare ground of the aerokratois had spread outward quickly. When the first of us were taken over the ocean to work here, there were only trees and the Hopper.

Whiffets clung to the backs of the yellow machines, waiting for their orders. Others walked along the roadsides with picks, keeping the roads in good order.

More worked deep in the earth, their fur thick with dirt, pulling Metal from the ground.

I knew every inch of the land. From generations back, the memories swirled inside me. Sometimes I remembered the land across the sea my kind came from. It was very similar, but without wild animals, aerokratois, or big yellow machines.

Time to walk the many miles of road back toward my aerokrat’s home.

My aerokrat looked down at me. I stood on the steps to his small hut. His eyes looked puffy, and the fur on top of his head was unkept.

I extended my forearm to show him the numbers on it. NN-721. The fur didn’t grow around those markings.

Bob flinched. He recognized me now.

“Oh, god,” he said. “I helped you run away. I freed you. What are you doing here?” His voice sounded like an angry hiss. I flinched. “No, no,” Bob stepped back. “I won’t hurt you.”

“I am back.” I was happy to be back, and in the presence of aerokratois again.

“But why?” Bob shook his head. “Do you know what it took for me to get you out there?”

I give him the aerokratois gesture of understanding: I nodded.

“You,” and I recalled it exactly, “faked a pass to use a flier to drop me off far, so I could get far away from this hellhole of bondage.”

It had been an exciting adventure.

And now I was back.

Bob leaned toward the side of the doorway and repeatedly hit his head against it. I watched, trying to understand his actions.

I walked over next to him and did the same.

Some ritual of returning?

Bob stopped and looked around.

“Get inside,” he ordered.

He closed the door behind me quickly.

“Didn’t I drop you far enough away, so you could get away from all this?” Bob moved to the back of his hut and mixed different colored liquids together from elaborate jars into a glass. His face twisted when he lifted the glass and swallowed.

The liquids must not have tasted very good.

Bob drank things that didn’t taste very good often.

“Yes, you did drop me far enough away,” I said.

“Then why have you come back?”

“How can I leave my master? You guide me, teach me, and command me.” I would learn more new things, things not in my memory. The moment I came out of the egg I had become bound to him. This was our way.

Bob drank more liquids.

“We are missing each other, I think,” he said. “We don’t understand each other.”

I was excited.

“Yes, we must understand.”

He grabbed my hand.

“Come on, we’re going out.”

Bob took me to the graves. Tiny white crosses spilled out over the hill like strange saplings.

“In just two years since we first came to this planet, look at all the whiffets worked to death.” He swept his arm at them.

I looked at the hill, thinking of all the foreparents there. Many of their memories swirled through me like a storm. They were not lost, their memories were all over the place, in other whiffets working for the aerokratios.

“They are remembered.” I looked up at Bob. “What is your complaint?”

“You are being exploited.” Bob walked around in circles. “It is bad.”

“Why?” I sat on the bare ground. “What else would you have us do now that we are here, an ocean away from our homeland?”

Bob’s lips moved, but nothing came out for several seconds.

“It’s not just you,” Bob said. “That is bad enough. But we are also destroying ourselves.” Bob crouched next to me and put his head in his hands. “Losing our self-sufficiency and innovation. You know, the other day one of the trucks broke, and instead of fixing it they chose to build a wagon pulled by whiffets… it’s easier and quicker than spending time trying to figure out how to fix the truck.” Bob looked at me. “It’ll keep going like that. First we used you to serve tired workers drinks and get into small areas we can’t. They said it was better to relocate the robots into dangerous areas, we needed more help than just the people we’d unfrozen. But soon they will use your labor to replace other things. We’ll be taking away the greenhouses and using whiffets out in the fields to grow crops. And then, when the robots break down, you’ll be doing that work, too.”

A thrill shot up my back. All these new things we would be doing!

“This is wonderful.” I stood up. “You came from the sky and blessed us with all these new things. And now you tell me you will give us more.”

Bob pushed his fingers through his hair.

“You make things worse thinking like that.” He pointed down at the direction of the Hopper. The great legs poked out. Smoke rose from its pipes. The maw gleamed with fire. “We were just passing by this system when our ship’s shield failed. We were moving so fast the interstellar dust just ripped through the hull. Half of the passengers died, and hardly anything of use survived. This was the best place they could find on short notice. The engineers dropped down plan-etside near the best resource-rich area they could find. They think the hopper can manufacture enough of the parts they need.” He pointed up at the sky where aerokratois came from. “They say we can, but I don’t think they’re going to be able to fix the damage. It’s been two years and we’re hardly any closer, and the hopper is beginning to show signs of failure.” Bob poked at the dirt. “They’re many more passengers in storage up there that they’re going to have bring down before more life support systems fail on the ship. That’s why they’re making the roads and buildings: temporary housing.”

