Popular culture failed to prepare me for first contact. Countless starships bristling with canon and rail gun turrets did not fill the skies. The aliens didn’t flood our television and radio bands with messages of conquest or world peace or miracle cures. They didn’t present themselves to the United Nations or to any government leaders. None of that. I was sitting in my condo in a suburb of Washington, D.C. when my mother phoned me from California. It was a Sunday afternoon. I’d just ordered a pizza and I’d planned to watch the big game on my new television. But my mother was on the phone. She’d just had a call from her own mother in her tiny mountain village back in China.

An alien had landed.

I charged the plane ticket to my credit card and was on a plane to Beijing two hours later. I didn’t watch the big game and I never got to eat my pizza.

My father is an American who, fresh out of university, traveled to China, specifically Guizhou Province, to teach English. My mother was one of his students, a member of an ethnic minority known as the Miao people, who had left her tiny rural village on a scholarship as part of a poverty abatement program. They fell in love, moved back to the United States, and I was born. My maternal grandmother still lives in China, much as her ancestors did. She manages just fine without indoor plumbing or electricity. She’s never owned a computer or a cell phone or a television. She raised her daughter, my mother, in a house that clung to the side of a steep mountainside half a kilometer from the same river where, according to a third-hand report from her much younger albeit blind neighbor who did own a phone and had actually placed the call to my mother, a “funny-looking fellow fell from the sky in a giant pearl and was teaching the village’s children odd things.”

I grew up a child of two worlds, which led me to work for the US state department. Which is probably why my mother called me.

The US government didn’t know about any alien. Nor, as best as I could tell with a few oblique inquiries of my counterparts in Beijing, did the Chinese government. The only ones who knew that an alien was visiting Earth were my maternal grandmother, her blind neighbor, and no more than a dozen or so villagers and their barefoot children.

My mother had called me at noon. She passed along surprisingly good video shot by a local child on the blind neighbor’s cell phone. I could hear the kid’s laughing commentary as he panned back and forth capturing some trees along the riverbank before moving on to show the water and what looked like an enormous pearl floating there. The trees provided perspective. The pearl had to be at least two stories tall. It looked like nothing on Earth, and certainly nothing that had any business being in my grandmother’s backward village. Except that’s where it was. Not the place where an alien visitor, or an alien invader, would set down. There was nothing significant there, nothing of value, just a handful of people who—a lone cell phone notwithstanding—had never joined the modern world. Nothing but my grandmother.

In hindsight, maybe I should have passed the video on to my boss, turned the whole matter over to the state department. Probably. Except that thought didn’t occur to me until after my plane had taken off and I was on my way. Instead, some dumb ass heroic notion had sent me racing off to save my grandmother from some science fiction nightmare.

Eighteen hours later, I arrived in Beijing feeling like I was dying. I’d used an American carrier that had opted to serve prepackaged Chinese food including at least one packet that had sat on the tarmac too long and spoiled. An hour into the flight and I was ill, very ill. I’ve never been sicker. I spent most of my flying time locked in an airplane lavatory as the world’s worst case of food poisoning purged everything out of my body. I only managed to get back to my seat in time for landing. I wanted to die, but I had to get to my grandmother. With the help of the airline’s customer service and endless apologies for the food poisoning, I transferred to a domestic flight leaving for Guizhou four hours later. I’d been upgraded to first class with all the amenities, but couldn’t bear the thought of eating or drinking anything. Three hours later, just after 1 a.m. local time, I stopped to pick up my rental car. There was a message from Mrs. Liu, my grandmother’s blind neighbor, letting me know my mother had called ahead. My grandmother was expecting me and would have dinner waiting, no matter how late I arrived. The thought would have made me ill, but I had nothing left in my stomach. I hadn’t even touched the stash of chocolate chip granola bars I’d brought for energy along the walk and I knew I wouldn’t. I drove for three more hours to get as close as I could to the remote village where my grandmother lived. I hadn’t slept on either plane; I’d crossed twelve time zones and been awake for about thirty hours, and still had several hours of hiking along a starlit goat trail.

Near the end, the sun was just starting to climb above the mountains, chasing the darkness from the narrow valley. The long walk in the dark had made me feel better. Not healthy, mind you, but not like I wanted to die. As I walked up the path to my grandmother’s house I caught the scent of her sour fish soup and I thought it the most welcome aroma in the world. No sooner had my dear sweet grandmother seen me approaching her door then she ushered me in and set a bowl in front of me. I ate two servings, and with every taste of pickled chili, cabbage, tomato, and local fish I felt myself restored a bit more. I’d come home.

When I pushed back from the table, sated and feeling like a human being again, my grandmother said, “You look terrible. All that big city living is bad for you. You should eat real food.”

“Yes, grandmother,” I said. “Thank you for the soup. It was wonderful.”

That made her smile. She squeezed my hand. “Do not try to charm me, boy. You didn’t come so far just because you missed my cooking. You came because of the funny man, didn’t you?”

Before I could ask her about the “funny man,” she stood up and stepped through a hanging curtain that divided the space. Dutifully, I followed. Her entire house was one small room, smaller than my bedroom back home. One side was kitchen and workspace with a long table and a massive storage chest, the other her modest living area with her bed, a shelf, and a small lamp. There was no bathroom; all of that business took place outside. In one corner of the living area, she’d set up a cot for me, piled high with cloth blankets decorated with intricate designs of white and deepest blue.

“Sleep now. Travel makes us wise in time, but first it makes us stupid. Sleep off the stupid. We’ll talk when you’re rested.”

I was born in China, but I grew up in the west. I graduated from Stanford University in California with a bachelor’s in experimental psychology and earned a law degree at Harvard. I’ve studied under brilliant professors and met some of the smartest people in the world. None of them was ever wiser than my grandmother. I went to sleep.

Blame the food poisoning. Blame the jet lag. Blame both, if you like, but I slept about twenty hours. That’s only an estimate because my phone had run out its battery while I slept and my grandmother had no need of clocks. It was still dark, but a faint light came from the other side of the wall hanging. I pulled it aside and found my grandmother tending to a large pot of fermenting leaves. She was making indigo. It didn’t matter that more than ninety percent of the world had switched over to synthetic, mass-produced indigo decades earlier. This was the way she’d learned to do it seventy years ago, as her family had always done it going back for centuries since they’d first come to this valley. And to hear her tell it, they’d done it that same way even before then.

Saying nothing, I moved to the kitchen and peered into her cupboards until I found what I needed to brew us both tea. I filled two cups and crossed the few steps to her workspace. She paused to accept her cup, sip, and savor the tea for a moment, then returned to making indigo. I drank my tea and waited. Back home, I’d have been impatient. I’d have seen waiting for this old woman to be overindulgent and a waste of my time. But that was half a world away, a different culture, and arguably a different time. This was my grandmother’s world. Simply being there somehow allowed all of the rush in me to drain away. I didn’t worry or fidget. I spent the time studying her face as she worked, the myriad lines and wrinkles in her skin as the years shrunk in upon her, the bright light that still burned in her eyes, the barest tip of her tongue peeking out between her lips as she concentrated on her task.

In time she set aside the pot of leaves, smacked her lips, and picked up her tea. “You have questions,” she said. “You are the most inquisitive boy I have ever known. Ask them.”

“Why do you call him the funny man?”

She snorted, almost spilling her cup. “Because he is funny. Don’t ask stupid questions.”

“People can be funny in many different ways. I wasn’t there to see, so how was he funny?”

“Well, for one thing, he was naked.”

“That’s odd,” I said, “But I wouldn’t have called that funny.”

“That’s not the funny part. But if he’d worn clothes I wouldn’t have seen it.”

“Seen what?”

“He didn’t have a penis,” she said.

I must have blushed because she added, “I thought living in America made you more worldly. Anyway, maybe ‘man’ isn’t the best way to describe him, but he didn’t have the curves of a woman. So, yes, I thought that was funny.”

“Mrs. Liu told Mother that you said the man fell from the sky in a pearl.”

“That’s right.”

My grandmother had always been very literal. “How could a man, even a funny man, fit inside a pearl?”

“Oh, well, it was a very large pearl, larger than this house. I know you must have seen the pictures Mrs. Liu sent.”

“And you’re sure it wasn’t an airplane or a helicopter?”

“I told you, it was a pearl, glossy and slightly off-white. It couldn’t have been a plane or a helicopter. It didn’t make any noise. Not a sound.”

“How did you happen to see it?”

“I was on my way down to the river to carry water back. It crossed the sky and then fell silently into the river. I saw it. I kept on to the water’s edge and by then the funny man had waded to the bank and was teaching the children.”

“What children?”

