ALIENS:

  RECENT ENCOUNTERS

  edited by

  ALEX DALLY MACFARLANE

  Copyright © 2013 by Alex Dally MacFarlane.

  Cover art by David Akbar.

  Cover design by Sherin Nicole.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  All stories are copyrighted to their respective authors, and used here with their permission.

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-412-6 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-391-4 (trade paperback)

  PRIME BOOKS

  www.prime-books.com

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  For more information, contact Prime Books at prime@prime-books.com.

  Contents

  Introduction by Alex Dally MacFarlane

  Frozen Voice by An Owomoyela

  The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species by Ken Liu

  Golubash, or Wine-Blood-War-Elegy by Catherynne M. Valente

  The Four Generations of Chang E by Zen Cho

  The Tetrahedon by Vandana Singh

  The Man by Paul McAuley

  Seasons of the Ansarac by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Lambing Season by Molly Gloss

  Celadon by Desirina Boskovich

  Carthago Delenda Est by Genevieve Valentine

  I Am the Abyss and I Am the Light by Caitlín R. Kiernan

  The Beekeeper by Jamie Barras

  Noumenon by Robert Reed

  The Death of Terrestrial Radio by Elizabeth Bear

  Honey Bear by Sofia Samatar

  The Forgotten Ones by Karin Lowachee

  The Godfall’s Chemsong by Jeremiah Tolbert

  For the Ages by Alastair Reynolds

  Sun Dogs by Brooke Bolander

  Honorary Earthling by Nisi Shawl

  Shallot by Samantha Henderson

  The Boy Who Learned How to Shudder by Sonya Taaffe

  Knacksack Poems by Eleanor Arnason

  Nullipara by Gitte Christensen

  muo-ka’s child by Indrapramit Das

  The Dismantled Invention of Fate by Jeffrey Ford

  Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck

  Test of Fire by Pervin Saket

  My Mother, Dancing by Nancy Kress

  Native Aliens by Greg van Eekhout

  Covenant by Lavie Tidhar

  A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel by Yoon Ha Lee

  About the Contributors

  Publication History

  About the Editor

  Introduction

  Alex Dally MacFarlane

  Whether extremophile bacteria under the ice plumes of Enceladus or sentient life on worlds orbiting distant stars, aliens could take many forms. Research throughout our solar system has not yet found life beyond Earth, though it has raised fascinating possibilities. What will we encounter? Will we be able to encounter it at all?

  Writers have been exploring those questions for over a hundred years. This anthology takes a modern approach: collecting the best recent answers, from authors who engage with the present day and futures that encompass the breadth of global human experience.

  One of the greatest strengths of stories about aliens is their ability to create life and worlds as we have never imagined them. Consider the hollow, four-legged parts of the alien planet Golubash used to age wine in Catherynne M. Valente’s “Golubash, or Wine-Blood-War-Elegy,” or the copper, hourglass-shaped Quatzoli of Ken Liu’s “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species,” or the tetrahedron that arrives in New Delhi in Vandana Singh’s “The Tetrahedron,” unfathomable to almost everyone.

  Other stories consider the limitations on our ever having meaningful encounters with aliens. The star-faring humans of Nancy Kress’ “My Mother, Dancing” live by the wisdom of Fermi, whose famous paradox (If it is so statistically likely that sentient life exists on other worlds, why haven’t we heard from them by now?) suggests the non-existence or scarcity of life beyond Earth. Elizabeth Bear’s “The Death of Terrestrial Radio” dwells on the difficulties of distance between the planets in our galaxy.

