Genuine Thargoid

By Moira Sheehan

It all started one warm summer's afternoon. We were visiting Uncle Anthony and Aunt Lucia, as we did every tenth day when Uncle Anthony reluctantly closed the shop at Aunt Lucia's insistence. I was feeling uncharacteristically resentful: my brother Patrick was at a racketball practice and I had no doubts that, having set a precedent, Patrick would no longer have to spend every tenth afternoon sitting on the edge of an uncomfortable, if elegant, chair, surrounded by flowers while his only pair of proper shoes pinched his toes. I had spent most of that morning trying to concoct a convincing argument as to why visiting Uncle Anthony and Aunt Lucia should be a duty only expected of girls, but I never tried it on Mother. I knew what would happen if I did. The conversation would turn to how Patrick, being tall and strong and athletic, needed to concentrateon racketball because professional racketball players earned a great deal of money, while I, being small and puny, might as well concentrate on the family's quest to ingratiate itself with our only wealthy relative.

The visits were always the same, we would perch on fashionably spindly chairs in Aunt Lucia's receiving room while Aunt Lucia and Mother made conversation and Uncle Anthony sat in the only chair that looked like it would take his weight. It was even worse if Father came with us; then Uncle Anthony would take Father off somewhere for 'manly conversation', as Aunt Lucia called it Father was not with us on that particular visit, he had the opportunity of some work, so Uncle Anthony was sitting in the big chair while us children played counting games in our heads to fill the time between the tiny sweetmeats that Aunt Lucia had purchased especially for us. We had strict instructions to accept only one sweetmeat every ten minutes, no matter how often Aunt Lucia offered them.

My resentment must have given me courage. Instead of going straight back to the receivin groom after escaping to use the 'facilities', I started to wander about. The upper storeys were boring, I knew that from the conducted tours that followed Aunt Lucia's biennial 'renovations', but below was the shop! I had been in the shop three times, twice when Uncle Anthony had taken us there, using the pretext of 'showing the boys round' as an excuse to receive an important communication and once when my father had been injured and I had been sent by my mother to tell Uncle Anthony.

To my disappointment, the door to the shop refused to open when pushed. I half-heartedly tried the next door along and found, to my surprise, that it yielded easily, revealing stairs down into a frightening but fascinating gloom.

I almost shut the door and scuttled back to the stilted conversation and occasional sweetmeats. Then I imagined telling Patrick about my adventure and my feet had carried me down the first five steps before I had time to consider the consequences.

Once my eyes had adapted I was entranced. Everywhere I looked there was something wonderful: a taloned foot; a pink, spotted pelt; a pointed skull; weird and wonderful objects, each of which had a thousand uses in my imagination. This was much better than the shop; in the shop each item was encased in glass and displayed in splendid isolation. The low hum of machinery drew me to the far side of the cellar, to a series of glass cases, each within a frame of tiny bright lights and flashing numbers. I knew what these were, Uncle Anthony had showed me one in the shop, these were the cases for the alien remains from places where extreme conditions were the norm. The first case in the row was filled with a green gas. I peered through the murk at a brown lump. To my disappointment, the other cases in the row were equally unimpressive. There was a row behind, then another. I began to use my imagination, visualising the alien being from the remnant in the case. The shard became an insect of monstrous proportions, the feather was from the neck of a bird the size of a house and the featureless grey blob was the slime from a gigantic slug. Finally I came to a thick curtain. Gingerly, I drew it back. The case was surrounded with ice-encrusted pipes but the viewing port, although small, was transparent. I had to stand on my toes to look in.

It was an arm. I do not know how I knew it was an arm because it was very different from a human arm. It had an extra elbow and the joints were different, like the joints in a spacesuit. The surface, except at the joints, looked hard, black and shiny. There was a hand, but no palm, just six shiny, black fingers, each with four joints, pointing upwards. In the surface of the forearm, below what I thought of as the wrist, there were bits bright blue and bright green shiny material set flush with the surface making a pattern. I stood imagining the alien that belonged to that arm for a long, long time.