“Some of the village children help me carry water back up here. They wait for me down there with their own buckets. But they’d abandoned their buckets and instead gathered around the funny man in the tall grass. He was talking to them, linking his fingers in theirs. He did this with several of them in turn, just for a few moments. Then they’d both laugh and the child would start plucking up blades of grass, causing them to light up and float up and away.”

“What do you mean ‘light up and float away’?”

She scowled. “It was just what I said. I didn’t say it made sense.”

“Then what happened?”

“I called to the children to stop goofing off and come help me with the water. They did, and the funny man just looked at me. But I had to get back to my dye work and turned to come back up the mountain. But I thought it was important, so later in the day when I went to visit Mrs. Liu I told her about it—”

“And she phoned Mother, who phoned me,” I said.

She scowled again. “You interrupted me. You don’t come into my house and interrupt me. Ever.”

“I’m sorry, Grandmother,” I said. And I was.

I retraced my steps partway down the dirt path I’d taken earlier, turning right at a branch point I’d missed on the way up. The left-hand route would eventually lead back to where I’d parked my rental car; the path I now walked took me around to the river. The water came into view while I was still high above it. There, sitting a third submerged in the current, just as my grandmother had described it, floated an immense two-story pearl. It gleamed rather than glistened. Looking closer I realized that the water did not go around it but rather appeared to flow through it, as if the massive pearl wasn’t there at all, just a bizarre holograph in this place that saw so little technology.

The path turned, pulling the river from my view. I continued my descent and heard peals of laughter, high-pitched and innocent. Soon, the path curved again and I arrived at a small sward that continued on a short distance and ended at the shore. I could see the pearl again, closer and even larger than before, but I ignored it. Sitting in the tall grass, giggling and carrying on were seven children ranging from three to eight years of age. Seated in their midst was my grandmother’s funny man. He appeared naked and pale, almost the same shade as the giant pearl in the water behind him but without the luster. An alien.

The children ignored me. The three oldest seemed to be plying the alien with pieces of fruit and what looked like an earthen jar of warm beer. The rest were engaged in some game that involved plucking blades of grass, breathing upon them, and tossing them into the air where the wind carried them up and away. The blades of grass seemed to catch the light as they rose, sparkling. Except, there was no wind, and this portion of the valley was still in shadow. The alien rose, tousled the heads of several of the children, took a swig from the clay jar, and stepped toward me. Now that it was standing, I could confirm that other detail my grandmother had shared. Its overall body shape was masculine, long and lean like a swimmer. The junction where its legs joined its torso was smooth and sexless. No bellybutton either, as it happens.

“Part of you is dark with unlife,” it said. “I can barely see you.”

It took me a moment to process the words. I don’t know, maybe I was expecting English or Mandarin. Instead, it had spoken in the same language of the Miao people that my grandmother had grown up speaking. The language of this valley, of the children who had stopped laughing and were watching us intently. The language I had learned from my mother as a child and studied as an adult from a university professor who, with western arrogance, had called it Hmong. I understood all the words, but they didn’t fit together meaningfully.

I turned my gaze to the children, paying attention this time, focusing on the impossibility my mind had rejected at first glance. The blades of grass they plucked and cast away, they actually glowed. They actually floated.

“What are the children doing?” I asked.

The alien smiled. “They are altering the grass. A simple trick I taught them in exchange for teaching me their language.”

“How did you do this? And what exactly are they doing to the grass?”

It frowned. “I am sorry. These are worthy questions, but I lack the concepts to form them properly in your words. They are only children. I had hoped they might in time bring me to one of their parents, or bring an adult to me. Someone who could teach me more of your language.”

This was the opening. If not actually first contact, then first significant contact. “I’m an adult. Can I teach you?”

The alien sighed. “Not yet. Perhaps never. As I said, part of you is dark with unlife.”

“What is unlife?” I asked. Then added, “Which part?”

Instead of answering, the alien knelt alongside the oldest child, a boy, offering its hand, palm outward and fingers spread wide. The boy met it with his own and they interlaced their fingers. Both closed their eyes and leaned into the other until their foreheads touched. Only a moment passed. Both smiled, released the other’s fingers, and the alien stood and faced me again.

“Your clothing. Your shoes. And . . . something else, in your . . . pocket? Yes, in your pocket.”

I reached into my pants and pulled out my useless smartphone.

“That, yes. Dark with unlife.”

“Of course it’s not alive. It’s a phone.”

“You misunderstand. Not not alive. Unlife.”

“And my clothes?” I asked.

“More of the same. You are dim, difficult to perceive, and the clothes make it harder still. These children are bright.”

I looked down at my clothes. I’d worn top-of-the line cross-trainers because I knew the dirt paths on my grandmother’s mountain would have ruined my normal dress shoes. My slacks were khakis, polyester with a permanent crease. My shirt was a cotton/polyester blend, pale blue, long-sleeved, buttoned down the front, brass stays keeping the collar flat. I was the poster boy for the US State Department’s diversity program. In contrast, the children were dressed in simple, homespun shorts tied off with handmade rope. They wore shirts or open vests of the same material. Most of them were barefoot but a couple had sandals, crafted from the same hemp as the belts.

“I’m sorry,” I told it. “I don’t understand. They’re just clothes.”

“It is the Rule of Three,” it replied.

I shook my head.

“Your shirt. Did you make it?”

“Make it?”

“Did you weave it yourself?”

“No. I . . .”

“Did the individual who wove it also harvest the plants from which it was made?”

“I’m fairly certain they did not.”

“And was that person the same as the one who planted and tended those plants?”

“What’s your point?” I asked. “Probably dozens, even hundreds, of different people were involved in the manufacture of my shirt. The textile industry is broad and far-reaching. Especially when you factor in distribution and sales.”

The alien frowned. “I do not know many of those words. But consider the children’s clothing. Describe their origins. Did they make them?”

“Their parents probably did. Or they bartered with a neighbor for them, either finished goods or the materials to make them.”

It nodded at me and smiled. “If I make a thing, I am one and the thing is full of the life that I gave it. If I pass that thing to you, you are two, and the thing still feels its connection to me and so retains that life. If you give the thing to another, that person is three. The thing still holds the link to me, my life still resonates within it. The distance does not matter, but the number does. Three is the limit. Pass the thing I made on to a fourth person and it can no longer detect me. The connection is broken. Unlife rushes in to fill the void. As a result it cannot be easily perceived. It is dark, inert.”

I swallowed. “You’re describing virtually all manufactured goods. Everywhere.”

“Not everywhere, but yes, much of your world is dark, roiling with unlife. I’d feared finding any people at all. My time on your world is very brief, but I needed to speak with someone I could perceive. This valley has only a few specks of the dark. I came here and found these children. They brim with life. But not you, you appear dark to me.”

Inspiration struck and I began unbuttoning my shirt. The children giggled when I pulled it off and cast it aside. “Better?”

The alien smiled. “Much. You remain dim, but the dark does not cover you as it did before.”

I unlaced my shoes, removed them and my socks. I didn’t much care for children, certainly I had no desire to produce any of my own. But these were here and I’d learned to work with the tools at hand. I beckoned to one of the older children and bartered three promised granola bars for his vest which I wrapped into a crude kilt. Next I took off my pants and underwear, removed my fancy watch and my college ring. I left them all in a pile and stepped closer to the alien.

“And now?”

“Now I see you more clearly. You are still dim, your body darkened by unlife it has absorbed, but with each moment you improve.”

“Absorbed?” I thought of the last meal I’d had before leaving D.C., a burger grabbed at the airport moments before boarding my flight. Prepackaged beef patty, shipped frozen from some warehouse, stamped out on an assembly line probably hundreds of miles away. The same for the bun, the slice of processed cheese, the fries guaranteed grown from Idaho potatoes halfway across the country. How many hands had touched them, from cow and farm to the moment I ate them? Almost everything I’d eaten as an adult failed the alien’s Rule of Three. The same would be largely true of anyone living in any city in the world. The food that sustained them, that became their muscle and bone, that gave them life, all of that was unlife to the alien. Was that what it meant when it said it feared finding any people? Were the vast billions of the world dark to it? And if so, how was I only dim?

My head spun, and only part of it was the strange explanation of the alien. Only part was meeting an alien. I was also light-headed from jet lag and a need for more sleep and a mostly empty belly despite the glory of my grandmother’s soup and . . . the soup. Was that why the alien found me growing less dim? Had the food poisoning purge from my plane flight also rid my body of some of the effects of food that didn’t pass the Rule of Three? Did that apply to everything I put in or on my body? Not just food but all of my vitamins and supplements, any medicine I’d ever taken, aftershave and cologne. The particulars didn’t matter. Only the Rule of Three. “Right,” I said. “Absorbed. Got it.”

