Six Scifi Stories Volume Three

Star SexThe alien who looked like a cactus blinked his prickly pear eyes and made a noise like a screaming cat. At first, Dinah Ryan wasn't sure that this was a bad thing. For all she and her fellow Earthlings knew about aliens, it could have been a cry of pure ecstasy. But then, the cactus puked chunky blue slime all over Ben Blakey, which tipped them off. With a noise like a dental drill running at full throttle, Mr. Cactus scooted off to the next booth. So humanity was still screwed. "Ah, man!" Blakey flicked slime from his gray jumpsuit and wrinkled his nose. "This stuff stinks!" "You're telling me." Mahalia Davis darted away from him. "How the hell many of these species communicate by spraying s**t at each other, anyway?" Dinah grinned and shook her head, tossing her shoulder-length sandy brown hair. "I still say it's a joke. Initiation pranks for the new kids on the block." "No," said Captain Alec Strayhorn. "We don't matter that much to them. Half of them don't even know we're here." Dinah gazed out at the cavernous hall and realized Strayhorn was right. Every imaginable shape and size of alien being walked and bounced and flew and crawled and oozed across that giant crystal chamber. There were aliens with skin like stained glass, faces like mirrors, bodies like smoke, fur crackling with electrical current...and none of them were looking or sniffing or twitching in the direction of the Earthlings' booth. "This is a disaster." Blakey used one end of the tablecloth to wipe slime from his arms and chest. "Three days at this debacle, and what do we have to show for it?" "Lots of alien freebies." Mahalia shuffled the pile of bizarre devices, objects, and pocket-sized lifeforms on the table. "Which we don't know what to do with!" Blakey bent down and wiped slime from his lumpy bald head. "For all we know, they're meant to kill and eat us!" Usually, Blakey was the funniest and most upbeat member of the team; his current surliness showed just how badly things were going. Some Worlds' Fair this was turning out to be. The Fair was designed to give the inhabitants of many planets the chance to showcase their wares and attract investors. Plenty of other species were getting attention...but for the humans, the Fair had been an exercise in invisibility. They sat at their cobbled-together plastic booth playing old Earth movies on a TV pried out of their ship's cockpit, and nobody gave them a second or even a first look. "We've done the best we could." Dinah tucked her hair behind her ears and shrugged. "We didn't exactly come prepared for this." It was true. As the crew of Earth's first deep space exploration mission, the four humans had not expected to be setting up a booth at a glorified trade show on an alien space station. They hadn't even expected to meet honest-to-goodness aliens, for that matter. Now, they'd been surrounded by so many wildly different varieties for so long, Dinah had to admit that the novelty was starting to wear off. "I say we pack it in," said Blakey, dropping the slime-covered end of the tablecloth. "Let's go home." "And tell the folks at home what?" Captain Strayhorn--a tall man with thick, dark hair, chiseled features, and haunted gray eyes--straightened the tablecloth. "That everyone on Earth will die because our trade show booth was half-assed?" That was enough to take the wind out of everyone's sails...and remind Dinah why she had a crush on him. Strayhorn was a leader. While everyone else got bent out of shape over a little blue slime, Strayhorn kept his eyes firmly on the prize. Which was saving humanity from extinction. Blakey sighed. "I just don't know what else we can do. These bastards don't care about what we have to offer." "Maybe you need to diiig deeper," said a familiar voice. Just hearing it was enough to make Dinah's skin crawl. The voice had an oily, sinuous quality that curled around her brainstem and licked her fear center with a flickering, forked tongue. The voice belonged to the alien who'd brought them to the Worlds' Fair in the first place. Dinah and the other humans called him "Heavy," which was derived from his endless, unpronounceable alien name. "Surpriise them." Heavy looked like a five-foot long eggplant covered with writhing cilia topped with chattering faces. There were hundreds of tiny faces, every one of them representing a different alien species. Whichever face Heavy was using at a given moment--the human face, in this case--inflated to life size and spoke the loudest. Mahalia patted her curly black hair and snorted. "How can we surprise them when we don't even know what's not a surprise out here?" Heavy's human face looked like Blakey's: pinched, puffy features and a lumpy scalp. The main difference was that the lip movements didn't always match the words. "Your homeworld wiiill be uniiinhabiiitable soon, yes?" "You know it will," said Dinah. Hyper-accelerated climate change on Earth had already cranked up the heat and forced everyone underground. Scientists projected that humans would no longer be able to survive anywhere on or under the planet within five years. "You came here looking for help to fiiix the homeworld, yes?" said Heavy. Dinah nodded. The team had originally launched into space seeking new Earthlike homes for humanity. When all the inhabitable planets within reach had turned out to be taken, they'd jumped at Heavy's invitation to the Fair. "You wiiill pay any priice for that help?" said Heavy. "Of course," said Strayhorn. "But we don't seem to have anything anyone wants." Heavy made a gurgling sound that the team had decided was his way of laughing. "Are you sure you have triied everythiiing?" "Pretty much," said Blakey. "Maybe you only thiiink you have," said Heavy. "Remember, somethiiing of no value to you could be worth a great deal to one of them." With that, he twisted his eggplant body around and waved every one of his faces at the crowd of aliens in the great crystal hall. "What's that supposed to mean?" said Blakey. "You tell me," said Heavy. "Iiit iiis up to you to fiiigure iiit out."