Alien Sex: 19 Tales by the Masters of Science Fiction and Dark Fantasy

WHEN THE FATHERS GO ^{BRUCE McALLISTER}

WHEN HE TOLD ME he had fathered a child Out There, I felt sure he was lying. I thought of the five years I’d been awake, the five years since his return, the five years I’d been pleading with him for a child, and I thought of all his lies. (They all come back lying.)

I was sure he was lying.

It was night in the skyroom. We were naked and wet from another warm programmed rain, and were again pawing at each other in good-natured frustration, laughing because the paper-thin energy field between us wouldn’t let us touch.

The frustration was important.

Soon one of us would tell the room’s computer to activate a stencil, a brand-new pattern for our hands to explore blindly, seeking the holes through which we might reach each other.

The frustration was so important.

Before long—if everything went right—we would be moving against the field like animals, two starved bodies no longer willing to accept the constraints so good-naturedly.

It was all a karezza, a game I suspected Jory liked, though I could never be sure. The only things I was sure of were the hallucinogens and the pheromas. These I knew he liked. Only these.

He might pull away suddenly from the stencil, stare at me, and walk off into the night.

And if he stayed, if he indeed stayed long enough for it to happen, it would be an event as unrelated to me as any dim nova in a distant galaxy. I would see it in his eyes: he would be somewhere else. His moment would belong to him and him alone—Out There.

I blame the hallucinogens as much as the rest. I am jealous of the Moonlight, the Starmen, Schwarzchild’s Love, and Winkinblinkins. They are his real lovers.

When he spoke, I assumed it was to the room’s computer. But his voice went on—the amplified stars twinkling madly through the electronic glass, the moonlight falling on our naked shoulders like a cold blue robe. He was talking to me.

“I’m sorry, Dorothea,” he was saying. “I am, as a long-lost poet once put it, a man adrift from his duties, a man awash in his world. I should have told you long before now, but did not. Why? Because it’s horrible as well as beautiful.”

He paused, so emotional, so crucified by remorse, and then: “When I was Out There, Dorothea, when I had the starlocks at my back and the universe at my feet, when I’d abandoned my home world as surely as if I’d died, I took an alien lover, Dorothea, and she bore me a son. I can’t believe it myself, but it is true, and the time has come.”

He was histrionic. He was heroic. He was playing to some great audience I couldn’t see.

And he was lying.

They say the ones who go Out There—the diplos, greeters, and runners—come back liars because of what they’ve seen, because of the starlock sleep, because of what they dream as they make their painful slow way through the concentric rings of sequential tokamaks, super-pinches, marriages of light-cones, and miracles of winkholes. It is a sleep (the rumors say) filled with visions of eternal parallel universes, of all possible alternative worlds—where Hitler did and didn’t, where Christ was and wasn’t, where the Nile never flowed, where Jory never left, or if he did, I never went to sleep for him.

They are changed by it. They come back seeing what isn’t, but what might have been, what isn’t but is—somewhere. And because they come back liars to a world fifteen years older, there will always be jobs for any man or woman willing to be a diplo or greeter or runner. They are the lambs. They are sacrificed in our names.

Whether Jory’s lies are universes he indeed perceives, or simply the handiwork of a pathology, I do not know. I do know that there are times when I enter his lies with him and times when I do not. There are even times when I love his lies, though it embarrasses me to say so. When we lie together on the little stretch of sand below our house and make a simpler love—the roll of the waves mercifully drowning out the sucking of the great factory pipes so nearby—I want those lies, ask for them in my own way, and he gives them to me:

“Dorothea, my love, I have known women, insatiable women, women from a satyr’s wildest dreams. I have known them in every port of the Empire—from Dandanek II to Miladen-Poy, from Gloster’s Alley to Blackie’s Hole, from the great silicon-methane bays of Torsion to the antigravity Steppes of Heart—and none of them can compare with the softest touch of your skin, with the simplest caress of your breath.”

There are no ports like these. Not yet. No swashbuckling spacelanes, no pirates of the Hypervoid, no Empire. No romantic Frontier for the sowing of the human seed throughout galaxies so vast and wondrous that their glory must catch in your throat. It is, after all, a simpler, more mundane universe we inhabit.

But when he speaks to me like this, my world is suddenly grand, the ports as real as San Francisco, the women as lusty as legends, and I, a Helen of New Troy, with a strange and beautiful apple in my hand.