By some unspoken agreement all of the children got up to go. Each held a bit of light green fabric they’d somehow woven out of grass. They passed these to two of the older boys who caused the individual pieces to come together in seconds. The one who had loaned me his vest stepped up to me and presented a pair of faintly glowing shorts. I turned my back as I slid them up my legs and removed my makeshift loincloth. Then, waving goodbye and shyly saying farewell they ran off, whether to continue their play elsewhere or head to their respective homes I couldn’t say.

My shorts gleamed, a soft pulsating of light that beat in time to its own rhythm, faster than my heart’s. They felt . . . light.

“You will not fly away,” said the alien. “I did not teach them that.”

“But you could have?”

“Perhaps. I do not know the limitations of what they, or you, can learn. But it is likely.”

“What did you teach them?”

“Only external workings. To speak to the grass. To persuade it to change its nature.”

It was one thing to be standing around chatting with an alien, but something quite different to abandon all scientific rigor. Still . . . , “Grass can talk?”

It smiled. “No, not as we do. But all living things contain information. They know themselves and communicate that knowledge internally. May I show you?”

It closed the distance between us and offered me one of its hands, fingers spread. I hadn’t noticed before, but its little finger was actually a second thumb. I raised my own hand, lacing my fingers through with its five digits. There was a tingling sensation. Time stopped. There was a feeling I can only describe as what a cup must feel when it is full of tea, drunk from, then filled again. Then my hand was free and the alien took a step back. In that moment it stopped being just an alien. It had a name. My mind held the idea of speech sounds that I couldn’t pronounce, sounds that didn’t exist in English or Chinese or any language on Earth. A single syllable that came close to sounding like Foom, a Miao name that meant “bless.”

“Ah, so much better,” it said. “Not surprising, you have vocabulary and concepts the children lacked. To resume, no, grass does not speak. That is but a metaphor. Rather, I taught the children how to coax the grass to alter the substance of its own genetic code to achieve several specific effects.”

“Like glowing?”

“Utilizing some of its stored energy to self-illuminate, yes.”

“And the floating?”

“Mmm, harder to explain. You do not have the science for this, your approach to technology is all dark.”

“What do you know of our tech?”

“Only what I gleaned in our brief melding. The core of it, what you call hypothesis testing, we share that, but your focus is all external, and most everything you learn you apply to endeavors that violate the Rule of Three.”

“Which makes them dark? And, part of unlife?”

Foom nodded again. “Yes, you understand perfectly.”

My mind reeled as the implications dropped into place, one by one. From the moment of my mother’s phone call, through a day’s worth of air travel, amidst the puking and shitting of food poisoning, driving and hiking to reach a tiny village of people who live as their ancestors did a thousand years ago, through all of that I hadn’t dared ask myself why I had come. I wasn’t representing the US State Department; maybe they’d have sent me as part of a team because of my connections and language ability, but maybe not. I certainly wasn’t here at the behest of the Chinese government. I hadn’t come so I could be the first westerner to meet an alien—that was crazy, dangerous, and meaningless. Looking back, I’d like to think that at some unconscious level, a glimpse of Mrs. Liu’s video was all I needed to know that Foom represented the future, that it had arrived essentially at my grandmother’s doorstep, firmly rooted in the past. I’d come to be a bridge, and in that moment, having the alien confirm my understanding, I knew the world was screwed.

There was no falling back on the classic trope of taking Foom to meet with world leaders. It wouldn’t be able to perceive them. Whether it was foie gras or prime rib, a fast-food cheeseburger or a cup of insta-noodles, antibiotics or cholesterol-lowering meds, there wasn’t a president or king or diplomat on the planet that wouldn’t appear dark to the alien. And even if they deliberately purged themselves as I had unwittingly done, if they ate my grandmother’s soup or dined on fish caught and cooked by their own hand, still the things they placed the most value on, computers and air conditioning and cars and smartphones and hospitals and organ transplants and electrical grids and highway infrastructure and missile defense systems, all the things we’d accomplished as we moved from the agrarian world through the Industrial Age, past the Atomic Age and into the current Information Age, all of it was dark. Unlife.

While these thoughts poured through my brain, Foom stood still as a statue. It didn’t breathe. Had it been breathing before?

“Your vocabulary improved after we . . . touched,” I said.

“We shared,” it replied. “I acquired more of your language, more sophisticated concepts, the patterns of your cognitive processes and decision making heuristics. I have a much fuller comprehension of humanity as a result. Thank you.”

“You said ‘share.’ What did I gain in return?”

“Insight.” It smiled, lips parting wide enough to show me that it didn’t have teeth. “Your previous world view was built upon numerous philosophies you believe to be universally true. I have shown you that while such beliefs may hold true at the local level, at a truly universal level there is only the Rule of Three. You’re working through the ramifications of this even now.”

Popular culture was wrong. Foom wasn’t here to end war or share cures for all known diseases. It said it wouldn’t be here long. Anything that was going to be gleaned from it while it was on Earth would happen in a very short window of time. There would never be any US ambassadors or diplomats here. Nor any Chinese officials. There was only my grandmother, blind Mrs. Liu, some children who’d learn how to make floating, illuminated grass, parents who had no idea their kids had made alien contact, and me. More realistically, I was on my own.

“I have been exploring your solar system for most of a century,” Foom said.

“Why?”

“Cataloging.” Foom led me down to the riverbank. A giant pearl sat in the water not ten meters away. “You would call me a completist. Visiting each and every one of Jupiter’s moons alone took more than a decade. Some were truly majestic. Which is not to say your own moon is not interesting, but I am still processing what I learned there. It was my penultimate destination in this system. I saved your world for last.”

We stepped into the river and were quickly engulfed above our waists. The water was cold but the current not especially swift.

“Did you find life anywhere else in our solar system?”

“Life, yes, but nothing alive that was also self-aware and sapient as you are. And I found death, too. But only on your world is there unlife. Your pardon, can you swim?”

“Excuse me?”

“I would have you step inside my home but the river bottom drops away deeper before we will quite reach it.”

“Yes, I can swim.”

“Very good. Let us do so now.”

And so we swam. As we drew closer I could see the pearl did not rest upon the bottom of the river, but floated partially submerged. Before we reached it, Foom dove down a meter or so and swam straight into the curve of the pearl. It passed within without a ripple. Closing my eyes, I followed.

I didn’t hit anything and a few moments after I should have struck the side I opened my eyes and swam up for air. I broke the water’s surface and found myself somehow inside the giant pearl. The nacre of the inner walls glowed, revealing a curving ramp that wound up the middle, opening onto ledges and alcoves above. Foom had already reached the ramp and climbed out of the water, waiting for me on a low bench extruded from the inner wall.

Foom was an alien. It had come to Earth from the stars, which meant that I was inside its spaceship.

“Explain something to me, please,” I said.

“Of course.”

“This is your home?”

“It is.”

“But it’s also a vessel, right? It’s how you traveled to my world.”

“Yes, your understanding is true.”

I shook my head and followed him from the water. “I don’t think it is. How can a vessel that travels between stars not violate the Rule of Three?”

“Because I made it myself.”

“How is that possible? Sure, you say you’ve been in this system a century so you’re longer lived than my kind, but how could one person make something as complex as a spaceship by themselves?”

“It’s my home. Who else would make my home?”

“But how?”

It waved me to the bench, the twin thumbs of its hand wiggling in an odd gesture. “Yours is not the first dark world I have visited. Everything you know of technology exists in the dark. Your people have breached your atmosphere, even stood upon your moon, by means of this technology, and spread unlife along the way. I cannot perceive such vehicles directly, or the people I assume traveled within them, only the darkness they define. You force your technology to shackle the universe to do your bidding, rather than work with those same forces to express themselves in ways of mutual benefit.”

I waved at the gleaming surface all around us. “I don’t understand.”

“Do you understand beer?” Foom asked.

“Beer?”

“A beverage. The children brought me some. It is . . . refreshing.”

“I know what beer is.”

“Do you know how to make it?”

“What?”

“The ingredients. The process.”

I flashed back on my sophomore year at university and the roommate who turned his half of our dorm room into a brewing den. “Um, grain, barley I think . . . and hops . . .”

“So you simply bring together barley and hops and you have beer?”

“What? No, you have to ferment it.”

“How?”

“Uhh, you heat and crack the grain, then you mash it, which means soaking the grains in hot water so the sugars come out.”

“Why do the sugars do that?”

“I don’t know. Enzymes? My chemistry isn’t very good.”

“Then what?”

