A wild slim alien

I began to trust my dimly-lit memories and those intensely violent nightmares, in which my wings were severed by Peldastiquon wielding ophidia.  From them it seemed safe to derive an assumption that modern day equivalents of the wing-taker sects had entered an alliance with Badezon scientists, who were themselves tasked and paid by a government that appeared to have forgotten its sworn obligation to protect its citizens from that ancient terrorism, among many other kinds.  Further, under the terms of such a malevolent alliance, my wings had been taken from me, and in their place I had received plasticizing surgery so that I could pass as human.

Facts kept falling into place.  Of course – now I understood the reason that the faces of the Badezon who took my wings showed no emotion.  The wing-takers were wearing the ophidian face masks that mythology suggested they should wear.  As for the scientists, men and women whose experimental routine dictates that they remain expressionless – poker-faced, humans would say – you could expect nothing better.

But when during the middle part of the day, I shook off the memories and nightmares, and felt myself warmed by Chan’s embrace, I was to all intents and purposes a happy human, living among humans.  The deficiency of having been rendered wingless was cancelled out here; it had no meaning.  My heart leapt at this thought, until others struck me in long and horrifying chains.  Was Chan an agent of the wing-takers, the scientists, the government?  Sandy too?  Was I in fact still on Badezon, imprisoned in some little-known and unrecognisable corner of it, where an innocent might be experimented or practiced upon?  An entertainment even, a day to day drama watched by millions Badezon over, discussed between colleagues, friends, and family as if it were indeed a fiction, and not a cage of misery into which one poor drugged and butchered unfortunate had been less than gently placed by manipulating claws?

I began to wonder whether anything I touched was real.  I imagined that this was all just a stage set, whose limits I would uncover if only I went far enough in any one direction.  Chan had entrapped me with her sweetness, her clever artist-cum-loner disguise, her entirely credible simulation of need, hunger, desire.  Seeds of hate were sown among the flowers of love.

One night I fastened upon the notion. Chan was no human, no artist, but a Badezon scientist.  A doctor or psychologist, perfectly positioned to control the subject of the experiment or the nature of the entertainment; on hand to ensure that I played by the experiment’s rules and inflicted no harm upon myself.  Witness the austerity of her gaze so habitually adopted in our first weeks.  Think of how well she calmed me when I woke from my nightmares.  Think of how she always tried to turn my thoughts to love, to loving.  Watched by millions!  Lying awake in bed in the wind-buffeted depths of the night, I became hot with shame and anger.  With an effort I forced myself not to move, struggling to contain the rage which would have me scream murderously at my captor.

But how could they be sure that I would not harm Chan?  They must be watching my every move.  This was not highlights, it was round the clock, from one day’s suns’ rising to the next.  Every Badezon knew that espionage was the government’s forte.  They would have military police – or even Gedavippio – on permanent stand-by in one of the other nearby coastal cottages in this artificial row, with a control centre somewhere close at hand – no doubt in the faceless concrete structure next to Sandy’s bar.

I must not give myself away in temper, if I wanted to escape.  Yet what was to stop me surprising them now, here in the middle of the night?  They would not expect it.  In which house were the guard stationed?  It must be one of the two either side, so that they stood a chance of reaching me in time were I to attempt to kill their scientist.  Unless, of course, they had a beam permanently trained upon me from within this house itself!  One false move and I might surrender my starring role to an equally unfortunate newcomer.

Again I urged myself not to panic, not to throw on the lights and put them on alert.  I must slip from the bed as if going to the toilet.  Then to the kitchen as if for a glass of water.  Then outside, as if to scan the sky as I had done so many harmless times before, looking earnestly for the return of my traitorous people come finally to fetch me home.

I needed a weapon.  I needed my own blade.  I did not think that any of Chan’s modelling tools in the lean-to by the back door would serve my purpose, so once in the kitchen I would silently take the bread knife from its stand.  It would hardly be a match for an ophidia or cintilar, but concealed in the arm of my jumper, I might surprise at least one of my enemies with it before they took me down.