I could have answered him with “What was she like, Jory?” I could have entered that lie, too, and said, “Did you ever see your son, Jory?”

But this one hurt. It hurt too much.

“What do you mean, the time has come?” I asked, sighing.

He was turning away, toward the darkness of the hills behind our house.

“He is coming to live with us,” he said.

I closed my eyes. “Your son?”

“Of course, Dorothea.”

I hate him for it.

He knows how it hurts. He knows why.

We have encountered three races Out There. The first two—the nearest us in light-years—are indeed humanoid, offering (for some, at least) clear proof of the “seeding” theory of mankind’s presence in this solar system. The third race, the mysterious Climagos, is so alien that instead of animosity and avarice we find in it a disturbing generosity—gifts like the energy fields, crystalline sleep, and the starlocks. In return, it has asked nothing but goodwill. We do not understand this. We do not understand it at all.

We have (we have decided) nothing to learn, nothing to gain, from the two humanoid species, the little Debolites and stolid Oteans. We ignore them, and are jealous of the attention the Climagos pay them. We are, it would seem, afraid of what these two humanoid species might eventually do with the Climagos’ gifts. After all, we know well what it means to be “human.”

“You haven’t asked, but I will tell you anyway,” he says.

He has followed me down to the tidepools, where I am trying to count the species of neogastropods and landlocked sculpins, to compare them against those listed in a wood-pulp book printed fifty years ago.

He seems sober, matter-of-fact. This means nothing.

Oblivious to the chugging of the factory behind him, he looks wistfully out to sea and says:

“She was Otean, of course. Her thighs like tree trunks, her body a muscular fist. The sable-smooth hair that covered her glinted like gold in the sunset of their star. She was a child by their standards, but twice as old as I, and her wide dark eyes were as full of dreams as mine. That is how it happened: we both were dreamers. I’d been away too long.”

It is a moving tale, in its own way convincing. Otus is indeed a heavy world, the atmosphere thick, the surface touched by less light than Earth. In turn, Otean eyes are more photosensitive, their bodies stockier, their lungs accustomed to richer oxygen. And although they are much more like us than the little Debolites are, they hate Terra; they cannot stand to be here even for a day, even in lightweight breathing gear. (Some say it is photophobia; others believe it is a peculiarity of the inner ear; still others, a vascularization vertigo.)

“I was drunk on the oxygen mix of that world,” Jory is saying now, “and never did smell the lipid alienness of her. My poor blind passion never stumbled the whole long night.”

I remember something else that gives credence: the marks—the dozens of tiny toothlike marks on his chest, on the inside of his arms. They’ve been there since I can remember, though I’ve never asked about them, assuming, as I did, that they’d been left by the medical instruments that prepared him for his journey.

Abruptly, somberly, Jory says, “No, I never saw the boy. I left Otus long before he was born.”

It is almost convincing. But not quite.

1. Humans and Oteans are able to copulate, but fertilization is impossible; the Otean secretions are toxic. And were a sperm cell to survive, it would not penetrate the ovum; and were it to penetrate, the chromosomes would fail to align themselves on the spindle.

2. Jory was never on Otus.

One day not long after he returned and I awoke, Jory said to me: “What does a man gain by winning the universe, if by doing so he loses himself? He can never buy it back once it is bartered away.” He was quoting someone, I felt sure. But I didn’t ask and he didn’t explain.

He was quiet for a while, and then, voice hoarse with sorrow, he whispered, “They lied to me, Dorothea, just as they lie to us all,” and he began to weep. I took him in my arms and held him. I did not let go.

That was the man I knew. I have not seen him since.

I have located four species of rock shell, but it has taken nearly five hours. According to the wood-pulp book, fifty years ago I’d have found four times as many, and in half the time.

The factory has been here for thirty-five, yet it denies its pipes have ever dumped oxygen-depleting wastes into the delicate littoral zone.

The liars are so nearby, Jory.

I recall something else now, too.

Four years ago, not long after we had the addition built, Jory received a tape in the mail. He never offered an explanation; I never asked for one. That is our way. But one day I heard it, and saw it.

I was passing his new room, the one he’d built for privacy. I’d never stopped before, but this time I did because I heard a voice.

It sounded innocuous enough—mechanical and skewed to the treble like a cheap computer voice. But when I tried to understand it, I realized that it wasn’t a simvoice at all, that the language I was hearing was not of Earth.

When I reached the doorway, I stepped quietly inside and stopped.