So long that my uncle finished searching the house and decided to try the locked doors to the shop and the cellar before informing my mother of my disappearance. I was too engrossed to hear his approach, for a heavy man he moved surprisingly noiselessly. The first I knew of his presence was a hand reaching over my shoulder to draw the curtain. I jumped back and flushed guiltily.

"I am sorry, Uncle," I stammered. "The door was open," I explained, knowing that it was not much of an excuse.

Uncle Anthony studied me for a few moment, moments that felt like hours. "Curiosity is a commendable trait in the young," he said finally. He looked about the room. "You did not touch anything." It was a statement rather than a question and I was relieved to hear a hint of approval in his voice. "Your mother was worried about you," he added.

No more was said as we made our way back to the flowery receiving room. I stammered out an apology to Aunt Lucia for being absent for so long without prompting and received an approving half smile from my uncle. There was no doubt in my mind that my foray into the unknown had been worthwhile, even after a tongue-lashing from my mother and a beating from my father.

The next winter was the start of a bad year for my family. There was a glut of cheap slaves, most of them big, strong males with a docile temperament. That meant that there was no work for my father. Mother tried to compensate by capitalising on the current fashion for hand embroidery, she and my sisters spent the greater part of every day sitting around the kitchen table embroidering flowers onto every imaginable item from silk knickers to tablecloths, but no matter now hard they worked there was never enough food on the table. I watched my mother piling the food onto Patrick's plate, telling him how important it was for a professional athlete to eat properly, while she herself became thinner and thinner. Patrick, being Patrick, accepted such generosity as his due and deigned to take up a part time job that he was offered because it would interfere with his training. I did everything that I could, given that my mother refused to show me how to embroider.

The best scheme was hanging about the spaceport and offering to carry bags or to conduct people to the correct gate.

We were coping, just, when my eldest sister announced that she was going to get married. I remember the stunned silence. I struggled to put a face and figure to the name of her intended and when I finally did so I understood my parents' horror. The man was fifty-seven, older that Father, older even than Uncle Anthony. Lettie was only fourteen.

Nothing my parents could say would persuade her out of it. Rauol Lefferham was wealthy, wealthy enough to give Lettie regular meals and hand-embroidered knickers. She would have a proper house, with a receiving room like Aunt Lucia's, instead of a kitchen and one other room tha thad to do for everything. When the day came we dressed in our best clothes, which were decidedly shabby, and tried to smile. Uncle Anthony and Aunt Lucia came to our home rather than going directly to the municipal hall and, for once, I was convinced that Mother and Father were pleased to see them: Uncle Anthony ferried the family to the municipal hall in his ground vehicle to save us the shame of arriving on public transport and Aunt Lucia presented Lettie with a full set of elegant, hand-finished china cups, so that she did not go to her new home empty-handed.

Seeing our home must have been a shock for Uncle Anthony and Aunt Lucia, Mother and Father had always managed to hide just how poor we were. Certainly Lettie's marriage precipitated the event that changed my life for ever. One day, soon after the marriage, I came home from the spaceport to find Uncle Anthony sitting with my father in the kitchen. I stood awkwardly in the doorway, wondering where I should be, until Uncle Anthony acknowledged my presence.

"I believe that Henry is old enough to participate in the decision," Uncle Anthony said in his quiet voice. Father was startled. I do not know if it was hearing my real name, everyone at home called me Harry, or the thought that I was capable of deciding anything. "If you want," he said gruffly.

Uncle Anthony gestured that I should sit at the table. I obeyed. He studied me for a few moments before beginning to speak.

"Your father has three sons, Henry, and I have none," he stated. I waited, a vague impression of what was happening creeping into my mind. "Lucia and I have considered adopting a boy from an orphanage. We have been considering this for some time. Yesterday, Lucia said to me, "Anthony, do you think that your brother thinks well enough of you to spare you one of his three sons?" and I said to her, 'Lucia, that is too much to ask of anyone, even a brother.' but she said to me,' Anthony, ask your brother. If he says no we can still go to the orphanage.' So I am here and I would ask your father for one of his sons, but only if that son would come to live with us of his own free will."

I looked at my father but there was no help there, only the familiar, impassive expression. I knew what my mother would say; all those visits were finally paying off. I took a deep breath.

