Agent to the Stars (13 page)

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Authors: John Scalzi

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I sensed the extreme irritation that lay directly under Carl's placid statement. He may not have been blaming me for anything that had happened, but that didn't mean that it didn't reflect on me. I was now going to have to work twice as hard to keep from pissing him off in the future. I figured, sooner or later, given the way things had gone so far, I was doomed.
“Fair enough,” I said.
“Good,” Carl said. He clapped his hands together. “You like ice cream? There's this place nearby that has the best soft-serve ice cream in LA. Let's go get some.”
The ice cream was as good as Carl promised; first it spiraled out of an ice cream maker, then it was dipped into chocolate that formed a hard candy shell. We sat outside the shop and watched rollerskaters and gulls go by.
“You know what I'd really like to know,” I said.
Carl was wiping off his chin from where some chocolate had smudged it. “I'm sure you'll tell me,” he said.
“I will indeed,” I said. “I'd like to know how you met up with our smelly little space friends in the first place. And I'd like to know how Joshua got his name.”
“Lunchtime is almost over,” Carl said. “I don't know that I have time to go into it right now.”
“Oh, come on,” I said, risking a little familiarity. “You're one of the most powerful men on this half of the continent. If you have a meeting, they'll wait.”
Carl bit into his ice cream. “I guess that's true. All right, then. Here it is.”
You
think of the human race meeting the first alien species, and you think of
Close Encounters
or maybe
The Day the Earth Stood Still:
big production numbers involving scientists, government officials, and a lot of background music. The fact of the matter is the first human contact with aliens happened on the phone. It's a letdown if you're into grand scale entrances, but in retrospect, I find it comforting, and, now that I think of it, indicative of the Yherajk: they were dying to meet us, but they're polite enough to make sure they're wanted.
At the time, though, I thought it was a crank call. Of course; who thinks aliens are going to use the phone?
The phone call came at about a quarter past eleven. I'd just gotten back from the premiere of
Call of the Damned;
I skipped the after-party because I didn't want to have to tell anyone
what I had really thought of the movie. Elise was in Richmond, Virginia, on her book tour—I remember her leaving a message and telling me she was thinking we should get a horse farm out there for when we retire. I mean, really—what the hell am I going to do with horses? But she's a horsey type. Never got over it as a girl.
I was sitting in my lounger with my second beer, listening to Fritz Coleman talk about one of those annual meteor showers. Perseids or Leonids. Can never remember which is which. Fritz was going on about it when the phone rang. I picked it up.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hi,” the voice on the other end said. “My name is Gwedif. I'm a representative of an alien race that is right now orbiting high above your planet. We have an interesting proposition, and we'd like to discuss it with you.”
I glanced over to the LED readout on the phone, which displays caller ID information. There wasn't any. “This doesn't involve Amway products, does it?” I asked.
“Certainly not,” Gwedif said. “No salesmen will come to your door.”
Thanks to the beer, I was just mellow enough not to do what I usually do with crank calls, which is hang up. And anyway, this one was sort of interesting; usually when I get random calls, it's some wannabe actor who's looking for representation. I was bored and Fritz had given way to commercials, so I kept going.
“A representative of an alien race,” I said. “Like one of those Heaven's Gate folks? You following a comet or something?”
“No,” Gwedif said. “I'm one of the aliens myself. And we passed by Hale-Bopp on the way in. No spaceships that we
could see. Those people didn't know what they were talking about.”
“
Actually
one of the aliens,” I said. “That's new. Tell me, does this bit work with other folks? I mean, I'm loving it, personally.”
“I don't know,” Gwedif said. “We haven't called anyone else. Mr. Lupo, we know it sounds unbelievable, but we figured this was the best way to go—cut the ooh-ah Spielberg stuff and get right to the point. Why be coy? We know you like to get right to business. We saw that PBS documentary.”
You remember that thing, Tom—they had a film crew from KCET follow me around for a week about a year ago, when I was putting the
Call of the Damned
package together over there at Sony. They actually ran it in a theater before they ran it on TV, so it'd be eligible for Oscar consideration. I'm pretty sure they can write off any votes from the Sony suits; the documentary makes it look like I rolled them. Well, maybe I did.
