Not One of Us: Stories of Aliens on Earth

WATER SCORPIONS Rich Larson

“This is you,” Noel says to his new brother, holding up a writhing water scorpion by its tail. Spindly legs churn and its pincers clack, but the tail is stingerless. It is thin and stiff and hollow like a straw, so the water scorpion can breathe through it when it clings to the rusty iron bar around the inside of the pool.

Danny rocks forward on his haunches and watches through his cluster of gleaming black eyes. His body is all slippery spars and gray angles. Noel hopes he sees the resemblance to the creature dangling between his fingers.

“This is you,” Danny mimics, a warbling echo that doesn’t require movement from his needle-lined jaws, coming instead from the porous bulb underneath them.

Noel stands up from the pool’s blue-tiled lip, keeping the water scorpion pinched between thumb and finger. He doesn’t have to tell Danny to follow. Danny always follows, even when Noel stamps his feet and screams at him to go away.

He leads his brother along the concrete deck, slapping wet footprints. Danny’s feet clop instead of slapping, like when their mother wears high heels. Now she sits barefoot in a dilapidated beach chair, wearing the stretchy black one-piece that hides her scar. Her eyes are on a work screen full of lab notes, but she sets down her stylus and waves and smiles when Noel and Danny pass by.

Noel lowers the water scorpion into the pocket of his trunks to shield it from view, still gripping the tail. It squirms and rasps against the fabric.

Nobody else looks up from their loungers. Nobody stares at Danny here, not even the cooks anymore. The private pool on the edge of Faya-Largeau, only hours from the Saharan crash site, was bought out by the UN specifically for its team of scientists, translators, engineers—all of them now used to seeing aliens.

Noel and Danny pass under a stucco arch, and the concrete becomes the courtyard’s chipped mosaic tile, hot on Noel’s feet. He does not know if it is hot on Danny’s feet; Danny never jerks away from scalding sand or half-buried thorns. Not even when Noel has him walk over a spread of prickly goatheads.

Pungent eucalyptus overtakes the smell of chlorine and greasy samosas. The silvery-gray trees line a long open-air entryway. Noel leads Danny all the way to the end, into the red dust of the parking lot where the pool sounds of splashing and satellite radio and voices are muted. Danny’s neck pops and swivels toward the family car where it gleams hot white in the sunlight.

“Look at this, Danny,” Noel says, lifting the water scorpion from his pocket. “Watch this.”

“Watch this,” comes the wavery echo. He crouches obediently as Noel drops the creature into the warm sand. It makes a skittering circle, claws waving, then tries to dart away. Noel meets it with a wave of sand kicked up by the blade of his hand. The water scorpion flails and shies off, scuttles in the other direction. Noel tosses another fistful of sand.

Danny keeps watching, stone still, as Noel pours scoop after scoop of sand onto the panicking scorpion, sucking the moisture from the cracks in its keratin, battering down on its carapace, until the creature turns sluggish and can only slowly kick its legs in place.

“That’s like you, if Mom didn’t bring you to the pool all the time,” Noel says softly. “You’d cook. You’d get all dried up and die, and after a while she’d forget you ever existed. Just like she forgot Maya.”

Danny looks up at him with all of his black beetle eyes. Danny never blinks. He never smiles and never cries. He doesn’t understand, not a single thing.

Noel covers the water scorpion over, heaping a burial mound. With his eyes on his work, he whispers, “I hate you.”

“I hate you,” Danny trills softly back.

The stork ship came down on the day Noel’s sister died. He was sitting in the waiting room, watching red balloons in animated smartpaint drift across the peeling green walls, reminding him his tenth birthday wasn’t far away, when the news feed sliced onto every screen in the hospital. A crumbling castle of pitted alloy and crystalline spars, falling from the sky. When the ship crash landed in the Sahara, an ocean away, an orderly gasped and bit the skin between her thumb and finger.

Noel understood it was something his xenobiologist mother would need to know about, something as important as the baby in her belly, so when she came from the examination room with her shoulders shaking, he rushed to show her the screen. She watched the crash calmly, nodded to herself as if it made perfect sense. Her eyes were shot through with pink.

Later, on the metro, she explained in her doctor voice that Maya’s umbilical cord had shrunk too thin, and she’d starved, but they would still have to go back to the hospital the next day for induced labor.

“If she died, then how can you give birth to her?” Noel asked, feeling a wave of confusion, a panic aching his throat.