“You pour off the hot water with all the sugars, then you add the hops and you boil everything. You cool it and filter it, and then you add yeast which turns the sugar into alcohol. That also releases carbon dioxide, which is why it has bubbles. And you get beer.”

“Do you enjoy beer?” Foom asked.

I couldn’t help but grin. “I do, sure. Most people do.”

“If you had never seen beer, never tasted or smelled it, had no knowledge of it, do you believe you could look at the components, the barley and hops and yeast and water, and see the thing they could become?”

What kind of a question was that? Beer was . . . beer. It was omnipresent, had always existed, hadn’t it? But thousands of years ago, maybe not. Someone must have discovered fermentation, airborne yeast landing in a rain barrel that had some rotten fruit in it or some such. Maybe something like that had happened many, many times before someone took a swig that led to the first hangover.

“No, I guess not.”

“It is a natural process. To brew beer you work with the substances of nature, following their own paths. In the case of beer those parts are external, but even so the Rule of Three is present at every step. I created my home in much the same way, though perhaps more directed. An internal pathway.”

It held out its hand before me, pressing the tips of its thumbs together. A tiny whitish drop formed where they touched. It grew into a small bead.

“You asked before about the thing I taught the children that made the grass float. This is like that, but more so. Whereas they taught the grass to change its nature, I have taught myself to change mine. Like barley and hops giving way to something unimaginable until it occurs, so too did I create my home.”

The bead had grown to the size of a fat pearl, grayish and iridescent. Foom parted its thumbs and the newly created pearl hung in the air. At a flick of its fingers it floated up then down then twice around its head before coming to rest upon my hand.

“How . . . ?”

“It is like your beer. A miracle until you know the way. To be fair, this is a small thing. It would take you at least a year of practice to make one as large as my home.”

“You’re kidding, right? You’re saying I could do this?”

Foom reached out for my hand again, pressing the new-formed pearl against my palm. “Surely there are things your people do that are not all dark, things of wonder like your language and beer. These are precious and I hope to experience more of them, but in truth what interests me more is art.”

“Art?”

“Every sapient people manifest their culture, producing records of who they are. Such art transcends mere language, often outliving the organisms that produced it. I hope to encounter some in this narrow slice of your world untouched by unlife. This is why I have come.”

I returned to my grandmother’s home late in the afternoon trading my western clothes for a simple shirt and trousers that had belonged to my grandfather, lying untouched for longer than I’d been alive. Both were short on me. Decades earlier my grandmother had acquired the cloth from another neighbor and then sewn them herself, making me the third in the chain of possession and thus acceptable under the Rule of Three. I ate a dinner prepared by her hand from food she had grown herself. I slept better that night than I had in years, probably the result of my exertions hauling water up for my grandmother and applying myself to chores that at her age went undone until some neighboring teen was sent over to help. I dreamed that the dark was leaving me, replaced by nutrients that met the alien’s rule, or sweated out of my body in service to exertion that served that same rule. And I dreamed of beer, appreciating it as I never had before.

Foom had been unacquainted with beer before meeting the children. It had immediately grasped the process of water and sugar being transformed to alcohol and carbon dioxide, but fermentation itself was new, a miracle. And clearly, it wanted more miracles. So much of the world’s food had converted over to manufactured production. Even naturally grown products were transformed. Something as simple as corn was not left alone but converted into high fructose corn syrup, an additive that by alien standards darkened everything it touched. But surely other natural processes remained. Bees still made honey and wax. Milk and rennet produced cheese. Foom would regard any of these as miracles, and what knowledge might it offer in trade?

I returned to the river in the morning. No children awaited me, though whether they’d taken the day off or Foom had sent them away I couldn’t say. The alien swam from its pearl home and clambered onto the shore, naked as the day before.

“There is less of the dark about you,” it said. “Do you feel it?”

“I suppose I do. I’ve been thinking about that, and about our conversation in your home yesterday. I have a proposition for you.”

“What specifically? We spoke of many things.”

“Trade. I could show you things, like the making of beer. What kinds of things could you show me in turn?”

Foom’s face broke out in a wide toothless smile. “I would teach you new ways to view your world, and skills with which to experience it.”

“What would that mean, pragmatically? Are you talking about ending disease? A stop to aging? Space travel?”

“Yes, all these things are possible, but I will expect a fair accounting, an introduction to processes untouched by the dark, such as the creation of beer. Or better still, some example of art, if it is to be found here.”

“I think I can make that happen. What do you know of batik?”

With no small portion of apprehension, I persuaded Foom to return with me to my grandmother’s home. She’d finished her work with the indigo yesterday and was carving designs into cloth in preparation for dyeing. She met us at the door with more of my late grandfather’s clothing.

“You are a funny man,” she said. “And I am an old woman. But you are no child wearing your innocence instead of clothing. If you wish to come into my house you will put something on. Or you can go away. I don’t care which.”

I flinched. I hadn’t expected any of this, and my imagination flared with the horror that generations of diplomats would have experienced at my grandmother’s handling of the first alien to visit the Earth.

Foom didn’t so much as blink—could it blink?

“Of course, Grandmother. Your generosity honors me.” It turned its back to her, much as it had seen me do when the children had presented me with shorts to wear yesterday, and donned the ancient trousers and shirt. The faded colors accentuated its pale skin but my grandmother was satisfied. She welcomed us into her home, taking a seat at her worktable and gesturing for us to watch her as she picked up a small knife and dipped it into a tiny pot of boiling wax. I’d seen her do this a hundred times. My mother had learned to do it as a child and practiced the technique well into her teens until a social program had sent her to school, ultimately leading her to meet my father.

“What is she doing,” asked Foom.

By this point my grandmother appeared to be attacking a large white cloth stretched before her, the blade of her knife imparting a delicate pattern of wax where it touched.

“This is batik,” I said. “The style dates back more than a thousand years, back when nothing on this planet was dark.”

Foom nodded with approval. “Unlife has never touched it. But what is it?”

“Art. She is creating a pattern on the cloth with the wax.”

“And the art is the interplay of the wax and the cloth? It tells a story?”

“Not exactly. The wax is temporary. It gets melted off.”

“So this is ephemeral art? The art is the memory of the pattern of where the wax previously had been?”

“No, something else entirely. When she has completed the pattern in wax, the cloth will be boiled in an indigo dye.” I directed his attention to the pot of leaves that would soon produce the dye.

“The white cloth will become blue,” Foom said. “But you said it will be boiled? Surely the wax cannot endure. The intricate patterns lost.”

“The wax is lost, yes, and deliberately so. But before that happens, it will have blocked the dye from staining that portion of the cloth. Where it had been, the cloth will still be white—”

“And the pattern preserved!” Foom practically shouted. “Do you have examples of this? Please, I must see.”

This was my mother’s family’s calling. Generations had spent their entire lives weaving cloth, making indigo dye, and designing the most astonishing batik patterns. Some of the greatest art of the Miao people had been created in homes like this, saved up week upon week and carted over the mountains from tiny villages into the towns and cities where time and progress existed, where commerce replaced barter, where unlife had developed and spread.

My grandmother was an artist—though she would have scolded me to be called such—with decade upon decade of experience and expertise. A buyer in distant Shanghai sent an agent twice a year, buying up everything she’d created for a fraction of its true worth. But there was little my grandmother needed or wanted. A few chickens, seed for her garden, a whetstone to sharpen her knives once in a great while. Some money too, but she never touched it, letting it accrue in an account to pay for my mother to fly in once a year for a visit or to be spent on scholarships for the village children who opted to leave this life behind and attend school in the distant city.

While my grandmother sat engrossed in her work, I led Foom to the trunk at the back of the room. I hadn’t been here in years, but there was nowhere else for her to keep her finished work. I lifted the lid and revealed what I can only describe as vast tapestries of her art.

Silently asking permission, the alien took them out of the trunk one by one, unfolding them and holding them at arms’ length. The designs were flawless, intricate, breathtaking. Some were fanciful, birds and fish and scenes of nature. Others were purely abstract, complex patterns that predated Mandelbrot’s awareness of fractals but spoke to the same geometric subdivisions going smaller and smaller. Each was a piece of perfection.

“This,” said Foom, “this is what I hoped to find. This is all from one.”

“From one?”

“One source, one origin. The cloth, the dye, the vision. All from her.”

“Right,” I said. “Your Rule of Three. So, she could give one of these to someone else and it wouldn’t go dark?”

“No, it could pass to yet another’s hands and still not be dark.”

“Would you like one? Something to decorate your home?”

“Such a treasure?” Foom’s voice dropped to a whisper, not that my grandmother had given any indication of hearing him before. “She would gift me with such a thing?”

