Aliens Among Us Read online

  Aliens among Us

  Edited By

  Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-106-1

  Copyright © 2013 by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann

  First printing: June 2000

  Cover art by: Ron Miller

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Electronic version by Baen Books

  Acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:

  "The Other Celia," by Theodore Sturgeon. Copyright © 1957 by Galaxy Publishing Corp. First published in Galaxy, March 1957. Reprinted by permission of the author's estate and the agent for the estate, The Pimlico Agency.

  "Residuals," by Paul J. McAuley & Kim Newman. Copyright © 1997 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, June 1997. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

  "Eight O'Clock in the Morning," by Ray Nelson. Copyright © 1963 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1963. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Expendable," by Philip K. Dick. Copyright © 1953 by Fantasy House, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1953. Published by permission of the author's estate and the agent for the estate.

  "The Reality Trip," by Robert Silverberg. Copyright © 1970 by Universal Publishing & Distributing Corp. First published in If, May 1970. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Decency," by Robert Reed. Copyright © 1996 by Dell Magazines, Inc. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, June 1996. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "The Mindworm," by C. M. Kornbluth. Copyright © 1950 by Hillman Periodicals, Inc. First published in Worlds Beyond, December 1950. Reprinted by permission of the author's estate and the agent for the estate.

  "Popeye and Pops Watch the Evening World Report," by Eliot Fintushel. Copyright © 1996 by Dell Magazines, Inc. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, April 1996.

  "The Autopsy," by Michael Shea. Copyright © 1984 by Michael Shea. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1980. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent.

  "Or All the Seas with Oysters," by Avram Davidson. Copyright © 1957 by Galaxy Publishing Corp. First published in Galaxy, May 1958. Reprinted by permission of the author's estate and the executor of that estate, Grania Davis.

  "Angel," by Pat Cadigan. Copyright © 1987 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, May 1987. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Among the Hairy Earthmen," by R. A. Lafferty. Copyright © 1966 by U.P.D. Publishing Corporation. First published in Galaxy, August 1966. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency.

  "I'm Too Big But I Love to Play," by James Tiptree Jr. Copyright © 1970 by Ultimate Publishing Co., Inc. First published in Amazing Stories, March 1970. Reprinted by permission of the author's estate and the agent for that estate, the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency.

  "The Hero as Werwolf," by Gene Wolfe. Copyright © 1975 by Thomas Disch. From The New Improved Sun (Harper & Row, 1975). Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency.

  "Motherhood, Etc.," by L. Timmel Duchamp. Copyright © 1993 by L. Timmel Duchamp. First published in Full Spectrum 4 (Bantam Spectra, 1993). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Preface

  The idea that aliens are in hiding among us—watching, observing, maybe drawing up nefarious plans against us, plotting in secret to conquer us, manipulating society in subtle ways, perhaps even secretly ruling us already, directing world events to further their own ends, alien eyes gleaming from behind their human masks—is one that probably goes way back into history, and probably even into prehistory—back to a time when people from outside your immediate tribal group were regarded with automatic suspicion, and not considered to be really human, not like the People, not like you and me. Even the Romans, at the height of an Empire that anticipated most of the tropes of sophisticated urban society thousands of years before we reinvented them, had this same attitude toward outsiders, toward "barbarians" (so named because they didn't really speak in a human tongue, just made inarticulate animal noises that sounded to the Romans like "bar-bar-bar")—they weren't really human at all.

  This attitude is convenient in some ways because, since outsiders aren't human, it allows you to treat them with a total lack of compassion or moral or ethical scruples, and you can slaughter them or rape them or buy them and sell them as you like and still consider yourself to be a good upright honest citizen, operating completely within the Law (since the laws that are designed to keep you from doing these things to other humans don't apply to Them, the non-human Outsiders), a mindset common ever since in everybody from players in the African slave-trade to Hitler and the Nazis.

  It's an attitude that has traditionally lead to paranoia, though. Some of the outsiders are easy enough to spot, being obliging enough to have different-colored skin, for instance—but some of the outsiders look just like us. Why, if they dress in human clothes and learn to speak in the human tongue, you might not be able to tell that they were an outsider at all! There might be one living right next door to you, and you wouldn't even know it! You wouldn't even know it—until it was too late! For certainly these outsiders are hiding among us for no good purpose—certainly they must be plotting against us, planning our overthrow, sabotaging the public works, poisoning the wells, setting fire to the cities, stealing our women and children, introducing fluoride into the water supply to pollute our precious bodily fluids . . .

  Throughout history, the identity of these Outsiders in hiding among us has changed; at one time or another in European history, they were Christians, pagans, witches, Jews, heretics, Communists.

  Today, they are aliens.

  The idea that aliens, creatures from outer space, are in hiding among us is very wide-spread today, almost ubiquitous, certainly as widely accepted as many more formally organized faiths, and can be seen in everything from the supermarket tabloids to television documentaries about Roswell to The X-Files.

