An Alien Through Alien Eyes

I was sitting atop her head, an arrangement she tolerated as it was the only way I could get a good look at what she was doing without risking getting under paw. In her rear paws she was holding two strands of wire insulated with some sort of tree gum, each strand half as thick around as my thorax. In one forepaw was another length of wire, softer and uncovered, and in the other she wielded a great iron rod fiercely radiating heat. at least it seemed great to me. She likely found its size quite unremarkable. A cable, even more thickly insulated, connected the iron to a large structure--she would have called it a mere box--that I guessed provided the iron's heat.

"What are you doing, great one?" I asked.

"I have a name, remember?" she said, her voice a low rumor like distant thunder. "It's Sunbeam."

A pretty name, but one that hardly matched her appearance. "What are you doing, Sunbeam?" I repeated.

"My job," she rumbled. "I'm building an electric light tower to put at the center of town. Well, I'm assuming it's a tower from your perspective. It's just a wooden dowel not even half the length of my tail, and I'm sticking that little LED array on top." She gestured with her tail toward a flat contrivance covered in intricate little studs--the LEDs she mentioned, as I would find out later.

"Your job?" I asked.

As she spoke, she touched the exposed ends of the insulated wires and twisted them into a single braid, then touched the hot iron to the area where they met. "I'm a hearthkeeper," she said, bringing the end of the softer wire in contact with the exposed copper. "I bring light and warmth, physical and spiritual, to those around me." The soft wire liquified, coating the exposed ends of the other two wires and releasing smoke that smelled like burning tree sap.

"Yes," I said half to myself. "You did say you're a missionary. Why don't you preach, then? You don't think your faith can stand up to scrutiny?"

"I wouldn't have spent hundreds of years travelling the stars to get here if I didn't have the courage of my convictions," she said. "But, well, look at me."

"It's hard to see a building when your standing on top of it," I said.

"Exactly. When we discovered your world we had no idea how... small you were. I'm not even that big, a runt in fact, but to you I'm a giant, a disgusting inside-out giant, if I recall what you said when we first met."

I looked behind me. From four stories up, I could see the moss farm just outside of town. The field still bore a faint indentation in the shape of one of her paws. She had trampled over half the crop in a single step. This was on her first visit to town the day after her skyship landed, before we knew what she was, before she knew what we were.

I had awoke to rumors spread by the town drunk that a star had fallen to the east, half a day's journey from town. I had dismissed them at first until a friend of mine, a fellow merchant who was up late taking inventory in his shop, confirmed that he saw it, too, a star, glowing violet, had fallen to earth. "Didn't make a sound," he had said. "You'd think something that big would make some noise when it landed."

The day went on as normal, other than a few lads trying to drum up a party of adventurers to investigate the fallen star, nobody seemd too bothered. "A great beast has returned!" one of them had said to me as he left my shop. He had purchased a water bladder, "For the adventure," he had told me. "I'm tellin' ya, there's riches beyond your wildest dreams. We just gotta slay the beast and its horde will be ours."

I clicked my mandibles dismissively. "You're chasing fairy tails. There haven't been any great beasts in centuries. We exterminated them all as soon as we figured out how to fire a cannon."

"Where's your sense of wonder?" the lad said as he walked out the door.

I had closed my shop for the afternoon and was chatting with some friends at the inn on the east edge of town, sipping a bead of honeydew. That's when we heard it, a dull, rhythmic tremor sent ripples through the drink on the table.

THUMP

We put our drinks down and looked through the open door to the street outside.

THUMP

Some ventured outside to find the source of the noise. Seeing that a crowd had already gathered, I took my satchel and made my way to the roof to get a better look.

THUMP

We stared past the moss farm at the crest of the hill behind. That's when we saw her. She bounded over the hill, crushing the moss crop under paw along with the decoy the farmer had placed in the middle of the field to scare away the crow-flies. She turned her head down to look at us all gathered at the edge of town. Her eyes widened. She dug her claws into the dirt leaving furrows in their wake.

The crowd scattered into the surrounding buildings to avoid being trampled. She bumped into the wall of the inn before coming to a stop. To her I suppose it was a bump, but the whole structure shuddered. I lost my balance and fell over the edge, landing square atop her forepaw.

It's hard for me to put into words exactly what I experienced next. Some people say that you don't know what you're looking at until you know what you're looking at. I had always thought that an odd notion until then. I didn't know what was paw or tail or leg or snout or fang or fur, all things I would only learn much later, so it should be kept in mind that the description that follows is only possible with the benefit of quite a bit of hindsight.

I had only gotten a glimpse of her before she sent me tumbling off the roof. She had four legs, as well as a long thick round structure protruding from her back end, a tail I would later learn. I suppose the first thing I noticed as I came to rest was the heat, this calid humidity that seemed to envelope her. I had spread my limbs to cushion my fall. I was expecting to feel a solid carapace beneath her pelage, but my hands plunged through stiff guard hares then downy undercoat before they were stopped by a pliable, oily surface, her "skin". It was not just warm, it was hot, like a balmy summer day. I felt something hard beneath the skin of her paw, "bone". It was bone that gave structure to her body, and the skin kept her soft viscera from spilling out. She was inside out, soft on the outside and hard on the inside.

I had only a second to contemplate this horror. She started and jerked her paw back, and I tumbled to the ground, my satchel landing some distance away. She raised her paw, giving me a good look at its underside. There were thick soft pads on each digit, with more pads arranged on her palms in the same pattern I saw pressed into the moss field. So ponderously massive was she that she needed cushions to soften the impact of her footfalls.

