I, Alien

HI, COLONIC by Harry Turtledove

SOME PEOPLE SAY probing other planets for intelligent life is an exciting, romantic job. As far as I’m concerned, that only goes to show they’ve never done it. Me, I do it for a living, and I’m here to tell you it’s nothing but a pain in the orifice. The air smells funny even when you can breathe it, the animals smell even worse (and taste worse than that, half the time), and even when we do find people, they’re usually backward as all get-out. If they weren’t, they would have found us, right? Right.

Another planet from space. If I’ve sensed one, I’ve sensed a thousand. Third planet from a medium-heat sun. Water oceans. Oxygen atmosphere. Life. Oh, joy. We weren’t even the first ones here. This place had been checked a bunch of times over the past fifty local years. Always nothing. So why did we go back again? Orders. If I don’t do the work, they don’t pay me. Even when I do do the work, they don’t pay me enough, but that’s a different story.

Down we went, into the atmosphere. Iffspay—he’s my partner—and I rolled dice to find out who got stuck wearing the calm suit. I give you three guesses. The calm suit we needed for this planet is the most uncomfortable one in the whole masquerade cabinet.

It’s bifurcated at the bottom, it’s got tendrils near the top, and then an awkward lump at the very top. Guess who got to put it on. I’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t Iffspay. I think he uses loaded dice.

“This is all a waste of time,” I grumbled.

“We’re here. We might as well do it,” Iffspay said. He would. Of course he would. He got to lie back in the ship and soak up nutrient while I was out there doing the heavy lifting.

The atmosphere on this one was really noxious, too. Way too much carbon dioxide for a stable climate, plus oxides of nitrogen and assorted vile hydrocarbons. I made damn sure the purifier in the calm suit was working the way it was supposed to. You could fry yourself on air like that.

To add insult to injury, the weather was fermented. Antigravity or not, round flat aerodynamic shape or not, we bounced around enough to turn your insides inside out. Iffspay was doing the flying, which didn’t help. As a pilot, he doesn’t know his appendages from a hole in the ground. I thought he was going to fly us into a hole in the ground, but he didn’t. Don’t ask me why. Somebody out beyond the cosmos must like him. Don’t ask me why about that, either.

Rain pounded us. “I’m supposed to go out in this?” I said.

“I would have done it if I’d lost the roll,” Iffspay said virtuously. He would have bitched all the way, too. Am I lying? If you’ve ever met Iffspay, you’ll know I’m not. You can’t tell me that’s not him, segment by segment.

“Just find some of them so we can run the tests,” I said. “We’ll get another negative and we’ll go on to another world. And when it comes to finding out who wears the calm suit next time, I’m going to roll your dice.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, as if he didn’t know. Ha!

Before we could really start quarreling, the heat-seeker indicated a target. Three targets, in fact, grouped close together. That actually cheered me up. If we caught all three of them, we could finish this planet in one fell swoop. I wouldn’t miss putting it behind me, not even a little bit I wouldn’t.

Trouble was, they were at the edge of a swamp. I worried that they might escape into the water or into the undergrowth, calm suit or no calm suit, before I could slap the paralyzer ray on them and we could antigravity them up into the ship. And if they did—if even one of them did—we’d have to go through this whole capture-and-release business somewhere else on the planet, too. Once was plenty. Once was more than plenty, as a matter of fact.

“As we lower, put on the full display,” I told Iffspay.

“We’re liable to scare them off,” he warned.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “If we do, we’ll try somewhere else, that’s all. But the data feeds say they usually gawk. They’re photosensitive, you know.”

“All right, already.” Iffspay complained, but he did it the way I wanted. He had to, pretty much. If he’d been going out, I would’ve done it his way. I wondered how much the rain would hurt the locals’ photosensitivity. Light is so unreliable. Since most planets rotate, half the time there isn’t any. Evolution does some crazy things sometimes.

I have to give Iffspay credit. He didn’t fool around when it came to the display. He had it radiating every frequency the locals could perceive, going from the high end to the low in rhythmic waves. He cranked the air vibrations way up, too. I could sense some of those myself. They seemed to go right through me.

I checked the heat-seeker. By the taste, the locals hadn’t moved. That meant—I hoped that meant—they were fixated on the show the ship was putting on. I struggled into the calm suit and went down to the exit orifice. “I’m ready,” I told Iffspay, exaggerating only a little. “Go on and shit me out.”

The mild obscenity made him mumble to himself, but out I went, floating in midair. Rain thudded against the calm suit. Considering all the crap in the atmosphere, the rainwater probably wouldn’t have done me much good either. Maybe I was lucky being in the suit, even if it was uncomfortable.

And the locals still didn’t try to escape. I can’t tell you exactly how much I resembled them—how do you evaluate a sense you haven’t got yourself?—but it must have been close enough for government work. I was glad the suit had its own powered heat-seeker; the rain would have played hob with the one I was hatched with, which naturally isn’t anywhere near so strong.