"I would be honoured to live in your home and I would work hard to be worthy of the title of adopted son, but only with my parents' consent."

Uncle Anthony smiled with approval and my spirit lifted. It would be good to live with parents who could approve of me.

In fact, I was never sure if Aunt Lucia did approve of me. She managed to stay as coolly distant when we both lived in the same house as she had when I visited one afternoon in every ten. I had always imagined that Aunt Lucia, like other humans, wandered about before breakfast in a robe and looked weary in the evenings, but she if was ever anything less than perfectly turned out it was in the privacy of her bedroom. Even on the maid's day off, when she did the cooking, every hair stayed in place and no bead of sweat every spoiled her perfectly painted face. Her only concession to practicality was a white apron of spot-proof fabric with a lace frill.

I had a room of my own at the back of the second storey, behind Aunt Lucia's receiving room. Next door was a second room with its own staircase leading down into the shop. When I first arrived the connecting door was locked, Uncle Anthony judging me to be too young for so much space or so much potential freedom. He was probably right, having even one room to myself was a culture shock.

I threw myself into my work, assessing my success by the frequency of Uncle Anthony's smile. I did everything he asked of me to the best of my ability, starting with polishing up my sketchy reading skills so that I could maintain what Uncle called his 'scrapbook'. This entailed reading the three main newspapers, the Imperial Herald, Frontier News and the Federation Times, from beginning to end every day. Any article that contained a reference to aliens or alien artefacts had to be copied into a memory cube. At the end of the process I had to take the memory cube out of the computer I had been using, the only one linked to the information network, and move it to an isolated system. I then had to allocate the articles to the relevant parts of the 'scrapbook' according to the parameters that Uncle Anthony had set.

It was half a year before I built up the courage to ask Uncle Anthony the two questions tha thad come into my mind the first time I had performed the time-consuming task.

"Why do you make a scrapbook, Uncle?" I enquired. "After all, all the back copies of the newspaper are available from the library."

My uncle only smiled slightly. "I have a reason, Henry. Perhaps you will be able to deduce that reason in time. You said that you had a second question?"

I hesitated, discouraged by his ambiguous answer, but he smiled encouragement. "Why do I have to read them all, Uncle? Why can't I use a search programme?"

Uncle Anthony ruffled my hair, a sign of affection that I would have hated from anyone else. "Reading, Henry, is part of your education. By reading newspapers you can learn a great deal."

I pondered for a few days on Uncle's reason for his scrapbook. Going with him to visit another merchant gave me the extra clue I needed. The other merchant had only one computer, linked to the network. I began looking everywhere I went for isolated systems. I saw none yet Uncle had two, the one I used and another in his private study. Slowly a hypothesis gelled in my mind. I tested it by comparing a hundred articles in Uncle's scrapbook to the versions supplied by the library computer. The results gave me my first lesson in practical politics. I did not mention it to Uncle. It seemed prudent never to speak of it.

After a year adapting to my new life and keeping the scrapbook, Uncle let me come into the shop in the afternoons. I was allowed to greet customers, to serve refreshments and to listen to the transactions. Courtesy has always been one of my strong points and I swiftly moved onto the next stage, accompanying my uncle during his morning business.

Suspicions slowly took shape in my mind over the first ten mornings. After twenty days I was certain. Some of the alien remains that my uncle was selling were fakes. I sat in my room one evening in a state of misery. I had thought Uncle Anthony so good, so kind, so honest.

I was late for the evening meal and Uncle came to find me. He seemed to know at once what the problem was. He sat on the chair and studied me. Then, after some minutes, he produced one of Aunt Lucia's little china cups from his pocket.

"Henry, is this cup the most practical form for drinking vessel?" he asked me.

It was a ridiculous cup and we both knew it. "No, Uncle," I answered.

"Is it unbreakable?"

I shook my head.

"Does it keep a liquid hot for longer than other cups?"

"No, Uncle."

"Does it hold a sensible amount of liquid?"

I shook my head again.

"Is it easy to hold? Is it expensive to make? Is the shape of particular aesthetic beauty? Are the flowers painted upon it especially well executed?"