“If I asked politely,” I said. “Especially if I explain that you have come from so very far for just such a thing as she’s made and already forgotten about in this trunk.”

“That would be wondrous,” it said. “But, might I ask some more? Is it possible she might share her knowledge, teach me to do this batik myself?”

I smiled, thinking back on all the times she forced me to sit at that same table with a knife and a square of practice cloth during one of my mother’s visits, when all I wanted to be doing was playing outside with the local children.

“I think that would make her very happy.”

Grandmother agreed to teach Foom, but would have none of its finger-melding knowledge transfer. She taught it as she’d been taught, as she’d taught my mother and tried to teach me, sitting at the same table with her, a knife in one hand, a small pot of liquid wax within easy reach, and a blank cloth on which to practice the most simple of designs. Foom was an apt pupil and I’m not sure who was more pleased.

The next day the alien arrived at my grandmother’s house at first light, joined us for a simple breakfast, and then set to work which usually involved a brief lesson and hours of practicing what it’d learned. Maybe it was the extra thumbs, maybe the fact that its remarks hinted that it was several hundred years old with several times the experience any human being could amass. Maybe the alien was just a batik prodigy waiting to happen. Whatever the reason, after five days of learning basic techniques and simultaneously observing my Grandmother’s work, it seemed to be patterning its cloth with the confidence and speed of its teacher. The proof of it came at the end of that fifth day when its cloth was stained with dye and the wax boiled away leaving unmarked cloth where it had been.

The result was breathtaking, a miniature tapestry of blinding white and brilliant blue, a set of panels that showed the solar system and Foom’s pearl home spiraling ever closer to the Earth.

“This is good,” said my grandmother. “You possess a gift limited only by your dreams.”

“My people do not dream,” said Foom.

“Funny man, perhaps you just don’t remember them when you awaken?”

It smiled. “That might be. Certainly I have thought about what it might be like to dream.”

“That is a good start. Next time, draw your thoughts upon the cloth.”

“The cloth?” I said. I’d been sitting at the same table with them, scribbling notes in a handmade notebook I’d bartered from one of the neighbors.

“The patterns we make speak more clearly than words,” she replied. “If you were a better student you would understand that. The funny man does.”

Foom bowed its head. I pushed back from the table to make tea for all, as that was about the extent of my contributions to the batik these past several days. After I’d poured their cups and sat back with my own, the alien looked up and placed his hand over my grandmother’s, not in the laced fingers way it had used with me and the children, but a simple and direct touch to add significance to the words that followed.

“What knowledge may I offer you in turn, Grandmother?”

“Knowledge? Pfah! I am an old woman. I live as my mother lived and her mother before her. The world has changed. As my daughter and grandson insist, but not so much here. There is no knowledge I need that I have not had since his mother was a little girl.”

“But this is a great gift you have shared, which I will share with many others when I return home. Surely there is something I know how to do that you would like.”

“I am content that you have learned so well so fast. My grandson hungers for new things. If you want to teach something, teach it to him.”

The alien turned to me. It still hadn’t tasted its tea and I set my own cup down under the weight of its regard.

“I have only learned this batik because you suggested it. It seems a reasonable solution to share knowledge with you, and when you visited my home you expressed an interest in how I had made it. Shall I teach you?”

“Too much talk,” said my grandmother. “If you insist on yammering, do so beyond my hearing. Go. Away with you.”

We left our tea and slipped out of her house, taking the path back toward the river.

“Everything I can do stems from a simple precept,” said Foom. “The mind shapes the body.”

“I’m not sure I understand. That’s pretty broad.”

“Do you still have the bead I gave you? You saw me create that. I could not always do so.”

“Wait,” I said. “I thought that was just something your people can do. A biological ability.”

“It is, but not innate to us. The mind shapes the body. We have learned new processes, taught ourselves to create what we need rather than suborn the environment to meet our needs. Thus we preserve the Rule of Three.”

“You make . . . everything? But how?”

“Think of beer, the miraculous chemical processes that transform water and grain and hops. You are aware that your body performs many processes of similar astonishment, from transforming the nutrients you ingest into the energy necessary to move you about, to encoding your sensations into memories that can be stored in complex networks and accessed in a myriad varieties.”

“I . . . suppose. But those are all just biological processes. It’s all internal.”

“Not always. Your females produce milk to nurture their young. It begins as an internal process but the result exists outside the body.”

In that moment I thought my brain might explode. Was Foom suggesting that a lactating mother’s breast milk was on a par with its space craft? I thought again of bees making honey and wax. I thought of beer, from the perspective of the yeast converting the sugar. “I suppose that makes sense.”

“So. What if you could teach your body a new process? To produce something you desired, within yourself rather than having to rely on your environment?”

I laughed. “What, you’re saying I could train my body to brew beer?”

“Why not? It already knows how to break down much more complex matter than grain. But that’s not what you want, you want to be able to create your own home like mine. Perhaps one day to travel beyond your world as I do.”

“And that’s possible?”

Foom laced its fingers with mine. “The universe is nothing but possibilities. But what you desire requires much practice. Let us hope you will be a better student of this than you were your grandmother’s batik.”

The next several days blurred together. This wasn’t like when Foom had shown the children how to manipulate blades of grass, how to change their nature. That had been rote memorization, revealing a simple truth, a fact. What it was teaching me was the underlying structures that would allow me to alter my own biology to achieve my desires, and to do so without conscious thought. The goal, in the end, was to make it as effortless as taking an evening stroll. That’s all well and good for an adult who’s been walking his entire life, but not so easy for an infant whose world has only been crawling. And yet, in time, all of us learn to walk and scarcely think about the how of it for the rest of our lives. Those first days were like taking my first stumbling baby steps again, certain that at any moment I would land on my face. Except this time I was mucking about blindly with my own biochemistry.

On the third day, I had learned to sweat at will. By the fourth, I could control the process so that only my palms perspired. On the fifth day, I could alter my sweat glands to produce other substances and that’s when the real change happened. It wasn’t just what I was doing, it’s how it made me feel. Bliss. That’s the only word that can describe it. Using the Rule of Three internally, to create from my own body the thing I desired was . . . numinous. Like everything in the universe was right where it was supposed to be, and that my small actions were a contributing part. The sensation overwhelmed me at first, but quickly receded into the background, leaving me free to continue.

I focused on the bead Foom had given me, probing it, trying to understand it in ways that I can no more describe than I can tell me how to play piano or ride a bicycle. I just did it. And on the sixth day, after an hour’s effort I could cup my hands together and produce a hollow bead of shining nacre that defied gravity and responded to my will. I’d like to say that on the seventh day I rested, but it was more like a coma. I passed out on the grass by the river and Foom must have carried me back to my grandmother’s house. I awoke on the morning of the eighth day and saw her expression go from worry to a scowl. I knew I was fine.

“This is difficult for you,” said Foom later that day, as we sat once more by the river. “There is no more complex substance on your world. It will take a year or more of practice before you can produce a vessel like mine, but the same principle applies to convincing your body to produce anything you like.”

“You’re saying I could sweat beer?”

It smiled that toothless grin. “Easily. And unlike the beer you’ve described from your homeland, the kind brewed in factories and transported vast distances to be sold in warehouses and then moved to stores and only then to the individuals who will drink it, your beer obeys the Rule of Three. It isn’t dark. Nor will its consumption contribute to the darkening of others.”

“But I can only learn to make it if I have actual beer to work from, to teach my body the template.”

“That is true of anything you produce. It must adhere to the Rule of Three or you will be unable to master it.”

“And you’re the same way? With the things you make?”

“I am.” It pressed the fingers on its left hand together, and as it pulled them apart drops of indigo dribbled free. “I have learned to make your grandmother’s dye. Prior to meeting her and being exposed to it I could not do this. But now that I know it, I can teach others. This is what my people do, why we travel the galaxy.”

That was key. This ability I’d gained, it wasn’t just limited to me. Everything Foom had shown me, and everything I did with it going forward, I could share. “So, while it may take me a year to create a ship like yours, I could be showing others the same thing and with enough of us working on it, we’d have a fleet of ships. Enough vessels for humanity to join your people out among the stars!”

“Oh. No, that’s never going to happen.”

“What? Why not? You said I could do it. That it would just take time.”

“And that is true, but you need to understand, most of your planet, most of your population, is dark. The most ‘advanced’ human beings are also those who are most distant from the Rule of Three. You are a blight and you are killing your world. That’s part of what drew me here—your efforts to leave your own gravity well, to travel to your moon and one day to the other worlds of your solar system. If you had been content to remain here, I probably would not have come to such a dark place, not even to complete my cataloging of this system. But you were not, and the risk of you using your technology, dark and unliving as it is, to spread into space, that is too great.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “What are you going to do about it?”