Jory was seated at the screen, his back to me, and by the way he was staring I felt sure the screen held a face, a face belonging to the voice.

I took one step and saw the screen.

There was no face. Instead, an alien landscape filled the screen, violet crags and crimson gorges bathed by an unearthly light, the entire vision quivering like a bright, solarized rag.

The voice chattered on. Jory remained hypnotized. I left quickly, shivering.

That evening I pleaded with him again. All I could think of was the gorges, the eerie light, the quivering screen. I still believed that a child, however it came, would be able to banish such strangeness from the heart and soul of the man I loved, the man I thought I knew.

Despite the Climagos’ greatest gift, very few humans have traveled Out There. As our technocrats learned long ago, the exploration of space is handled best by machines, not by flesh-and-blood liabilities.

There is one matter, though, that cannot be handled by mechanical surrogates—not, that is, without risk of diplomatic insult. That matter is Business—the political and economic business between sentient races and their worlds.

The leaders of Business understand the risks, and in turn, the diplos of interstellar politics, the greeters and runners of interstellar trade, and the occasional scope of interstellar R&D are all common men and women. All contract for the money (so they claim); all are commissioned with instant diplomatic or corporate rank in the departments of state, MNCs, and global cartels that hire them; and all have little computers implanted in their skulls.

To make them what they are not.

To make them what those back on Earth so need them to be.

“She was a Debolite, Dorothea.” His agony is profound, his confession sincere, tortured. “Forgive me, please. I know few women would, but I ask it of you because you, more than most, should be able to understand.” The pause is a meaningful one. “I shared a meal—skinned rodentia of some kind and a fermented drink made from indigenous leaves—with a committee of seven provincial demipharaohs. She was their courier. Later that night, she visited me in my quarters with an urgent—and I might add, laudatory—message from the Pharaohess Herself. I was intoxicated from their infernal tulpai, Dorothea. Otherwise, I’d never have been able to do what I did—to touch a body like that, so small and fragile, the face a clown’s, the skin like taut parchment except where the slick algae grows.”

He puts his head in his hands. He slumps forward. The scar is no longer red.

He says: “I saw the boy two years later. I could barely stand the sight of him.”

He seems to collapse. “Dear God,” he whispers. Quietly he begins to sob.

I get up. He is probably sincere. He probably believes what he is describing. Nevertheless, I blame him and with blame comes the hate.

1. Procreation is no more likely between humans and Debolites than it is between humans and sheep.

2. Jory was never on Debole.

3. Jory does not believe in the God whose name he takes in vain.

Debole is a small planet, and does not spin. Its inhabitants—fauna and flora alike—hug the twilight zone between eternal sun and endless night, and the thermal sanity which that zone provides. The Debolites are much smaller than humans, no larger in fact than the prosimians who scampered on Earth’s riverbanks forty million years ago, grist for the gullets of larger reptiles. The black algae that feeds on the secretions and excretions of their skin helps insulate them from the cold, as do the arrangements of fatty deposits around their vital organs, deposits which give them a lumpy, tumorous look. And the natural violet pigment of their dermis protects them from ultraviolet agony.

The Debolites are five thousand years away from their own natural space age. Because they are, mankind couldn’t be less interested. But the Climagos are interested. This puzzles us. What do they see?

I’ve taken the pheroma capsules, and try not to complain.

To keep our skin’s bacterial succession intact, we have not bathed. Our exertions fill the air with a nightmarish brine, and I choke on it. The copulins are fiery ants behind my eyes, I am as nauseous as I’ve ever been in my life. (What was the dose this time? Which series did he use? Am I developing an allergy? Is there anyone who hates them as much as I do?)

We are squirming like blood-crazed chondrichthy. Jory’s breathing is stertorous from the olfactory enhancement, the steroid bombardments, and I am doing my best to emulate his passion despite the threat of peristalsis.

Suddenly, in the voice of a stranger, Jory says:

“You’ll choose not to believe me, as always. That is your right, Dorothea. But I must try to prepare you.”

I shudder, shudder again. The room is warm, sickeningly so, but Jory’s body has stopped moving. What will it be this time?

“She was a Climago, Dorothea. I use the term she to help you—to help us both—understand what happened. Don’t bother insisting that such a thing is impossible, because it is possible—it indeed happened. The Climagos are a compassionate race. They gave humanity the starlock secret; they gave humanity crystalline sleep and energy fields. And they gave one lone man—me, Jory Coryiner—another gift as well.”

He pauses, mouth open, his jaw struggling.