His mother wept then, a raw rusty sound that made other people watch her in the subway windows. Noel buried his face in the crook of her arm. The woman in front of them played the news feed at full volume on her tab, about the UN seeking to assemble a response party, to drown out the noise.

Back poolside, their mother has migrated back under the gazebo, rolling up her work screen. Noel and Danny join her in the straw shade for samosas. Iridescent green and purple swirls over Danny’s body, as it always does around their mother. Noel leans back against a rust-flaking pole of the gazebo while Danny hurries to her. She strokes his jaws, an approved contact from the stork instructional transmissions, but can’t resist giving a human squeeze at the end. When she motions the same for Noel he digs back against the pole, feeling it on the nodes of his spine.

“Have you been playing Marco Polo today?” she asks helplessly, trying to drop her open arms naturally to the tabletop.

“We’re killing water scorpions,” Noel says, just to watch her smile cloud over. “They’re pests,” he adds, because the clouding still hurts. “Jean says so. Says we can.”

“Eat now,” his mother says. “Stay in the shade for a while. You’ll burn.”

“Danny’ll burn, you mean,” Noel says. In the year since they came to Africa, leaving the flat in Montreal with the empty baby room, he’s baked dark. He never burns anymore.

They eat the samosas without speaking. Noel hides the gristle with ketchup. Danny cakes them with the nutrient powder from their mother’s Tupperware, which is better than when he covers them in sand. Danny can eat anything. Once, he ate half the pages from Noel’s favorite paperbook comic, slow and deliberate, back when Noel was scared to put his fingers near Danny’s teeth. Their mother thought he confused it with the paper-wrapped spearmint gum she’d given him a day before.

“I have to go back on-site for a few hours,” she says, zipping her swim bag. “Will the pair of you be all right until supper? Jean is in the clubhouse.”

“Jean is in the clubhouse,” Danny echoes, a high sweet distortion of their mother’s voice. His bony head swivels toward the stucco entrance.

She smiles. “That’s right. Noel, watch out for your brother.”

She gives them francs so they can buy Fanta and credit for Noel’s tab so he can play netgames. When she leaves, Danny’s skin fades back to slippery gray.

They’d been in Chad for three months already when Noel’s mother told him about Danny. He’d spent the day, like most, climbing trees, hurling a mangy tennis ball against the concrete wall of the house, and watching procedurally generated cartoons instead of doing Skype school.

The first weeks had been the exciting ones, with his mother coming home with stories each night about the team cleaving their way inside the ship to find the stork adults (Gliese-876s, back then, after their star system) dead and decaying, bonded by bone and neurocable to the ship’s navigation equipment, rot seeping slowly outward. Noel had liked hearing about the low keening sound that made some of the other xenobiologists and one of the soldiers vomit, about the dissolving corpses in the dark swampy corridors.

He’d even liked hearing about the warm red amniotic pool where they found the babies who’d been remade, as best the storks’ genelabs could achieve, in humanity’s image, swapping vestigial wings and spiny shells for bipedalism and articulated necks. Babies who grew to child size with slender limbs and overlarge heads, features vaguely neotenized either by chance, a side-effect of the gene alterations that saved them from the ship-wide plague, or by design, like a cuckoo trying to slip its eggs in.

But now his mother wanted to bring one home.

“Danyal,” she said, pulling herself up to the Formica countertop beside him. “The government still wants them all to have Arabic names. But we call him Danny.”

Noel spooned yogurt into his ceramic bowl, listening to a breathless story about the one stork baby who wouldn’t socialize with his siblings, who aced cognition tests and mimicked speech and followed her tirelessly through the lab.

“He’s sort of imprinted,” she said, with the fragile smile Noel had learned to cherish these past three months, learned to cup in his hands like a brittle bird. He felt the question coming before it reached her lips.

“What if he stays with us?” she asked. “He’s not doing well at the center. And you always wanted a brother.”

The word felt like a glass shard in his gut, but he kept his face blank, how he’d learned from watching her. Noel had wanted a brother. It was true. It gnawed at him. Maybe if he’d wanted a sister more, she wouldn’t have died. They wouldn’t have had to cut her out of his mother’s belly. Maybe he hadn’t wished hard enough.

“For just a little while,” his mother said, smile already moving to slip away.

Noel couldn’t say no.

Noel and Danny are swimming circles around the bobbing, plastic-coated lifeguard, making it spin in place like a sprinkler. No matter how hard Noel kicks, Danny is still quicker. They don’t notice the weather turning until the stacks of rust-red cloud wall off the sun. Noel comes up for air in a sudden dusk and the smell of cool wet dirt itches inside his nose. The deserted pool deck is strangely still. Then all at once the trees frenzy, a ripple of whipping branches, and the dust storm the weather probes missed sweeps down over them.