  Print science fiction is where this idea got its start, though, decades before The X-Files was even a gleam in some producer's eye, and is still where the theme is handled with the most imagination and ingenuity (including stuff far weirder and more bizarre than anything you'll see on television), and where it's explored in the most variety and depth (because not all of those aliens are in hiding among us for sinister reasons, you know, nor are all of them interested in administering anal probes or mutilating cattle ), with the most sophistication and profundity and power.

  And the most entertainment value as well—because, of course, the colorful, fast-paced, and wildly imaginative stories that follow were written to entertain, not to warn humankind of some sinister alien menace . . . although many of them will scare the pants off you nevertheless.

  So sit back, relax, make sure the lights are on and the doors are locked, and enjoy. And when your spouse gets home, examine them with a suspicious eye. Are you sure you know where they come from. . . ?

  The Other Celia

  Theodore Sturgeon

  The late Theodore Sturgeon was one of the true giants of the field, a man who produced stylish, innovative, and poetically intense fiction for more than forty year
s; a writer who was as important to H. L. Gold's Galaxy-era revolution in the '50s as he'd been to John W. Campbell's Golden Age revolution at Astounding in the '40s. Sturgeon's stories such us "It," "Microcosmic God," "Killdozer," "Bianca's Hands," "Maturity," "The Other Man," and the brilliant "Baby Is Three"—which was eventually expanded into Sturgeon's most famous novel, More Than Human—helped to expand the boundaries of the SF story, and push it in the direction of artistic maturity. In Sturgeon's hands, the SF story would be made to do things that no one had ever believed it capable of doing before, and several generations of SF writers to come would cite him as a major—in some cases, the major—influence on their work.

  The sly little story that follows, a classic tale of aliens among us, gives us a vivid glimpse of the strangeness that underlies the everyday world. It's Sturgeon at the very top of his form . . . which places it among the best work ever done in the genre.

  Theodore Sturgeon's other books include the novels Some of Your Blood, Venus Plus X, and The Dreaming Jewels, and the collections A Touch of Strange, Caviar, The Worlds of Theodore Sturgeon, Not Without Sorcery, The Stars Are the Styx, and the posthumously published Godsbody. His most recent books are a series of massive posthumous retrospective collections, part of an ambitious and admirable scheme to return every short story Sturgeon ever wrote to print. The first five volumes of this sequence have been published: The Ultimate Egoist, Microcosmic God, Killdozer!, Thunder and Roses, and The Perfect Host You may be unable to find these books other than through mailorder, so for information contact: North Atlantic Books, P.O. Box 12327. Berkeley, CA, 94701.

  If you live in a cheap enough rooming house and the doors are made of cheap enough pine, and the locks are old-fashioned single-action jobs and the hinges are loose, and if you have a hundred and ninety lean pounds to operate with, you can grasp the knob, press the door side-wise against its hinges, and slip the latch. Further, you can lock the door the same way when you come out.

  Slim Walsh lived in, and was, and had, and did these things partly because he was bored. The company doctors had laid him up—not off, up—for three weeks (after his helper had hit him just over the temple with a fourteen-inch crescent wrench) pending some more X-rays. If he was going to get just sick-leave pay, he wanted to make it stretch. If he was going to get a big fat settlement—all to the good; what he saved by living in this firetrap would make the money look even better. Meanwhile, he felt fine and had nothing to do all day.

  "Slim isn't dishonest," his mother used to tell Children's Court some years back. "He's just curious."

  She was perfectly right.

  Slim was constitutionally incapable of borrowing your bathroom without looking into your medicine chest. Send him into your kitchen for a saucer and when he came out a minute later, he'd have inventoried your refrigerator, your vegetable bin, and (since he was six feet three inches tall) he would know about a moldering jar of maraschino cherries in the back of the top shelf that you'd forgotten about.

  Perhaps Slim, who was not impressed by his impressive size and build, felt that a knowledge that you secretly use hair-restorer, or are one of those strange people who keeps a little mound of unmated socks in your second drawer, gave him a kind of superiority. Or maybe security is a better word. Or maybe it was an odd compensation for one of the most advanced cases of gawking, gasping shyness ever recorded.

  Whatever it was, Slim liked you better if, while talking to you, he knew how many jackets hung in your closet, how old that unpaid phone bill was, and just where you'd hidden those photographs. On the other hand, Slim didn't insist on knowing bad or even embarrassing things about you. He just wanted to know things about you, period.

  His current situation was therefore a near-paradise. Flimsy doors stood in rows, barely sustaining vacuum on aching vacuum of knowledge; and one by one they imploded at the nudge of his curiosity. He touched nothing (or if he did, he replaced it carefully) and removed nothing, and within a week he knew Mrs Koyper's roomers far better than she could, or cared to. Each secret visit to the rooms gave him a starting point; subsequent ones taught him more. He knew not only what these people had, but what they did, where, how much, for how much, and how often. In almost every case, he knew why as well.

