Agent to the Stars, John Scalzi [paper ebook reader .TXT] 📗

not to worry, that I could take care of myself. Then I went to sleep, but woke up two hours later, too excited to stay in bed. I found Gwedif outside, by the pool.

“I’m just admiring my work,” he said. “I don’t know if you can appreciate it, but this” — he produced a tentacle and motioned at the pool — “took some doing. You try to shoot a pod into a swimming pool from 50,000 miles out. And not have it do major damage. And have it look like a natural meteor on the way down.”

“It was a nice touch,” I said.

“It was, wasn’t it?” Gwedif agreed. “A pain in the ass, you should pardon the expression, as I obviously don’t have an ass to have a pain in. But we have to do it that way if we want to land near a city. You can fool some of the Air Force all of the time, and all of the Air Force some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the Air Force all of the time. Better this way than shot down by a Stealth fighter. Of course, there is the problem of getting back. That thing” — he pointed to the detritus at the bottom of the pool — “isn’t moving anywhere it’s not hauled.”

“So how are you getting back?” I asked.

“Well, we’ve scheduled a rendezvous near Baker for later tonight. There’s nothing out there in the desert, so we don’t have to worry about rubberneckers. Even so, we’ll probably light up the radar something fierce. It’s going to have to be quick in, quick out. I was hoping I could get you to drop me off.”

“Of course” I said.

“And also that you’d come with me,” Gwedif said.

“What?”

“Come on, Carl,” Gwedif said. “You can’t possibly think I came this far just for a quick hello. We have serious stuff to talk about, and it will go much, much faster if you come to the ship.”

Even though I had known Gwedif for a very short time, I could tell that he was holding back on something. He wanted to have me come to the ship, all right, but I had a feeling it was for more than just a chat. I had the immediate brain flash to the alien abduction cliché, strapped down to the table while a blob of Jell-O readied the rectal probe. But that wouldn’t have made any sense. You don’t act all friendly with someone just to get them for lab experiments. They would have just grabbed me.

And anyway, I wanted to go. Are you kidding? Who wouldn’t?

That morning, I phoned for a taxi and went to a used car lot in Burbank to get a cheap, nondescript car. I paid $2,000 and got a twenty year-old Datsun pickup. I then went to a pick-a-part place and pulled the license plates off of a wreck. Finally, I pried the Vehicle Identification Number off the dashboard. I didn’t know if Gwedif was right about the radar being lit up when they came to pick us up, but I didn’t want my own car there if anyone came to investigate.

At about eight o’ clock we set off down the 10, towards the 15, out to Baker in the middle of nowhere. Gwedif spread himself out under the bottom of the truck seat and popped a tendril over the back to see and talk. The truck wasn’t worth nearly what I had paid for it; it almost died twice on the way out, and once I did an emergency stop into a gas station to add water to the radiator.

About five miles to Baker, Gwedif had me exit the 15 and take a frontage road for a few miles until we came to an unmarked road heading south. We drove along that for another four or five miles, until literally the only lights I could see were my headlights and the lights of the stars above me.

“All right,” Gwedif said, finally. “This is the place.”

I stopped the pickup and looked around.

“I don’t see anything,” I said.

“They’re on their way,” Gwedif said. “Give them another three seconds.”

The ground shook. Thirty yards to the left of us, a black, featureless cube 20 feet to a side had dropped unceremoniously from the sky. The ground cracked where it landed.

“Hmmm…a little early,” Gwedif said.

I peered over to the cube, which, disregarding the fact it had just fallen from the heavens, was severely lacking in grandeur. “Doesn’t look like much,” I said.

“Of course it doesn’t,” Gwedif said, transferring from behind the seat. “We’ll save all the pretty lights for when we want to have our formal introduction. For now, we just want to get up and out without attracting attention. Ready?”

I started to open the door.

“Where are you going?” Gwedif asked.

“I thought we were leaving,” I said.

“We are,” Gwedif said. “Drive into it. We can’t very likely leave this car in the middle of nowhere. Someone might find it. That’s why I had them send an economy-sized box.”

“I wish I’d known,” I said. “I would have brought the Mercedes.”

“I wish you had,” Gwedif said. “Air conditioning is a good thing.”

I turned the wheel and drove gingerly towards the black cube. When the bumper nudged against the cube’s surface, I lightly tapped on the gas pedal. There was a slight resistance, and then almost a tearing as the cube’s surface enveloped the pickup.

Then we were inside the cube. The inside was dimly it, from luminescence coming off the walls. The space was utterly nondescript, the only architectural feature being a platform ten feet up that I couldn’t see onto, since we were underneath it.

“When do we leave?” I asked.

Gwedif stretched out a tendril to touch the nearest wall. “We already have,” he said.

