Agent to the Stars (6 page)

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Authors: John Scalzi

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I
got a ticket from the California Highway Patrol, for speeding on the 210.
“That cop was not at all what I expected,” Joshua said. “Neither Ponch nor John had breasts. I'm going to have to revise my expectations.”
No kidding.
“
All
right,” I said. “Question and answer time.”
“Gasp,” Joshua said. “Torture me all you want. But I'll never tell you the location of the rebel base.”
Joshua and I were sitting at my dining room table. More accurately, I was sitting at the table; Joshua was sitting on it. Between us was a Pizza Hut carton and the remnants of a large pepperoni pizza. Joshua had eaten four slices. They lay, haphazardly, near the center of his being. I could see the slices slowly disintegrating in an osmotic haze. It was vaguely disturbing.
“You going to eat that last piece?” Joshua said.
“No,” I said, turning the carton towards him. “Please.”
“Great,” Joshua said. A pseudopod extended, folded around the crust edge, and withdrew back into his body. The slice was surrounded and joined its brethren. “Thanks. I haven't had
anything all day. Carl thought it might be upsetting to you to see food rotting away in the middle of something that looked like dried glue.”
“He was right,” I said.
“That's why he's the boss,” Joshua said. “Okay. Here's the rules for the question and answer period: you ask a question, then I ask a question.”
“You have questions?” I asked.
“Of course I have questions,” Joshua said. “From my point of view, you're the alien.”
“All right.”
“No lying and no evading,” Joshua said. “I think we can be pretty safe with each others' secrets, because, really, who are we going to tell? Fair enough?”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“Good,” Joshua said. “You go first.”
“What are you?” Might as well get the big one out first.
“A fine question. I'm a highly advanced and organized colony of single-celled organisms that work together on a macrocellular level.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Wait your turn,” Joshua said. “How did you get this place? These are nice digs.”
He was right. They
were
nice digs. Far better than I could have afforded on my own (until today, that is)—a four-bedroom ranch on three-quarters of an acre, overlooking the valley and abutting Angeles National Forest in the back. Occasionally I woke up and went out back to find a deer in the yard or a coyote digging through the trash. That passes for nature here in LA. It was just above the smog layer, too. Such are the advantages
of having prosperous parents. My mother left it to me after my father died and she retired to Scottsdale, to be closer to her mother's nursing home.
The only thing that could be held against it was that it was in the wrong valley—San Gabriel, where the “real” people (read: not in the movie business) lived. Every once in a while one of the other agents would mock me about that. I would smile sweetly and ask them what the rent was on their one-bedroom condo in Van Nuys.
“I've lived here all my life,” I said. “My mom gave me the house when she moved. What does ‘highly advanced and organized colony of single-celled organisms' mean?”
“It means that each of the cells in my body is a self-contained, unspecialized organism,” Joshua said. “How did you decide to become an agent?”
“My dad was an agent—a literary agent,” I said. “When I was a kid, he'd bring his clients over for dinner. They were weird but fun people. I thought it was cool that my dad knew such weird people, so I decided I wanted to be an agent. I must have been about five. I had no idea what an agent really did. If you're actually a bunch of smaller creatures, how do you get them all to move and act the way you want them to?”
“I don't know,” Joshua said. “Do you know how you make your heart beat?”
“Sure,” I said. “My brain sends a message to my heart to keep beating.”
“Right,” Joshua said. “But you don't know the exact process.”
“No,” I said.
“Neither do I,” Joshua said. “Do you have a game console?”
“What? No,” I said. “I had a Nintendo when I was younger, but that was a long time ago. Do you have any organs, like a heart or a brain?”
“Not exactly,” Joshua said. “The cells take turns performing functions, based on need. Right now, for example, the cells on my surface are collecting sensory information. Other cells not otherwise occupied are performing cognitive functions. The cells around the pizza are digesting it. Like I said, I don't think about doing these things, they just get done. What about cable?”
“Basic plus HBO and Playboy Network.”
“Naughty boy.”
“I wanted Showtime. They screwed it up. I never got around to fixing it.”
“I believe you,” Joshua said. “Really I do.”
“Are you male or female?” I asked.
“I'm neither,” Joshua said. “My cells reproduce asexually. Spice Channel will do nothing for me. Do you have a computer with an Internet connection?”
“I have a Mac and DSL,” I said. “Why are you asking about these things?”
“I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm a gelatinous cube,” Joshua said. “It's not like I'm going to be getting out of the house much. The neighbors would talk. So I want to make sure I'm going to be able to keep myself amused. Got any pets?”
“I had a cat, but he ran away about two years ago. I say ‘ran away,' but I think he was hit by a car or eaten by coyotes. The Escobedos next door have a retriever, Ralph, that will occasionally get out of the yard and come over for a visit. I don't think you need to worry about Ralph, though. He's fifteen years old. He might be able to gum you, but that's about it.
Anyway, he never comes in the house. So, if your species reproduces asexually, that means you're a clone of some other Yherajk, right?”
“Eeeeeeeh …” Joshua sounded suspiciously like he was trying to evade the question. “Not exactly,” he said, finally. “Our cells are asexual but we have a way of creating new … ‘souls' is probably the best word for it. I'd have a really difficult time explaining it to you.”
“Why?”
“You're out of turn.”
“You're evading.”
“Oh. Well, in that case, let's say it's a sort of societal taboo. Asking me to talk about it would be sort of like me asking you to describe in graphic detail the sexual encounter between your parents that resulted in your conception.”
“It was during their honeymoon in Cancun,” I said.
“What position did they use? How many thrusts did it take? Did your mom bark in pleasure?”
I reddened. “I think I see what you're saying.”
“I thought you might,” Joshua said. “Speaking of which—any brothers or sisters?”
“No,” I said. “Mom had complications during the pregnancy and nearly died. They thought about adopting for a while but they decided against it. Can you die?”
“Sure,” Joshua said. “More ways than you can, too. Individual cells in this collection die all the time, like cells in your body die. The whole collection can die, too—I'd say we're probably less prone to random death than your species is, but it happens. The soul can also die, even if the collection survives. You in a relationship?”
“No. I had a girlfriend at the agency for a while, but she
took a job in New York about six months ago. It wasn't very serious, anyway—more of a tension release thing. How long do you live?”
“Three score and ten, just like you,” Joshua said. “More or less. It's actually a very complicated question. Do you like your job?”
“Most of the time,” I said. “I don't know. I think I'm good at it. And I don't know what else I'd do if I wasn't doing this. What's your spaceship like?”
“Crowded. Smelly. Poorly lit. What do you do when you're not working?”
“I'm pretty much always working. When I'm not, I read a lot. Got that from being the son of a literary agent. When my mother moved out, I made my old room into a library. Other than that, I don't do too much. I'm sort of pathetic. How do you know so much about us?”
“What do you mean?” Joshua said.
“Your English is as good as mine. You know about stuff like video games and cable television. You make references to fifties horror films. You seem to know more about us than most of us do.”
“No offense, but it's not
that
hard being smarter than most of you folks,” Joshua said. “Your planet's been broadcasting a bunch of stuff for the better part of the last century. We've been paying attention to a lot of it. You
can
actually learn English from watching situation comedies several thousand times.”
“I don't know how to feel about that,” I said.
“There are some gaps,” Joshua allowed. “Until I actually got down here, we were under the impression ‘groovy' was still current. It's all those
Brady Bunch
reruns. Stupid Nick at Night. For the longest time it never really occurred to us that they
weren't live broadcasts. We thought that the repetition had some ritual significance. Like they were religious texts or something.”
“I'd think the fact that the Brady Bunch never aged might have been a tip-off.”
“Don't take this wrong,” Joshua said. “But you all pretty much look the same to us. Anyway, we figured it out eventually. My turn.”
 
