Page 7 of Alien Desire
I’m beginning to trudge defeated to the snow mobile when I see a shape: the outline of a body.
I rush towards it, skidding down on my knees beside the large spacesuit laid out on its back on the ground. It is dark blue with strange markings, the material light and shiny. It’s not a uniform I recognise.
I peer into the helmet, but its visor is cracked and misted and I can’t see the person within. I know they are alive, though, because they are moving. Fierce shudders shake the suit violently.
The shape and size of the body tell me it’s a man, six-foot-five at least and far too big for me to lift and carry. Instead, I bring the snow mobile closer and drag him onto it. It takes me several attempts of heaving and groaning, needing to stop to ready myself and pull him along.
After several failed attempts, he’s slung over the seat and I hover behind him, cocooning him in my arms, and speed back to the station. He groans every time we hit a bump on our path, the impact jolting us both, and I flinch, imagining his pain.
The distance seems further than on the way out and it stretches with each of his yelps. I will us to get there; my fingers so tight around the handle bars they cramp
At the station, I fetch a stretcher, which makes the act of dragging him inside a little easier, if not by much. His trembles are weakening, and I fear I’m losing him.
I probably shouldn’t have moved him. What damage have I done to his head and his spine? But if I hadn’t moved him, he risked dying of exposure, freezing to death out there alone on the ice.
Inside the station, I tell the computer to ramp up the heat.
“Unknown arrival,” she says in return. “Please state your rank, name and ID code.”
“I don’t know,” I mutter.
The computer whirrs. “The arrival is severely injured. Medical attention is required immediately.”
“Shut up!” I shout, “I can’t concentrate when you’re talking at me like that.”
Kneeling by his side, I take a deep breath to steady my nerves.
What injuries will I find beneath this suit? The thought has my insides churning with nausea. All that training, all those simulations and practice runs, and nothing prepares you for the real thing, for the way adrenaline makes your hands shake. Does more death await me under this helmet?
I glance over my shoulder, spying Fluffy hovering in the doorway, and then bite my lip and turn back to the injured man.
My fingers discover the catches at the neck of his suit and I snap them open. Each click sounds like a bullet from a gun, echoing around the station. As the last one releases, a hiss of gas escapes and carefully, carefully, I lift it away.
In years to come, I will look back at this moment and still feel the disbelief and horror that hits me next. Forgetting that the first thing I feel is confusion. For long, long seconds I kneel, the helmet aloft in my hands, staring down at this stranger, and my mind does not compute what I see. It scrambles desperately to make sense of it.
Because the face that stares back at me is not human.
The muddled thoughts that flutter through my brain offer explanations. A mask? Injuries? A dream?
But the face is perfectly formed, perfectly complete. Pale, almost translucent skin, not unlike the strong thick hide of an elephant’s. Large eyes occupying the upper part of the face, nestled beneath a fiercely protruding brow. A mouth with thick, plump lips. Ridges run from the bridge of the nose and sweep over the forehead, one at the centre of the crown, one on either side, and one across each sharp cheekbone. Long white hair is drawn up in a braid that weaves over the crown of the head and down the neck.
For centuries and centuries, perhaps even from the beginning of our creation, my species has pondered the question of whether we are alone in the universe. Through the years, we have created monsters and gods, debated the possibility that there are others out there. But in all those millennia of our existence, in all that time, merely a blink of the eye in the lifetime of the universe itself, we have never, not once, made contact with another species that is not of our home planet Earth.
I peer at the creature in the space suit, motionless on the hard station floor, my heart hammering in my chest, and I am stunned beyond words.
Life beyond Earth exists.
And right now, the life in front of me is slowly fading away.
According to all the horror movies I’ve seen and sci-fi novels I’ve read, this creature — this alien — should be feared. It may be hostile. It may be dangerous.
But it seems so precious, the purest meaning of the concept rare. It is a living, breathing being and I am no longer alone. I cannot let it slip through my careless fingers.
I creep forward to get a better look. The alien is not grotesque, not frightening. In fact, it is quite exquisite. Beautiful in the way unusual things always are, and not too unlike myself.
Should this surprise me? Should an alien appear so similar to my own race? I don’t think it is so very strange.
Life formed on our own planet due to the pure chance of the right ingredients being present for which life could form. The Goldilocks phenomenon they call it — not too hot, not too cold, not too salty, not too sweet. That such an ideal spot exists elsewhere in the infiniteness of the universe is not so infeasible. And that life would form, adapt to those ingredients, those environments, in much the same way it has to those ingredients and environment on earth, seems almost likely.