“Really?” I said. “I wish this thing had windows. I’d like to see where we’re going.”

“Okay,” Gwedif said. The cube disappeared. I screamed. The cube reappeared, transparent but visibly tinted.

“Sorry,” Gwedif said. “Shouldn’t have made it completely clear. Didn’t mean to freak you out.”

I gathered my wits, rolled down the window, and stared down at the planet, which was tinted purple by the shaded cube.

“How far up are we?” I asked.

“About 500 miles,” Gwedif said. “We have to go slow for the first few miles, but once we’re up about 10 miles, nobody’s looking anymore and we can really pick up speed.”

“Can I leave the truck? I mean, will the floor support me?”

“Sure,” Gwedif said. “It’s supporting the truck, after all.”

I opened the door and very carefully placed a foot on the cube floor and added weight to it. It felt slightly spongy, like a wrestling mat or a taut trampoline, but it indeed held my weight. I stepped fully outside, leaving the truck door open, and walked away from the pickup. I looked up, and I was able to see through the platform; on the other side of it were two other blobs, also with tendrils extending into the walls — the pilot and co-pilot, I assumed.

After a few minutes of walking around, I had Gwedif make the cube totally transparent. For the briefest of seconds, I felt a surge of panic again, but it was immediately replaced by the most astounding sense of exhilaration — a God’s eye view of the planet, unencumbered by spacesuit or visor. I asked Gwedif if there was artificial gravity in the cube and he said that there was; I asked him if we could cut it off so I could float, but he demurred. He said he’d prefer not to have the pickup floating around aimlessly. They did decrease the gravity to match the spaceship that we were going to; suddenly I was 40 pounds lighter. After a few more minutes I asked them to retint the cube — my forebrain had accepted I was safe, but the reptile regions were having trouble with it.

The flight was a little under a half-hour long; we slowed appreciably as we approached the spaceship although I of course didn’t feel the deceleration. But I saw it — one moment I was staring at the blackness of space, and the next a huge rock came hurtling at me, not unlike the meteor had the night before. I cringed involuntarily, but suddenly it appeared to stop, hovering what seemed a few miles away.

“There it is,” Gwedif said. “Home sweet home.”

It was impossible for me to judge how big this asteroid-turned-spaceship was. As we got closer, I guessed that it must be close to a mile in diameter, a guess that was confirmed by Gwedif to be in the right ballpark. The asteroid appeared to have no non-natural features, but as we approached, I saw featureless black streaks dotting the surface. We were heading towards one.

“Does the ship have a name?” I asked.

“Yes,” Gwedif said. “Give me a second to translate it.” He was quiet for a moment, then, “It’s called the Ionar. It’s the name of our first sentient ancestor, like an Adam or Eve for you. It also means ‘explorer’ or ‘teacher’ in a loose sense of those words, in that Ionar, realizing he was the first of his kind, learned as much as he could about the world so that his” — another pause here — “children could know as much as possible. His exploration is our culture’s first and greatest memory epic. We thought that his name would be a good one for this ship. Provident. That reminds me, we should plug your nose before we go out into the ship.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“We communicate with smells,” Gwedif said, “When I said I had to translate, I meant that I had to translate the smells that we associate with a concept into an auditory analogue. But only a few of us know this translation as yet — and obviously the rest of us will be speaking our ‘mother tongue.’ But I don’t think that you’ll find our conversation very appealing to your senses.”

“I wouldn’t want to be rude,” I said.

“Well, here,” Gwedif said. “Here’s how we say Ionar.” A smell erupted from Gwedif like fart from a dog. “And here’s how I say my name.” The fart this time came from a larger dog than the first. My eyes watered.

“Now, keep in mind that there’s a couple thousand of us in this ship,” Gwedif said.

“I see your point,” I said.

“I thought you might. I’ll make arrangements. Look, we’re about to dock.”

Our cube was coming to rest on the edge of one of the black surfaces, about 100 yards long and half as wide. Underneath the surface of the cube, the black surface thinned out and cleared away, leaving what seemed to be an airtight seal around the outside of the cube. The cube dropped slowly through the seal. As we cleared the skin, I could see that we were dropping into a cavernous hangar about 100 feet deep. The hangar was dimly lit, and as far as I could see there weren’t any other cubes or anything else that might resemble a ship.

I thought about asking Gwedif about it, but then there was gentle thump and we landed. Almost instantly the cube began to melt; a circular hole started in the center and became wider, with the residue sliding down the walls of the cube, which were themselves sliding away. The Yherajk on the piloting platform slid down the walls a fraction of a second before the walls dripped away like wax; the platform itself sucked into the wall and disappeared. The mass of the cube lay in huge mounds on the floor of the hangar; then were suddenly absorbed, leaving me, the three Yherajk, and