  Almost every case. Celia Sarton came.

  Now, at various times, in various places, Slim had found strange things in other people's rooms. There was an old lady in one shabby place who had an electric train under her bed; used it, too. There was an old spinster in this very building who collected bottles, large and small, of any value or capacity, providing they were round and squat and with long necks. A man on the second floor secretly guarded his desirables with the unloaded .25 automatic in his top bureau drawer, for which he had a half-box of .38 cartridges.

  There was a (to be chivalrous) girl in one of the rooms who kept fresh cut flowers before a photograph on her night-table—or, rather, before a frame in which were stacked eight photographs, one of which held the stage each day. Seven days, eight photographs: Slim admired the system. A new love every day and, predictably, a different love on successive Wednesdays. And all of them movie stars.

  Dozens of rooms, dozens of imprints, marks, impressions, overlays, atmospheres of people. And they needn't be odd ones. A woman moves into a room, however standardized; the instant she puts down her dusting powder on top of the flush tank, the room is hers. Something stuck in the ill-fitting frame of a mirror, something draped over the long-dead gas jet, and the samest of rooms begins to shrink toward its occupant as if it wished, one day, to be a close-knit, formfitting, individual integument as intimate as a skin.

  But not Celia Sarton's room.

  Slim Walsh got a glimpse of her as she followed Mrs Koyper up the stairs to the third floor. Mrs Koyper, who hobbled, slowed any follower sufficiently to afford the most disinterested witness a good look, and Slim was anything but disinterested. Yet for days he could not recall her clearly. It was as if Celia Sarton had been—not invisible, for that would have been memorable in itself—but translucent or, chameleonlike, drably re-radiating the drab wall color, carpet color, woodwork color.

  She was—how old? Old enough to pay taxes. How tall? Tall enough. Dressed in . . . whatever women cover themselves with in their statistical thousands. Shoes, hose, skirt, jacket, hat.

  She carried a bag. When you go to the baggage window at a big terminal, you notice a suitcase here, a steamer-trunk there; and all around, high up, far back, there are rows and ranks and racks of luggage not individually noticed but just there. This bag, Celia Sarton's bag, was one of them.

  And to Mrs Koyper, she said—she said—She said whatever is necessary when one takes a cheap room; and to find her voice, divide the sound of a crowd by the number of people in it.

  So anonymous, so unnoticeable was she that, aside from being aware that she left in the morning and returned in the evening, Slim let two days go by before he entered her room; he simply could not remind himself about her. And when he did, and had inspected it to his satisfaction, he had his hand on the knob, about to leave, before he recalled that the room was, after all, occupied. Until that second, he had thought he was giving one of the vacancies the once-over. (He did this regularly; it gave him a reference-point.)

  He grunted and turned back, flicking his gaze over the room. First he had to assure himself that he was in the right room, which, for a man of his instinctive orientations, was extraordinary. Then he had to spend a moment of disbelief in his own eyes, which was all but unthinkable. When that passed, he stood in astonishment, staring at the refutation of everything his—hobby—had taught him about people and the places they live in.

  The bureau drawers were empty. The ashtray was clean. No toothbrush, toothpaste, soap. In the closet, two wire hungers and one wooden one covered with dirty quilted silk, and nothing else. Under the grime-gray dresser scarf, nothing. In the shower stall, the medicine chest, nothing and nothing again, except what Mrs Koyper had grudgingly installed.

&nbsp
; Slim went to the bed and carefully turned back the faded coverlet. Maybe she had slept in it, but very possibly not; Mrs Koyper specialized in unironed sheets of such a ground-in gray that it wasn't easy to tell. Frowning, Slim put up the coverlet again and smoothed it.

  Suddenly he struck his forehead, which yielded him a flash of pain from his injury. He ignored it. "The bag!"

  It was under the bed, shoved there, not hidden there. He looked at it without touching it for a moment, so that it could be returned exactly. Then he hauled it out.

  It was a black gladstone, neither new nor expensive, of that nondescript rusty color acquired by untended leatherette. It had a worn zipper closure and was not locked. Slim opened it. It contained a cardboard box, crisp and new, for a thousand virgin sheets of cheap white typewriter paper surrounded by a glossy bright blue band bearing a white diamond with the legend: Nonpareil the writers friend 15% cotton fiber trade mark registered.

  Slim lifted the paper out of the box, looked under it, riffled a thumbful of the sheets at the top and the same from the bottom, shook his head, replaced the, closed the box, put it back in the bag and restored everything precisely as he had found it. He paused again in the middle of the room, turning slowly once, but there was simply nothing else to look at. He let himself out, locked the door, and went silently back to his room.

  He sat down on the edge of his bed and at last protested, "Nobody lives like that!"

  His room was on the fourth and topmost floor of the old house. Anyone else would have called it the worst room in the place. It was small, dark, shabby and remote and it suited him beautifully.