Way back in 2012 I wrote a novel in a month for NaNoWriMo, except at that time I was terrified of writing dialogue so tried to do it without having any at all. “It has no plot or characters!” I told my sibling excitedly, then slowly realised that this did not excite them much at all.
Anyway. The novel was called Swimming to Earth, and each chapter was about the reader visiting a new planet and having an interesting experience. One of the planets was made of floorboards and another was full of sentient chairs, and most of it is not very good and I will not be publishing most of it here. But looking back on it I did quite like bits and pieces— like this chapter about meeting alien life for the first time.
You have passed many planets in the last twenty-four hours, but all have been – to your eyes – lifeless. At first the dust-stained bulk of Elabon appears the same, and you prepare to pass it as you have so many before. It is only the blinking light in its northern hemisphere that convinces you that it is here you will encounter your first signs of alien life.
Upon breaching the atmosphere, however, despair sets in. The light you had seen from space is not the product of technological advancement, but some kind of complex weather formation you neither understand nor care to. But your despair is quickly replaced by elation: under the light rests something resembling a city, sprawled out with the activity of life.
You are worried the inhabitants of this place will shun you, or worse. After all, you have no idea what a real alien will look like. Your mind runs back to images of slime-encrusted mutants and snail-like eyes, and your stomach turns as you walk towards this place that is not quite a city. Perhaps they grow plants that look like people, you reason, which will munch you up when you meet them like so much baby sweetcorn. Or perhaps the aliens themselves are plants, or creatures made of clothes that long for flesh, or, or…
…The reality is not worse than your fears, but it is stranger. The people of Elabon are both like and unlike human beings in ways you had never imagined. You are surprised to discover you can almost understand them, but more surprised at where comprehension fails— you can talk of emotions like love and honour and they look bored with understanding, but a casual mention of a garden results in aghast confusion. A place where living things are kept for pleasure? You try and explain what a plant is, then what a flower is, and before long you are waving your hands in the air illustrating the concept of a bee. They do a thing which is not nodding – though it means the same thing – but you’ve already spent enough time with them to sense the insincerity.
After conversation falls short, Elabon’s people turn to your body, prodding bits of you that you’d never considered and asking questions which you barely understand. Your kidneys, you learn, are fantastic creations completely unknown to Elabonian science, and you are unnerved to learn their existence may set tongues wagging among their intelligensia. Because the point here, you feel, is that they have tongues – they have intelligensia! – but they don’t have mouths, or hair, or the concept of a road. Through your time with the people of Elabon you realise you’d always imagined aliens as delineated somehow— either containing something that a human lacks, or lacking something that any sane person could explain in patronising tones. To discover that real aliens are both very like you and not at all like you is a more profound blow than you had realised. To be alien, you realise, is to have chips but no fish and cars with five wheels; it is to be not quite a mirror of your own world, but a sculpture of it smashed up and repaired with another.
You had, you realise while walking up the winding stairs that characterise Elabon’s one city, imagined without thinking that you would find a lesson here among the aliens. When your journey back home was complete, you thought, you could burst through the corridors of power with a simple fact about what humanity was, and what in turn the vast universe had to say about our own place in it. You had not considered what now seems obvious: that while swimming through the unknown you would find whole stretches of complexity, and that these places would merely confound rather than clarify your smudged perception of what you are.
Leaving Elabon by its highest spire, which stretches into the storm of light into the space beyond, you realise that your destination has already changed in your mind. When you arrive back upon Earth, you will no longer be able to walk past a lamp-post without seeing an Elabonian look of confusion, or listen to people talk on the peculiarity of human hands without shivering at the similarity you had seen in that alien race. When you go back to your planet, you think to yourself sadly, you will know which parts of it are truly unique, and – when it comes down to it – how mundane those things can be.
Robert Shepherd: Writer 