The legends of the wing-taker sects remain as stories to scare the young and the nervy.  Legend relates that it was Peldastiquo himself who took the last pair of wings from the last bird, and that he arranged that henceforth members of the sect should wear a mask imprinted with the facial image of that extinguished ancient species.  And though it is not known whether Peldastiquo himself used it – despite the attempts of artists of later centuries to show him in the throes of smiting the last bird with it – the blade of the Peldastiquon was named after this species against whom we had used the weapon over long centuries – the ophidia.  The sword which bore the ophidian name had long since passed into disuse, revived only by myth and dramatisation, but in its time it was said to be sharp enough to cut the substantial flesh of even the toughest of those wild reptilian birds, and light enough to wield at speed and with great control.  The metal was the colour of mercury, the weight was akin to steel’s and in its diamond hardness it resembled titanium.  A lattice work handle allowed the Peldastiquon to achieve the best claw purchase on the weapon; the blade was shaped like a snake in flight, its sinuous edge a lacerating wave.  Catch flesh with the leading part of the ophidia’s wave, and it was cut away; catch a limb with the depth of the curve and it was as if the blade doubled, clossing around gristle and bone with a scissoring motion.

With symbolic intent, a later largely ceremonial sword modelled on this early bird-killer was named after our sworn inter-planetary enemies the Cintilars.

The Peldastiquon killed off bird species successively and mercilessly, deaf to naturalist protests.  They had taken their wings as trophies, but the wing-taking lust still raged.  Unchecked by legislature or populace – both of whom feared to oppose them – the Peldastiquon finally brought about a birdless world.  After that there was only one species left whose wings they could take.  Their own.  Not that they had waited until the ceremonial slaughter of the last bird had taken place.  They developed their taste for Badezon wing-taking long before the last mournful swoop of an escaping bird against the sky was witnessed.

Legend also says that on the day of judgement it will be the resurrected Peldastiquo who will with a giant ophidia scythe the mountains of Badezon in two, opening up the furnaces below for the molten liquid of destruction to pour forth and burn up the forests, boil away the lakes.  On that day those Badezon who can still fly will hover above the raging fire and bubbling lava until exhaustion takes hold, and one by one the last of our species will drop to their deaths.  (Legend has of course been surpassed by the subsequent technological developments that made leaving our planet possible, but the mythic horror remains, for what good would the life of Badezon explorer be without a home planet to which one day he or she can return?)

Grounded on Earth, increasingly I suspected that the Peldastiquon ophidia was the blade that had taken my wings.  In my darkest moments Chan could not reach me and in my wingless state I believed it was worse to live on so than to die.  The wingless were in all respects deficient.  They were deprived of the practical means upon which living in the Badezon world depended; and, believe me, the symbolic weight of their loss was greater still.

If I was not of this planet, if I was originally from one called Badezon, had I paid the ultimate price in service of my species on this research mission to Earth?  Had my wings been amputated so that I might pass as human?  And was the process reversible?  I looked in Chan’s hallway mirror at where the stumps should be, at where the welts were, red scorches in white human skin.  I could imagine no operation that would be successful in reattaching wings to these alien shoulders.  There were recent instances of reattachment, but they stemmed from accidental severance and close proximity to the best surgeons with the wing accompanying the victim into the operating theatre.  Where were my wings?  The best I could hope for was that they had been placed in frozen storage.  But I had lost not only my feathers but the bony structures at the shoulder blades to which Badezon wings were fixed.  I could not see a future in which I was able to fly again.  The boy who had been fascinated by the stories of the ancient wing-taking sects of Badezon had somehow become their modern-day victim.

Of the many rival sects that the mythological history of Badezon records, two became dominant, and their names have been whispered down the ages, ensuring the survival of their enigma if not their actual continuity.

There were the Peldastiquon, an order at the level of the ancient aristocracy of Badezon.  What had begun as sport turned into darker pursuits over the centuries as they used hunting skills on their political enemies.  It was enough to take the trophy of their wings, and then the token of their tongues, for who could continue to hold the ear of a king or a queen without a tongue?

As is so often the case with sects, the Gedavippio began as a faction of the Peldastiquon.  Legend says that there was a move by the Peldastiquon leadership to curtail the extent of the sect’s barbarous practices, with a stipulation that the wings of fellow Badezon should not be clipped without the exhaustion of all other options and a unanimous vote by all attending its necessarily secretive ruling council.  With sufficient sleight of hand the ruling council used both political and a final few nostalgic wing-taking measures to rid itself of opposition, and push through the sect’s transition into an expanded honorary organisation, the guiding purpose of which was to look after its members career and business interests.

But they failed to tear the wings or tongue from Gedavippi himself.  Always a killer and never a council member, none dared go after him.  He drew many younger members, their blood-lust still keen, away from the portly embrace of the Peldastiquon, and satisfied that keenness in allowing his new followers to ground the leaders of the old order one by one.  The Peldastiquon was forced to recreate an armed wing to defend itself against the Gedavippio until finally, after many wing-takings, a kind of balance – in the form of an unspoken truce – was reached.  Through the centuries the fortunes of each rose and fell, coincided and were once again sundered.  In modern times the Peldastiquon have become extremely secretive.  No member would publicly admit to membership; but it is well-known that certain government and military roles are in their gift.