More? More aerokratois?

I jumped up.

“This is marvelous!” I wanted to share this new information, to ask if I could leave again, but Bob heard sounds from the tiny machine on his hand and sighed.

“Time to work.”

Bob directed teams of whiffets. We built huts for the aerokratois. It was long, hard work. Others around me, their fur thick, clumping, and ready for anakoinosis, talked with me as we sawed wood and hammered the buildings into shape.

Even though I could talk to other whiffets while I worked, we all knew this did not bring true understanding. For us speech was just a shadow of the truth. Only through constant anakoinosis could we truly be a community, and know what lay in each others’ hearts through the shared memories of our foreparents.

Because we could not understand the aerokratois, we were happily there to work, observe, and struggle to understand them.

And Bob had told me interesting new things.

Bob kept me out of sight. He let me work with other whiffets, but then hid me in his hut at night. He was worried about other areokratois realizing I had returned.

“They might decide to do something to you,” Bob said. “Some of the men are worried that one day the whiffets will start running away.”

“Do not worry,” I said. “We will not leave your side.”

That did not make Bob relax, it made him drink more of his different colored liquids.

It took several days of work before Bob talked to me about leaving again. My fur had thickened considerably, and was full of healthy clumps. Bob and I sat at his table. He turned away my attempts to cook dinner for him, or mix his funny liquids.

I asked Bob if he would let me leave again.

“Won’t you just come back?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Where are you going?” Bob stood up and looked out the window. “How long?”

I was excited.

“Anakoinosis! I will share what I have learned about your ships in the sky and your prediction of more of your kind coming to live among us.”

Bob’s voice sounded like it was cracking. “You will not try to escape, then?”

“I could not do that,” I told him.

He shook his head.

“What is this anakoinosis? The men told me you mean sex,” Bob said. I stared at him blankly. “Reproduction?” Bob continued.

I grabbed his hand.

“I will show you what it is.”

In all my memories, in the last two years, and so many generations of whiffets since the sky broke and aerokratois came among us, I don’t think any of the aerokratois had taken the time to understand what anakoinosis really was.

They were too busy worrying about the Great Repair and how to feed the Hopper with Metal.

Two years was not long to them.

Bob followed me out of his hut.

A small group met on the far side of a hill an hours’ walk away from the lights and buildings. They didn’t know what to think about Bob, but I talked to them gently until they agreed to let him stay.

Bob sat in the grass and watched.

One of the four whiffets still had patchy fur, but he was excited. He had learned how to operate one of the yellow machines by looking in through the windows at the aerokratois while they operated it.

It would have been better to wait until his fur was thick, but he was in a dangerous job. I chose him.

The other three faced each other, a triple act of anakoinosis. I turned away from them and grabbed the arms of the other.

His tattoo was NL-501.

I leaned forward and brushed my cheek against his, hugged him; and felt my skin stir. He smelled of machinery, aerokratois, and dirt.

I slowly began to molt as we held each other tight. The fur on my arms and chest intermingled with his. We rotated, pushing our backs against each other, then rubbed our legs together.

Fur sloughed off, responding to touch, and drifted into a compact ball on the ground. Naked, we both sat next to the new egg and watched it bind itself tight.

The loss of fur made me very hungry, and tired.

I let go of 501 and walked over to Bob, who sat very still.

“Explain this to me.” I could barely hear his voice as I sat next to him. We watched the trio standing over by their own egg.

“This child, when it matures will have both the memories and understandings of my insights with you, and the insights of learning how to operate the yellow machines,” I tell Bob. “That is anakoinosis; true understanding. The egg will be brought to our masters, and they will choose who to bind the children to, as that will let them learn more than I could ever teach them. They know everything that I have known.”

“But these are your children!” Bob was loud now. He got up and walked in slow circles again.

“They are us.” I followed him around in circles. “They will be bound. They will be paired with those who know different things. If you had been one of us, before you died, we would share anakoinosis, so your knowledge would not be lost, and the memories of those after us increase. Only after our masters die are we free, and alone.”

Bob’s mouth hung open. He was trying hard to understand. It was the closest an aerokrat could get to anakoinosis.

