4
I woke up on the worn-out floral pattern sofa in my living room, a leftover piece of my parents’ furniture from years ago which I could never bring myself to replace. I felt bleary-eyed and slightly nauseated, like from a hangover, except that I’d barely had half a beer.
I couldn’t remember how I got home either, which would seem like déjà vu except for the two people standing in front of me.
That woke me right the hell up.
My first reaction was to lunge for the side table, where I kept a loaded .38 revolver in the drawer. I was groggy enough that my hands fumbled at the knob, and something was telling me to relax. Like I could hear them in my head.
“That won’t be necessary,” one of them said with a slight wave of his hand, like I’d been Jedi-mind-tricked. “Please don’t be alarmed.”
I stared at them like an idiot for what felt like an eternity. They could have been twins: both tall and thin, with shoulder-length blond hair so light that it could’ve been spun gold. I self-consciously fluffed my own hair. Whoever their stylist was, I could’ve used a referral. They wore identical pale two-piece suits with silver piping, which I assumed was some kind of uniform. The only difference between the two was the color of their eyes, which shone like jewels. One was sapphire blue, the other emerald green. Whoever these guys were, they were definitely not from around here.
“A-alarmed?” I stuttered. “I wake up in my living room, with no idea how I got here, with a couple of guys that look like Nordic gods standing in front of me. And I swear I just heard one of you in my head. So yeah, I’m alarmed.”
They exchanged looks; Green Eyes gave Blue Eyes a nod like he was answering some unspoken question. “May we sit?” Blue Eyes asked.
I got the sense this was to put me at ease more than it was for their own comfort. I waved them to a pair of wingback chairs across from me. What else was I going to do? “You’ll have to excuse the mess. I wasn’t expecting company.” Sarcasm felt like my best defense.
“You’re wondering why we’re here.”
“I’m wondering a lot of things right now.”
“Not long ago, you came across one of our survey vehicles which had experienced mechanical difficulties. It was what your pilots might call a ‘forced landing.’”
“You mean it crashed.” I knew that, but why did it feel like it had happened ages ago?
“Yes, though the situation was rather more complex than that. It is also somewhat beside the point. You stopped and rendered aid to its occupants. Why?”
For the first time, I felt like I was looking at them in the same way they seemed to be looking at me. That is, like a specimen under a microscope. Their question was so obvious as to be ridiculous. I pointed at the blue six-pointed emblem on my shirt. “I’m a medic. It’s what I do.”
“You no doubt noticed they were not your typical patients. Yet you showed remarkable composure.”
Why did that feel like a distant memory too? They had for sure been unlike any accident victims I’d ever come across. I remember thinking they were children, which wouldn’t make sense if that had been a military jet . . .
I was being interrogated, which made me impatient and not a little pissed off. “Are you with the Air Force?” I kind of knew the answer already; they were dressed alike but not in any uniforms I recognized.
“No.”
“Space Force?” It was a stretch which later turned out to be not too far off the mark. At least not in astronomical terms, which I would also learn later.
“We are not part of your military, or any other arm of your government.” There was a slight emphasis on your.
“Independent, nongovernmental agency . . .” I trailed off midsentence. “United Nations, then?”
“We are quite outside of any such organization. They are completely unaware of our presence, by design.”
Presence seemed like an awfully loaded word in this context. “You’re, um, not from around here. Like really not from around here. Are you?” I couldn’t bring myself to finish the thought yet because the answer was terrifying. “So when are the guys in sunglasses and black suits going to show up? Or has that already happened and they brain-zapped me?” It would explain how I’d managed to skip a whole day of my life.
Green-eyed guy and blue-eyed guy exchanged another look. They seemed amused. “We can assure you that is purely fiction. Now, if you don’t mind, we still have many questions. We are particularly curious about your ability to render aid to those who may seem . . . unfamiliar.”
“Training,” I shrugged. “Reflexes. You come on an accident scene like that one, the training takes over and you just go. Everybody thinks they’ll turn into Superman in a crisis, but the reality is you fall back on your training. If you haven’t practiced to the point where it’s second nature, you’ll freeze. Or worse, screw up. Our job is to get the patient stabilized and take them to an ER where they can be fixed.”
Blue-eyed guy seemed especially interested. “Yet you encountered beings which were completely outside of your experience.”
I was so in the moment that his choice of words—beings—went right over my head. “Not entirely.” I stood and smoothed down my wrinkled uniform. “Look, guys, this is all getting weird and I need coffee. Can I have a moment?”
Green Eyes stood in what seemed like an imitation of human manners. “Of course. This is your home, after all.”
