Visitors from Above

High over the dark side of North America, where the night still had most of Ohio and saw no reason to hand it back early, a ship the color of poured mercury hung in place and made no sound at all.

Prellaxian ships did not make sounds. Sound was a byproduct, and the Prellaxian Bureau of Galactic Compliance had spent several hundred thousand years eliminating byproducts, beginning with engine noise, proceeding through clutter, ornament and small talk, and arriving at last at facial expressions, which it phased out as an efficiency measure and had not missed once. The ship was sleek as a phone designed by a civilization that considers phones quaint. It had no seams, because a seam is where a thing comes apart, and nothing Prellaxian had ever come apart without first being scheduled for demolition in the correct form.

Inside, the cabin was white. The walls were white and the floor was white, and the ceiling was the white of a form nobody has filled in yet. There was one chair. It faced a window that ran the width of the ship, and in it sat the ship’s only passenger, reading a planet.

His name was Vex. He was seven feet tall and thin, gray from his narrow skull to his long fingers, and his face was angular and entirely still, a face with no expressions in it, only findings. He wore a business suit made of liquid mercury. It moved when he moved and settled when he stopped, always perfectly tailored.

The planet in the window was blue and green and very small, and from this far out it was faintly ridiculous.

“Planet Earth,” Vex said, to the cabin. “Sol system. Outer Rim.”

A holographic clipboard lay across his knees, lit in clean cyan lines that did not bleed or glow, because glowing was also a byproduct. He touched it, and it gave one precise tone.

“Galactic Classification: Level 2. ‘Mildly Amusing, Do Not Engage.’ Last inspection: four thousand years ago.” He scrolled. “Status: overdue.”

The Bureau had not forgotten Earth. The Bureau did not forget things. It had placed Earth in a queue, and the queue had advanced at the speed at which the Bureau’s queues advanced, which, measured against a species that had in the meantime invented the wheel, the calendar, the printing press and the drive-through window, was slow, and measured against the career of a Prellaxian inspector with fourteen thousand years of service behind him, was roughly the time it takes to find a pen.

“Recent flagged activity,” Vex said. “Unauthorized Zogarian presence on surface. Anomalous energy signatures detected.” The clipboard offered a third line, and he read it with no change in his voice, because he had none to change. “A force field over a public park. Visible from orbit.”

He looked down at the dark continent. He could not currently see a force field over a public park. He noted that he had verified this personally, from orbit, and the note went into the file beside the other one, where the two would contradict each other for as long as the file existed, which was forever.

“Unofficial amendment on file from a Zogarian observer.”

The clipboard displayed it. Whoever had submitted it had chosen their own font, which was large and round and slightly festive: Revised ranking: Worth Preserving for Tacos Alone.

Beneath it, in the Bureau’s font, which nobody had chosen, since choosing was a byproduct: Amendment not recognized.

Vex did not know what a taco was. He made a note to find out, so that he could disapprove of it accurately.

“Also,” he said, and scrolled to the bottom, where the Bureau’s analysts kept the remarks they could not fit into a category, “the species has not yet agreed on a temperature unit.”

He considered the little blue planet, which was at that moment measuring its own weather in two systems at once, one built on the freezing of water and the other on reasons its users could no longer explain, and arguing about the difference on several continents while the weather did whatever it wanted.

“Truly remarkable,” he said, in the tone the Bureau reserved for mold.

He stood. The suit rippled and resettled, perfect, before the ripple had any chance to become interesting.

“I will conduct a standard planetary assessment. Duration: twenty-four standard hours. If the planet fails to meet minimum compliance standards, I will recommend rezoning.”

A committee had chosen the word rezoning because it sounded like paperwork, and it was paperwork, all the way to the end, and past the end, where the work was done by contractors who had never read the forms. Four hundred planets had been rezoned in recorded galactic history. Every one of them had been given a fair hearing first. The hearings were considered very thorough.

Vex looked at the planet a moment longer, the way a man looks at a stain on a carpet he has been asked to assess.

“I have never not recommended rezoning,” he said.

The clipboard, which had been listening, plotted the anomalous energy signature for him: a single cyan point, pulsing, fixed in a patch of woods on the eastern edge of a small settlement in the middle of the continent, where the frost had been down since midnight. He enlarged it. The settlement was flat and square and had one water tower. He asked the clipboard for its name, and the clipboard, which knew everything the Bureau knew and a little more, told him.

The cruiser tipped its nose toward the frost and went down through the clouds, silent, toward Bakerfield, Ohio.

Where else.