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Go shoppingThere may have been an intergalactic consensus. A treaty or something, an agreement to leave us alone. Like not experimenting on animals. Or had we been part of an experiment all along? One that required non-interference for a set period, laboratory conditions. Maybe it was more haphazard than that. Maybe they just got curious. Whichever way it went down, the gloves were suddenly, undeniably off. That was the autumn of the aliens.
[private]Not just the odd landing – hundreds every night. Daytimes too, Sundays while people were in church, before breakfast, mid-afternoon. Not just in New Mexico or New Jersey either, but Ulan Bator, Guatemala, Iceland, Angola. (Was there anywhere they didn’t land? For some strange reason, Scotland.) And not just one type of spaceship. There were mottled, scaly ones and bright mauve ones with mirrors; buzzing or warbling or completely noiseless; spinning, hovering, flitting about or simply materializing; round spaceships and irregular spaceships and two-dimensional spaceships; spaceships the size of Superdomes and others you could fit in your purse.
Did people panic? You bet they panicked, but when the aliens came calling resistance was futile. And the panic only lasted a few days. Once it became clear how things were going, it was amazing how attitudes shifted. People came on board, if you’ll excuse the pun. Nobody resisted at least. They were ready to go. Some even packed a bag. These were people with stuff to lose: families, jobs, nice houses with above-ground pools. They didn’t care. They didn’t want to be left out, or behind.
And then what? Then it was all over: the calm after the storm. Six weeks to the day then no more aliens – it was like they’d seen all they needed – and everyone back safe and sound. So what were they like we all wanted to know, all of us who hadn’t been abducted. The funny thing was, out of thousands of abductees, there was no one who could really say. They were polite but very firm. Superior, but not in an unpleasant way. It was hard to describe them in any physical detail. People used words like radiant and ethereal.
One other thing we longed to know: what had they made of us? Nothing more frustrating than to take a test and then no results. Had we come up to scratch? Or had we, perhaps, been found wanting in some respect? As weeks turned to months and the skies remained devoid of extraterrestrial traffic, as even the bright memories began to lose their lustre, questions like these became the focus of newspaper, TV and radio chatter in a hundred languages. Scores of scientists were hauled from their offices, dusted down and quizzed for an opinion. Alas, in the complete absence of evidence, the dutiful scientists had little to offer. Others, of course, were willing to opine, but in a case like this such speculation seemed especially idle. What we yearned for was an official report or dossier, with bullet points, pie-charts, graphs, conclusions.
As the months turned to years, and still no word from our examiners, one thing became increasingly evident. Humankind’s brief encounter with alien life had left us rattled. As a race, we’d never been short on confidence. Now, no longer alone or pre-eminent, we were shaken and insecure. No sentence had been passed but still we felt we’d been judged. We felt the urge, too, to protest the lack of a verdict, only who to protest to, and how? No doubt they were busy out there, inspecting other worlds, other civilizations, but would it have hurt our alien visitors to offer a little affirmation? Telling us what a complex and engaging species we were, or promising at least, and good sports. We scanned and monitored and probed the skies, but the silence only deepened.
Now, there are those – a number of abductees among them – who are claiming it never happened: the alien autumn. They’re crackpots for the most part, nostalgists and flat-Earthers, a small minority but who’s to say that in a hundred years, or a thousand, theirs won’t be the prevailing view? We are not alone, we know that now, but company isn’t always a blessing. There’s a certain comfort, it turns out, in a solitary existence. Less soul-searching.[/private]
Paul Blaney lives in Pennsylvania and teaches in New Jersey, at Rutgers University where he is Writer in Residence. He recently finished a short story collection, Polymorphous Perverse, that explores the BDSM subculture. He has a wonderful wife called Karen who’s also a wonderful reader.