“What needs to be done. Better for your species to die out, even if that includes some members of humanity who do live by the Rule of Three. When you are all gone, when the only inhabitants remaining live by the Rule of Three, your world will heal itself of the dark. It will become a paradise again. In time a new sapient species will rise, and Earth will have another chance.”

“But . . . human beings will have been eradicated?”

“You understand me perfectly. That is my task while I’m here.”

“I can’t let you do that!”

Foom tilted its head, first right and then left. “You’ve already been a great help to me. Just as you’ve been learning from me, I’ve been learning about human bodies from you.”

With a sudden burst of energy it leapt to its feet and jumped into the river, waving for me to follow and calling out, only his head above the water. “Come with me. The thing I’ve been waiting to show you is ready. And I cannot advance things to their next stage until you see it.” Without waiting for me to follow it dove beneath the water, surfacing several meters away as it swam toward its home.

“This isn’t happening,” I said to myself, maybe to the river. “I misheard or didn’t understand. It can’t seriously have a plan for exterminating the human race.”

I hit the water and swam after Foom. I came up at the bottom of the giant pearl as I had before, and ascended the ramp in a slow spiral. Halfway up I found Foom waiting for me on a bench in one of the alcoves opening off the central ramp. A naked man sat with him, slumped as if asleep. I stared at them both and Foom grinned back at me. Moments passed before I found my voice. “That’s . . . me!”

“Yes,” said Foom. “I made a clone. It was simple, really; your cells already contained their blueprint. I just nudged them forward to aid me in the next stage of my work. But first I require your assistance to quicken this body.”

“Quicken it?” I averted my gaze from the clone. It was like seeing my own corpse.

“The body lives, but isn’t alive. I’m sorry, the language I have from you lacks the nuance I need to explain.”

“Try,” I said. I didn’t know where to look. “Try real hard.”

“I accelerated its growth to bring it on a par with your own age, but it is not otherwise a reflection of you. To continue my work, I need you to connect with it, bring it in accord with yourself.”

“And how am I supposed to do that?”

“Everything in it is primed to recognize you. We need only give it a push to connect. Give me your hand.”

It spread its fingers for me as it had before, all while lacing the fingers of its other hand with those of a hand of the sleeping clone. There was no tingling this time, rather a sense of falling. Not a flailing or tumbling kind of fall, more like a plummet, the personification of my lifelong relationship with gravity. I plunged into myself, nonsensical as that sounds, as if I had just dove into a pool of me, a lake, an ocean. I didn’t surface, I just kept falling ever deeper.

When I came back to myself it was to discover I had laced my free hand with the clone’s. Foom had released both of us. I was staring at the clone, but also staring at myself from its eyes. And it was like looking upon the face of creation, like being fully aware at the moment of one’s own birth. The earlier sensation of bliss I’d experienced working the Rule of Three paled by comparison. I was suffused with a rapture beyond my own comprehension.

I let my hand drop away from my doppelganger’s.

“This is impossible,” I said, and heard two voices. The clone’s rasped a bit, speaking its first words. My words. My clone.

The alien gave me one of its toothless grins. “I would suggest you forget that word. It will only hold you back.”

In other circumstances that would probably have been encouraging. But even overflowing with the exponential joy coursing through me, I still wanted Foom’s creation of my clone to be impossible, because more than anything I needed its plan for extermination to be impossible. And if I admitted the reality of the one, what would hold back the other?

“So . . . are you saying all things are possible with your Rule of Three?”

“Ask yourself rather, how can you realize the concept of free will if you accept limits upon yourself?”

I wanted limits. I desperately wanted to limit Foom’s ability to wipe out humanity. “And you’re going to teach me that? To transcend all limits?”

“Nothing would please me more. I believe you have the potential, with sufficient practice. And the clone should be an aid in this. Meanwhile, I can continue my own research, with the help of you and your double.”

I shook my head. “What research? Is that why you made a clone of me?”

“Your duplicate will be the proving ground for my work, but before I can begin that piece of it I must first obtain a detailed understanding of the workings of the human male reproductive system. And I can’t do that without your help.”

It was a day of casual threats of extinction, of feeling my consciousness centered in two separate bodies, of drowning in euphoria, but even still the non sequitur of Foom’s reply stopped me cold. Was I being propositioned by an alien?

“I don’t know how to respond to that.”

From between the thumbs of one hand Foom conjured up a palm-sized nacre cup. “As soon as you provide the sample we can return to the riverside. Then you can resume your practice and soon realize there is no such thing as impossible.”

“Sample?”

“Yes, please. A sample of your ejaculate. I will analyze it and perfect my understanding. I cannot use your double’s; because of the accelerated growth I utilized, it would be unreliable.”

It handed me the cup.

The less said about providing a sperm sample for a sexless alien, the better. Suffice it to say that I did what was necessary, with my clone miming my every movement, and then the three of us wound our way down the ramp and swam out of the pearl and back to the riverbank.

Controlling the movement of two bodies is crazy difficult if you try to do both at once. I started swimming and then switched my attention, seeing the world through my clone’s eyes and started it swimming, too. Back and forth was odd but easy, and we made it to shore without incident.

Foom busied itself with its analysis for the rest of the day, encouraging me to use the time to practice my new knowledge of generating floating nacre beads as a template for shedding my concept of impossibility. Somehow having two bodies at once was oddly synergistic, as if I was both watching another person doing it and adding my clone’s efforts to my own. More, the feeling of bliss that filled me while I worked helped to distract me from Foom’s ultimate goal. The result was that my clone and I both produced hollow beads twice as large as I’d managed only an hour before. My control over the beads also grew. I sent the pair of them—mine and my clone’s—soaring high into the sky, feeling a connection to them long after they were lost to sight. I must have remarked on this out loud because Foom looked up from its own wool gathering to say “Automaticity” and then went back to work.

That first pair of larger beads had to have taken more than an hour—I’m not certain, I’d left my watch with all of my other dark items, back at my grandmother’s home. The next pair took less than half that time and were a third larger. The third set was fully four times the size of the first one I’d made, and accomplished in less than ten minutes. Automaticity, yeah.

I was getting . . . well, not tired, exactly, but I needed a break from sweating balls of flying, alien nacre. Now that I had the knack of it, Foom had said that I could make anything I was familiar with. I gave a pass to its idea of producing beer, but thought instead of my grandmother’s soup. I closed my eyes and the memory of it was still vivid in my mind, the range of tastes from the pickled chili to the succulent fish pulled from the nearby river. It was so vivid I swear I could smell it. My clone made a throat clearing noise and I looked over to see it sitting there with both hands cupped together. He held soup. I shook my head at him and we both focused. Nacre formed in his hands, encapsulating the soup. A similar ball appeared in mine and when it was complete I caused it to fill with more soup, then set both to floating a few feet above our heads. I smiled from both bodies, the absurd idea popping into my head that if I ever got back to the USA, I was going to make a killing in soup delivery. I tried producing other foods and failed. My memories were vivid, full of taste and temperature and mouthfeel, but when I tried to actually exude them I fell short. They were all foods from back home, tainted by too many hands and time and distance and thus far removed from Foom’s Rule of Three. I didn’t understand how that should matter but it did. The technique came easier with each creation and I was getting used to the feeling of universal joy that using it brought. I felt certain I could make anything now, provided I’d experienced it personally and that the past event subscribed to the Rule of Three. I saw a lot of locally sourced restaurants in my future.

It was a silly and charming thought, and almost enough to distract me from Foom sitting across from me working on a method of ending the human race to keep us from spreading our madness throughout the rest of the galaxy. Almost.

Late in the day Foom laced its fingers with my clone’s and I felt my consciousness pushed aside. Not entirely out, but no longer in control of my doppelganger. There wasn’t the exchange of knowledge and insight that had accompanied this gesture in the past. I followed the alien’s focus, using everything I’d learned in the last few days. I could see what it was doing, but not understand it. “Can you explain what’s happening?” I asked.

“I am crafting what you would call a retrovirus from your double’s cells. Actually, many variations of this retrovirus. If I am successful, one of them will rewrite your gonads and ultimately alter the viability of any spermatozoa they produce. He’ll still produce semen in the normal fashion, but it will be inert for reproductive purposes. No ‘Jing’.”

Foom grinned as it said that last word, lapsing from the Miao tongue into Chinese for an old word from Chinese medicine for ‘sexual energy’ that I must have picked up years ago and long since forgotten. Apparently, it had pulled more than just the one language from me.

“Shooting blanks, as the Americans would say,” I added.

