The Wanderers

Originally appeared in Clarkesworld (Issue 77, February 2013)

We came to your planet because we knew that you, the peoples of Kill Bill and Saw and Vietnam and Columbine Massacre would understand us. You could not call us monster, as our subjects had done, and you would not call us morally reprehensible, arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct. We had watched your entertainments, our satellites catching your transmissions from so many fog years away, through so much space we marveled at the quality of transmission. The other planets never sent out such good entertainments. Yours we liked to watch most, the four of us, as our subjects screamed from the metal chambers which we had locked them in and which we never strayed from so we could hear them as they cried.

Names of our own place would not fit in your world of dirt and blue sky, our names too convoluted, too garbled in the throat, so we gave ourselves your names. Joker and Samara and Alexander Great and Corleone. We matched them to personalities and memorized them and learned your language from the entertainments and from a red book Webster's that had made it through the satellites and into the entertainment machines. We used a laser to transfer it across our skin and we soaked the words in through our bodies which, we now know, would look to you like extended shadows in too little sun or ghosts, blank of mouths except when we need them and they open in our skins. Our stretched translucent bodies full of fog inside.

Once we had our names and were bored of our own subjects, who begged us not to go, not to go, because much like in your world, in ours we of violence are royalty. We launched ship despite their grabby hands and watched out the window as our subjects bowed low in our absence and wailed like the dying birds on your planet as our ship sunk down into your earth and broke the bird bones to pieces. Crows, our eye scans told us, for we had rigged them to match word to physical scan. It seemed when we landed that we had arrived in realm of crows, which was not what we had desired, and so we walked on from that place, black sand beneath and hot ball of roiling gas sun above so we would no longer hear the shriek song of crow throats.

Before you mention it, I will admit that yes, we had come to be your leaders. We had come to slay the ones you called leader before us and to take your whips and reins into our ephemeral hands. This is metaphor, we think. Your red book is unclear on metaphor. But we knew from your entertainments, which like all good entertainments must be based of truth, that you would not fault us this. That you would open your mouths in complaint and tell us you would destroy us but that it would delight you to be forced to try. Yes, we knew we had found people who would fight back, would claw their way past us to trade places, to be us, to be top. Our subjects let us lead too long. No resistance. They screamed but never tried to flee. Called us names and meant them because they did not have in them what we four have in us: need to dominate. Need to be on top. Need to press our metaphor feet into metaphor peoples and metaphor grind them into metaphor dirt.

We wandered until we came to dirt. It was same as black sand but made us sink less when walking. Around us the sky turned hazy orange and then cold. We had heard of cold. We loved it, loved how it rattled us inside, how we shook without meaning to.

Finally in our shake we decided to speak, to try our hands at voice in the strange air we did not breathe for fear it might be poison to us. We used the breath we'd stored inside, enough for two fog years at least, more waiting in the ship for refuel.

"That place was like Iraq War," I said. The voice surprised me, shrill and unsure. I was of Corleone name. I was of that name because I stood tallest, reddest, not strongest of body but strongest of mind. It was me had absorbed most of red book, me who writes this now to you so you will know our reasons for coming.