“It must be a survival mechanism. You commingle to pass on all your knowledge. Your fur . .’.” He stopped and ran his hand over my bare skin. “It’s protein, right? The DNA must combine, they… I don’t know…” He looked up into the sky. “I cannot believe they decided against unfreezing anyone to study you all. We need the scientists down here!” A new thought caught him, and he whirled on me. “What happens to you when there are no new masters with new memories, when you share all?”

I spread my arms.

“Those are happy times,” I said. I remembered generations of pleasant times in the woods. Times when you knew, from all your prior foreparents’ memories, which trees could produce fruit every year. How many could gather in a copse and not go hungry. The feel of the sun on bare skin by the coast. Communal ana-koinosis of hundreds together. Stasis for thousands and thousands of generations, with no new ideas to be found.

“These are not happy times,” Bob said.

“These are learning times.” I pointed at the Hopper. “We must learn everything you can teach us. And then, when there is nothing more to learn, we can have happy times. We will be just like you.”

Bob shook his head.

“It won’t work like that. It won’t.”

“But it will. It always has. In memory, there were other threats. Great predatory animals, others of my kind who knew very different things who came from different parts of the land we lived on before you took us away. We incorporate them, become them, reflect them, remember them, their thoughts, and their essence. We will do the same to you.”

Bob walked away from me. I ran to catch up with his long strides.

“There is never stasis with humans.” His feet hit the ground hard. “We always change.”

“Then we will learn this, and…”

“Not as long as you consider us different, or masters of any knowledge. You will always be bound. And since we have longer lifespans than you, you will be bound forever.”

I could barely keep up with him.

“Well, yes. Eventually your young will need to become bound to us if they are to learn new things.”

Bob stopped.

“What?”

I smiled happily and said nothing.

“We can’t share memories with you,” Bob’s hands waved in the air. “Humans barely understand and agree with each other.”

“We will come to be just like each other. That is how things must work. We will become just like you, and once we are just like you, you will be just like us. We will do all the same things to each other.”

Bob looked down at the ground.

“Oh, god!” He rubbed his forehead. “You might just do that.”

He walked in silence back to his home, me right by his side. Inside he made liquids and drank them late into the night, while I watched.

He shook. It was not laughter, but something else. His eyes watered over.

When he thought I had fallen asleep he picked up a blanket and spread it over me.

“I think we fucked up real bad here, whiffet,” he said, his voice slurred and funny sounding. “And I don’t know how to stop this mess. I just don’t know how.”

My aerokrat became strange. He avoided me, refused to let me work, and he stayed out late. That went on for many nights.

It seemed like he was trying to induce anakoinosis in the other aerokratois in his own way, but not doing well.

He finally came home one night with bruised eyes and a bleeding Up* People gathered outside Bob’s hut, screaming and shouting at him.

Bob said some of his companions listened to him and were sympathetic. But there was the Great Repair to be thought of, and most ridiculed him for questioning the need to get everything fixed on his ship as soon as possible.

“They say we have to return to civilization, or our machines will eventually fail us and we’ll all die as savages here on this planet,” Bob says.

We sat at his small table.

“I’m really sorry.” Bob took a long drink of his liquid. “I think they’ve had enough of me challenging them. I tried to organize, but there are too many of them.”

I nodded like I understood, but in truth, I was not sure why Bob would try to break the entire process. It served learning well. It served anakoinosis.

But I didn’t say anything. I did not want to agitate him. I only wanted to learn from him, and pass that learning on to all my children.

Bob leaned close to me.

“The people outside, they’ve come to take me back.”

“Where?” I wanted to know.

Bob pointed up at the ceiling, indicating the sky above.

“The ship in the sky. There are places aboard it where I will be frozen again, so I can’t speak up anymore. They’re putting me back in storage with all the other passengers.”

New things to learn. I was excited.

“When do we leave?”

Bob looked at me strangely.

“You must do me a favor,” he told me. “I need you to run out of the door, and go toward the forest. I will follow you in a bit.”

“Okay.” I said.

“I think,” Bob stared at the door, “I think I may have found a way to do something good, something that might help you, something that might help all of us.”

When I opened the door, twenty loud aerokratois shouted at me. I walked toward them, scared of the yelhng. The nearest aerokratois kicked me. I was lifted up and beaten, tossed from hand to hand. In seconds, blood ran down my face. My newly regrown fur was torn out of my skin by* the angry aerokratois.

I barely crawled away from the mob into the grass, and as I collapsed I heard a loud explosion. Nothing was visibly damaged, but the aerokratois fell silent.

“He killed himself,” one of them shouted.

I learned something very new about the aerokratois.