Noel barely has time to pull up his goggles before the stinging sand slaps across his face. He throws out a hand for the lifeguard’s orange floaters but finds Danny’s slick hard skin instead and flinches away. But Danny’s hands clamp to him, and then his legs, and Noel’s chest seizes with a sudden panic: Danny is drowning him. Then Danny vanishes, slides past, and Noel thrashes blindly after him until he rams against the metal bar of the edge.

Someone heaves him up and out of the water; sand pelts his bare back and shoulders. “Inside, vas-y,” Jean’s voice booms in his ear. The big man has already draped a protective beach towel over Danny’s head, and now grips Noel’s arm.

“My tab,” Noel says automatically, looking to where the table should have been visible, not looking at Danny.

“I have it. Dépêche-toi, hein?”

Jean ushers them back across the slippery deck, through a battering cloud of red dust, into the clubhouse. He puts his shoulder into the door to close it behind them. Noel claws sand out of his hair while Danny struggles out of the orange towel. The barrage has left small red welts on his gray skin.

“Wash out your eyes at the sink,” Jean says, pointing to the concrete basin back behind the bar. The clubhouse is dark except for one flickering fluorescent tube in the ceiling and the glow of a plasma screen hooked to the wall. The few UN workers who didn’t leave earlier now slouch to the sunken couches, mumbling bitterly about cell signals lost, windows left wide open, faulty weather probes.

“I had my goggles,” Noel says, tapping one lens.

“Wash the rest of you,” Jean says curtly. “Then help the stork.”

Noel goes to the basin and splashes cold chemical-tanged water over his skinny arms, his chest, his face, rinsing away the dust stuck to his wet skin. When he straightens up, Danny is standing directly behind him. The sight jolts him.

“Don’t do that,” Noel hisses.

Danny says nothing, washing himself in silence. Someone brings two bottles of wine from the kitchen, and someone else finds a preset film on the television, something with arctic explorers on shifting glaciers, and everyone settles in to wait out the storm. Jean clears Noel a space on the far end of the couch, pulls his unharmed tab out of his pocket.

Noel keeps his head bent over the small screen when Danny slips away to the kitchen, but he still sees it happen.

Danny had lived with them for a week when Noel tried to show him Maya’s picture. He took the Polaroid from his mother’s closet, where she kept an album in case digital storage somehow disappeared, which to Noel sounded like the sun somehow going out. It showed Maya’s small face in black-and-white, the face he remembered as scrunched and dead purple.

With the photo clutched to his chest, Noel went to the living room where Danny was playing. Their mother called it playing, but Danny mostly stared at the old die-cast Hot Wheels and Lego kits, except for the time Noel left and came back to find the plastic blocks built into a twisting Fibonacci spire. Now, Danny was crouched on the rug, holding a chewed yellow Mack truck in his spidery hands.

“This is the sister Mom lost,” Noel said, extending the photo. “We lost. The one I told you about.”

Danny gave him a gleaming black stare.

Noel had tried to teach him words, in English, in French, sometimes in the Arabic he picked up from the response center guard. Car. Voiture. Sayara. He’d guided Danny to the porch one morning to warble a near-indiscernible “I love you” to their mother. That had made her happy for an entire day.

“This is Maya,” Noel said, shaking the photo slightly between his fingers.

Danny took it, gently, then eased upright, clicking and clacking, and walked away. Noel blinked. He followed Danny into the kitchen, past the fridge where he’d scrawled Bienvenue Danyal and then Welcome Danny the day Noel’s mother brought him back from the response center, savoring the static crackle under his fingertip and the electricity of anticipation.

Danny opened the sink cupboard, looked back at him, and slipped the photo neatly into the garbage. As his new brother walked back out of the kitchen, Noel wanted desperately to hit him, to stop him, to make him understand, but he just stood digging crescents in his palms with the ragged edges of his nails.

He realized that he hated Danny. Danny, who was here because Noel’s sister was not, who secreted his strange fluids on the concrete floor, who made a low keening screech in the night, who’d shredded Noel’s book. Maybe his sister was not because Danny was here.

As soon as he’d fished Maya’s photo out of the trash and put it back in its album, Noel went to his tab. It only took a simple question: are storks bad. The nets were inundated with vitriolic conspiracy rants and he read them now, one after another, even though he didn’t understand some words. He read how the stork babies secreted a mind-altering pheromone like the ones that bonded pregnant mothers to their newborns.

