Once upon a time, forty years ago or so, the residents of a secretive alley in the centre of Brussels rescued the pilot of a small spaceship that had crashed on Grand-Place, a mere five paces away from the steps leading up to the medieval town hall.
Luckily, the accident happened in the middle of the night, and for some reason no one was around. An odd coincidence, in the heart of a vibrant city and at a time when cars were still allowed to park on the square, but why quibble with a stroke of fortune?
The craft’s outstanding safety features saved the pilot from the worst, but the impasse’s search and rescue detail found him unconscious, and the vehicle itself was badly damaged.
Both were quickly relocated to the impasse, well away from prying eyes, and a maintenance crew hastily assembled from the alley’s handier residents had soon removed all traces of the impact. When dawn rose over Grand-Place, the cobble stones that the crash had dislodged had been relaid in perfect, rock-solid rows, projecting an air of grey innocence.
At the hostel’s infirmary, Adelphine and healer Xavier attempted to remove the alien’s space suit to see how they could help. To their surprise, most of what they had assumed was his body came right off with it.
What remained appeared to be a translucent, oblong sac filled with fluid. Several types of liquid seemed to be sloshing about and mingling in audibly gurgling eddies, with bubbles of – what, air? – rising to the surface from the murky depths below.
There were shiny, multi-hued particles churning in the whorls, with different colour combinations dominating in the individual fluids. Where droplets of one liquid had spilled out into another, the tiny, shiny dots appeared to be losing their sheen.
There were no eyes or ears or hands or feet, just a sort of cantaloupe-shaped head bulge at the top and stubby arm- and leg-tubes on either side.
The membrane seemed intact. But presumably its content needed the exoskeleton-suit-thingy to survive and communicate? The healers adjusted the faceplate over the front of the head, concerned that they might damage the wobbly vesicle if they tried to zip it back in, and threw a few blankets over the lot.
When the mauve eyes did finally open, the pilot was still very weak.
“Where am I,” he burbled, as the team was later to learn.
“Sh-hal ar’hp” is what they heard, and Xavier had just asked him for his name. It was to take many years before the misunderstanding was finally cleared up, and by then the moniker Chlurp had stuck.
Soon enough, the sac managed to sit up in the bed. It seemed responsive, engaging with the healers’ efforts as far as its strength allowed, all the while emitting pongy gurgles and burps that made no sense to them.
On the morning following this breakthrough, Xavier and Adelphine walked in with a tray.
“Good morning! How are you today?”
The reply came in the form of a guggle, which sounded much more composed than the previous days’ rumbles and squeaks. A rectangular patch had appeared on the sac’s delicate “skin”, halfway down the front and about as wide. Sort of where the waist might have been, if the stranger had had one. It displayed shifting patterns of multicoloured dots formed by the particles inside.
Upon examination, it seemed that the fluids in the sac had settled. The swirls looked far more sedate, the individual liquids had separated, and all the tiny specks in the flow were again shining brightly, churning in a hypno-kaleidoscopic dance that soon had the healers spellbound.
Completely absorbed.
Staring and slack-jawed, in fact.
Adelphine tore herself away and elbowed Xavier.
“He looks fine. Cover him up or we’ll never get anything done.”
Xavier shook himself out of it and reached for the blankets.
“We didn’t know what kind of nutrition you need, so we didn’t dare put you on a drip while you were out.” He probably didn’t understand, but Adelphine was doing her best anyway. “Now that you’re better, we’ve brought a few things you might like.”
She pulled up the overbed table on which they had placed the tray, positioning the tiny buffet in front of the sac. They couldn’t wait to see what the creature would choose. And how these picks would be absorbed – the thing didn’t seem to have a mouth. Did it soak nutrients up by osmosis?
Best to plan a variety of consistencies, and an assortment of containers. Who knows, maybe their patient needed to roll around in the stuff.
Which explained the baby bath on the floor, and the predominance of liquid options – a banana smoothie, a blended leek soup, a litre of apple juice. A picture of the ingredients was helpfully attached to the various offerings, so that their guest could weed out anything that might bring him out in hives.
They saw no obvious way for their patient to ingest solids, but then again who knew. Just to be on the safe side, they had added a few wedges of cheese, two thick, buttered slices of soft raisin bread, a quartered apple and several pieces of chocolate.
For a while, the sac seemed perplexed as it appraised the situation through the ill-adjusted face plate. And then, one of the arm stubs lengthened, reaching across to hover briefly over each dish in turn.
A pocket opened wide on the end of the arm, transforming the limb into an appendage that resembled an elephant’s trunk. Which then just inhaled the entire banquet, down to the very last droplet and crumb. The trunk retracted back into the stump, the sac settled back against the pillows, and a resonant burp concluded the meal.
“I think I know what we’ve got here,” Xavier said.
“Yep.”
“It’s a sentient digestive system.”
“That would be my guess.”
“Un ventre sur pattes.”
“An intelligent, self-aware bag of bacteria,” Adelphine concluded.
Science keeps telling us that our gut, with its complex microbiome, is a kind of second brain. Maybe this alien kept his auxiliary brain in his head.
* Him?
Indeed, the pilot could just as easily have been a she or a they or an it or any number of other pronouns, all of which we’re very happy to embrace here at stoempsurprise. But to the untrained observer this one did apparently come across as a he, and so the team just went with that for the time being.
It later turned out that they were right, but on further reflection they couldn’t quite pinpoint why they had made this assumption. What was it about the alien’s average height and build, the huge mauve eyes or their vertical lids that had seemed presumptively male?
To Tildie, the rescuers’ split-second decision smacks slightly of bias, but she doesn’t want to sugar-coat their account of what happened.