The
question-and-answer session went on for another couple of hours, with me asking larger, cosmic questions, and Joshua asking smaller, personal questions. I learned that the Yherajk spaceship was a hollowed-out asteroid that traveled at slower-than- light speeds, and that it had taken them decades to travel from their home planet to here. Joshua learned that my favorite color was green. I learned that Yherajk-to-Yherajk communication most often took the form of complex pheromone “ideographs” launched into the air or passed on through touch: the “speaker” was identified with an identifier molecule—his own personal smell. Joshua learned that I preferred Eurotrash dance music to American guitar rock and roll.
At the end of it, I knew more about the Yherajk than any other person on the planet, and Joshua knew more about me than any other person on the planet. I ended up thinking that Joshua had somehow gotten the better end of that bargain; there was only one other person who knew about Joshua, after all. But presumably a lot of other people knew about me.
Only one question remained unanswered: how Joshua got his name. He refused to tell me.
“That's not fair,” I said. “You said no lying or evading.”
“This is the exception that proves the rule,” Joshua said.
“Besides, it's not my story to tell. You need to ask Carl how it came about. Now,” he executed a maneuver that looked very much like a stretch after a long bout of sitting, “where is that computer of yours? I need to sign in. I want to see how much spam I have.”
I led him to my home office, where my computer was; he slithered onto the seat, glopped himself onto the keyboard, and shot out a tendril to the mouse. I was mildly worried that parts of him might get stuck in my keyboard. But when he moved from the table on the way to the office, he didn't leave any slime trails. Chalk one up for my upholstery. I figured my keyboard would be okay. I left him to clack away online and headed out to the back porch.
My backyard was sloped up into the mountainside and heavily wooded in the back. It was on slightly higher ground than the adjoining houses' backyards—something I appreciated greatly when I was thirteen and Trish Escobedo next door would lay out next to her pool. I settled into my usual chair, which looked out onto the Escobedo backyard—Trish was now married and hadn't lived there for nearly twelve years, but old habits died hard. On the way out, I had pulled a beer from the fridge; I twisted off the top and sat back to look up at the stars.
I was thinking about Joshua and the Yherajk. Joshua was an immediate problem—very smart, very amusing, very liquid, and, I was beginning to suspect, very prone to boredom. I was giving him a week before he went off his rocker in the house. I was going to have to figure some way of getting him out of the house on an occasional basis; I didn't know what a bored Yherajk was like but I didn't aim to find out. Priority one: field trips for Joshua.
The Yherajk were a less immediate but infinitely more complicated problem—alien globs who want to befriend a humanity that, if asked, would probably prefer to be befriended by something with an endoskeleton. The only thing that possibly could have been worse was if the Yherajk looked like giant bugs: that would have turned the half of humanity already afraid of spiders and roaches into insane gibbering messes. Maybe that was the way to go: “The Yherajk—At Least They're Not Insects.” I glanced back up at the stars and wondered idly if one of them was the Yherajk asteroid ship.

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