Stowaways
Dave Fischer
https://www.cca.org

We are here, in this village, on this planet, because of The Sneaky
One. He lived through many ages, with many names, behind many faces.
You may have met him before, you may even be him one day. He appears
unexpectedly and stays briefly. Here, or on Earth, or on any other
planet mankind has reached. When it is not enough to be smart and
strong, the Sneaky One shows how to find an unexpected way.

In the early dawn, when our ancestors were just tiny dots in the sea,
he was the first to whisper and share his plans half-and-half with
another, to grow sneakier and sneakier. He was curious so he grew eyes,
and what he saw scared him so he grew armor. He grew a backbone and
fins, then traded his fins for legs to walk on the land.

He was a furry little blur running between the feet of giant lumbering
monsters. The world exploded while he hid under a rock. The strong died
and he survived. He flourished with a leap into the trees and then onto
the plains, where he discovered fire. He was a hunter, a farmer, a
trader, a doctor, an engineer. He stayed in no one place, but ran on
and on.

He discovered the Lambda Calculus.

He was there when Outsiders first visited our homeworld. He didn't
trust them, and hid in the shadows. They were tall and skinny, with too
many eyes and not enough arms. They lived in tanks of thick fluid. They
offered to help us visit the stars. Many went with them, but none
returned, and the stories that made it back drove their families to
vengeance. The same thing happened with the silent ones covered in
horns, the floating ones that looked like kaleidoscopes, and the ones
that were just clouds of very smart dust.

They offered much, took much, and no one who dealt with them survived.

The Outsiders treated Earth like a truckstop. They entertained us with
shiny trinkets, but gave us nothing of value. There was no war and no
famine, but Earth was doomed all the same. We built no trinkets of our
own, had no trinket factories or trinket engineers. Earth was dying of
apathy.

Everyone wanted a fresh start but there was no place to go.

The Sneaky One decided to lead a group to settle a new world, even if
the Outsiders would not help.

Our ancestors built ships that could reach nearby villages (like the
boats we sail on the freshwater sea), then bigger ships that could
reach distant shores, (like the ships we sail on the oil sea), then
giant ships that traveled to the moon and nearby planets (like the
ships we sail on the lava sea).

But they went no further. They never built a ship that could reach the
stars.

The galaxy must be filled with civilizations, because every ship that
landed looked different, and was manned with completely different
Outsiders.

The Sneaky One watched each ship as it arrived, as it sat, and as the
crew readied it for departure.

One was filled with swirling red fumes that killed anything in their path.
All the grass around the ship turned to dust, dotted with the bodies of
birds that had flown too close. These Outsiders wore suits
that covered them completely and protected them from Earth air, which
was surely as poisonous to them as theirs was to us. The Sneaky One
kept his distance. It was no good to sneak onto a ship filled with
death.

One ship landed like a mountain dropped onto the plains. It sank
halfway into the ground before coming to a stop. Tiny earthquakes shook
the town until it left. It had no openings, no doors, and no Outsiders
were seen. A thin layer of the hull melted and dripped onto the ground,
and Earthmen came and took that away, then sprayed some other substance
onto the ship. It flew away as slowly and heavily as it had landed. The
Sneaky One thought perhaps there were no doors because there were no
rooms - the ship was a solid block of metal. Could one ever understand
the Outsiders behind such a ship?

One huge gleaming metal ship landed, ate a bunch of people, fell asleep
for a month, and then launched back into the sky on a plume of fire.
Even the Sneaky One was surprised by this. No one had ever heard a
spaceship snoring before.

One day there was a new star in the sky, brighter than any other. News
spread that it was a visiting ship, too large to come close. A smaller
ship - still larger than any we had seen before - landed to bring the
Outsiders down to visit. Hundreds of beings, many different types,
wearing all different uniforms, spread out from the ship and wandered
the city.

The Sneaky One smiled. He knew these Outsiders. He had seen the same
types among his own people many times over the years. Sailors are the
same, in any time or place. Men on wooden barges, women on titanium
rockets, aliens on indescribable spheres leaping between the stars.
There are things about all these crews that are familiar. They come
ashore from ships in every port, looking for a game or a hustle; they
are out for a good time, out for themselves.