“I don’t need to tell you what they look like. You know.”

I say nothing, the nausea unending.

How could I possibly know? Those who come back with descriptions are liars, and there isn’t a government on Earth that appears interested in dispelling the mysteries. Even the commedia claim they can’t get stills or tapes—not even of those Climagos who visit Earth. (Are they so shy? Are they so archetypally terrible to behold that the teeming masses of Terra, were they to find out, would riot, destroy their own cities, demand an instant end to diplomatic relations?)

But like everyone else, I’ve collected the descriptions—dozens and dozens of them. Chambered nautili with radioactive tendrils? Arachnoids cobalt-blue or fuchsia, or striped like archaic barber poles? Bifurcated flying brains? Systolic muscles with “gyroscope” metabolisms? Silicon ghosts? Colonial pelecypods looking more like death’s-head skulls than clams? Which do you prefer, Jory?

“And you know, I’m sure,” he is saying now, “how they’ve managed to survive on their hostile world for two hundred million years. I’m sure you know.”

Perhaps I do. Perhaps I do not. I have heard the stories—and chosen to believe them—about those miracles of symbiosis, the Climagos. How their world is a litany of would-be predators, of knife-blade mandibles, deadly integuments, extruded stomachs that should have consumed every Climago on the planet a million times over—and would have were it not for the one trait that makes them not unlike us: a talent for adaptation, for cooperation, for helping and being helped.

It isn’t simply cortical convolutions, though Climagos are certainly as intelligent as Terran cetaceans and pachyderms and Homo erectus, whatever “intelligence” may mean. It is the myriad ways in which they have learned to cooperate—to co-opt and thereby to best every other species on their home planet. The apelike things (so the stories go) who for aeons lent them their prehensile hands. The great saurians who provided them with locomotion and “gross environmental-manipulation capability.” The mindless coelenterates who shared their nutrient flesh with them during drought and famine. And the endless others. The helpers, and the helped.

In return, the Climagos—telepathic, patient—provided the sensory information needed to lead the day-blind lizards to new species of prey, to keep the feathery simians one step ahead of their growing enemies, to help the eternal jellyfish foresee the impending changes in the great tidal inlets of the world.

“You can understand why it happened. She was a greeter, too—one of theirs—and I was a lone human. As a devout student of humanity, she understood what my solitude meant; she understood that in their social needs humans are not at all like Climagos, who do not fear loneliness, but are instead like the bottle-nosed dolphins of Earth, who suffer horribly when removed from their own kind.”

He pauses now, averts his eyes and sighs. I smell half-digested food. I smell my own bile. The world swims.

“There was an aeon of need within her,” he is saying, “the need to help, the need to cooperate, the need to court a creature who, under other circumstances, might have been a predator. And within me, there was an aeon of need as well—the need to find kin, a creature I would recognize by the most primitive of means.”

I am still on my hands and knees, unable to move, the sickness darkening with a dread. Above me, Jory’s eyes are the true purple of space, and the metallic breath of nausea moves through me like a toxic tide. It is the pheromas, yes, and the sweat, the androstenol, and all the others, but it is what I see too. Whether he knows it or not, I can indeed see his Climago greeter clearly. It is the version most often described. The horrible consensus.

I see a man so lonely, so crazy from his years of inhuman sleep, so twisted in his pent-up libidinal soul, that he can bring himself to touch it—a worm, a slug, its rolls of fat accordioned on a cartilaginous spine, its face (do I dare call it that?) a lamprey’s, the abrasive bony plates, the hundreds of tiny sucking holes pulling the blood gently—like honey—from his chest, from the in-sides of his arms and thighs and—

Somehow I get up. I stumble. I rush from the room.

The footsteps behind me are heartbeats.

When I reach the bathroom, the sickness comes out. The pheromas make it the odor of death.

Behind me, a voice, disembodied:

“It wasn’t like that at all,” he whines. “Why can’t you try to understand?”

I have started to cry.

“It was beautiful,” he says, faithful that words can change it. “She made it beautiful. They are an incredibly beautiful people, Dorothea.”

A moment ago, it was tears. Now, it is laughter. Here I am, kneeling in my own ambergris, as though worshiping a sunken bathtub, as though believing his most outrageous lie yet. The teeth marks, the rapture. Perhaps that, yes. But not the other.

Not a child.