"No, Uncle," I admitted.

"Then why did Lucia buy it?" he asked. "She paid a sizeable amount of credit for it."

I hesitated before answering. My mother would have said that Aunt Lucia was a fool with too large a credit limit, but I could hardly say that to Uncle Anthony. "Because she wanted it?" I suggested.

My uncle beamed at me. "Yes, indeed, because she wanted it. Do you think it gives Lucia pleasure to own this cup?"

There I was on safer ground. "I am certain of it, Uncle."

"So am I, Henry, so am I." He stood up and the chair creaked with relief; it had been chosen for an adolescent boy rather than a man of substantial means. "Lucia will be fretting. The meal will be cooling."

That night I lay in my bed and thought about the silly little cup and next morning I followed my uncle about his business with a lighter heart. Watching him sell alien remains had been interesting but studying the manner in which he acquired them was truly fascinating. Firstly, there were the official channels. These consisted mainly of high security cases that arrived at the spaceport. Uncle Anthony would go to the spaceport personally and argue volubly with the customs officials as to the amount of import taxes that were to be paid before the packages would be released. The obscenely high import taxes that Uncle paid established two facts in everyone's mind: alien remains were expensive and Anthony Danaslov, owner of the Alien Emporium, had an irregular, but continuing, supply of them.

The second channel was the crates marked 'exotic foods' that arrived quarterly at the warehouse. Uncle also paid the import taxes on these, but indirectly though a middle man. I particularly remember the third time I was present when Uncle opened one of the crates, about a year after the conversation about the cup. Inside, surrounded by insulation and dry ice, was a dismembered Thargoid. I stared in astonishment at my uncle who was transferring each piece into its own, individual carrying case using long tongs. He let me gape until he had each piece safely stowed.

"Is there anything wrong, Henry?" he asked.

I struggled to find a starting point. "But Thargoid artefacts, particularly Thargoid remains,are chemically unstable in an oxygen atmosphere," I began, quoting the book 'On the Care of AlienArtefacts' that had been written by Olaf Danaslov, Uncle Anthony's grandfather.

Uncle fastened the catches on the final case and started to load them onto a trolley.I automatically helped him. He smiled at me. "True, but all instability is relative," he said betweenlifting one case and the next. "These remains would show substantial degradation after, say, a yearexposed to an oxygen-rich atmosphere."

My mind leapt to the expensive display cases in which all Thargoid remains were sold, alongwith dire warnings as to what would happen to them if the case was opened. "But the cases?"I queried.

Uncle's smile did not falter. "Henry, the customer pays a great deal for his own personalpiece of alien. We Danaslovs want the owner to be able to leave such a treasured belonging to hisson, then his son's son."

I frowned, recognising a half-truth when I heard one. I waved a hand at the stack of caseson the trolley. "Why sell it in bits? A whole Thargoid would be worth an awful lot." I trailed off. Whole Thargoids did not exist, at least not in Human Space. The last Thargoid had been chased out of Human Space by the fighter pilots of INRA a hundred years ago. When we sold Thargoids remains, usually a piece of exoskeleton or part of an antenna, Uncle debated at length where such a item might have come from.

The most popular provenance was that it had been sold by an old soldier, a survivor of the Thargoid Wars, who was down on his luck. Whole, dead, Thargoids did not arrive in crates of dry ice marked 'exotic foods'.

Uncle had not answered my question, he could see that I was preoccupied. Only two solutions to the problem came to mind: either Uncle Anthony knew the location of the Thargoids' home planet and had agents stealing the odd one, which seemed a little unlikely, or this was not a genuine Thargoid. I thought about the shape of every piece that Uncle Anthony had lifted from the dry ice and plunged into the preserving fluid.

"It has to be genuine," I whined. "Every bit was exactly right, just as described in 'Thargoids: Building a picture of an Alien from its Parts'."

My uncle smiled. "That is hardly surprising. After all, Professor Thomas Giomanst obtained all his specimens either directly or indirectly from us. I believe that he had two specimens that did not fit into the overall pattern. He dismissed them as fakes."

I suddenly had an overpowering urge to sit down. Instead I followed Uncle Anthony as he wheeled the trolley towards the safe that was hidden beneath the floor.