Bob was the only aerokrat buried in the hill. His white cross was much larger than the other small crosses that covered the grounds.

I imitated the shaking and wet eyes ritual he had done before his death.

And I was alone, my own master.

On the second night of being alone, I tried to join in anakoinosis behind the same hill where Bob had watched us, but was refused.

“You have nothing new to give,” a trio of whiffets told me. “And maybe what you bring is bad.”

They even refused to let me work with them, and learn new things. Among the thousands there, none would look at me.

I fled away from the areas near the Hopper to go toward the forest.

At night I walked the roads, and during the day I found places to hide and sleep. The forest, when it came up, was welcome. For a whole month I disappeared into it.

There was food in berries and roots. Other animals sometimes came toward me, but I ran from them. They were dangerous and rough. They were not like the docile animals in the land we were taken from to bond with the aerokratois.

My fur soon became shaggy, matted, and long. My skin ached for anakoinosis.

A gang was working on the edge of a new road. They jumped when I came out from behind a tree. I had visions in my mind of being a master to other whiffets. I thought about being alone, and that maybe I could spread the memory to other whiffets. If they were like me, alone and their own masters, but with me, maybe I wouldn’t be so lonely.

Was this what it was like to be an aerokrat? I wondered.

A cool wind blew over us and rustled the falling leaves on the ground.

I held my hands out.

“Do not be alarmed.”

“Who are you?” they wished to know. I showed them my tattoo and told them I had lived near the Hopper.

“Such thick fur!” they said. They gathered around me. “We have not had time for anakoinosis for a while. We have worked so long and hard.”

I stroked their arms.

“Then let us,” I said. “All of our fur is thick.”

They, found me strange, but relaxed enough to let me into the group. Our egg was thick when it formed on the ground by our feet.

“We’ll give it to our aerokratois,” they insisted afterward.

The road was getting hotter as the sun rose higher into the sky.

“No,” I told them. “I will take this one.”

They were shocked.

“You are too similar.”

“I know.”

They watched, quiet, as I took our egg with me deep into the forest.

When my child hatched several weeks later, he stood up, full with pieces of my own knowledge and the knowledge of the road crews and the knowledge of all their foreparents.

He didn’t bond with me. Just like I had been free since Bob killed himself, my own child was somewhat free. I could see that he was a bit confused, and that he had much on his mind. Just as I did.

We stood with each other for a long while.

“We should go find other road crews,” my child finally said. “If we both have anakoinosis with others, then others can be their own masters with us.”

I was happy he felt the same way I did, and did not feel so alone.

My child told me where the nearest work camps where, and we split company to spread our new revelation.

It was a rainy day when I found the work camp.

The sun remained almost invisible behind the clouds, but it occasionally broke out to illuminate the rows of tents behind the barbed wire. Several aerokratois walked around the edges of the camp, giving orders to the multitudes of whiffets bonded to them.

I stopped. I was about to return to being ruled by the aerokratois in there. Maybe it was better to stay in the wilderness, taking eggs from work gangs. It would be better to remain free, and spread my memories, than return to a work camp.

The memories of my foreparents bonded to aerokratois overwhelmed me, telling me to return to the camp. The memories of foreparents who where their own masters remained distant.

It was comforting to think about returning to a workgang, and being told what to do, and when to do it.

Would I ever be my own master again?

The desire for anakoinosis tugged at me, and with a strange feeling in my stomach I walked to the edge of the camp. At the gates I stood in the mud and the aerokratois let me in.

My fur was thick with dirt.

The aerokratois were such exciting creatures. They brought these new concepts, new behaviors, and many other things we never could have come up with. I had so many things to learn from them yet. It was good that I was returning, I reassured myself.

There were many whiffets in the camp behind the sharp wires.

I hugged the first one to reach his arms out to me behind one of the tents. I touched his cheeks to mine and shared my memories of my foreparents, my life, and Bob’s strange gift to me.

I wondered if there would ever be stasis again, now that I was trapped inside the camp, working for the aerokratois again. I hoped my child spread some of the very new thoughts Bob gave me.

Those memories would never die, but live on. My fur fell to the muddy ground as I gave new memories to another.

The next morning I was awakened by an aerokrat with red hair. He handed me a pick.

“We’ll be breaking rock, today, whiffet,” he grinned. I was slow to stand up, so he yanked me to my feet with a shout, hurting my arms.

As I walked out into the sun, blinking, I knew, deep within me, that the longer we worked for the aerokratois, the sooner we would become just like them.

Then both would have true anakoinosis.