My home. Damned skippy it was. As I headed for the kitchen and turned on the tap, the smell of well water brought another rush of memories.
I was in the barn with Dad, tending to Snookie, a Jersey cow we’d had since I was barely old enough to milk her. She’d provided us with the key ingredient for a lot of homemade ice cream over the years and was getting up in age. She was still in remarkably good health for being over twenty years old, which I mentioned to Dad.
“It’s because she’s spoiled rotten,” he said while injecting a syringe of antibiotics into her mouth. “You made her into a house pet.”
I dug my boot into the dirt. “I can’t help that she acted like one.”
“Because you treated her like one of the dogs!” he said, mock-complaining as he finished off her injection and gave her a scratch behind the ears.
“She liked to climb up on the back porch with us in the evening,” I remembered fondly. “You have to admit that was kind of funny.”
“What about letting her into the kitchen? That wasn’t so funny.”
“She was still a calf,” I protested.
“And a calf can leave almost as much manure. In the house, Mel. In. The. House.”
I’d remembered that lesson well, after he forced me to clean up the pile from the kitchen floor before Mom found it. It didn’t stop me from letting Snookie in again; I only got smarter about it.
He studied me, no doubt catching the amused look I had to be wearing. I’ve never been very good at hiding my expressions. “Vet school teaching you any different?”
Where to begin with that? “Well, it’s definitely more clinical. Learning to assess and diagnose a sick animal is a lot different.”
He showed his understanding with a grunt. “You get to know these creatures pretty well on a farm. Spend enough time around them and you figure things out quick. It’s different when you’re not around them every day.”
“It is,” I agreed. “Every animal I see, it’s the first time for them. Even if I’ve seen the same breed before. And it’s not like they can tell me what’s wrong with them.”
“Empathy,” he said, giving Snookie another rub behind the ears as she nuzzled him. “It has to become like a sixth sense, getting to know an unfamiliar animal so quickly.”
Dad had of course known what I was talking about; he’d been the county extension’s vet for decades. He hadn’t exactly steered me into veterinary medicine on purpose, but growing up in that environment, in his shadow, had made it a foregone conclusion. I’d come to love animals and had a fascination with medicine; it seemed like a natural progression.
“And then your father died,” Green Eyes said. “That changed your path in life.”
I could only answer him with a blank stare. I hadn’t voiced any of those memories. “How would you know that?” I demanded, alarm bells ringing in my head. This was rapidly becoming too much to process. I had instinctively known something was wildly different about this pair, but still couldn’t bring myself to speak it out loud. “You’re reading my mind.”
“In a sense. Yes.”
“How?”
“Empathy is a more important quality than you may imagine,” he said coolly. “There are some species who have it as part of their essential biology. A ‘sixth sense,’ as your father explained.”
I slammed the coffee pot back into its cradle, hard enough to crack it. “It’s your turn to explain. Who the hell are you people, and what do you want with me?”
His face projected a serenity which seemed natural, but was no doubt intended to keep me from losing my shit. He was choosing his words carefully. “We are emissaries, from a civilization which you have had direct exposure to through your actions. Normally, we would have taken more active measures to ensure this did not leave a lasting impression.”
“You mean wiping my memory.”
“It is more delicate than that, but you are in essence correct.” He paused as I sipped at my coffee, noticing my trembling hands. “Rest assured you are in no danger whatsoever. Whatever transpires from here is entirely up to you.”
“Why? What makes me so special?”
“You have demonstrated an ability which our society, for all of its qualities, does not have in abundance. That is, the ability to render aid to species quite different from your own.”
“Species?” I could feel my heart begin to race. “That wasn’t a human I was treating, was it?”
“It was not,” he said. “It was from another star system, far beyond your own. As are we.”
I stumbled back into the living room and collapsed onto the sofa. “I knew it!” Or at least I remembered now. Almost breathless, I struggled to get the words out. “You’re space aliens!”
Blue Eyes answered for them. “That is not how we think of ourselves, but it is understandable from your perspective.”
Green Eyes elaborated. “What we call our ‘union’ is a collective of different races from across the galaxy. We don’t consider any of them to be ‘alien’ any more than you might consider a particular variety of plant or animal to be alien simply because it is not your species. We are what we are, as you might say.”
“And you are . . . ?”
“As we explained, emissaries.”
“I get that’s your job. What’s your species? Where are you from?”
“It is something more than our job, and the specific designation of our kind is difficult to pronounce in any language you may be familiar with,” Blue Eyes said. “Our home world no longer exists. Our race was forced to spread out into the galaxy.”