“Thus ensuring the extinction of your species without causing any physical harm to the living.”

“Maybe not physical, but what about emotional? Most people want children, long for them. Millions, maybe billions, will be devastated when the world comes to understand what you’re setting in motion.”

The alien pulled its fingers back and my full awareness snapped back into place, leaving me regarding it from two perspectives. But something had changed. I hadn’t returned to being one mind in two identical bodies. Something was wrong with my clone, which meant something was wrong with me, just not the first me. I pressed my hand to my double’s forehead. He was burning up. I turned to Foom for an explanation, but it was oblivious and still caught up in our conversation.

“It is not that I lack empathy,” it said. “But nor can I predict how the members of another sapient race will react, most especially not a race that has no knowledge of the Rule of Three and is so dark and wrapped in unlife. They exist beyond my awareness. Perhaps an effective analogy would be to liken them to the ants that live beneath your feet. When you walk upon the grass here, do you consider what impact your passage has upon them, their tunnels, their dwelling places?”

“So, we’re ants to you? So far beneath your notice?” I suddenly felt chilled, or rather, my clone did. It made no sense. I could feel the warm sunlight on my skin.

Foom frowned. “You focus on a portion of the analogy I did not intend. I was not expressing superiority but rather ignorance. I can no more plan for human emotional suffering than you can take into account the daily acts and aspirations of ants. The virus I have crafted will ensure there is no pain. That much I can do. It is why I made your clone.”

My clone began coughing and couldn’t stop. He took a drink of water from one of the clay jugs we replenished from the river. It didn’t help. “What, it’s okay for my clone to suffer?”

“You are not dark. You have purged the unlife from yourself. I did not wish to risk harming you in the event that my first attempts at producing the virus damaged you in any way.”

“What about emotional damage? Don’t you think I’m upset by your plans for humanity?”

“Not directly, no. You have no children. No plans for any. Your major empathic ties are to older relatives, your parents and your grandmother. They will, in all probability, expire well before you do. They will feel no impact from the sterility imposed on your species. You are of an age such that your friends who are likely to wish offspring have already conceived and birthed them. Again, no impact. The same for associates of these friends. The Rule of Three applies. Any further and your upset is abstract and irrelevant.”

It was becoming more and more difficult to argue with Foom as the clone’s physical distress grew. By now he was lying on his side, still coughing. He was shivering uncontrollably. I felt aches in his arms and legs, his neck. His head pounded and his throat felt raw. All of it was vivid and real but also removed, confined to that other body.

“What’s happening? Why do I feel so sick?”

For the first time, Foom looked genuinely concerned. “You are unwell?”

“Not me, him!”

The alien spared a glance at the duplicate it had made and nodded. “Ah, my apologies. It is temporary, I assure you. Your double is serving his purpose as a proving ground.”

“Why is he sick?”

“His body is responding to the assault of two hundred thirteen variations of the virus I have developed. I am confident that one of them will be successful. Once I determine which, these trials will conclude. I will only inflict a single virus on humanity, with no more additional impact than a mild instance of influenza.”

“So, that’s it? You’ll be done and all of humanity is screwed? No appeal?”

Foom rose and laced its fingers with the clone again and again I felt my awareness of the body shunted aside. The sudden relief from his symptoms stunned me with just how sick he was. “A moment . . . yes, the testing is complete. I have isolated the successful virus.” It freed its fingers from the clone’s hand and the chill and fever and ache and nausea all rushed back to me. Foom resumed speaking but I couldn’t fully focus on its words.

“There is nothing to appeal. If your people could embrace the Rule of Three then they would be able to effortlessly counter any virus. Doing so would be proof that they will not succumb to the unlife that covers this planet.”

“How long do we have?”

“Do you mean your double, or are you asking me about your species?”

“Wait, what? The clone is dying?”

“Of a certainty. His body’s attempts to fend off so many distinct viral attacks have triggered a cascade failure. He is burning himself up. I can terminate your connection with the body if you like.”

“Yes. Wait, no. Just no. What about the rest of humanity. How long does it have?”

Foom raised both hands, palms up, directing one at me and one at my clone. “That depends. Will you continue to aid me?”

“Of course not. I’m not going to help you to wipe out my species.”

It nodded. “I understand. Then it will take longer, several hours at least.” Nacre spheres the size of softballs grew upon each outstretched palm. Something sloshed within them. “These vessels will contain the virus in a sustaining aqueous medium. I will need to produce thousands of them, pausing to replenish myself several times before I complete the process. When I am done I will scatter them throughout your stratosphere, blanketing the planet. Without a mind to guide them, the ozone there will begin to dissolve the shells, releasing the virus to rain down upon your people. Within days, every male of every age will have been exposed and rendered infertile.” It tossed one of the spheres to me. I slapped it aside and it landed in the grass.

“And I suppose you’re just going to sit back and watch?”

It frowned again. “No, I will have left before that. I intend to take my leave of you once I have launched the virus into your sky. I had hoped you would understand, I take no pleasure in denying you the stars. You yourself may one day manage to use what you’ve learned to leave here.”

Lost in some fever dream just a few feet away, my clone moaned. I’d just been offered the stars and I felt myself dying.

There was nothing more to say. Foom excused itself and went off to its ship, to rest or replenish or whatever it needed to do before beginning the seeding process that would destroy humanity.

“What am I supposed to do?” My clone turned back to me with a look of complete helplessness that I knew showed on my own face. I pondered the question and then answered myself, letting the words fall from my double’s lips as he slipped in and out of consciousness. “Our grandmother would chide me for tackling such a difficult question on an empty stomach.” At a thought, a pair of my soup spheres fell into our respective hands and irised open, delivering a welcome ripple of bliss. “Our grandmother is wise,” I said, and ate the soup.

It’s a difficult thing to hold your dying self in your arms. To feel your own life trickle away and yet continue to live. To sip comfort food from an otherworldly bowl and know there is no comfort to be had. My mind slipped free of him, returning my previous singularity.  I sat there, rocking him silently, until his body grew cold. It took a long time. When I could at last let him go, I eased his lifeless body down and left him lying supine on the grass. I looked up to find Foom sitting near, hundreds of virus-filled nacre spheres already floating above its head.

“He’s dead,” I said.

“Of a certainty.”

“Why? You said that knowledge of the Rule of Three could save him.”

“Yes, easily. You would only need to focus on the attacking virus while it remained in the host body, engineering a counter virus from it to reverse and restore what had been changed.”

“Then why didn’t you? He didn’t have to die!”

Foom paused, two new spheres finished. “Why does this upset you? He wasn’t truly alive, just an outgrowth of yourself, and you are fine. He served the purpose I created him for.”

“To kill all of humanity!”

“No, to spare you. I told you, I needed your biology to produce the virus. But I consider you an ally. You have shared your grandmother’s art with me, taught me your language, introduced me to marvels here on your world. I could not repay that with your death.”

“So you just had me experience it from a slight remove? Is that your idea of kindness?”

“I offered to sever your connection earlier. You chose to decline. I’m sorry if the outcome is other than you expected. I thought you understood how things would end from the beginning. Now, please, I need to focus and continue my work.”

“Finish your death spheres,” I said.

“The virus will not result in anyone’s death. Your double succumbed to the sheer weight of hundreds of viral attacks, not a single one.”

“Fine, sterility spheres.”

“An apt name.”

Foom continued producing the nacre spheres that would destroy humanity. It’s not like I could have stopped it. Instead I positioned my clone so that he looked like he was asleep instead of dead. I plucked handfuls of grass, and using the external version of the technique Foom had shown me caused them to weave into a shroud. More trickles of bliss. I wrapped my double once, twice, then bound the grass closed around him. I’ve never been especially religious, but I’d attended plenty of funerals. I spoke prayers for the dead in three languages, wondering if there was an afterlife for cloned bodies that had never had a soul of their own, wondering if, when my own passing came, my spirit would be divided.

When I was out of words and empty of emotion, I did a variation of the tricks Foom had taught the children. The grassy shroud around my clone flared with light and began to rise into the sky. It would precede Foom’s virus spheres. Indeed, I intended it to go far higher, carrying my double beyond the Earth’s grip. At least he would get to space.

“I am done,” said Foom.

“Done?”

“With the sterility spheres. All I have left to do is send them on their way, and then depart myself.”

Like a magician performing some big reveal it crossed its arms over its torso and then spread them wide. Thousands of spheres that had been hanging motionless just above its head took off, flying straight up. In the last instant before they were lost to the eye, they spread out in all directions and kept climbing. Then they were gone.

“That’s it, then. End of humanity.”