I turn to him savagely. “And who carried the fetus for her? Some obliging surrogate, some Otean bound by diplomatic duty? If that strikes your fancy, Jory, just nod once and we’ll tape it. But I’m puzzled, Jory. How will he reach us? The locks are far too slow. Is he coming in a taterchip can with tiny retrorockets? Or an FTL attaché case? Climagos are small, you know.”

He looks at me in amazement, his eyes like a child’s. I could kill him and he doesn’t even know it. And I would kill him, I’m sure, were there anything near me sharper than a dryer or a toothcan. This man—this man who for five years has shown so little interest in the woman he lives with, who has heard none of my pleas—now offers me lies for a moment’s absolution.

He steps toward me, takes my arm. I twist my head in a snarl, but I do not pull away.

The look is still there. He shakes his head, horribly hurt. “There’s a son, yes, Dorothea, and, yes, he’s very small—as you surmised. He’s more Climago than human—an alien, yes—but he’s intelligent and caring and he has the capacity to love us. Can’t you at least—”

“Stop it!” I scream, hands over my ears, the smell of my own body like dung.

He goes dreamy now. He turns slowly, stares at the closed windows. I will scream again; I cannot bear what he will say.

“There’s a son, yes,” he begins anew. “He isn’t small at all. He’s a mutant, Dorothea, barely alive, and he may not make it through the starlocks. He’s a pitiful thing, and he deserves our compassion. He has a human head, a nudibranch’s body; he whimpers like a human child, but chokes on his own excrement if held the wrong way. Climago scientists have been studying him for years, but I want him with me now, and his mother—decent soul that she is—agrees. The child is allergic to so many things there; perhaps he will fare better here. If he survives the trip. If we can love hi—”

I hit him. I hit him on the temple, over the scar, feeling the metallic edge of the thing the corporation put there. The thing that has helped make him what he is.

The skin splits at the metal. He flinches, grabs my wrist. The blood begins to ooze.

I’m screaming something now that neither of us understands.

He says calmly, “Accept it, Dorothea. He’ll be arriving soon.”

He leaves me in the bathroom, where I continue to cry.

I do not see him for days.

I was a pale girl and still haven’t lost it. No amount of UV—no matter how graduated—can change that, with all the Irish and English I have in my genes. I’ve got big bones, too—big country-girl hands, pronounced veins and tendons, and hipbones that bruise loves. “Daughter of a meatless tribe,” as my father used to put it.

I wonder how I first looked to Jory.

He was the darkest man I’d ever met, as dark as an “olive” complexion can get—the curse (as he put it later) of some rather thoughtless BlackAm, Amerind, and Hmong-refugee ancestors.

His face, when he turned it to profile, was a hatchet from an ancient dream, and he frightened me at first.

I was raised on one of the last megafarms of the American Midwest. No, that’s wrong. I was raised as the daughter of the senior administrator of one of the last megafarms of the American Midwest. There is a difference. Our house was a big plasticoated three-story Victorian in Cedar Falls, an hour’s helirun from The Farm. No one ever really grew up on a farm like that.

Jory, though, was a son of the Detroit Glory Ghettos—those Recessional projects begun by a cornered liberal administration two decades before his birth. Every minute of his life had been subsidized by citizens who, at their noblest, were full of self-congratulating “concern”; at their worst, rationalized bigotry; and for 1,439 minutes of every day, apathy and indifference. He knew this. He’d grown up knowing it—1,440 minutes of every day.

For years I dreamed of a career somehow related to the magical sciences of megafarming. What I really wanted, of course, was a way never to leave home—a career to protect my narrow affections, first loves, prized childhood memories of a mother and father who worked happily for The Farm. My father, the loud, proud administrator; my mother, the taciturn gene-splicer whose love of her work showed clearly in her quiet eyes.

The last time I saw The Farm was the eve of Jory’s departure. I was twenty-eight years old. The machines were still incredible—the immense nuclear combines, the computerized “octopus pickers” and “dancing diggers.” The land was just as awesome—the dark pH-perfect soil stretching from horizon to horizon. But it was boring now. How could this be the world I’d romanticized for so long?

The career I finally chose to pursue—at the clear-thinking age of fourteen—was veterinary medicine. Not the anthropomorphic-pet kind (which I knew was glutted with practitioners), but the animal-husbandry kind (about which I knew absolutely nothing).

I made it as far as my fourth year of undergraduate studies, and then the world changed. I discovered people, and the dream of veterinary medicine began to fade.

One day I discovered a young man named Jory Coryiner and never dreamed the dream again.

