Kayleigh whirled around. Standing behind her was an authoritative-looking man in a suit, clean-shaven and with fading brown hair. He looked like the sort of man who would play the President in a movie. Kayleigh found herself backing up against the window, trying to put distance between her and the sudden arrival.
"This guy just popped up out of the floor," said Richard, as though he was watching TV. "It was pretty crazy."
Tom stepped in front of his girlfriend, trying to look intimidating despite his pantslessness. The man in a suit chuckled. "Don't worry. I mean you no harm. If I did, I would simply drop you into space and be done with it. I have come here to talk."
"Well good, because we need some answers," said Tom.
Kayleigh thought he looked quite adorable when he tried to act tough. She put a hand on his shoulder. "Let's sit down, Tom. Hear what this guy has to say."
The couch was quite comfortable, soft white leather that yielded to their bodies. The man in the suit decided to remain standing. "First off," he said, "I should like to apologize. We have treated you most unfairly, and while that unfairness is necessary and frankly inevitable, you still have every right to be angry at me."
No response. Even Richard was on edge waiting for his next words.
"Approximately ten of your hours ago, a rebel named Gaog sent out an unauthorized transmission to your planet. Currently Ide-3 is under consideration for admission to the League of Worlds, and a strict communications blackout has been applied. Gaog was not the first and will not be the last to violate that blackout, but the damage he has done must be minimized. There is a procedure we follow in these cases. The perpetrator is brought to justice in the Galactic Court, and anyone who knows of their message is quarantined from the rest of the population, so to speak."
Kayleigh was trying to figure out the truth behind the man's official-ese. "And by quarantined, you mean... abducted?"
"That is the word often used in popular accounts, yes. They are removed from their home planet and placed under custody of the League of Worlds."
Richard was up and starting to pace. Kayleigh had noticed this in him before whenever something unusual or interesting would come up in their data. "So what you're saying is that you whisked us up to take us off to space, without so much as a hello, and no matter how we feel about it we can't go back to Earth again?"
"That is a negative way to phrase it, but yes."
Tom had his head in his hands. "Can't you just wipe our memories? Like in that movie..."
"Men in Black?" said the man in the suit.
"Aliens watched that?"
"With great mirth. Memory erasure was the original technique used, but without extensive research requiring human subjects, it was unreliable and tended to cause brain trauma."
"So instead you're just abducting us," said Richard. "Well that's great. You know, I have friends, people at the university... they're going to notice I'm gone."
The man in the suit remained unemotional. "That's being taken care of. At this point I'd recommend you stop thinking about it. You're beginning a new life, in a much vaster and more advanced world than the one you know. This is an opportunity very few people get, and most everyone who does is glad for it in the end. You will meet alien species, travel to new planets, enjoy technology you could never have imagined. You are free to explore the galaxy, go wherever you want -- except back to your home."
Kayleigh thought she should have been more distressed about that, but at the moment it was hard to process any of this as real. She thought it might be a dream -- but in a dream you never think that. Of course she had spent long nights arguing with friends that aliens had to be out there somewhere -- but deep down she had never really believed it, not as more than an intellectual notion. They existed only on paper, not as something you could reach out and touch. She thought she should say something, ask a question, yell at their abductor, but she seemed to have lost the ability to combine words into a sentence.
Richard was perched on the edge of his seat with an eager, almost manic look on his face. Kayleigh recognized it from class -- from the rare moments when a student would seem to genuinely get something and show a glimmer of promise. "So, who are you? Another abductee? A human Uncle Tom?"
"My name is not Tom," said the man in a suit. (In the back of her mind Kayleigh was glad, because two Toms would just confuse things even more.) "I have been called Wings of Iron, Circler of Long Spaces, He Who Lives In Lockstep... you must understand, my race communicates psychically, through concepts, which may be somewhat unwieldy on the human tongue."
"So you're not human?" Richard stared intently at the man's body, as if trying to find an abnormality beneath his clothes.