“Do not be despondent,” said Foom. “The last generations of your people will still endure for many years. And the rest of the galaxy will be spared the inevitable dark that your continuation would have brought. Nor will you be forgotten. I will share your grandmother’s batik with my people. I cannot properly describe how much you have enriched us.”

“Right. And you’ve killed us by way of thanks.”

The alien ignored me. “I will always treasure the gift you asked her to give me. As you have seen, I keep few personal mementos of my travels, but this will inspire me for centuries to come. As will the memory of the time I shared with you. Thank you.”

I glared at it, but Foom just stood staring back at me, waiting for some response.

“Right. Got it. ‘So long and thanks for the fish.’ Will you just go?”

The alien nodded. It walked to the river, dove in, and swam toward its home floating in the water. Moments later that magnificent pearl rose up from the river and drifted lazily away, rising above the valley, over the mountain tops, higher and higher to visit other worlds, study their wonders, maybe take home a few treasures, maybe leave behind a promise of extinction for its next hosts.

I think I sat there in the grass for hours, staring up into the empty sky. But the sky wasn’t empty. It contained thousands of nacre spheres waiting to decay and infect every man on the planet. How long before nations began realizing that the birth rate had ground to a halt? The limited reserves at sperm banks would only delay the inevitable. In less than a hundred years, humanity would be wiped from the Earth.

I didn’t know what to do. I could flee, rush home armed with the knowledge that the future had been stripped from us. I could try to warn the government, here in China, or back in the US. They wouldn’t believe me at first, but a quick demonstration of creating my own nacre spheres would silence some of the doubts, and the utter lack of new births would do the rest. Not that it would do any good.

And yet . . .

I went looking for that first sphere full of the virus that Foom had lobbed at me, and found it right where it had fallen. The alien hadn’t sent it off with the others. Was that an oversight or had it left the sphere behind deliberately, intending for me to find it? I unsealed it, ignoring the trickle of joy that using the technique brought, pressed my face to the opening and inhaled a dose thousands of times greater than would reach anyone over the next several days. I switched my focus inward, awash in bliss as I tracked the infection spreading through me. Time fell away and I dove deeper, seeing the mechanism that performed a tweak that would work on any adult male. I should have been impressed by the masterstroke of genetic engineering, but it all looked so easy when you knew what to look for. I touched a portion of the virus, held it tight, changed it, and set it free. It quickly attacked the original virus, rewriting it to undo the sabotage, leaving me whole again. Or whole until other bits of unaltered virus still in my system rendered me sterile again. Another touch and I’d suborned more of Foom’s work and repaired myself again, then purged any remaining trace of the alien’s original virus from my body.

I focused on what I’d changed, concentrated on creating a new sphere in my hands, and filled it with the antivirus I’d envisioned. I had a cure. I just didn’t have enough of it.

Foom had said the thing was possible, that an antivirus could be used to reverse its virus while it lingered in its victims. I’d made the cure and seen it work. But how much time did I have to produce and distribute it to the entire world? How long would the original virus linger after it had done its work?

I was running before I even knew where I was going. Down the dirt paths where days before I had seen the children scatter. It was nearly dusk, but that didn’t matter. I ran until I came across the first house and pounded on the door, calling for any children inside to come out and play, babbling about glowing grass. An adult opened the door and began shooing me away. Behind him a child peered out, one of the ones who’d first taught Foom to speak a human language. I ignored the adult and called for her to find her friends, all of them, and meet back where Foom had shared his magic. I conjured a quick nacre bead and sent it flying over to her. She snatched it from the air, darted around her father, and vanished further down the dirt path. I spun around, ignored the angry man behind me, and headed back to the clearing where, with luck, the children would find me.

Soon five of the original seven had arrived. It would have to be enough. I didn’t think I could spare the time to wait for the missing two. One by one I laced my fingers with theirs and shared knowledge the way Foom had with me. I showed them the nacre bead that I had managed on that first day. It was one thing, one substance, a tiny hollow sphere. A pearly, empty marble. I made up a song on the spot for them to sing, about dancing beads floating above their heads, making a game out of how many they could manage. And as they filled the air with their creations I gathered them to me, one by one, and poured my retrovirus cure into them and sent them flying away to rendezvous with Foom’s spheres. Night had fallen but I didn’t care. The kids kept making their hollow beads, getting better and faster at doing so, and I kept filling them up and casting them into the sky. First hundreds, then thousands. We worked through the night, the older children taking a moment now and then to set some of the grass aglow.

By dawn I’d long since lost count, but surely we’d launched more than five thousand tiny packets, each instructed to seek out Foom’s larger spheres, punch through them, and rewrite its virus. Three of the children had fallen asleep and the other two had slowed down. I was exhausted as well, drained. I felt like I hadn’t eaten in weeks, drunk in days. But we’d done it. Or I thought we had. Maybe not all of them, but nearly. Most. I hoped so, anyway.

The next morning found a gathering of children clamoring for me outside my grandmother’s door. The five who had helped the day before had been joined by the missing two from that first day in the clearing, and another six besides. They’d brought water from the river to free me up from that chore and plaintively asked if I was free to come play. Several of them held out hands full of nacre beads for my inspection. The new children looked at me with yearning and hopeful eyes.

I led them back down the path to the spot where Foom had held court. I began by lacing fingers with all of them, bringing the new recruits up to speed on the game of illuminating blades of grass and making them float. I shared the concept of exuding the nacre and the first hints of how to make the resultant beads fly. In turn, I asked them for the stories of their lives and their families. I asked them for their hopes and dreams. And I asked myself how the Rule of Three might best be tailored to serve them.

It became apparent that they couldn’t do the work internally. They could learn to copy anything put in front of them, as they had that first day with the nacre beads that I’d then filled with the retrovirus. But they could not imagine a thing they had experienced and produce it fresh as an act of will. I didn’t know if this was a talent that came with adulthood or something I could do because Foom itself had taught me and I lacked some necessary piece for imparting it to another. Time would tell. Meanwhile, there was plenty to do with the things in front of and all around us.

Several days later, after starting our morning session, I left the children and paid a visit to Mrs. Liu, my grandmother’s blind neighbor. She very generously allowed me the use of her phone, which I discovered she kept charged using a single solar panel on top of her tiny house. I phoned home. Specifically, I called my boss in the state department. After a few minutes of her yelling at me that I’d worried her by vanishing, yelling about my failing to show up for work, and yelling with relief that I wasn’t dead from the mystery strain of influenza, I learned the important details. All over the world people had come down with what looked to be the flu. Men and women both, though men fared worse. Most people recovered after a day. Even so, a tiny percentage had died, much as happened with every flu, but the sheer number of people affected meant the deaths reached into the tens of thousands. Then, just as quickly as it had begun, the pandemic had passed. She asked where I was and I told her I was visiting family. She asked when I’d be back and I told her I’d always liked her laugh. Then I ended the call. I returned the phone and asked Mrs. Liu if she needed anything. I helped her with a few minor chores for less than an hour and then returned to the children.

They’d come a long way in just a few days. I had, too. Together we were altering some of the local trees, teaching their limbs and leaves to absorb light throughout the day and return it as radiant heat from their trunks after the sun set. We were changing grass to grow longer and weave its blades into rounded walls and floors and roofs, creating living houses more durable than anything the Miao people in this valley currently enjoyed. And we all learned to copy the food that each child brought so that they returned home with enough to feed their entire families.

As the days turned into weeks, weeks into months, I shared and taught other things I knew. Every day was something different but topics included Mandarin and English. Arithmetic and basic algebra. What I remembered of philosophy and economics and astronomy and the scientific method from my college classes that seemed so very distant now. We talked of outer space and had sober discussions of what it meant to have met an alien. And every day, at one point or another, we’d all grow quiet and gaze upward and speak of visiting the stars. I was getting better at creating my own nacre spheres now, producing orbs the size of beach balls that I could wrap around some of the smaller children, giving them giggling rides high above the trees.

Foom had promised to share my grandmother’s batik with people throughout space. I intended to bring her soup to them as well.

In June of 2018, the Future Affairs Administration flew me and three Canadian authors to participate in a workshop co-funded by the Wanda Group which was running a poverty abatement program in Guizhou Province, traditionally one of the poorest and most ethnically diverse regions in the country. We picked tea, made paper, learned batik, visited historic sites, and spoke with many people. I don’t have enough superlatives to describe the trip. When it was over, FAA asked us to write novelettes inspired by our experiences there. “The Rule of Three” was my result, the words coming to me without effort as I daydreamed about the places I’d seen.

Want to read more fiction by Lawrence M. Schoen?

Future SF recommends Barsk: The Elephant’s Graveyard and The Moons of Barsk.