Science Fiction
Colours
An Alien Intervention
“Rose Guardian?!” exclaimed Nigel. “You want to call me the ‘Rose Guardian’? Are you completely nuts?”
B’lel’s smile vanished. His large dark almond-shaped eyes blinked beneath a tight little frown on the bulbous grey forehead, while the thin purple lips pursed together. Behind Nigel a number of the other humans giggled or sniggered, depending on their persuasion, while Tckek clicked unintelligibly behind B’lel.
“Well, yes,” said B’lel patiently, his condescending little smile flicking back into position. “I thought I had explained this. All of the Earth Guardians will be named after a colour that suits their interests or character.” He waved a long-fingered hand towards two humans standing to one side of the group. They were a male and a female, tall, athletic and well-muscled, but apparently covered in a tight form-fitting costume, indeed so form-fitting that it practically looked as though their naked bodies had been painted. The female was entirely green, the male was blue.
“Amongst the two of you who first volunteered for the process of augmentation, Katryna here is a botanist, while Andre is an oceanographer. The colours suit their areas of interest. The body-shields reflect the colour. It is all quite simple. We had considered red, which is to be Danielle here, to be for human concerns. As Danielle is passionately concerned about the starving and underprivileged of your world, it seemed appropriate. White is for cool reason, that is why it has been assigned to Marta. She will help you all reconcile your desires as you change the world to a better place. You are a combination of these attributes, Nigel. With the powers we will give you, it will be possible to create independence for the Kurds, Tibetans, and many others for whose cause we know you feel. But we know that you are one of the more contemplative members of the group, and will not act rashly. Red plus white: rose.”
“Yes, yes,” said Nigel, with some impatience. “You said all that before, but this is really impossible. Don’t you know what this means? Rose Guardian? Don’t you people think up in your little blinking spaceships?”
Tckek clicked impatiently and threw herself onto a sofa. The humans watched her with some trepidation as they retained some preconceptions and indeed not a few prejudices in regard to six-foot tall blue arthropods.
“This is ridiculous Nigel,” said Andre the Blue Guardian. As he stepped forward the blue covering disappeared from his head, showing itself as an energy field rather than textile. The head revealed was of a staggeringly handsome man perhaps in his mid twenties. “This is all a lot more important than some pettiness of a name.”
“Christ, Andre!” said an astonished Nigel amid similar murmurs from the assembly. “You didn’t look like that when you went out through that door an hour ago!”
“Ah yes!” said B’lel. “I said that you would be altered, albeit within the parameters of your pre-existing genetic makeup, to enable you to withstand the vigors of your new life.”
“But this is aesthetic change!” insisted Nigel.
“He looks over ten years younger and I don’t remember him looking that good when I first met him an hour ago.”
“I thought her breasts were larger!” Exclaimed Danielle from amongst the throng of unaltered humans. “Get over here, Katryna, and let’s have a good look at you.”
“Don’t be absurd, Danielle,” Katryna replied sharply. “It’s just that my frame and musculature have increased. My body shield can carry me through the air at Mach ten and withstand a thermonuclear explosion, but my body still needs to be stronger to cope with those events.”
“I dunno, they look pretty big to me,” agreed Nigel.
Suddenly Tckek starting clicking in a manner which seemed to suggest irritation. This quietened the humans considerably.
“Yes, you are right,” said B’lel, presumably in reply to Tckek. “We will get back to your problem, Nigel, but in the meantime we will continue. Leon, you will be known as the Violet Guardian …”
“What?” interjected Leon. “You are joking. This is a joke, yes?” B’lel again assumed a puzzled expression and Tckek clicked mournfully to herself.
“But I have an aunt Violeta, a maiden aunt. This is silly, what is wrong with using our own names?”
“As I explained at the beginning,” B’lel started again, slowly, perhaps with rather more crispness than he had betrayed so far. “The names are to reflect your roles as Earth Guardians. It will also protect your families. Do not forget, you will make a lot of enemies in your work. You will be stopping pollution and over-exploitation of the planet, giving freedom to the oppressed, enforcing peaceful co-existence. This will make you very unpopular in some very powerful and influential quarters. These people will strike back at you any way they can, and if they have any clues to your identity at all, they will target your families to get at you. Now, can we please continue!” B’lel was clearly becoming irritated. Tckek started clicking something at him. “I am not getting irritated!” He shouted at her, the purple veins throbbing on his domed forehead. “Now, Marysa, you will be the Yellow Guardian, please tell me that this is acceptable to you.”
“Well…” she began, exhibiting some discomfort and indecision.
“What!?” screamed B’lel, his little grey body becoming rigid with tension. “What is wrong with yellow?!”
“Well, I don’t really like yellow. It never looks good on me.”