As for the Gedavippio, few now believe they remain at large, although occasionally reports surface of ritualistic murders with wing-taking hallmarks, creating a flurry of rumour which dies away soon enough.  But though the Gedavippio went deep into the forests of Badezon long ago, no-one knows for sure whether the sect has managed to hand down its tenets with unbroken continuity, or whether the wing-takings that sporadically darken the light of our suns are the work of individuals or groups invoking their name for purposes which always and inevitably remain obscure.

These wild tales of flight.  At first I didn’t believe them, wouldn’t dare myself to believe them.  But as he kept telling them, as he continued to convey a picture of a planet that seemed ever more plausible and increasingly real, as he never seemed to contradict himself, as what he told always seemed to build on what he had said before rather than amend or subtly refine it, well, then I began to doubt my doubts.

Whether he was telling the truth or had caught me in a web that was more or less sophisticated in its spinning – a Scheherazade to my unwitting portrayal of Shahryar – time and the unfolding of this tale will tell.  Hold your judgement, for you do not yet know what happens next, nor what after that; anything subsequent to what each of us, alien and human, has so far related.

We were so happy discovering what our bodies – alien and human – were together, and how they seemed less themselves, less our own, when at last we unwillingly separated the one of us from the other in order to pee or to eat.  We talked and talked, words tumbling out of first one of us, then the other.  Everything he said was a surprise, and I surprised myself with much of what I said, having through love become suddenly and shrewdly clear about my life and my art.  We might be seeing everything through lenses the colour of rose, but every tinged-pink detail was sharp.  The questions we asked of each other were the ones which addressed the formative parts of our selves, and we fished deep within for the answers, like ocean probes seeking out information far beyond the level to which light penetrated, the self-generated radial light of a previously undiscovered species being the sole source illuminating the murk as the answer rose back to the surface, thrusting aside the wash and plash of those everyday creatures drawn towards the sunlit fringes of the liquid mass.

The hearts of our minds were as much as each other’s disposal as the napes of our necks and the tenderest parts of our navels.  We ate and drank of each other.

Nothing he said gave any hint that he had lived as a human and was now deceiving me, except his quickly established facility with a new language, that and the extent of what he described – without any sense of knowingness or irony – as his programmed knowledge about the earth.  Physically and socially he was still as awkward as shy adolescent, but this only served to make his story stronger.  There was a lot you could learn about humans from a distance, but interacting with them on their planet was always going to be a challenge.

Besides, after that one night at Sandy’s, we shunned the social for some time, content simply to develop the rules of our own intimacy, of first contact.  How odd that he should be learning the nuance of look, touch and word from one who had almost forgotten what it was to be close to another; from one who had found proximity to another suffocating for so long, long ago.  But I had to lead, and that gave me confidence, and an acknowledged pleasure in shaping the wild slim alien’s understanding of a relationship, of love, of what it was to be human.  I was making him in my image, out of my own rib.

Of course, I got too comfortable.  Imperceptibly I began to think that the present moment would stretch infinitley into the future.  I should have known that it couldn’t last.  The rebirth of his nightmares was only the beginning, but sure enough it was his screaming during the first reprisal of them which ripped me not only from sleep but from that state of bliss.

‘What is it my love, what’s wrong?  Tell me what’s wrong.’  As if I had the power by listening to cure him of his terror, his madness, if that is what it was going to turn out to be.  For that is what I would begin to fear, that he was simply mad, in an essentially human way, that this was not the inevitable pain and estrangement of an alien far from home.  I ran my hands over his back, trying to smooth away the intensity of his distress into something more manageable, but my hands it seemed were sand-paper to him, and when they touched his shoulders, he screamed a scream of hurt.  Startled, I fell backwards, and smacked the back of my head on the low, sloping ceiling.  I must have lost consciousness, but his continued screaming was soon as effective as cold water would have been in reviving me.  I could feel a bump swelling and an oncoming headache, but I knew I had to calm him down before – on a still night when there was no wind to mask sound – one of the neighbours called the police.  I held him as firmly as I could by the arms and tried to hush him with eye contact.  In between gasps of air that entered his lungs and hung heavy there, he spoke a few words.  This is the sense that I made of it:

‘I dreamt that my wings were being severed.  One of my own people, with a sharp knife.  They would have to be strong to cut through tendons which connect wing to body.  There is no greater crime, short of killing.  Instances are rare outside of war now that the days of the ancients are long behind us.  These Badezon were of a wing-taking sect that is as reviled as cannibals are by your people.  How can they come to me as real as they seemed and yet I am unable to return to the world from which they travel?’ 