I met him at one of the dinners my parents gave for the Huddleston Industries trainees. There were twelve this time—the usual fifty-fifty split of women and men—and Jory was impossible to miss: dark, cocky, intimidating, haloed with heroic rumors—in all, the most magnetically masculine thing I’d ever encountered in my cloistered Iowan life.

He disliked me intensely at first, I know that now. And with good reason. He knew who I was, and dreaded the inevitable patronizing. I persisted. Here was a young man all were talking about, a young man who’d won a fertboss traineeship not through federally imposed quota-tokenism but through his own impressive record, and for some reason I felt chosen, destined to understand him—his obvious need for a wall, tough carapace, calciferous shell, to hide behind.

How it happened, I can’t say. After an hour’s efforts, he softened. By the end of that hour, I felt I had glimpsed what few others had—the real reason for his chitinous ways: he was the son of a “welfare gloryhole” and he believed he wore that stigma for all to see in the melanin of his skin.

He was wrong, of course. To most men and women, his complexion was charismatic, magical, superior to their own. My own parents certainly never thought twice about my seeing him. But he never understood this. He still doesn’t, and now, it is too late.

I should have seen it. I should have realized that the son of two mothers and two fathers—a boy shuttled back and forth from “step’nt” to “step’nt” throughout childhood—might perceive families in a different way. That a man from a Glory Ghetto who had struggled to escape the dark badge of its dependency might never stop struggling. That the moat might never dry up, the walls never crumble, the carapace never see a shedding no matter how much love fell upon it.

Were there alternative worlds in your eyes even then, Jory—places where Hiroshima never rose toward heaven, where the Jurassic Sea never dried, where the Visigoths held Italy for over five centuries?

I do not know. I lied to myself then, too.

When you told me you had contracted as a runner for Quanta, you took two hours to explain it. When you were through, you did not want to hear any of my questions. Fait accompli. You wanted no chinks, no soft underbelly through which your resolution might be undermined.

You said you were doing it because of your great boredom—and because of the money, the fortune you’d have when you returned. The fertboss position was driving you crazy, you said. Even with the antidepressants The Farm’s headmeds were giving you (I knew nothing of this), your days were leaden with despair, you said.

You said, too, that you’d talked it over thoroughly with three who’d just come back. Two greeters and a diplo—three men. They were colorful talkers, yes, even a little strange at times, but they weren’t crazy, not at all. And they were very happy they’d gone.

Willi, who was eight then, said the only thing he could have: he didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want to give up his school, his teams, his clubs, his counselor, his center, his world. I had no choice. I had to respect it. He would not be our son fifteen years later when Jory returned and I awoke, but it was Willi’s life, too, and to take him with us to a future where he would have only the two of us was all wrong. I believe that still. I do.

My mother was ill. She probably would be for the rest of her life. He could not stay with them. It was Clara and Bo, our friends from Cedar Falls, who at last agreed to take him. He would live with them during the school year until he was eighteen; he would spend summers with Jory’s sister in Missoula or my parents in Cedar Falls. Whichever he preferred.

That was the best I could do, and as I did it, I wept.

You signed your contract. Quanta responded, depositing fifteen years of executive salary with the Citibank trustees. While you slept in the starlocks and did your business on Climago, the capital earned. When you finally returned, you were (like the others) a millionaire and (like the others) so happy.

I slept for you, Jory, because that was my adventure, an adventure I believed was as noble as yours. All around us men and women were doing such things for their departing lovers, and I knew we would meet again—you and I—in a distant, idyllic future, to begin life anew like a modern Adam and Eve.

I slept for you, and my sad but loving parents paid for the suspension care without complaint, though they knew they were burying me.

I’ve seen my father only once since I awoke. Mother is dead. He had nothing to say.

I will not do that to him again.

Time marries. Time reconciles. “It is a recombiner like no other,” as my mother used to say quietly. It has only been two weeks since Jory’s announcement, and I have already begun to believe, to accept what I know cannot be true.

I must be prepared. I cannot afford not to be. If what Jory claims is true, if indeed we are about to have a visitor, I must begin to prepare this house physically—and myself psychologically—for its arrival. Whatever it may be.

After all, the notion of a visitor is, in its own way, appealing. Anything that makes the days feel different is, in its own way, appealing.

I give it the better part of each day. I give it so much that the headaches are excruciating. But they are a small price to pay for being prepared.