I wanted to get really close before I paralyzed them, for fear all that water coming down out of the sky would attenuate the beam, too. And I did. I got so close, my instruments could tell they were emitting air vibrations themselves. The ones from the ship had much more pleasing patterns, but I wasn’t there to play art critic.

Ready… Aim… The calm suit’s appendages aren’t as sensitive as real ones, so I squeezed the control inside just as hard as I could. “Got ‘em!” I told Iffspay. “Bring me back, and bring them in, too.”

“Keep your integument on,” Iffspay said. There are times when I’m tempted to turn the paralyzer on him. Leaving him unable to communicate would be all to the good. That’s what / think, and nobody’s likely to make me change my mind.

Up went the locals, one by one. Iffspay saved me for last, just to annoy me. He did, too, but I wasn’t about to let him smell it when I got back to the ship. He was bustling around when the antigravity beam finally pulled me back aboard. The locals were all lined up neatly, ready for us to start doing our latest check. Two of them emitted significantly more heat than the third, which meant they had more body mass.

All three of them also went on emitting high amplitude air vibrations. “Why are they doing that?” Iffspay asked irritably. “Aren’t they supposed to be paralyzed?”

I had to check the manual before I could answer him. “It says paralysis only inhibits gross motor functions. If it inhibited all movements, they’d die.”

I got out of the calm suit. I didn’t need it anymore, and we’d made the capture. The paralyzed locals weren’t going to interfere. As I put it back in the closet, the amplitude of their air vibrations increased even more. “They’re still sensing us somehow,” I said. “Those waves have to be voluntary.”

Now it was Iffspay’s turn to check the manual. Yeah, yeah, I know—when all else fails, read the instructions. At last, he said, “I think they’re photosensitive to some of the wavelengths we use for heat-seeking.”

“Oh. All right.” That even made sense. “I wonder if those were alarm calls, then. They might have been surprised when they perceived me changing from something like their own shape to my own proper one.

“Who cares?” Iffspay said. “Let’s get them ana-lized, and then we can analyze the data—not that there’ll be any data to analyze. We’ll do it by the book, though.”

“By the book,” I agreed. And, by the book, we did the two bigger specimens first. We had to check the manual again to make sure just where to analize them. Iffspay thought the orifice emitting the air vibrations was the one that would take the probe, but he turned out not to be right. Evolution was even crazier than usual on that planet, you betcha.

And the manual didn’t exactly match the specimens we had. By what it said, the orifice should have been accessible once we figured out where the space fiend it was. But the locals had integuments more complicated than what the manual showed. Good old Iffspay was all for cutting right on through them. Iffspay never was long on patience, I’m afraid.

“Let’s try peeling them instead,” I said. “That way, we’re less liable to injure them.”

“Oh, all right,” he said sulkily. “It’ll take longer, though.”

I was the one who got to peel them. Since it was my idea, Iffspay didn’t want thing one to do with it. I wasn’t too thrilled about it, either, not getting started. I kept thinking about gross and fine motor functions. If the locals weren’t perfectly paralyzed… well, they’d splatter me all over the walls of the ship.

But I managed to peel the first one without doing it any harm I could detect—its heat signature and the kind of air vibrations it emitted didn’t change at all— and without getting hurt myself. Once I’d taken care of the hard part, Iffspay grabbed the glory. He bent the local into the position the manual suggested and threaded in the probe.

“Well?” I asked.

“Well, nothing,” Iffspay answered. “The computer can check me later, but there’s nothing. A big, fat, juicy nothing. So much for that.”

“Don’t prejudge. We’ve still got two more to go,” I said, though I wasn’t what you’d call optimistic about them either.

“Go on and peel the next one, then,” Iffspay said.

“Why me again?” I asked him. “How come I get stuck with all the hard stuff?”

“Because you did such a good job the last time,” he answered. Iffspay tastes smooth, no two ways about it.

After letting out a few last bitternesses of annoyance, I got to work on the second large local. Fortunately, everything went well. In fact, it went better than it had the first time, because I’d had the practice of doing it once. I reached for the probe once I’d got the local into the position—I did it myself that time— but Iffspay already had it in his appendage.

“This is the last lump,” I said angrily. “You’re going to peel the third one, and I’m going to do the analyzing. And if you don’t like it, I’ll talk to a lawyer when we get home. There are limits to how much you can impose on people.” I had really had it.

Iffspay could tell, too. “Fine. Fine!” he said. “Don’t get all disconnected from your nutrient provider. You want to analyze the third one, be my guest. Meanwhile, though…” He inserted the probe. He tried to go on as if everything were normal, but my talk about lawyers had put a bad smell in his chemoreceptors, let me tell you. After he withdrew the probe, he added, “Nothing again. Not even a hint. If you want to waste your time with the last one, be my guest.”

