Monster's Mind
Corwyn Green
(1997)
(dedicated to Kilgore Trout the character in Kurt Vonnegut's books)
On a whim, the Unna-med Aliens chose a single human to represent
the entire Earth in a deadly battle with a creature from another planet.
The Aliens would have accepted anyone, from the weakest new-born to the
largest sumo-wrestler. But they did not choose their warriors for strength
or intelligence, but for entertainment value.
Their human they finally chose, Aaron Adams, was like every one
else: slightly more or less than average on everything. He was slightly
taller than average, slightly thinner than average, and scored slightly
better than average on human intelligence-grading tests.
He held unexpressed thoughts that were pure poetry, that, if
expressed in his High School, would have made him a social disaster. He
acted on intense emotions he did not know he had. He dreamed of success,
money, and prestige in endeavors he would never undertake.
Aaron liked hot dogs and pizza, but not hamburgers. He liked the
Internet and knew all the best role-playing games. He liked football but
never played it.
He occasionally read Star Trek novels because the local T.V.
stations didn't carry the show and his parents refused to get cable. His
reading attracted bullies, so he took Ninjitsu classes for a year. When he
was a yellow-belt, he quit Ninjitsu because the teacher kept making him
fight a green-belt, but by then he had become good enough to at least
leave the bullies with some bruises, discouraging them from further
conflict.
When the Aliens snatched him from Earth, Aaron left behind a
gold-haired, slightly anorexic girlfriend who liked sunflowers and
body-piercing. He also left behind a round-faced, round-bodied, girlfriend
who liked 50's music and going out on Saturday nights. Neither one knew
that Aaron was going out with the other. But what Aaron didn't know, but
the rest of the High School did, was that the blonde was also going out
with the school's best guitar player and that the Saturday-night girl went
out on Fridays with someone other that Aaron and on Sundays with someone
else still. If Aaron died in the fight, neither girl would die of a broken
heart.
Aaron didn't think of his girlfriends as he waited for his
opponent to appear on a large black triangle that floated in a foggy white
nothingness. He thought of his parents, and wondered if the Unna-med
Aliens chose him from an alphabetically ordered list. His name made him
first for any unpleasant task on Earth, so why should his luck be
different off Earth? he thought.
In truth the Aliens-who didn't have names--didn't care about
Aaron's. They chose him because, of all humans, the black lustre of his
rebelliously un-cut hair best matched the black shine of the battlefield's
surface. Not to imply that the Unna-med Aliens didn't care who lost and
who won. They cared very much, since the loser would be the new source of
food for the Unna-med Aliens, and unless the winner proved squeamish about
such things, for the winner's race as well.
The truth was, the Unna-med Aliens were a very old race and
everyone agreed that they were senile and should he dying out
soon--everyone had thougth that for billions of years now, and races had
been born and destroyed in that time--all thinking the Unna-med aliens
were about to die. But senile or not, the Aliens and their technology
inspired terror and instant obedience in anyone they came in contact with.
They could not, now, invent such devices as the ones they had, they could
not even replace the ones they lost. But the heartening decline in their
technical abilities was irrelevant--they had so many strange technologies
left over from the time they were young-- and thriving in the universe
like maggots in crap--that their devices would outlast the end of the
Universe, and maybe, even the end of the Unna-med Aliens themselves.
Sometimes the Aliens gave some of their technology to the younger
races as tokens of favor. To up the stakes, the Aliens decided to bestow
just such a token of favor on whoever won the upcoming battle. The aliens
cared about sensation, not logic. Logically, there was no reason to put
Aaron in the fight because most members of the Alien race wouldn't eat
humans if humans were the last source of fresh meat in the galaxy, yet all
agreed that Aaron's opponent would be a very refreshing addition to their
menus. The Aliens could have simply taken a majority vote amongst
themselves and decided to eat Aaron's opponent, but they wouldn't even
consider such a thing when they could stage a duel instead.
And so, the fate of the Earth rested on the shoulders of a High
School kid with an alliterative name.
Aaron didn't know that the battlefield was triangular for a
reason, as there were supposed to be three races fighting. The third race
had used a piece of lethal technology, which it had obtained from the
Aliens for a past service, to destroy itself and it's planet. The third
race had committed auto-genocide to avoid becoming Alien food or being
partly responsible for bringing that doom to another race. The third race
didn't even consider using the Alien's technology against the Aliens: they
knew the Aliens too well.
Aaron wasn't afraid of the Aliens at all. In fact, he ached to
fight one of the Aliens instead of whoever they set against him. Aaron
wasn't afraid of his opponent either. He didn't know what creature he was
up against, but he knew that the creature was similarly disadvantaged. He
thought of what lay ahead of him as "just a fight", different, but not any
more difficult, than the ones he's been in before. The stakes were higher,
but he didn't care about the stakes--he didn't care that humanity would
die if he lost. He survived High School and a job as a bagger in a
supermarket. He had faced humanity's casual cruelty instead of pretending
it didn't exist. And no matter how much ridicule they drew, he had not
(yet) given up his Star Trek novels. He actually found death and Aliens a
lot easier to face than life and humanity.
When Aaron's opponent appeared on the far side of the triangle, he
almost laughed. By any science-fiction fan's standards, his opponent was a
Bug-Eyed-Monster: the kind of creature portrayed in 1950's low-budget
alien- attacks-Earth movies. Not only was it a B.E.M., but it was a
humanoid B.E.M.. Aaron half expected it to take off it's head and reveal
an actor underneath. But no, the fangs dripped just a bit too much saliva.