  It is no surprise that several stories are about the consequences of aliens successfully reaching us. The possibility has excited and frightened countless people, providing the subject matter of numerous movies from the global invasion of Independence Day (1996) to the South London troubles of the recent Attack the Block (2011). An Owomoyela’s “Frozen Voice” is also about a catastrophic invasion—by aliens with unfamiliar concerns—while Sofia Samatar’s “Honey Bear” shows a slower, more unsettling take-over. Not all alien arrivals are violent, however: some are the small, personal encounters of Nisi Shawl’s “Honorary Earthling” and Molly Gloss’ “Lambing Season.” Other aliens have come to our aid, as in Karin Tidbeck’s “Jagannath” and Paul McAuley’s “The Man.” The Styonkars of Pervin Saket’s “Test of Fire” are simply unimpressed with what they find on Earth.

  When we are the ones arriving on inhabited worlds, the outcomes are rarely straightforward. Often, they are informed by the violent legacy of colonialism on our world and a tendency among science fiction writers to use aliens as a stand-in for Othered peoples. Greg van Eekhout’s “Native Aliens” makes the metaphor explicit, as the descendants of Brevans and humans face difficulties caused by the humans’ colonial legacy. Children fighting for their right to remain on an alien world are forced to deal with uncomfortable truths in Karin Lowachee’s “The Forgotten Ones.” Zen Cho’s “The Four Generations of Chang E” looks at a different aspect of life affected by uneven international relations in our world: immigration, though the Chang E of her story moves not to another country but to the moon.

  Not all alien stories need to centre humans. The Ansarac of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Seasons of the Ansarac,” who have cut themselves off from human visitors, continue to lead their lives according to seasonal patterns. The Goxhat of Eleanor Arnason’s “Knapsack Poems” never meets a human, instead composing poetry and dealing with the vagaries of life as a person of many bodies. While Jeremiah Tolbert’s “The Godfall’s Chemsong” begins with the arrival of a human, the nutrition supplied by that man—impacting on the relationships between individual members of the planet’s sentient aquatic species—is the extent of his importance.

  Some stories take entirely individual approaches: the varied forms of space travel in Yoon Ha Lee’s “A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel,” the dogs of Brooke Bolander’s “Sun Dogs,” the fraught, hopeful message of Alastair Reynolds’ “For the Ages,” and more.

  This anthology, then, presents stories that span our fictional theorising about alien life. There are many people—alien and human—to be met here, the relationships between them complex and unexpected: fitting predictions of any real encounters in our future.

  Frozen Voice

  An Owomoyela

  They’ve made us speak Hlerig.

  They’ve made us wrestle sounds slippery as fish or burly as bears through our throats. They’ve made us stumble through conversations, even human-to-human, that we can hardly say. We can’t pronounce our names. They named me Ulrhegmk, which in Hlerig means little mountain thing.

  My mother named me Rhianna.

  The things that brought us Hlerig are called mklimme. Us humans, they call hummke, and all our languages share the descriptor rhlk, a term which means soft or runny. I use rhlk terms to describe Hlerig: Viscous in rhlk English, lipkiy in rhlk Russian, klebrig in rhlk German. They mean that Hlerig sticks like glue in your mouth.

  We have a term for mklimme, too: daddy longlegs.

  A longlegs came walking through my part of the city on a muggy night while my mother was gone later than usual. Thirty, forty feet above us, its eyes flashed like cats’ eyes and its spindly legs crossed blocks in three, four steps. One of its feet put down right across the street, big around as a trashcan and still delicate because it was so tall, and the other two feet stood in front of the low dome of the granary and at the common park at the end of the path. Three feet, two hands. One head which descended through the air and twitched from window to window, its faceted eyes angling back and forth until it came to ours. It put its hands, wide as splayed-open dictionaries, on the sill, and looked at us and the rest of the room.

  Who is watching you children? it said, in a language my mother called “whalesong.” Hlerig isn’t their only language, and they prefer the whale-song speech humans can’t hope to pronounce. I answered in Hlerig, pushing my brother out of the way.

  “My mother watches us, but she’s with friends.”

  She shouldn’t be away, the longlegs said, and its head went up and back away from our window toward the sky. We’ll find her.

  Longlegs all think they’re so helpful.