‘These dreams of yours.  They are a curse.  My species do not dream.  Our sleep is short but deep and rarely troubled.  We awake and we think of the new day, and sing our praises to it.  Images of horror come only in conscious reflective moments.  We control them, not they us.  We turn them into art, drama, but we process such imaginings quickly, and we never dwell on them.’

It was as if he was calling down a curse not only on what was bad about our dreams, but what was good; and on the ambitious deliberations of what we might achieve in future that we also counted as dreams.  A sentiment confirmed by the morning light when it revealed the raw red welts on each of the wild slim alien’s shoulder blades.

For weeks we lived day to day, moment to moment, in a state of bliss.  With the attraction acknowledged, and alien-human relations consummated, the remaining barriers were down.  I was less extraterrestrial and more Chan’s lover.  She was less species to be researched and more my reason to exist.  I began to talk, and talk, and with each word came more recollection of the planet I had left.  Whether I had left by choice or involuntarily I still did not know, but my memories took wing as I told Chan of the endless forests and sudden mountainous verticals out of which we had hewn our dwellings, once life among the trees began to be thought of as overly primitive.  I told her of being young and flying alone for the first time through these ancient forests that were once our habitat and now were our playground.  The trees there that grew on a scale whose greatness was in equivalent ratio to us as the average tree to bird size here on earth.  I told her in a voice of sorrow and shame that there were no other winged species – archaeological records showed that there had been once, and among evolutionary biologists arguments still raged as to whether we or some other natural force had killed off these potential rivals.  Secretly we all knew in our hearts what the answer was; the wars we had fought with our interplanetary neighbours told us all we needed to know about our natural bellicosity.

I told Chan of flying through the tops of those trees and meandering beneath them; of tight spots with beasts of prey whose earthbound heaviness we would dare ourselves against, risking our limbs were we to find ourselves trapped from skywards escape by a web of criss-crossing low-hanging branches.  I told her of the tribes that still lived in the trees, preferring the freedom and the light, suspicious of us cave dwellers and how far we had dug ourselves into the mountainous massed of rock that was the contrasting inorganic substance of our planet.  The young were excepted in this regard, for curiosity on both tree- and cave-dwelling sides had not yet been quite extinguished.  Unlikely friendships blossomed across this divide like a vast forest of flower-vines, and secret courtships were warily undertaken despite that each such instance of love was doomed and in all senses finite.  How blessed was I now to feel that this new love of mine and Chan’s had no restrictions, was seemingly without end; but I did not speak my happiness out loud for fear of ill-fortune or hearing from Chan in reply a note of contradiction, however small.

I told her of flying above the crystal plains of the mountainous regions, eyes part-shielded from the glare produced by the sun reflecting off the quartz slopes, their semi-translucence smoothed into waving rolls by prehistoric geological forces of unimaginable magnitude; of how our wings caught flashes of purple and green as we swooped low across them.  When she asked me who I had flown with, I made light of the fact that I could not remember, returning to the question only when the spirit of Eden we had found became the everyday state in which we lived and I began again to wonder about the purpose that had brought me to earth.  What was it?  Surely I had not been sent to Earth just to please one of its inhabitants.

Finally I told her of the cathedrals of light we had built by tunnelling into the dominions of quartz and in so doing creating vast rooms separated from the sky, the sun and the moons only by a thin thickness of translucent roof.  These rooms, their expanses bathed in light tinged with grey, green or violet were where those of us with an inclination to do so worshipped, or governed, or performed, or lived, if you were rich or powerful or both.  I could not recall that I was well-off or that I possessed any kind of authority; increasingly I began to feel that I was here on earth because I was expendable.

It was when I could not imagine life without Chan that the nightmares began, waking me each night with what became habitual and disorienting terror.  In the quiet before dawn, once she had soothed me, I told her what had caused me to wake clutching at my shoulders and screaming in pain.

‘I dreamt of the severance of my wings.  There was a blade – a sharp one – wielded by the claws of my own kind – strong they would have to be to cleave through the muscle and tendon which connects wing to body.  Their faces betrayed no emotion, no concern or malice – just a strength whose violence was concentrated on one end – the ultimate crime for and against us, short of taking a life.  To take the wings of a fellow Badezon – that’s not how we are at all, not now…’  I shuddered, and made as if to shelter myself beneath the wings that I no longer had.