There was a bar in the spaceport called "The Crashed Spaceship". When
the Outsiders arrived, man abandoned his own spaceflight plans, and
most of his ships were scrapped. This one fell off a transport on the
way to be melted down, and was abandoned. Squatters lived in it for a
few years, but eventually someone fixed it up, cut new windows, and
turned it into the seediest bar in town.

The Sneaky One walked in, ordered a drink, and sat down to wait.
Eventually an Outsider appeared and settled down at a table in a dark
corner.

At a distance this Outsider looked human, but as he got closer The
Sneaky One realized it was a robotic suit, and looking in the visor
where his face should be, he found the Outsider to be a writhing mass
of worms. They appeared to be fighting, and their battles controlled
the Outsider's behaviour. When the worms with sharp red and black
spikes were ascendant, the Outsider was confident and confrontational.
When the tiny translucent worms overwhelmed with their numbers, he
became withdrawn and paranoid. It was strange to talk to one whose
imminent moods were so visible.

The Outsider told him of an opportunity for a limited number of guests
on his ship, of the distant planet they would be taken to, of the
beautiful empty land seeking settlers. The Sneaky One smiled and asked
naive questions about the new frontier.

It was all lies: he knew the Outsider was a low-ranking sailor in no
position to offer him anything legitimate. But The Sneaky One knew that
his money would get him on board as a stowaway, and that would suffice.
He quickly contacted the people he knew that were desperate for a new
life and got a group together ready for the journey.

The group boarded the ship hidden in boxes, and the Outsider told them
to stay put. As soon as he left them alone, The Sneaky One led them
away from that room and into a hidden corner of the giant ship.  There
were many different types of Outsiders on the ship. Only the ones that
looked somewhat human had landed. The others were giants, and the ship
was built to their scale. We walked among them like mice. We hid in a
coil of electrical cable, behind a burning-hot air duct, between
barrels waiting to be dumped into a passing star.

The ship's crew searched for us, and we hid in a tiny dark crevice
while they passed just outside. The Sneaky One wove a spider web over
the opening, so no one bothered to look inside.

We adapted to life on the ship. Time passed differently for the
Outsiders and for us. For us, generations passed between each port.
We lived and died hidden away in crates and dark corners. We grew, as
we have always grown, since we were tiny creatures lost in the tide.

We adapt to stay alive.

Each time the ship stopped The Sneaky One would look at the crates The
Outsiders were getting ready to unload, and try to guess what kind of
planet it was. Usually it was horrible chemicals and incomprehensible
machinery which told him nothing, but one day he saw boxes of something
sort of like chainsaws, and guessed that the planet must have many forests.

They decided to take a chance, and he led the group out of hiding, and
down to the planet below. It had been a very long voyage. We were not
exactly the same creatures that had snuck aboard that ship, but close
enough - the spark of humanity was still inside.

The new planet turned out to be a disaster that almost wiped us
out. We escaped the dangers of the ship only to find ourselves hunted
in the new world. No one lived here. Robots patrolled the land,
protecting giant automated factories from interference. Merely existing
was good enough for the robots to start shooting, so we were on the run
again.

As descendants of the furry little blur running between the feet of
giant lumbering monsters, we knew how to adapt. We built villages
and a life in the cracks and crevices between the robotic factories. We
learned how to hunt and harvest when the robots weren't looking. We
learned how to be invisible when they were.

It was The Sneaky One who discovered that certain color clothes made us
invisible to the robots, and that we only had to hide completely when the
sun was very near the horizon, early or late.

In time we realized that it really was a beautiful world, but with
towering featureless metal cubes instead of mountain ranges, and huge
security robots instead of dinosaurs.

Like volcanic eruptions, the robot factories spit cargo into the
sky in deafening explosions at regular intervals. The automated
launches take the planet's resources to ships in orbit, to be scattered
to the surrounding stars in trade.

Sometimes The Sneaky One breaks into one of the factories and hides a
message in the cargo waiting for launch. A single note in one box among
millions will probably never be seen, but if he sends enough maybe one
will be found by a worker in a factory on an unknown planet, circling a
distant star.

Maybe one day one of those workers will be from Earth.

"Hello! We are here! Come sneak away, stow away to a new life!"