“You were scattered among the stars?” It sounded a lot more poetic than I felt.
“Our home world was the second planet of a white dwarf star in proximity to the open cluster your astronomers call the Pleiades. When our star began the end of its life cycle, it first expanded to eventually consume our planet before collapsing in on itself. Our civilization was fortunate to have been advanced enough to embark on what we called the Great Diaspora. We scoured our region of the galaxy, searching for other systems to settle. We were unsuccessful, though we managed to form allegiances with many of the species we encountered.”
“Is that where the ‘emissary’ part comes in?”
“That is correct,” Green Eyes said. “As we encountered other races, we came to realize that ours possessed a unique empathic ability. We are able to connect with and understand others in ways that are uncommon.”
“You mean read their minds? Like you’ve been doing with me?”
“It is more nuanced than that,” Green Eyes explained. “With certain races, we can sense precisely what they’re thinking. With others, we can gain more of a general understanding. It largely depends on the emotional state of the subject. Your kind tends to become rather anxious, which from our perspective means you are telegraphing your own thoughts.”
“So it’s something I can control?”
“In time, yes. That will depend on your comfort level with us.”
“I’m mighty uncomfortable right now,” I grumbled. “But I get what you’re trying to explain. It’s kind of like working with sick animals. They can’t tell a human what they’re feeling, and blood tests or X-rays don’t always paint the full picture. Sometimes you’re left with gut instinct.”
Green and Blue exchanged looks again, like they were impressed that I grasped whatever they were talking about, though it seemed like a first grader realizing there was more to math besides addition and subtraction. The kid might not be capable of understanding it, but she knows it’s there.
Blue Eyes leaned forward. It was remarkable, and not a little unsettling, how he could command my attention. “What you call ‘instinct’ is the reason we sought you. As we mentioned, you possess a trait which is important to our collective civilization.”
“How so? I don’t have anything close to your abilities.”
“While that may be true, it is not in the way you think. You have shown competence, and a willingness to not allow the unexpected—even shocking—to deter you. You would be surprised at how uncommon that is within the Galactic Union.”
Now I was even more confused. That didn’t make sense. “How so? I can’t imagine you get to be a galaxy-spanning civilization without being smart.”
A thin smile crossed his face, probably more from my human naïveté than amusement. “Intellectual ability isn’t the limiting factor. It is the general reluctance of many of our member species to provide medical assistance to anyone outside of their own kind.”
“Intergalactic racism? And here I assumed it’s one big happy, harmonious United Federation of Planets.”
“It is not like your televised entertainments, I am afraid.” Green Eyes actually looked saddened by this. “It is also not as crude as you suggest. Our member civilizations are not hostile to each other, but very few are comfortable with providing care for species they are not intimately familiar with. It is a cultural limitation, not an intellectual one.”
“I’m still having a hard time with this. I hear what you’re saying, but it sounds comparable to veterinary medicine. You take what you know and apply it using your best judgment.”
“A valid comparison, if somewhat superficial.” He must have caught the look on my face. “Do not take that as an insult. If we didn’t think you were capable of learning, we would have left you alone with no memory of your encounter.”
Blue Eyes jumped in to elaborate. “Imagine if one of your animal species could speak to you. A canine, perhaps. Would that make it easier for you to treat it?”
I was reminded of the Dr. Dolittle books I’d read growing up. “Of course. If they could tell me what they felt, I wouldn’t have to rely so much on instinct.”
“Which makes perfect sense, from your point of view. Now, imagine your patient was part of a greater civilization of intelligent canines. How might you feel as an ‘outsider’ in that context?”
I had to think about that one a minute. “Like I didn’t belong there? Like they should be able to take better care of themselves than I could?” I was of course ignoring the part about them not having opposable thumbs; I had the feeling it was irrelevant to the point he was trying to make.
“That is an apt approximation of the difficulty we face. We have a comparatively small number of individuals within the Union who can look past their own kind and are not intimidated by the prospect of rendering aid to others.”
“So they’re afraid of making mistakes?”
“In a sense. There is a different appreciation for animal species within the Union. All but the simplest organisms are assumed to have their own form of intelligence. Pets and livestock are not generally a feature of our civilization.”
“So you wouldn’t have people—or whatever you call them—with my kind of background.”
“Very few.” He pulled a small rectangular crystal from his tunic and placed it on the table before me. It contained text in a language I couldn’t begin to recognize, which began translating itself into English the moment I picked it up. “Which is why we are offering to add you to their number.”