"You mean that Thargoids don't exist?" I asked in a small voice. I had not felt like this since Patrick had told me that the Space Fairy was make-believe.

Uncle Anthony stopped to mop his brow. "Of course they exist. We fought a war with them. They were trying to invade Human Space and INRA repelled the invasion. It was the last truly heroic battle. That's why humans find Thargoids so fascinating." He paused before opening the safe. "Only space battles don't leave many remains so great-grandfather Jasper Danaslov, whose business selling the remains of the local aliens had been slacking due to a fall-off in supply, decided to improvise."

"Improvise?" I echoed faintly.

Uncle was entering his retina pattern, finger print and genetic code into the safe's security system so any further clarification was delayed until the shipment was stored and the safe properly camouflaged under the floor.

"You were telling me about great-grandfather Jasper Danaslov," I prompted as we strapped ourselves into the ground vehicle.

Uncle Anthony set the auto-driver and settled back in his seat. "So I was. Jasper's father and grandfather had been paying explorers for any information about aliens, sentient or not, hoping to set up a steady supply of remains, or even exotic pets. The luck was with Jasper, one of the explorers had reported a liquid-ammonia based ecosystem on an obscure little world. One of the animals was a large insectoid, vaguely like the descriptions of Thargoids that the soldiers were giving. Every ten years or so, through a long chain of contacts, we fund a scientific expedition to the planet from one of the more peripheral Independent Worlds, picking a different world each time. They rarely think it odd that some professor of alien entomology deep in the Federation should want a single specimen of the largest insectoid on the planet. Of course the specimen does not end up with a professor in the Federation, it ends up coming to Achenar as exotic food."

"One body every ten years?" I queried.

Uncle Anthony frowned. "Yes. We do not wish to overload the market. We do not wish to raise people's suspicions. Of course other alien remains are more easily come by. Some are positively common."

It was another ten years before I felt confident that I could have coped if something had happened to Uncle Anthony. There were so many small finesses that contributed to the business' ssuccess. Some of them were easily learned because they occurred so regularly, like getting the Empire's foremost xenologist to authenticate every one of our Thargoid remains. It was so easy, because he, like all xenologists, used Giomanst's great and definitive work. We suspected that somewhere, in some secret research facility funded by the Imperial Navy or the Federal Military, there were scientists who knew about real Thargoids, but, as Uncle Anthony said, if they had objected to what we were doing they would have done so generations ago.

Other refinements were rare opportunities that my uncle recognised and seized. In my sixthy ear with him, just after I officially changed my name from Johanson to Danaslov, a space bum came into the shop demanding to speak to the owner. I would have thrown him out but Uncle invited him in and encouraged him to talk. It was immediately apparent that he was crazy, babbling on about knowing the location of one of the Thargoid colony worlds. I only listened with half an ear, everyone knew that the Thargoids had not established colonies, just attacked human ships with unjustified aggression. Yet Uncle listened to him and at the end he gave him a sizeable lump of credit towards funding a mission to the non-existent Thargoid colony world. I could barely contain my disbelief until the bum was out the door.

"Uncle!" I objected.

He patted my arm. "Henry, I assure you that it is a good investment. The man will tell people that I have sponsored him. He will use my name in his attempt to raise more funds. It will become known, established, that the Danaslovs are interested in finding out everything that there is to be known about Thargoids. And maybe, sometime in the future, someone will actually think of counting the number of Thargoid fingers in Human Space and they will question the source of such a large number of Thargoid hands. Then, Henry, you may be grateful that you can remind people about expeditions to Thargoid colony worlds and smile enigmatically."

As always, I admired his long-term planning. "But what about when he comes back?" I asked.

Uncle stood up, brushing non-existent motes of dust from his clothes. "They never come back," he assured me.

"Never?" I queried.

"Never. The Danaslovs have sponsored five, now six, expeditions to find Thargoid colony worlds. Not one of them has ever come back to Capitol."