Anyway, the “aliens” saw it, and thus, the upfront phone call. And now they wanted to arrange a meeting. By this time I had drained the second beer and had gone to the fridge for a third. So I figured, what the hell.
“Sure, Gwed—you don't mind if I call you Gwed, do you?” I said.
“Not a bit,” he said.
“Why don't you come on over to the office sometime next week and we'll set up a meeting. Just call the front desk and ask for Marcella, my assistant.”
“Hmmmm, that'd be sort of difficult,” he said. “We were kind of hoping we might have a chat tonight. There's a meteor shower going on.”
I didn't really understand that last part, but I figured it was
par for the course when you're talking to ‘aliens.' “All right,” I said. “Let's chat tonight.”
“Great,” Gwedif said. “I'll be down in about fifteen minutes.”
“Swell,” I said. “You going to need anything? A snack? A beer?”
“No, I'm fine,” he said, “though I'd appreciate it if you'd turn on your pool light.”
“Well, of course,” I said. “Everyone knows to turn on their pool light when aliens drop by.”
“See you soon,” Gwedif said, and hung up.
I hauled myself out of the lounger, clicked off the TV, and went to the sliding glass door that leads to the pool area. The pool's light switch is right by the door, so I clicked it on as I headed out the door. You've never been to our place, Tom, but we have a huge pool—Olympic-sized. Elise was a swimmer at UCSD and still uses it to stay in shape. I wade around in the shallow end of the pool, myself—I float better than I swim.
I plopped down into a patio chair and sucked on my beer and thought about what I had just done. I never invite strangers over to the house, even sane ones, and now I had just invited someone who said he was a representative of an alien species over for a chat. The more I thought about it, of course, the more stupid it seemed. About ten minutes of this, I had become convinced that I had just set myself up for some sort of ritual Hollywood murder, the kind where the newscasters start off their stories by saying “The victim appeared to know his assailant—there was no struggle of any kind,” and then pan to walls, which are sponge-painted with blood. I stood up to go back into the house and phone the police, when I noticed a meteor streaking across the sky.
This in itself was no big deal. There was meteor shower going on, after all, and my house is high up enough in the hills that the light pollution isn't so bad; I'd been seeing little meteor streaks the entire time I was sitting there. But most of them were small, far off, and lightning quick; this one was large, close, and dropping its way through the sky directly towards my house. It looked like it was moving slow, but as I stared at it, I realized that it was going to impact in about five seconds. Even if I hadn't been paralyzed, staring at it, I doubted I could have made it into the house. It looked like I wouldn't have to worry about being murdered by psychopaths, after all—I was going to be struck down by a meteor instead. At this point, some absurdly rational chunk of my consciousness piped in with a thought:
Do you
realize
the odds on getting hit by a meteor?
About two seconds to impact, the meteor shattered with a tremendous sonic boom, the tiny pieces of the rock vaporizing in the atmosphere like a sudden fireworks display. I stared dumbly at the point of the explosion, blinking away the afterimages, when I heard a far-off whistling sound, getting closer. I saw it a fraction of a second before it hit my pool—a chunk of meteor that had to be the size of a barrel, whirling end over end. The explosion of the meteor must have acted like a brake on its momentum, because if something that size had hit my backyard at the speed the meteor had been going, neither I nor any of my neighbors would have been around to tell the tale.
As it was, it hit the pool like a bus, and I was hit by a tidal wave of suddenly hot pool water. Steam fumed from where it dropped, in the deep end. I regained enough of my senses to wonder how much the pool damage was going to cost me, and
if meteor strikes were covered by my home insurance. I doubted they were. Several pool lights had been extinguished by the impact; I went back to the door and turned them off, so as not to have electrified water, and then turned on the main patio lights to get a closer look at the damage.
Miraculously, the pool seemed in good shape, if you didn't count the broken pool lights. The pool water was still bubbling where the meteor had gone in, but even so, I could see enough through the water to see that the concrete appeared to be uncracked. The meteor chunk had come in at just the right angle into the pool; the mass of the water, rather than the mass of the concrete, absorbed the impact. The water level of the pool was a good foot lower than it had been pre-impact, however.