“What?” B’lel was a paroxysm of fury. “Doesn’t look good on you? This is not a fashion parade! Yellow has the exuberance and joy of your yellow sun and of your character! By Alle’s nipples what is wrong with that?!”
“Well you did ask me if I liked it,” she said petulantly.
“Argh!” B’lel’s hands came up, quivering, to cover his head. He staggered to the sofa where Tckek was and sat down, his knees trembling as he bent them. Tckek got up, and touched a blinking apparatus on her carapace. She started speaking to them, the audible clicking accompanied by simultaneous translation from the box.
“The M’la are a very meticulous race. Poor B’lel here has been searching your planet for twelve individuals with your mixture of knowledge, commitment and abilities for many cycles. The system of naming you has an elegance that has considerable appeal to the M’la sense of elegant order, and to threaten to pull it apart is quite debilitating for him. We Ichick are more relaxed about such things, but you must also recognise that we are less concerned about endoskeletal life-forms than are they. The imminent demise of your planet is of less concern to us.
“Imminent demise,” the Blue Guardian, or Andre to everyone else, quickly picked up on this. “We were told nothing about imminent demise.”
“Yeah,” agreed the Green Guardian, a.k.a. Katryna. What do you mean?”
“I believe it is called the Macta Syndrome, after the Chiban anthropologist who first identified it. Subsequently it has come to be widely recognised throughout the known part of the galaxy. It is all due to pollution. Pesticides, chemicals and that sort of thing, together with low-level radioactive contamination from old surface tests and permitted leakage from reactors.”
“Yes, we all know about that, it is presumably why we are here,” said Danielle.
“Right, but what about imminent demise? This might take another thousand years to kill us off,” agreed Nigel.
“Actually it will be minor cases of influenza and other rhino-viruses that kill people off. You see over a few generations of exposure to these apparently low levels of pollution, the natural immunity systems break down. It will probably only take one more generation. Probably the children being born now will be wiped out in twenty-five years time.
“Do you mean like HIV?”
“Actually HIV is one of the first expressions of this. If you had been watching the news you might also have noticed the disappearance of numerous amphibian species from apparently pristine environments; the distemper virus that obliterated the North Sea seal population; the “killer-flu” that seems to pop up every now and then; the rapid increase in asthma amongst children. Things like that. It’s all part of the same syndrome. Without anyone noticing it the immunity system of each generation is weaker. In the end it will be so weak, a simple flu-like virus will wipe out great swathes of population. The entire infrastructure of developed society will collapse, leading to even greater suffering and death. In less than fifty years, the great cities will be wastelands, and in the countryside the few survivors will be fighting over what resources then remained.”
There was silence for some time as all this sunk in.
“Sorry to change the subject,” interjected Nigel, “but who or what is a Chiban?”
“The Chiban? They are another sentient species on the Interstellar Council. They are actually the ones who are concerned about your future, they are concerned about everything. It is their way, to be full of compassion and understanding, to care about the welfare of every race on every planet across the galaxy.”
“Why were none of their race here?”
“They were busy,” said B’lel, the irony and bitterness dripping from his voice. Tckek started a high-pitched whine, but the translator interpreted this as laughter.
“No, that is not the truth. The truth is that you would find them so indescribably ugly you would be physically sick if you beheld them.”
“Listen, Tckek, or however it is your name is pronounced,” said Andre, “forget these losers. There are enough of us who will do the job without the roses and violets and sunflowers.”
“Hey, butt out, jerk!” exclaimed Nigel. “I heard what he said, but I still don’t see the point in this Rose Guardian crap!”
The Blue Guardian, or Andre, strode over to Nigel. “You should know that I am capable of crushing your skull, Rosie.”
“Really? I suppose they inflated your ego too when they were at it. And did they do something to your brain? Is that why you are so keen to do everything they say?”
“And I wonder if they made anything else bigger?” Danielle interjected. “Yes, you know what I mean, I can see it in your eyes! You men are all the same. How big is it now? Nine inches? Ten? Did you try it out on her or is she not your type?”
As the humans were swept up in a melee of finger prodding and shouting, they did not hear the door click behind Tckek and B’lel as they quietly left the room. They did, however, notice the large doors at the opposite end of the room slowly grind apart, revealing the openness of space. At first they thought it was a window, until the force-field maintaining the air pressure was turned off, and they were all swept out into the chilling vacuum of space.
In the control room Tckek and B’lel were slumped in their chairs.
“So.” said Tckek eventually. “You want to start looking for another twelve?”
“Screw them,” B’lel replied bitterly.
“The Chiban will be dissed,” said Tckek as she toyed idly with the navigation console, keying in a course for home base quite accidentally.
“Screw them, too.”