I turned my head away. This was how I would end. The old stories spoke of our ancestors stealing forbidden knowledge from the gods. To punish us for our hubris, they made us small and frail, and set great beasts upon us to trample us or devour us by the hundred. The last thing I would feel was her inexorable bulk crushing me from above. My only consolation was that I wouldn't be eaten.

I felt pressure, not from above, but on either side. She had gently taken me between her thumb and finger and was lifting me off the ground. When I was a mere nymph, during one of the vanishingly rare snowfalls that would blanket our little village, I remember delicately taking a snowflake in my arms to examine, careful not to break it. It was with that same tenderness that she plucked me from the ground.

As I ascended, I saw her thorax, or what she would later tell me was called her "chest". It was expanding and contracting, like a set of bellows were inflating and deflating.

She raised me to the level of her face. I felt more heat, this time pulsing over me in rhythmic waves. I stood there in the hollow of her paw, all six limbs shaking, staring into her great red maw. I saw her mandibles, well, "mandible", singular. Rather than two mobile mouth parts it was fused to form a single structure that could only move up and down. It was hanging lax. A disgusting red growth, glistening wet and twitching in time with those same heat waves, lolled out of her mouth to one side. This I would come to know was called a "tongue". Pointed white protrusions lined both sides of her mouth, erupting like stalactites and stalagmites in a cave. "teeth" they were called. Four of these, two below and two above, were larger than the rest. These were "fangs".

Her mouth was the source of the hot air washing over me. Just like us bugs, her body required air to live. We bugs simply took in air passively through spiracles dotted across our carapace. Because of her massive size she required organs dedicated to the purpose. These "lungs" were constantly inflating, drawing in fresh air, and deflating, exhausting spent air. This was why her chest was heaving.

She drew me closer to her snout. I debated whether to leap from her paw, but, I reasoned at the time, if death was inevitable, I would rather it come sooner than later. Besides, I wasn't entirely sure now that it was her intention to do us harm. At least she had thus far taken care not to damage me, and curiosity was beginning to displace my terror.

I was very close now to two large spiracles surrounded by black skin, wet like her tongue and the inside of her mouth. Through these she dew in rapid shallow drafts of air. This was her means of olfaction, a sense well developed in her kind.

Framing the wet tip of her nose were clusters of stiff hairs, much longer than the surrounding fur, "whiskers", tactile sense organs not unlike our antennae, though lacking the faculty of smell. Presently she turned her head slightly, and I felt them brush against my carapace.

Now I was very close to her eye, simple, deep, black. Soulful, I would come to say with time. She slid a lustrous golden membrane over top of it, in which I was clearly reflected. I saw that my antennae were covered in dust from my fall, and I quickly cleaned them.

She lowered her paw and gently deposited me back on the roof of the inn. Rumbles issued from her chest. Now I am no scholar of languages, but I am a merchant, and a well-traveled one at that. I am fluent in a few idioms and proficient in many more. There was no doubt in my mind that these thundering utterances were words, not the mindless bellowing of a brute beast. Of course I did not know precisely what she was saying, but now after patient instruction in her language I can recall her words.

"I'm SO sorry. Are you alright? I hope I didn't step on anything... uh... or anyone. She scrutinized the palms of her forefeet in much the same way she had examined me, with much sniffing and whisker brushing. "hmmm Nothing here." Then, much to my astonishment, with some astounding contortions she brought her hind feet close to her snout and repeated the same self inspection. "OK... OK... I think we're good, Sunbeam. No manslaughter charges today. Unless..."

She bowed her head to the ground and inspected the wall and windows of the inn, causing a new wave of terror to ripple through the bugs hiding within. She spied them through the window. "Oh, So that's where you guys went. I'm sorry... uh... again. Big miscalculation on our part. Seems you're a lot smaller than I was expecting." She noticed a large crack running up the wall. "Oh no, that was me, wasn't it? Yeah, definitely my fault. Sorry.... again again. Look, I don't have any money on me, 'bring with thee no coin' and all that, but I promise I'll make this right."

Before righting herself she noticed my satchel lying where it had fallen. She sniffed it. "This must be yours." She hooked the strap on one of her claws and brought it up to me. I took it and motioned thanks with my antennae.

Slowly she began slinking away, keeping her body low to the ground, her long tail curled tight against her back. With each footfall she spread her digits wide apart. The points of her claws touched the ground first, and she carefully rolled her weight from toe tip to heel, making sure the only thing underfoot was ground. "Careful, Sunny, slow and careful."

I waited for the dull rumor of her footsteps to fade into the distance before making my way off the roof.

"You are... quite singular," I said after my long reflection.

"Which is exactly why I have to watch what I say and exactly how I say it." She had slid a black sleave over the two spliced wires and was applying blistering hot air from another of her seemingly endless array of cunning artifices. "That's why I'm hesitant to preach. I'm not afraid I won't be compelling, I'm afraid I'll be too compelling. Error barks, the Truth whispers, but how can I whisper when every syllable I utter is a thunderclap?"

The black sleeve had shrunk tight around the wires, joining them as one. Dazzling white light burst from the LED array, turning the fading evening twilight to mid-day. "You're lucky," she said, pushing the wooden pole into the earth. "Just a little light for little eyes." She tilted her muzzle skyward, and I had to grab hold of her ear to keep from loosing my balance. "You can still see the stars."

She rumbled a prayer under her breath. "O icons of the Light, shine upon us little ones."

"US little ones?" I asked. "You call yourself little?"

"We're all little measured against the vastness of Creation," she said. "You may be smaller than my thumb and I may be four stories tall, but we're both not even rounding errors in the grand scheme of things."

"Infinitesimal," I said.

"Yes, infinitesimal in scale, but infinitely loved." She seemed to be gazing in adoration at something beyond even the black behind the stars, and just for an instant I thought I felt someone gaze back.