Elemental by Steven Savile

husband, two children, two rambunctious cats, and a fluctuating population of hamsters.
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    â€œI beg your pardon,” said the alien. “There appears to have been some mistake.”
    â€œI should say so,” his unwilling guest replied with an indignant snort. He made a great business of shaking the rumples out of his robes and brushing invisible specks of dust from his person. “And you’ve made it.”
    The alien’s luminous blue skin went watery green, a sure sign of embarrassment. Probing himself sheepishly with one barbed tentacle, he sidled over to the viewing panel of the little scout ship, his slime trail
minty with dismay. “I can’t for the lives of me understand what went wrong,” he bubbled, all five eyes sliding wildly over the surface of his head, searching the banks of screens and telltales for the elusive answer. “I was aiming for the brown, hairy one. You’re neither, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
    â€œBah,” was all the answer the visitor deigned to return. One toss of his head and his long, golden curls took on a life of their own, filling the control pod with the radiance of a thousand dawns.
    â€œOh my. You can do—you’re certainly not—What else might you be able to—? Dear me.” The calculated display of celestial splendor threw the alien for more of a loop than the one he was already riding. At a complete loss, he sucked a tentacle nervously, forgetting about the barbs, and cut his rubbery lip badly.
    His abrupt cry of pain wrought a radical change in his conscripted guest. Light flared from the visitor’s hand, a spout of flame that congealed into the dimensions of a sword, but when the fire dimmed, the object showed itself to be no more than an olive branch. Waving the lithe bit of greenery in a no-nonsense-now manner, the alien’s abductee seized his captor’s oozing face and declared, “Let me see that. I’m a trained professional. Healing’s my specialty, not these ridiculous reconnaissance assignments.”
    The alien eyed his captive charily, three of them firmly fixed on the visitor, a pair left over to mind the ship’s controls. The olive branch whisked across his lips, leaving a pleasant tingling sensation in its wake and filling his scent receptors with the rich perfume of the homeworld jungles. He gave a little shudder of ecstacy and molted in spite of himself.
    The visitor jumped back, his disgust plain to see. “What was that all about?” he demanded, toeing the alien’s sloughed skin with one golden-sandaled foot.
    The alien went positively emerald out of sheer mortification. As with many species, he immediately sought to counteract his discomfiture by going on the offensive. ( It Is Better to Bluff Than to Squirm is a dictum embroidered on samplers all across the universe and outnumbers Home
Sweet Home by a factor of a trillion and three.) His whole attitude toward his peculiar guest turned crisp and curt. “Look, I don’t have time for this,” he said. “I’ve got a job to do; a job you’re delaying.”
    â€œAnd what do you think I’m supposed to be doing with my time?” came the testy reply. “Planting fig trees? I was just about to Reveal myself to the chosen creatoid when zap !—I’m jerked right off the earth to this Himforsaken place. Not that He isn’t everywhere, of course, but you get my meaning,” he added quickly.
    â€œUh … sure I do,” said the alien, who didn’t. “But what’s a … creatoid?”
    The visitor sighed, and the smaller plumes edging his mighty wings riffled delicately in the breeze. “A creatoid is something that He created, naturally. Only it’s something that—well—something that’s not exactly like the rest of His creations. You see, most of His work’s got a fairly straightforward purpose, a clear-cut and