1. I’m actually quite qualified to receive the creature, whatever it may be. I received a decent formal training in biology, zoology, and physiology, and I’ve educated myself in recent years in invertebrate and marine biology, malacology, conchology. Jory would be the first to admit this, I’m sure.

2. If the creature is indeed intelligent, I cannot afford to make it feel unwanted. Jory will insist, I am sure, that it remain with us indefinitely, and I will have to abide by that as graciously as possible.

If the creature is intelligent and feeling—if it is indeed from a race driven by an aeon-spanning need to help, to cooperate, to “care”—there is reason, is there not, to assume that some day I will be able to feel something resembling affection for it?

If it survives, of course.

I cannot guess his exact needs. I can only prepare for a variety of contingencies. I know, for example, that Climagos do not need daily intakes of atmosphere, that their integumentary system is “closed,” that they require infusions of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and other elements only occasionally—once a week, say. And though the notion doesn’t reconcile easily with hemophagia, their nutrional needs (according to the one reference tape I’ve been able to locate) follow a similar periodicity.

I will order the appropriate compressed gas tanks from San Francisco, and I will have a marine construction firm in Fort Bragg build a self-sterilizing, airtight room. But I need to do more homework on the nutrion. Perhaps through supplements of some kind—say, a concentrated mineral/protein mixture tailored to blood profiles on Climago—we may be able to circumvent the need for volumes and volumes of blood-bearing tissue.

I’ve gone ahead and phoned three exobiologists in the Bay Area and in Houston, and have extracted all the information I can without jeopardizing our secret. We just can’t let people—scientists, doctors, and commedia folk—know what is about to happen here. Were the word to get out, our lives would be a hell of ruptured privacy. And if the child is as fragile as Jory claims it is, such a commotion might endanger its life.

But the exobs are willing to part with more information than either the transnational corporations or national governments seem to be, and I have unearthed the following: a Climago should be able to exist comfortably on a mixture of oxygenated, hydrogenated, and proteinized Na, K, Ca, Mg, Cl, and various iron- and copper-based transport pigments taken from Terran mammals and accessible through a durable membrane, natural or synthetic.

I haven’t seen Jory in days; I have, in fact, seen him only two or three times in the past few weeks. It is as though his announcement that day—his “gift” to me—was at last able to liberate him.

Which is what he has wanted for five years.

When he visited me at the hospital just after I awoke, he said he wanted a house on this desolate coast. I thought I knew why. I imagined the harshness and solitude would be his way of bringing us together again.

I was lying to myself then.

It was the gray sea, the cold crags, the solitude itself that he wanted, not a marriage of lives. It was the inhumanity of it all that he wanted, and he wanted it more than anything else.

There are times—those rare moments when we embrace without the need to consummate—when I feel in his body the rhythms, the suckings and chuggings of the factory itself, of the great pipes that pull their material from the far seabed, of the dark engines that do to it what they do.

“Why is he coming?” I ask gently, wondering if gentleness can prevent a lie.

“His mother is dead,” Jory says. “He is too human to live out the rest of his life there.”

“No, Jory,” I say. “Why is he coming?”

He looks at me sadly, cocks his head like a dog, and tries again: “Because he has a terrible congenital disorder and has very few years to live. He wants to be with his father, his cold mad feary father, before he dies.”

“Please. Why is he coming?”

The smile flashes like a knife. The cruel eyes transfix me.

“Because I’m sick and tired of your nagging, your slop pails of complaint, Dorothea. I am giving you what you want and need. It’s a better career than the aborted one, isn’t it?”

All I can think to say is, “I see.”

In a softer voice, he tells me, “Because I asked him to, Dorothea.”

“Oh,” I say. “And when was that?”

He looks away. “A few years ago. I’ve missed him so.”

“Jory, a lockgram come-go takes two or three years.”

“Yes, it does, but their telepathy is a very special kind. That’s their survival secret, Dorothea. I can think a message to my beloved son across the whole galaxy and he can hear me. Hemispherical space is no obstacle for a love that—”

I turn. I leave him.

I am sure of it now: Jory invited his “child” to live with us before he left Climago.

Only one explanation is possible: the Climagos are immeasurably more advanced than we are in genetic engineering. They are able, through computer modeling and analog translation, to convert human genetic message into Climago genetic code. They are able to replicate human morphological and physiological capabilities in Climagoan cellular arrangements. But they made a mistake this time. The translation failed. The resulting organism: a hybrid mess, a congenitally doomed anomaly. What Jory has described. Why they would attempt such a thing, I do not know. They are aliens, and perhaps we should not expect to understand them.