If my neighbors heard anything, they gave no indication—or at least, I never heard them if they had. The walls around the backyard are twelve feet high; I had had them built around 1991, when my next-door neighbor was a heavy metal drummer. I had gotten sick of listening to his parties and watching him and his women having cocaine-fueled orgies in the hot tub, and it was easier to build the walls than to get him to move. As it turns out, I needn't have bothered; about a week after the walls were up, his wife filed for divorce and he had to sell the house as part of the settlement. George Post lives there now. Plastic surgeon. Nice neighbor. Quiet.
After the water settled down for a few moments, I heard a small
crack
, and looked into the pool in time to see a thick liquid oozing out of the meteorite remains and floating to the top of the water. The stuff was mostly clear but oily-looking. Space phlegm. After a couple of minutes of accumulating, the phlegm did something surprising: it started moving toward the side of the pool. When it got to the edge, a tentacle shot out
onto the patio concrete and the rest of the phlegm hauled up through it. When it was totally out, it launched up another tentacle that waved around for a second, then stopped and shot back down into the rest of the phlegm. It began to slide over towards me.
I can't even begin to tell you what was going through my mind at that moment, Tom. You know those dreams where something horrifying is coming at you, and you're running as fast as you can, but you're moving in slow motion? It was like that feeling: disassociated horror and utter immobility. My brain had stopped working. I couldn't move. I couldn't think. I'm pretty sure I stopped breathing. All I could do was watch this thing work around the patio to where I was standing. For the third and final time that night, I was utterly convinced I was going to die.
The thing stopped short two feet in front of me and collected itself into a compact Jell-O mold shape. A bowling ball–sized protuberance emerged from the top and launched itself up to eye level, supported by a stalk of goop. And then it
talked.
“Carl? It's Gwedif. We talked on the phone. Ready to take a meeting?”
Tom, I did something I've never done before. I fainted straight away.
I was down for just a couple of seconds; I woke up to find Gwedif looming over me. I caught a whiff of him: he smelled like an old tennis shoe.
“I'm guessing that wasn't planned,” he said.
I rolled away from him as quickly as I could and reached for the nearest dangerous object. My beer bottle had broken, so I grabbed it and held it in my hand, jagged end out.
“Eek,” Gwedif said.
“Stay away,” I said.
“Away put your weapon,” he said. “I mean you no harm.”
The line floated in my head for a second before I attached it with what it was from: it was a line of Yoda's in
The Empire Strikes Back.
It knocked me off kilter just enough that I relaxed just a little. I lowered the beer bottle.
“Thank you,” Gwedif said. “Now, Carl, I'm going to move toward you, very slowly. Don't be frightened. All right?”
I nodded. Slowly as promised, Gwedif moved over to reaching distance.
“You okay so far?” Gwedif asked. I nodded again. “All right, then. Hold out your hand.”
I did. Slowly, he pulled a tentacle out of his body and wrapped it around my hand. I was surprised not to find it slimy; in fact, it was firm and warm. My brain looked for a concept to relate it to and came up with one—those Stretch Armstrong dolls. You know, the one where you pulled on the arms and they stretched out for a yard. It was something like that.
My hand wrapped in his tentacle, Gwedif did the unexpected. He shook it.
“Hi, Carl,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”
I looked at Gwedif, dumbfounded, for about twenty seconds. Then I started to laugh.
 
What
can you say about the experience of meeting an entirely new, wholly alien, intelligent species of life? Well, of course, Tom, you know what it was like; you've done it, too. But I think by now you may have noticed that I plowed you right through that first meeting with Joshua, and I did it for a reason. I wanted to give your conscious brain something relatively familiar to work on, while your subconscious was grinding its
gears on the existence of an alien. I don't know if it was fair to do it that way; it might have been a sort of
coitus interruptus
for appreciating the wonder of the moment. What? Well, it's good to know it doesn't bother you, then.
Personally, it took me a good hour before I finally calmed my brain down enough that Gwedif and I could start having a real conversation. During the interim he answered my semicoherent questions, allowed me to touch him, literally sticking my hands
into
him on one occasion, and otherwise talking me down back into a rational state of mind. I was like a kid with a new toy. You're looking at me like it's hard to believe, Tom. And it is, I suppose; you folks at work only see me in control, and that's also for a reason.

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