The man -- Wings of Iron or one of his many long names -- nodded. "I am one of the Erusmi. I have merely taken this form to create something familiar for you -- a voice of authority you would understand."
"Well, it was a nice gesture, I guess," said Tom. "So what do you really look like?"
"I am a being of pure energy. I take whatever form I choose." Wings of Iron cast a hand at the floor beneath them. "I am the ship that you are in right now, as well as the humanoid speaking to you, as well as the furniture you are sitting on. My species moved beyond fixed material forms many eons ago."
Tom got off the couch, staring back at it. "You're telling me I was just sitting on you?"
"Don't worry. I'm not offended."
He shivered, looking around, frantic at his inability to not be in contact with this alien creature. Wings of Iron continued. "I can create any kind of item you need."
"Can you make us some clothes?" said Kayleigh, still feeling rather exposed.
"Certainly." The walls shifted again, before spitting out a plain white T-shirt and black sweatpants. Kayleigh tugged them on.
"Um, Kay, you do realize that you're wearing him," said Tom.
Kayleigh shivered, but kept the clothes on. "I'm just not gonna think about that. It's better than wandering around in my birthday suit the whole time."
"You know," said Richard. "I have to wonder what you two were doing when you got abducted..." The other two blushed.
Wings of Iron cleared his throat. "Even with spaceslipping, it will take about two weeks to reach Jian-2, the central planet of the League of Worlds. I understand that this is a lot to take in, but please get comfortable. Make yourselves at home, as you say." And with that the man in the suit stepped into the wall and promptly melted away.
It took everyone a moment to process the conversation's abrupt end. "Like hell he understands," says Kayleigh. She kicked at the nearest wall, but it felt as hard and unfeeling as any wall did. She clutched her feet and cursed. When she finally quieted down, the room was eerily silent. The usual filter of city noise was completely absent. It was only in the silence that the three realized that they were truly alone.
"So," said Richard. "Anyone see any good movies lately?"
--
The first day was a question of survival. Wings of Iron produced items upon request, but didn't say anything to them. The first thing they requested was a deck of playing cards, which they used to play poker until they were all sick of it and had won and lost imaginary fortunes many times over.
But they had to eat, eventually. At Richard's suggestion, the three began requesting increasingly elaborate meals from the energy being, beginning with high cuisine pasta and ending with a big turkey dinner that could have fed eight. But the ship just silently complied with everything. The food all looked gorgeous, but tasted bland.
Boredom set in quickly. Kayleigh would never think she would get bored so quickly of an alien experience, but there was genuinely nothing to do. Wings of Iron produced a chess set and a go board, but said he couldn't replicate movies or books -- he hadn't spent enough time studying Earth culture. Tom and Richard eventually gave in and asked for clothes, and got the same white shirt and black pants. Whatever Earth culture the alien had imbibed, fashion was obviously not included.
Tom and Kayleigh both slept fitfully, when they could sleep at all. They both tossed and kicked in the hotel bed, trying to shake the feeling of being wrapped up in somebody's skin. (She guessed it would really be more like someone's internal organs, but declined to follow that train of thought to the end.) Sometimes they would turn over simultaneously, bodies colliding with each other, and smile in shared recognition at each other.
But somehow, in the dim hours of the early morning (according to their watches, at least -- out here there was nothing to differentiate day from night, and their Earthly system of time seemed quaint and artificial) Kayleigh drifted off to sleep. When she woke up, she was crying.
Tom, who seemed to have an instinctive sense of these things, put his arms around her and hugged her tight to his chest. "What's the matter?"
She was thinking about people. Melissa, her best friend since high school, she of the short hair and shorter temperament, who got her through every break-up or other personal tragedies with all-night sessions of alternating between video games and shoulder-crying. Dale, the dorkiest of all her dorky friends, with the big horn-rimmed glasses and the infinite well of jokes. Dr. Jameson, the gray-haired professor who had gone to bat for her and got her this grad school spot, all without so much as a you're-welcome. Her parents, aggravating and embarrassing but ultimately loving. Her little sister, just about to start college, with undecided ambitions but brilliant energy.
