We Came To Learn

A note on speech. When the visitors speak their own language, the English is given in [square brackets]. When they speak English, there are no brackets.

The ship landed at 4:12 a.m. in a hay field behind Millbrook, Pennsylvania. It made no sound. The only witness was a cow, who kept chewing.

It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving, the first morning of deer season, and every man in the county with an orange hat was already out in the woods. The three travelers had crossed four years of dark to get here, and they had picked the worst day of the year to look like deer. They didn’t know that yet.

Nuu opened the hatch and looked up. The sky was enormous and almost empty. One jet, a few cold stars.

“#~!! ∆/? [Everyone out. Fold it.]”

The ship was a silver cube the size of a bus. Zik laid his palm on it and it came apart into three flat plates, quietly, like a book closing. Each plate slid into a suitcase they had grown from the ship’s own skin: brown, scuffed, with a handle. The core, a heavy silver heart that could not be replaced, went into Zik’s case. Nuu had chosen that on purpose. She had once watched him carry a full cup down a moving corridor without spilling a drop.

“ו: ()~ [Why suitcases?]” said Brav.

“[I scanned their airport,]” said Nuu. “[Everyone carries one. Nobody looks inside.]”

“[Nobody looks at the ship either. Best hiding place in the galaxy.]” Zik lifted his case and it clipped his knee. “!!! [It has a knee-attack function.]”

“[Carry it properly.]”

“[I am. It’s attacking.]”

They crossed the field toward the trees. The grass was stiff with frost and the suitcases left three dark lines behind them. At the edge of the forest something moved. A brown animal stepped out from between the trunks, unhurried, on four legs, with a crown of bare branches on its head.

Nuu stopped. The other two stopped behind her.

“[Don’t go into the town as ourselves,]” she said. “[We watch first. Nobody questions an animal.]”

“[Which one?]” said Brav.

“[That one.]”

Three green beams touched it. The animal lifted its head, looked at them with enormous patience, and walked away as if it had been scanned before and found it boring.

They were deer now.

Zik looked down along his new body, slowly, from the front to the back, and stopped.

“ו: ()~ [Why do I have five legs?]”

“[You have four,]” said Nuu.

“[There is a fifth. In the middle. It is not touching the ground.]”

Nuu did not look. “[We do not discuss the fifth one.]”

“[It is swinging.]”

“[Zik.]”

Brav, who had not spoken since the scan, said without turning his head, “~# [That is why the other deer looked at us.]”

It took ten minutes to understand the legs. Zik fell twice. Brav stood in the middle of the clearing and hated everything. Nuu found that the suitcase handle fit in her teeth and that she could walk if she did not think about it.

“[Follow it,]” she said around the handle. It came out as a wet grunt. “[It knows where it’s going.]”

Three deer followed one deer through the woods, each carrying a suitcase in its mouth. Had anyone seen it, the story would have gone a long way.

The lead deer stopped in a clearing to eat. Zik trotted up beside it and stared. The deer ignored him. He leaned in, then closer, until their noses touched. It was the first time he had touched anything on this planet that was alive and not afraid of him.

A crack, flat and very loud, rolled across the trees.

The lead deer folded at the knees and went down.

Zik waited for it to get up. Everything they had learned about living things said that it would get up.

“[Zik,]” said Nuu, quietly. “[Come back.]”

A man walked out of the trees. He wore an orange hat and an orange vest and carried a long dark tool, and he was smiling. He was saying something to himself in the soft voice of a person who has had a good morning. Nuu understood one word of it: “Dinner.”

Brav let go of his suitcase. The symbols came out of him low and fast, and Nuu didn’t translate them because she didn’t need to.

[It led us. It trusted us. And he killed it.]

“[We don’t know why yet,]” said Nuu.

“[He’s smiling.]”

“[I know.]”

They backed into the trees. The man knelt and lifted the dead deer’s head to look at its face. He was the first human Nuu had seen up close. Two eyes, a gray beard, a thermos sticking out of a pocket.

“[Scan him,]” she said. “[Deer are meat here. He isn’t. That body is safer.]”

“[I’d rather stay a deer,]” said Brav.

“[You’re a deer holding a suitcase. Someone will notice.]”

He said nothing. She took the silence for a yes. Zik was already scanning. The beam ran across the hunter’s back and flickered, and Zik’s antlers folded into his skull and his skin rearranged itself into flannel and stubble. Nuu followed. Brav stayed a deer.

“[The fifth leg is much smaller on this one,]” Zik whispered, looking down at himself.

“[Perhaps he is cold.]”

“[Perhaps he is sad.]”

“[Stop looking at it.]”

Two identical hunters stepped out of the brush, each holding a brown suitcase. Behind them stood a deer, holding a third in its mouth.

The real hunter turned around.

He looked at himself. Then he looked at himself again. The three of them stood there in the cold, breathing.

“[Say hello,]” whispered Zik. “[It was on the screens at their airport.]”

“HELLO,” said Zik, in a voice like a door being opened by a drunk. “I AM YOU.”

The real hunter, whose name was Dale Hutchins, sat down on a log. Something fell out of his jacket and landed in the leaves. He didn’t notice. He looked at the deer with the suitcase. He looked at the two men wearing his coat.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. That’s Gary’s moonshine.”

He stood up. He picked up his rifle, left the dead deer lying where it was, and walked back the way he’d come, not fast, not looking over his shoulder. Near the road he began to whistle, badly, to show anyone listening that everything was normal.

Nuu watched him go.

“[He left it,]” said Zik. “[He killed it and left it.]”

“[Then it wasn’t for dinner.]” Brav’s voice cracked. “[It was for nothing.]”

Nobody answered. The dead deer lay in the grass and the wind moved its fur. Zik crouched and picked up the thing that had dropped from the man’s jacket: a flat black rectangle, glowing. It played a short song.

“[What is it?]”

“[It belonged to him.]” Zik studied the screen. “[He has forty-one messages from someone called Mom.]”

“[Put it away.]”

“[Forty-one, Nuu.]”

“[Away. Yes. Later.]”

They did what they could. There was no time and no one to ask. They broke pine boughs from the nearest trees and laid them over the body, one layer, then another, until it was a low green mound in the clearing. Brav did the last one alone. He laid it very carefully, the way a person does when they have already decided something.

“[This is what we do for ours,]” he said.

Nuu nodded. She didn’t say that she had never seen him do it for anything.

Then they picked up the suitcases and went to find the town.