“I want to perceive you peel it,” I said. “That should be funny enough to go on the planetwide sensorium special.”

“You’ll find out.” Now I’d got Iffspay mad. I could taste it. And, of course, when he got mad, he got clumsy. I wish they would put the recording of the botch he made of that peeling job on the sensorium special. He’d have an offer to do sitcoms so fast, you wouldn’t believe it. The local’s air vibrations increased in amplitude, too. I don’t think it much cared for what was going on. After what seemed like forever, Iffspay turned to me and said, “There. All yours.”

I took the probe. But it didn’t want to do what it was supposed to. I had to feel around near the target area. “You bumbling idiot,” I said. “There’s still a layer of integument here. The other two had this layer—weren’t you paying attention when I dealt with them? Once you get this down, then it’s pay dirt.”

“Well, take care of it, then, if you’re so smart,” he said.

“Oh, no. The deal was you’d peel this one and I’d probe it. You finish your job, and then I’ll do mine.”

He made a stink about it, but he did it. I suspected there’d be some long, nasty silences on the way to the next star. Well, too bad. I know what my rights are, by the Great Eggcase, and I know when to curl up for them.

“I hope you’re satisfied now,” he grumped when he’d finally got the peeling right.

“Couldn’t be happier,” I told him, just to smell him fume.

And I meant it literally. This time, the analizer went in just as smooth as you please. I extended an appendage through it—and made contact!

Photosensitive creatures use energy waves to talk. I suppose you could talk with air vibrations, too, though I’ve never heard of any intelligent races that do. Too much ambiguity either way, as far as I’m concerned. Taste and scent, now, those are universal languages. No doubt about ‘em.

“Hello, there,” I said. “How are you doing?”

“We’re fine,” came the answer. “Hooked on to the intestinal wall here, kicking back and living the life of Reilly.”

Even universal languages have dialects. I’m still not sure what a Reilly is. But I got the point. They were happy where they were. “Do you need anything?” I asked.

“No way, Jose,” they replied without the least hesitation. My name isn’t Jose, but I didn’t bother calling them on it. “We’re happy right here, you better believe it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Now that we’ve finally found you, we’ll probably send you an ambassador or something before too long.”

“Whatever. No hurry. No worries,” they said. “You guys are free-living, aren’t you?”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “We have been for a long time. We think hooking up with nutrient when we want to is easier than staying tied to a host.”

“We like it better this way,” they told me. “We can ease back and relax and go along for the ride. Beats working—who needs technology if you’ve got a tasty host? From what we’ve smelled, free-living makes people pushy.”

“I didn’t know you’d met Iffspay,” I said.

“Hey, don’t drag me into this, you flavorless, unseg-mented thing,” Iffspay said, neatly proving my point.

“What’s an Iffspay?” the planet’s intelligent life-forms wanted to know.

“Nothing much—he’s my partner here,” I replied, just to smell Iffspay fume. He didn’t disappoint me either. Iffspay is a reliable guy.

The locals said, “Nice to meet you and everything, but we’d really like to get back to what we were doing. Some of our segments are going to break off and go out into the world to find new hosts.”

Ah, the simple pleasures of parasites! It almost makes me long for the eons before we were free-living. Things were simpler then. They… Well, enough. When a worm starts getting nostalgic, he’s the most boring creature in the bowels of the galaxy. And so I won’t. I just won’t.

I unthreaded the analizer and said, “Well, we’ll have to be careful placing the locals back on the ground now that we know some of them are inhabited.”

“Tastes like you’re right,” Iffspay agreed. “Who would’ve thunk it? All these negative reports, and now this!” Then he let out a bad smell. “Think of all the forms we’ll have to fill out on the way back to Prime.”

I did a little farting of my own, too. I hadn’t thought of that. I hadn’t wanted to think about it. “Can’t be helped,” I said, and he knew damn well I was right again. He set the local hosts back where we’d found them. Old Iffspay does have a nice appendage on the antigravity when he wants to, I will say that for him.

And then we flew away. As we headed for the next star on the list, I started in on some of that miserable, vermicidal paperwork.

Some things are too big to be fully comprehended. Willie and Al and Little Joe had only the vaguest idea how they’d all ended up back in their duck blind in an Arkansas swamp with their pants around their ankles. What had happened to them beforehand was, mercifully, even vaguer.

Pants still below half-mast, Willie stared up at the sky—and got rain in his face. “We are not alone,” he said… vaguely.

“Yeah,” Al murmured, slowly and wonderingly pulling up his jeans.

“Reckon the two o’ you are,” Little Joe said. “Not me.” Solemnly, Willie and Al nodded, though they didn’t quite know what he meant. Which was okay, too, because neither did he.