I realised Mandeville was pressing his face close up to the alien’s body.
“What’s happening?” I gasped.
“I am doing what you demanded.” Mandeville’s voice seemed to come from three places at once. Far away and right by my ear.
“We hepping the effelant,” Angel squeaked from three different places.
“Mandeville’s trying a possession,” said Isis, also weirdly tripled.
“Work of this magnitude requires great concentration, great power,” said Mandeville. “Are you ready?”
“Yes,” said Isis.
“… yes.” I don’t know if it was me said that, or Angel or Isis or Mandeville. We were all together. All part of the same thing.
And then Mandeville… I don’t know how to explain what happened next. How can I tell you what it’s like being an alien?
Try. Whatever you can remember.
It was… like going down a slide into a whirlpool made of rainbows. Swirls of colours getting nearer, until they were everything, until we were… him. The-crash-of-a-meteor-into-a-rocky-planet. That’s the alien’s name. Or maybe it’s more of a description.
He stretched underneath the whole valley, going beyond it and down so deep his belly was sitting on molten rock.
Not that he had a belly.
The alien’s body was stone, but also soft and always moving, like water seeping through sand. It flowed and floated inside the bedrock, while all of us tiny humans were scurrying around on top, going to work and school and all that stuff, not even knowing what was underneath. All the houses and roads, they were like insect bites or nettle stings. The diggers, working down to start the quarry, they were knives slicing in. And the blasting, the explosions that were all set up… They were, would be, the most incredible pain. Agony. It was happening so fast, like a burning rash, or a killer virus eating the alien alive.
He was panicking. He was trying to reach out to those of us who’d breathed him in that day in the quarry. He was trying to get our help.
So you could you sense its thoughts?
Well…
He was alone, and frightened at being alone. He was hoping the others, his family, would turn back for him, but they probably hadn’t noticed he was gone yet.
That’s the thing. The aliens live at this other speed, so slow we can’t even tell it’s happening, like continents moving. To them he’d only just crashed to earth. To us it was thousands of years ago. In hundreds of years from now, when his family returned to find him, he’d have been mined away to nothing. They wouldn’t even have known what had happened, only that he’d vanished.
He was terrified. He’d speeded himself up as fast as he could, the way we get an adrenalin kick, but he still wasn’t fast enough. It had taken him weeks just to say one sentence to me.
That’s what some of his thoughts were.
There were other things too.
Other things?
Things that made sense when I was joined to his mind, but now…
Like what?
Like… he could taste gravity, and the Earth’s was really bland.
He rotated his body with the changing of the seasons, because it made him feel… sun-happy?
He saw our life through the standing stone – soil and plants, trees and birds, animals and humans – and he couldn’t understand why we’d bother. All of us stuck to the skin of our planet, never going anywhere else – he thought it was funny. Until we started hurting him.
I told you. It sounds crazy.
To aliens, human behaviour seems inexplicable.
Yeah, well. That’s for sure.
I was the alien. But I was me too, kneeling in the quarry with the grit digging into my knees. And I was Isis, lying with my face on the ground, and I was Angel, holding colours with my hand, and I was Mandeville telling everyone what a magnificent possession this was…
Through Isis I was joined to all of them, their thoughts crowding into mine so it was hard to tell which was whose, and shot through with the slow-moving hopes of the alien, like a river flowing, or currents in the ocean. And even though I’d come down here to tell Isis the charges could blow any second, I knew we couldn’t just leave.
The alien was caught and lonely, trapped and in pain, too slow to get away. He needed to escape before the electricity buzzed down the wires and hit the explosive charges, but only we could do that for him, because to do it he needed to be as fast as a human, running away from it all.
I was Isis, she was me. I didn’t need