“There is no pheromone, Noel,” his mother told him that night, when he said, voice shaking, that they needed to wear masks around Danny. “Is that what’s upset you? It’s just a myth.”

Noel knew better. Danny was making her forget.

On the screen, an explorer stuck in an ice crevasse takes the pickaxe to his trapped arm. The adults groan or stammer laughs, gesticulating with tumblers of sloshing wine. Noel makes himself watch the axe thwack, the blood trickle and steam, until the man’s arm tears away. Then he slides from the couch into his chunky plastic flip-flops, and goes to the kitchen to find a Fanta.

He expects Danny to be there, because Danny doesn’t like crowds of people unless their mother is nearby, but the kitchen is empty. A forgotten pot of coagulating spaghetti bubbles on the burner. The lime green radio built into the counter stutters static from the storm. Noel looks to the heavy back door and sees a wash of red sand around it.

Danny is outside. Noel finds a crate of lukewarm Fanta in the corner and tugs one free, replaces it with a handful of francs. He searches slowly for a bottle opener while he thinks of what might happen. Danny’s skin is soft. Danny doesn’t breathe well in Harmattan season. Stupid of him, to go out in the storm.

Noel knows in his hot angry gut that his mother will blame him if Danny is hurt. He could tell Jean to go look, but Jean would pick him up and bring him back without a flicker of irritation on his face. If Noel finds him alone, he can punish him for being so stupid, so selfish. Nobody will notice bruises among the welts.

Noel has never hit Danny before. The thought of it unsettles his stomach, but he loops it through his head as he sets the Fanta aside, pulls someone’s track jacket from the hooks on the wall. By the time he wrestles his way out of the door, a brief shriek of wind that the adults won’t notice with the volume up, he thinks he knows how it will feel.

Outside, the dust flies like shrapnel. Noel hides his face in the peaked hood of the jacket and wishes he’d brought his goggles. The transplanted eucalyptus trees are lurching with the wind, near cracking, as he battles his way into the courtyard. Sand peppers his exposed calves and feet like a thousand tiny wasps.

Through the maelstrom, Noel catches a flash of angular silhouette: Danny, hobbling away toward the parking lot, through the archway of thrashing trees. Noel opens his mouth to shout and ends up chewing sand. He pulls the hood tighter and follows Danny, eyes squeezed to slits, fists clenched inside the balled up ends of his sleeves.

By the time he fights his way to the end of the tile and scuttles down the worn steps into the lot, Danny is sitting where they buried the water scorpion. His head is bent against the wind and his overlong arms envelop his knees, compacting him. Waves of dust belt across him, rocking him back and forth.

“What are you doing?” Noel demands, fists still clenched, chest still scalding. The wind scours his words away, but Danny notices him. He looks up with all of his glittering black eyes. Then he reaches into the dirt and pours a handful over his head. The puff of dust is nothing in the storm, but Noel understands. He understands even before Danny’s thin distorted voice slides under the windy howl.

“This is you,” Danny says, shaking another handful of dust. “Watch this.”

Noel’s stomach plummets. He reaches for his anger. “Get up,” he shouts. “You’ll get us in trouble. You’ll get me in trouble.” He tries to kick at him and loses his flip flop. “Come back inside!” His eyes are stinging from sand and now tears, sliding thick down his grimy cheeks. “Come on,” he pleads. He tries to haul Danny up by the shoulder, but his hand’s shrugged off.

Noel feels a panic welling inside, panic for Danny’s face crumpled purple, for a grave dug with one shovel. “Stay, then,” he hollers. “Stay and get sand in your lungs and die.”

Danny’s head cocks up at the last word. He considers the sand trickling through his fingers. “This is Maya,” he says.

Noel doesn’t realize he’s no longer standing until his kneecaps scrape the dirt. “I’m sorry,” he says, crawling forward, face level with Danny’s. “Danny. Sorry. It wasn’t your fault. It’s not your fault.” He goes to drape his arms over Danny, but is shoved off. “Come inside,” Noel begs.

Danny turns away. Another billow of dust blasts across them; Danny takes the brunt of it and every bit of him wilts. As the wind roars louder, Noel strips off his jacket and pulls it over their heads like a tarp. Danny stiffens, then allows it.

Their breath is hot underneath the nylon. Noel feels his skin press against Danny’s clammy back. He feels the puckered marks left by flying sand.

“Not your fault,” Noel mutters. The storm dances all around them.

He waits, and waits, for the echo.