Federations

They greet each other in the same breath and then the widowed Praesidentrix begins catching up on all the things she has wanted to say to him, repeating all the things she did tell him while he writhed in delirium from his withdrawal, while she had concocted a false story about his fatal “accident” in order to avert a scandal.

But first she must say how proud she is of their son.

DIFFERENT DAY K. TEMPEST BRADFORD

K. Tempest Bradford’s fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Electric Velocipede, Podcastle, and Strange Horizons. In addition to writing, she’s worked in the editorial trenches of several magazines, and is currently the managing editor for Fantasy Magazine.

Bradford says that she’s an “un-fan” of how SF on television and film often depicts each alien race as a monoculture. “When characters go to alien planets, they generally deal with one government, one group of people, one culture, as if that planet is made up of one huge, happy group who work together and have no internal differences,” she said.

So she started thinking about what it would be like if the aliens that came here had the same problems we have—fighting between groups and cultures and such. “I also thought it would be nice to show that they wouldn’t necessarily come to America first,” she said. “Or, if they did, it wouldn’t be because they think we’re superior.”

I didn’t pay much attention to the aliens at first. Oh, if you mean like that first week, then yeah, we were scared and hiding and shit like everyone else. But once the whole thing calmed down and everything went back to normal I didn’t spend that much time thinking about them.

It’s all well and good to come down from space and promise you can fix the ozone or whatever, but any group of people—aliens, sorry—that come to this planet and start out by talking to our government have to be seriously doubted. All the countries on all the continents and they think we’re the most likely to care about cleaning up the environment? Ha ha, yeah right.

Anyway, like I said, after that first scare I didn’t pay a lot of attention to them. Not like my daughter with her t-shirts and webpages and all that. My little corner of the world wasn’t going to change.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a head-in-the-sand kind of guy. I read newspapers from all over on my Google News. I knew about how other countries were mad that those—whatchacall’em? . . . By-er-nam-yan? Yeah—them Byernamian aliens were making deals with us like America has some kind of power to decide stuff for the whole planet. Thing is, no matter how many threats they make, I live in Mason fucking Ohio. Nothing ever happens here until it’s happened somewhere else at least five times. Aliens or not, I still have to be at work on Monday and take my son to karate on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

It got really messed up when the other aliens came, though. The other ones. You know, the ah . . . Deb . . . Debachhhk—whatever. I can’t make that sound—neither can anyone on CNN. My wife and I call them the African Aliens because they have that weird head shape.

I was pulling an all-nighter here at the store—correcting the bedroom set inventory my stupid nephew screwed up—when I heard Nelson Mandela on the radio announcing that he’d been negotiating with aliens too, and that they were from the same planet as the Byerwhosits but a different tribe or somethin’. And you know that it was no mistake that shit was broadcast when it was 4 A.M. here.

Now see, that was when I started paying attention. Cuz those first aliens had promised to do something about global warming, but here the African Aliens come to tell us that they were lying. Flat out. Those Byernams don’t even have access to the technology. And here we’d given them, what, half of the global soy crop already? For nothing?

I tell you though, even though they freak me out a little, I gotta respect those African Aliens. They deal with Mandela and the Dalai Lama and only them two. They did their homework before showing up here. Mandela and the Lama are the only two guys on the planet I would trust not to screw everybody else over. Of course, my wife is pissed that they don’t have a woman in there, too. Knowing her, she’d probably want it to be Oprah.