The orange eyes were a little too large and far apart to be human and too
mobile to be plastic. The red spaghetti-looking hair was obviously
attached to living skin.
Aaron saw the irony that first extra-terrestrial that a human
encountered didn't have the exotic phsyology but obviously human soul that
modern sci-fi insisted on portraying, but was the over-used BEM no writer
who actually expects to get published would write about. Maybe it had
emotions humans didn't and vice versa, but Aaron saw no way he could find
out.
The B.E.M., true to stereotype, spread its arms wide and roared.
So, Aaron thought, gorillas beat their chests, this one spreads
its arms. These creatures probably wrestle opponents instead of beating
them into pulps.
But no matter how his opponent looked, no matter how violent
his(?) disposition, Aaron knew that the B.E. M. wasn't the real enemy.
That honor Aaron reserved for the unseen, unheard ones who had created
this game and put the rules in his head. Aaron, raised on liberal
politics, Star Trek, and the more inane kinds of comics, thought he was a
sophisticated member of the human race. He often declared that he abhorred
violence, usually to show any gathered audience that his opponent was
leaving him no choice.
Although he wouldn't hesitate to kill any or all of the Unna-med
Aliens--that would have been self-defense and therefore justice--he could
not simply attack his opponent, who was as little to blame for the
situation as Aaron.
The creature roared louder. It seemed to be getting more
confident, shuffling back and forth in its corner.
Aaron did his best "I won't fight you. They can't make us fight if
we don't. Habla espanol? Parlevu Frances?" (Aaron was glad the B.E.M.
didn't because he sure didn't). The B.E.M. had toned down its growling to
hear what Aaron was saying, but started lumbering forward as soon as he
stopped. So he started talking again. "Myr. Ya lyublu vas." those were the
only words he knew in Russian. The beast flexed its muscles. A primitive
aggression display?
What about body language? If the beast used displays of
aggression, it could also use displays of love. He held his arms forward,
palms outward, in what he understood as the universal gesture of good
will.
It displayed its long, wet fangs.
Aaron tried telepathy, desperately thinking happy loving thoughts
at it with all his might.
Maybe he had communicated something, because the B.E.M. chose this
moment to charge. Apparently, it wouldn't hesitate to kill him.
Apparently, killing was its first--and only--choice, while Aaron had at
least tried to establish mutual understanding between races. So, Aaron
reasoned, if the B.E.M. was a genuine representative of his race, and
Aaron lost the fight to it, then the surviving race would be one of brutal
primitives, of murderers. Yet if he killed just this once, humanity would
survive and might, with time, confront the beings who had staged this
conflict in the first place.
Aaron waited until the B.E.M. was almost upon him and kicked.
Aaron was ready to back up the kick with blocks or more blows, depending
on the situation, but rather than halting the beast or throwing it back,
Aaron's foot had gone straight through the thing, coming out the other
side. The B.E.M. had looked like a gorilla, but it was as soft as wet
clay.
The beast's momentum had carried it forward, and it closed its
arms around Aaron to keep itself from falling. Its fangs were right where
Aaron's neck was, but it didn't try to bite.
"Oommmm?" it said and collapsed onto him.
Aaron found out that its fangs were as soft as a jellyfish and wet
like a dog's tongue.
Aaron lowered the creature to the floor and knelt beside it as
best he could, considering that his foot was still inside it. He
desperately wanted to apologize, but knew that this wasn't Star Trek and
aliens didn't speak English. The only way he could think of communicating
to it was by kissing it on its hairy forehead--and then he knew that it
had understood Aaron from the first--it had understood his universal
gesture of good will and his desperate loving thoughts. It was also trying
to communicate. This race wore their emotions like clouds around their
bodies, and their thoughts as facial expressions. They communicated
empathically, by being near each other. Now that Aaron was in its
emotion-cloud, he knew. This creature would rather die than kill.
The creature was a lot like Aaron in one way: it thought every
living thing reasoned like it did. It had thought that any being smart
enough to understand the rules of the senile Alien's game would also be
smart enough not to play by them. Also, every time it had made gestures of
friendliness, Aaron had responded with his own gestures of peacefulness
and friendliness. When Aaron telepathically broadcast happy loving
thoughts, it had gotten them clearly and thought that this was the perfect
time to act, to try to get Aaron into its emotion cloud. It did not
expect that Aaron would lash out so suddenly. It could not conceive of a
creature that would act in such an alien way--to project love while trying
to kill--even if it was an alien, and so it died.
The Unna-Med aliens set Aaron free again and gave him
technological gift, which, he was unsurprised to discover, was a weapon.
The Unna-med Aliens were pleased--they had hoped Aaron would win.
They were glad they didn't have to eat humans.
After several years on Earth, Aaron was able to observe the
restaurants competing with each other over who could serve the best
"space-man beef" without having any unsightly emotional displays. He could
even eat his vegetarian meals in the same room with the rest of his family
without wondering if they were eating the same being he had killed. He
could even listen to people talk about how lucky they were to live
now--with alien meet and electronic music, things people of only a few
generations ago could not have--without making himself seem like an insane
back-to-the-earther by arguing with them.
But he couldn't kill himself, and he couldn't stop screaming at
night, and he still played around with the Unna-med Alien's technology,
hoping to discover something that would hurt the Unna-med Aliens or at
least change his own life.
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