It was a good that I felt vaguely competent to run the business by my eighth year because that was when Aunt Lucia became ill. She became thinner and thinner, so thin that her bones stuck out and her hands and feet looked too big for her body. Lines of pain, too deep for cosmetics to cover, were etched into her face. I tried to persuade Uncle Anthony to hire a physician but he only shook his head and said that Lucia had a phobia about conventional medical treatment with its machines and tailored drugs. He bought her analgesics, moving from one to another as they became ineffective. A year after the first signs he asked me if I would mind running the business with him only functioning in an advisory capacity. He also asked me to keep to the shop and the cellar, and to use the private entrance to my rooms.

I often worked late, it was a fad I went through at that age. I needed some information that was stored on the isolated computer system in my uncle's study and it was far too late to call through to my uncle for permission. I honestly expected them both to be in bed, asleep. Perhaps the pain meant that sleep eluded Lucia. I was already in the study when I heard someone walking about. I turned off the lights and waited, knowing how much Aunt Lucia valued her privacy and not wanting to upset her.

I could see her quite clearly as she walked slowly up and down the corridor. Perhaps walking reduced the pain, I do not know. All I knew was that this pitiful wreck was not the Aunt Lucia who had offered me biscuits, nor the elegant figure in the frilled apron who had made me my evening meal every tenth day for eight years. Her poor, wasted body did not even look female.

Luckily she went back into her bedroom within a quarter hour, giving me the opportunity I needed to slip back down the stairs. Somehow my work did not seem as urgent as it had a hour earlier. I went to bed but slept restlessly, my mind sliding between dreams and semi-consciousness.

I do not know when the thought germinated, nor where the sudden desire to sate my curiosity came from. Before I had assessed the consequences I was sitting at the networked computer system calling up the census information that had been gathered the year before.

There, clearly, was the entry that corresponded to Danaslov's Alien Emporium:

Category - shop / business premises / residence;

Occupants - 3 males (Anthony Danaslov, age 58; Luke Skidden, age 46; Henry Danaslov [ne Johanson], age 22).

Aunt Lucia was a man.

I wished I had not found out. It left my head bursting with questions that I would never be able to ask. Sadly, Uncle Anthony was too preoccupied with his lover's imminent death to notice any change in my attitude and by the time Lucia died I had managed to sort myself out.

My family, or what was left of it, came to the memorial ceremony. Mother was just the same, only now she was feeding up my baby brother, Freddy, rather than Patrick. Patrick had never made it as a racketball player but at least he had realised that Achenar offered nothing to a man with little brain and less education. The last we heard of him was when he shipped out on a coldsleep colony ship. Lettie had not lasted long with Rauol. She turned up in a skin-tight dress and far too much make-up and cried a lot. I think that the tears were real, she kept talking about the set of china cups that Aunt Lucia had given her. My other two sisters, Carly and Susie, arrived with their husbands, who were both stolid, reliable and poor. Susie was pregnant. Father looked a lot older. He stooped. Mother told me that he had not worked for some time. Uncle Anthony had ordered thousands and thousands of flowers. They filled the room. He was very still during the ceremony and then insisted on standing at the door and thanking each person for coming as they left. Once everyone had gone he went back into the flower-filled room alone and I waited outside. I waited a long time.

It took him years to recover, perhaps he never did. Three years later he suddenly hired an assistant without consulting me. I was annoyed, but the mood only lasted until I met him. Ben was a quiet, middle-aged man with a soft voice and long, narrow hands. He had no aptitude or interest in business. After a few fumbles in the shop, we retired the maid and let Ben do all the cooking and cleaning. The arrangement suited everyone.

One summer, when I had begun to accept that Uncle Anthony would not last forever, we decided to sort through the cellar. It proved to be the most amazing collection of alien remains, a wonderful combination of items that various Danaslovs could not bring themselves to sell for sentimental reasons and the odd specimen that it was prudent to keep out of the public eye. It was soon obvious to both of us that the process was more to do with introducing me to the family treasures rather than with any serious attempt to create space for storage. We ended up at the back of the cellar, behind the three rows of tanks. Guided by Uncle Anthony's nod of approval I drew back the final curtain. The arm still took my breath away. Uncle Anthony leaned across me and tapped the front of the tank.

"Genuine Thargoid," he confided with a smile.