  I watched it walk away, and grabbed my brother. My mother had told us where she was going; after making sure we had food in the cooler, just before she walked us to class in the park two days before, she’d told me exactly where she’d be. When the longlegs went looking they wouldn’t find her with friends, and then they’d look elsewhere.

  I pulled my brother up to the second floor of the house, where the walls had been ripped away and rebuilt like a paper wasp nest. “We’re going to find her,” I said.

  My brother clapped to get my attention, and then made a clumsy sign with his hands. The longlegs tried to teach him to
sign like they did, with their seven digits and two opposable thumbs, but his hands were no more made for their sign language as my mouth was made for their words. I had to squint in the darkness to understand him.

  “We’ll tell her they’re out looking and bring her into the city a back way,” I told him. “We just have to make sure she’s not coming over the plains.”

  I was young, then, and I thought that would be easy.

  My brother nodded and began to prepare, picking up what he thought we’d need—scarves and a flashlight and a compass with no letters on it, only tick marks around the circumference. The needle wobbled from North to Northeast whenever we used it, but it was the only one we had.

  When we were sure the longlegs wouldn’t see us, we went downstairs and pushed open the door. I grabbed my brother’s hand, and we ran for the edge of the city.

  The mountain by our city is called Etrhe, and the rocky hills and destroyed roads leading up into them are called ulrhe—not foothills, not exactly, but little mountains. In the ulrhe are ruins. And the cairn.

  Our mother went to the cairn whenever she could sneak out at night—whenever the mklimme in our city were few enough in number, or when the skies rumbled with thunder and crackled with lightning. Storms confound the longlegs. They can’t see or hear.

  She came back from the cairn with books: old books, lost books, books we hid the instant we had them.

  I’d never been out to the cairn. I didn’t know my way out of the city like my mother did. She knew how to evade the longlegs and their sympathizers. (Sympathizers have little to do with sympathy, and we could never tell them anything.) I just ran with my brother, past houses, past the longlegs’ paper-wasp structures, doing our best to look like we were on an errand whenever a longlegs turned its body and brought its all-seeing head our way.

  Soon we were in the outskirts of the city, where old houses that hadn’t been repopulated stood. And all the ruins began to look the same: wrecked walls, decaying doors and wooden floors, swept eerily clean of furniture and furnishings and all the detritus of domestic life. Humans had gone through, under the longlegs’ watchful eyes, long ago. They’d brought everything to the cairn.

  The night deepened and we were picking our way around the buildings, backtracking when roads were blocked, trying to find our way past buildings that had crumbled over their yards. Now and then shadows would move through the rubble, or seem to move, or a sound would be caught by the skeletal landscape and come twisting out at us so warped and strange that my brother had to clap a hand over my mouth to keep me from screaming. It was no wonder we got lost, and with that sense of being lost came fear. Then exhaustion.

  We went into an old building. I didn’t want to—the war left a lot of buildings crumbling, and every few months you’d hear about someone who got caught in one, broke a leg or their skull or their spine trying to scavenge some piece of a pre-war life. Almost without exception, those pieces were taken to the cairn anyway.

  But it was cold, and we couldn’t risk the mklimme finding us out there, so I smoothed the broken glass away from a windowsill and climbed inside. I told myself that when the sun rose, I’d go up to the roof and plot a course to the edge of the city. But for that night, we went up a set of groaning wooden stairs and found a bathroom—no windows—to hide in.

  We didn’t sleep. We huddled there for hours, my brother pressed against my side, and just as I thought he might drift off, the Hum began. The longlegs have a language for calling from city to city. Humans can’t hear it but we can feel it in our bones, and certain houses amplify it. It felt like the tile floor was trying to skitter under us, trapped in the instant before the skitter, and I felt sick to the bottom of my gut.

