I, Alien

“It didn’t hurt me,” he said. “It only helped me.”

“You caught it for us, Kutu,” said one of the men. “Good work.”

There were provisions for gatherers who encountered disaster on harvesting forays. In the best-case scenarios, gatherers were abandoned. There were too many of my people on my world, and we were too easily trained for us to be very valuable as individuals.

Worse-case scenarios involved self-destruction. I wasn’t important enough to rate a bite-down poison, though. Worst-of-all-case scenarios meant that the gatherers were gathered for something unpleasant.

I had worked my way up from fuel gatherer to fungus hunter. My masters valued my special sense of smell; I could find funguses others missed. But I wasn’t the only one like me.

If only I’d gone for the truffles and left the boy alone.

I slid a knife free and slipped my hand up under my upper arms. I sawed on the rope thing that had caught me. Even though I kept my knives super sharp, they couldn’t saw through the ropes that bound me.

Who were these people? Where did they get their ropes? Usually on this world I avoided contact with the natives. Wrong-shaped people in other dimensions got upset when they saw me, so I had made stealth my practice.

I had no interest in being a meat-hunter. Fungus was what I liked to harvest. It didn’t fight back, and I could snack on it while I gathered. I had finally gotten the job I had always wanted.

A line of fire striped the backs of my legs, then another. My homeworld handlers were jerking my leash a little early.

Some of the people around me stirred. They brought out more ropes, made loops, dropped them over my upper parts. Many of these few-limbed people spread out around me, gripping ropes that ended in loops that restrained me, tugging from different directions.

When there were enough ropes, they dragged me out of the forest into the hot wet daylight

“But it didn’t bite me,” Kutu said.”

“You were lucky,” someone told him.

“You told me it would eat .me or kill me for the wishballs. It just cut leaves for me and told me to go home. It didn’t even try to get the balls.”

“You were lucky.”

He pushed away from his mother and came back to where I walked along, responding to the tugs of eight different people with ropes on me, all going in more or less the same direction.

“I’m sorry, Monster,” he said.

“Me too.”

“Kutu, get away from that thing!” said someone.

He pulled one of the globes out of the bag on his back. I saw where the first one had cut him when it broke. Black blood.

“Would you like this?”

I sheathed my useless knives and grabbed the ball from him with one of my lower hands.

“Yes,” the globe told me. “I want to belong to you. I want to serve you.” It felt warm in my hands.

“Kutu!”

What to wish for?

Six more lashes hit my legs. I stumbled. I felt the hot green blood flowing down my calves toward my ankles.

I didn’t know what the people who had captured me wanted with me. I couldn’t do anything to satisfy my handlers. Even if they pulled me home, I wouldn’t have the truffles, and that meant punishment, maybe becoming an entree.

I held the globe tight in my lower hands and wished for freedom.

Nothing changed, and everything changed. Part of me still walked along in the grip of ropes between these villagers, suffering from cuts to my back and legs from the handlers on my home world. Part of me lifted out of my body and rode up into the sky, free of everything. The sky part almost let go of the body part, but not quite. The sky part watched everything below.

The globe didn’t work. Or only a little. Not enough.

I threw it on a rock, where it broke wide open. It screamed. My sky part flew back down to become trapped inside my body part. I shuffled on toward the village with my captors.

Entree at home, if they jerked me back? Or entree here, where the natives had ropes that could withstand my best knives, and wishballs nobody in the gathering community had ever mentioned?

Either way, entree, I guessed. I hoped I would meet a chef with skill and go to the shadow hive in glory.

WHAT MUST BE by Josepha Sherman

YOU ARE MY FRIEND, Human though you be, and so I shall tell you the tale I have told no other Offworlder.

I am Krahelk, a warrior as are all Gratarikai. Our world is a sterner one than yours, with more power to its gravity than yours as well. And so your people are smaller and less powerfully built than is our way of being. Your eyes, too, are strange to me, Human eyes with their strange variety of colors. Gratarikai eyes are always one shade, the proper yellow that is the color of fierceness. Our hair is always the proper black, and worn by most in traditional warrior knots.

And we are beings of honor. Honor, yes, it was honor that ensnared me—

Wait. I am aware that Humans are quick with questions. I will tell you of my world, my family, but you must promise not to interrupt.

So now. I will begin by warning that Humans do not truly understand our Gratarikai government. We are not a monarchy, yet my father, Kratarel, is the people’s ruler. So I would, in turn, have become his heir, if the council so approved and the rites were all propitious. And… if what must be had not been.

Yes, I know that is not yet clear. You must listen.

Here is our world: Rugged as we are, our beautiful, fierce mountains and red earth. Here is my father’s mansion or, if you prefer, palace: A long sprawl of compounds, each separate as a bead on a necklace. We do not live close together as you Humans, for our warrior spirits will not permit that, and one clan will not overlap the territory of another.

All is elegance in that palace, clean white or sleek and gleaming metal walls, green things growing for food or ornament. We have no need for beast-pens. We do not eat tame creatures, since there is no honor in killing something that has no freedom.

And here, now that you can understand a little more of us, the tale can truly begin.

Youngling was I then, still bearing nothing more than my child-knife, my jaws barely strong enough to tear the throat from a tiny kragi—a creature, maybe, like your sheep—assuming that I had the skill and speed back then to catch a kragi. But I was learning quickly, as a Gratarik child must. The weapons teacher did not knock me down half so often, nor was I quite so covered with slashes and bruises. I need not mention that I was learning other things, since we do not deny ourselves the worth of art and music. Politics and cunning I was being taught as well, being the son of Kratarel, as well as the way things must be.

There was more to learn. I knew, of course, that I was not my father’s only child. There was another son, my half-brother, though I had never seen him, nor he, me. We lived in separate wings of the compound. His name, I was told as soon as I was old enough to understand such things, was Erekal. And as soon as I was old enough to have the concept, I was taught to know him as my enemy. How else? There can be but one heir.

Akkkh, you give the Human dip of head that says you understand. You do not. Not yet.

There could, of honor, not be a reckoning till he and I were both of age. For now, I was a child, curious as a youngling must be, and stealing silently through the compound, stalking I knew not what, practicing skills I was only just learning. There was the smallest tangle of undergrowth, a long hedge of dark green-and-silver