Mike Resnick (Editor) - I, Alien

Some people sayprobing other planets for intelligent life is an exciting, romantic job. As faras Im concerned, that only goes to show theyve never done it. Me, I do it fora living, and Im here to tell you its nothing but a pain in the orifice. Theair smells funny even when you can breathe it, the animals smell even worse(and taste worse than that, half the time), and even when we do find people,theyre usually backward as all get-out. If they werent, they would have foundus, right? Right.

Down we went, intothe atmosphere. Iffspayhes my partnerand I rolled dice to find out who gotstuck wearing the calm suit. I give you three guesses. The calm suit we neededfor this planet is the most uncomfortable one in the whole masquerade cabinet.Its bifurcated at the bottom; its got tendrils near the top, and then anawkward lump at the very top. Guess who got to put it on. Ill give you a hint:it wasnt Iffspay. I think he uses loaded dice. Before we could really startquarreling, the heat-seeker indicated a target. Three targets, in fact, groupedclose together.

Trouble was, theywere at the edge of a swamp. I worried that they might escape into the water orinto the undergrowth, calm suit or no calm suit, before I could slap the paralyzerray on them and we could antigravity them up into the ship. And if they didifeven one of them didwed have to go through this whole capture-and-releasebusiness somewhere else on the planet, too. Once was plenty. Once was more thanplenty, as a matter of fact.

FromHi, Colonic by Harry Turtledove

I, ALIEN

EDITED BY MIKE RESNICK

DAW BOOKS, INC.

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Copyright 2005 by Mike Resnick and TeknoBooks.

All Rights Reserved.

DAW Book Collectors No. 1326.

DAW Books is distributed by Penguin Group(USA).

Allcharacters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons livingor dead is coincidental.

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SCIENCEFICTION LOVES aliens. Weve had cute aliens, frightening aliens, brilliant aliens,stupid aliens, friendly aliens, hate-filled aliens, lustful aliens, aliens whothink and sound just like us, and aliens whom we will never begin tounderstand.

Thetrue alien is a cipher that doesnt serve much use in science fiction. If heexistsexcuse me: if it existsit probably breathes methane, excretesbricks, smells colors, reproduces by budding, and has totally differentconcepts (if it has any at all) of love, hate, fear, and pain.

So,very early on, science fiction writers learned to use aliens as metaphors forvarious aspects of the human conditionas a funhouse mirror they could hold upto humanity to examine whatever happens to be pleasing or annoying the writerthat particular day.

Thehistory of science fiction is filled with aliens, many of whom became morepopular than the humans from the same stories. You can go all the way back toTars Tarkas in the Martian stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs; the whole crew ofSecond Stage Lensmen in Doc Smiths Lensman saga; Tweel in Stanley G. WeinbaumsA Martian Odyssey; and on through memorable and beloved aliens created byEric Frank Russell, Roger Zelazny, Vonda Mclntyre, and dozens of others,right up to Chewbacca in the Star Wars saga.

Everyscience fiction writer has created aliens at one time or another. Even IsaacAsimov, who populated his robotic and Foundation futures with nothing buthumans, eventually got around to it in The Gods Themselves. Andcertainly every writer in this book has created aliens in previous stories.

Butthis time we asked them to do something different. Remember that I said alienswere incomprehensible? Well, not anymorebecause each author was asked to writea story in the first person of an alien. The aliens in these stories are notjust the main characters; theyre the narrators.

Lastyear I edited Men Writing Science Fiction as Women and Women WritingScience Fiction as Men for DAW Books. Those were nice imaginativestretches, but nothing compared to the stretching the authors in this book wereasked to do.

And,being science fiction writers, they succeeded in ways that surprised even theeditor.

ALACTICDATE: 17%.8*!0/MWUG PRETTY GIRL TUREEN

Aftera long and arduous journey during which I traveled five thousand light-yearswithout a bathroom stop, I have arrived safely at my destination, code named ThePlanet with Waffles by the Interstellar Council on Covert Relocation (ICOCR).However, there were several mishaps during my voyage which made me fear I wouldnot survive long enough to submit my application to the Bureau of GalacticRefugees, Escapees, and Synchronized Swimmers (BO-GRESS) for my RelocatedInterstellar Fugitive benefits.

Thecatastrophic explosion of my transport vehicles sound system when I neglectedto install proper safety devices before exposing it to With Wafflish music,code named Britney Spears, caused my navigational system to malfunction.Consequently, I am not in the designated landing zone, code named City ofAngels. That destination was selected for me by ICOCR on the basis of a reportin the seven hundred-fifty-third edition of The Interdimensional Guide toGalactic Emigration which cited experiential evidence indicating that myarrival would go unnoticed there. So I was very alarmed when I realized I hadmissed the target zone by quite some distance due to the technical malfunctionwhich made my navigational system mistake virtually all landmarks for my formermother-in-law.

Fortunately,however, despite this problem, I seem to have landed in a zone as benign as thedesignated one, this one being code named, according to my observations, SinCity. Despite causing some negligible destruction to indigenous machinery uponlanding, my arrival attracted no serious attention and incited no commentbeyond a few untranslatable exclamations from several natives making elaboratebut incomprehensible gestures.

Afteremerging from my vehicle, I discovered that the transport podsmolecular-restructuring device was damaged during landing and no longerfunctioned. To quote the most sophisticated philosopher whom I have encounteredin my background reading on the Planet with Waffles: Its always something.This mishap meant that I could not disguise the pod as a nuclear warhead,though Id been informed that this was advisable in order to conceal evidenceof my arrival and to protect the pod from discovery in the event of a laboriousindigenous ritual, code named UN weapons inspection.