  My father used to tell us, before he was taken, that the longlegs don’t sleep. They go about their business at night, walking through the cities or from city to city, with their long legs and their earth-skittering Hum. The ones inside the cities would peek in windows, make sure their humans were sleeping. And if there weren’t humans sleeping there, they’d check back the next day, then look until they found them.

  I couldn’t understand the Hum, but I felt down to my bones that the mklimme were discussing my mother, my brother, and me.

  I turned to hug my brother. His eyes were closed, his mouth pressed into a thin line that made him look much older than he was. “Don’t worry,” I said in pidgin rhlk. “Pretend we’re playing hide-and-seek. Remember when we hid in the fireplace? Before mom brought home those encyclopedias and we had nowhere else to put them?” I brushed my hands against his hair. He has dark hair, almost black. It’s a hobby in my family to name each other, because names are forbidden. Human names, at least.

  When I was born, our longlegs looked from us to the mountain bordering our city and then bent down to say the words in Hlerig. Your name is Ulrhegmk. Little mountain thing. When I talked to other longlegs, they made noises and said my name was beautiful.

  I used to stand over my brother’s bed and say Your name is Dougal. It means “dark stranger.” I’d say Your name is Wyatt. It means “hardy” and “brave.” Or I’d say Your name is Avalon. It’s a name from a far-away place. I’ll teach you to read about it one day.

  “Remember when we hid in the fireplace all day?”

  The far wall of our living room was false. My mother and my father covered up the shelves along the mantle-piece. The false wall wasn’t hard to get into: it was held on with construction gum, and if you knew where to look, you could slide your hand into a handhold and pull it out. Even my brother could, if he planted both feet and tugged; my mother wanted us to have access.

  I hugged my brother against me. “We’ll just be quiet. They can’t see in.”

  Our fireplace had never been used for fire. No one in the city cleaned chimneys and we didn’t want to ask the longlegs, so my parents called it a fire hazard and left it alone. If you were very careful, after the false wall went up, you could climb into the fireplace and ease the wall into place behind you. Sitting in the fireplace wasn’t comfortable, but it was the safest place to read. You had to position yourself into a corner with your legs tucked to one side, then you could put a candle in the corner left over, and you could read.

  “We’ll be very quiet,” I told my brother, who was always quiet. “In the morning we’ll find mom, and then we’ll go home.”

  Our longlegs, the one who caretakes our neighborhood, has a name we can’t pronounce. The name it gives us in Hlerig is Gnheg, but in secret we call it Eroica because the unpronounceable name reminded my father of part of a song by that name. Eroica saw our living room before the false wall was put in, but my father wasn’t worried. He and my mother painted a fireplace on the false wall when they put it up, and Eroica never noticed the difference. It was depth perception, my father explained to me; all the longlegs had problems with depth.

  But their vision was fine.

  They saw him running home with a book one day. A bound book, bound for the hidden fireplace, my father bounding over all the things in his path. It’s funny how some things come together.

  They caught him.

  He must have thought he could hide the book, explain his running away, but they broke a window after he closed the door. My brother screamed, like he’d never scream again, and I held him back on the stairs. From the stairs I saw Eroica’s hands (wide-open dictionaries) groping after my father (and I hate that word, grope, oshchupyvat’; it’s as gummy in any language as its Hlerig word botb, as stupid and unfeeling) until they found him, standing not quite six feet from the tip of his head to his feet on the ground, and when one of those hands wrapped around him and the other touched the book, I heard Eroica scream too.

  Zenig-hrie. Frozen voices. That’s the Hlerig word for books; nothing frightens them more. When they came, mother said, they stomped over our armies and our nuclear waste sites and even natural terrifying things like volcanoes and steep cliffs and the tornado alley, but on pulling a roof from a library they would scream, like Eroica screamed, and they would run away on their long long legs until certain ones, special ones, came and took the books away. Brave people, then, like fighter pilots, followed them and saw them doing strange things to the books, and later on they saw them doing the same strange things to their own dead.