I heard voices as I came down the cedar stairs from the helipad yesterday. One was raised, almost violent, and I should have recognized it.

The other was softer, though not conciliatory.

“I can assure you,” the softer voice was saying, “that we do not look sympathetically on visas for them, let alone immigration.”

“And I can assure you”—it was Jory’s voice; I recognized it now—“that if any government tries to block this, you people will know more trouble than you’ve ever known in your puny functionary lives. I’ve accommodated you and your bigoted quarantine laws; now you will accommodate me. If you do not, I can promise you I will spend what funds I have on the loudest, most public litigation this nation has ever seen. The diplomatic repercussions will not be negligible. Official prejudice is never negligible.”

The softer voice said something and Jory screamed, “That’s xenophobic bullshit and you know it! How in God’s name can an organism that must replenish itself once a week with available equipment, that hibernates for two months of the year, that can move no faster than a walk be dangerous? A creature like that is considerably less dangerous than most federal bureaucrats, Mr. Creighton-Mark. “

There was a silence. I stepped into the room.

The violence seemed to recede from Jory’s eyes, which twinkled suddenly in a smile. But the violence was still there; it was there in the rippling muscle of his jaw.

“This is my spou, Mr. Creighton-Mark,” he said. “Dorothea, this is the BIN—or at least a representative of it.” To the official, he said, “May I assume her feelings are admissible?”

The man ignored me and said, “She knows what’s at stake here?”

“Of course.” The anger glowed in Jory’s eyes again, the scar livid. “But why ask me? She’s only a meter from you, and I’m sure she’d answer a question put to her. She might even thank you for the courtesy of it.”

The man ignored the sarcasm. He looked at me at last, and waited.

Helpless, I looked at Jory, found eyes burning with a passion I did not recognize. If love, love for what? If hatred, toward whom?

I nodded, found myself saying, “Of course,” and then repeating it. “Yes, of course.”

Again the violence receded from his eyes, only to be replaced by a distance I knew all too well, as he said:

“We are childless, Mr. Creighton-Mark. I was gone for fifteen years. My spou suspended for me. Our one pre-contract child is now twenty-nine. He’s a courteous young man, but he doesn’t know us, and couldn’t care less. Who could blame him? We abandoned him, did we not? We want to try again now—to be a family.”

My face burned. I could not look at either of them. How could Jory use me like this—against this man? How could he claim feelings he’d just never had!

When I finally did look at the visitor, I could not understand what I saw. His eyes were on Jory; his expression was chaos—as though nothing Jory had said had made any sense to him, as though Jory’s entire speech was the last thing he had expected to hear.

It was the look, I would realize later, of a man stunned by insanity, by the look of it, by the sound of it.

“I see,” the visitor said at last, expression fading, words full of a relinquishing fatigue.

It was over. Jory had somehow won. Parting amenities were exchanged, and as he left the official offered a platitude about government’s debt to those who serve its diplomatic and economic interests at great sacrifice. He stressed it—the word great.

The autonomous room was finished two weeks ago. The shipment of blood components arrived yesterday. I still have questions, dozens of basic ones, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I’ve used every possible tape available through interlibrary banks and manufacturer listings, and I will not risk further exposure by contacting more “experts.”

These remaining questions would worry me if Jory seemed at all anxious. But he is calm. He must feel we’re prepared.

We argued today about who should copter in to SFO to get him. I insisted that both of us should, but Jory said no, that would be unfair to both “the boy” and me. I did not understand this, and I said so. Jory said only, “I need some time to prepare him.”

I resent it, being excluded. Am I jealous already?

Jory took the copter to SFO this morning. I’ve been spending the day putting finishing touches on the special room, and on the refrigeration units with their blood substitutes and pharmaceutical stocks, all of which should allow us to control any Terran disease to which the poor thing might be susceptible. (I’ve done my homework. I’ve mustered up enough courage to phone two more exos—both at UC San Diego—to get the chemoprophylactic information we need. And I did it without making them suspicious, I am sure.)

They’re here and I never heard them arrive! I’ve been too involved in last-minute scurrying.

I try the covered patio first, expecting Jory’s voice, but I hear nothing. I start to turn, to head back toward the south patio, imagining that Jory has perhaps carried him down the cedar stairs toward our bedroom.

I see something, and stop.

A figure—it is in shadows under the patio beams. I cannot see it clearly, and what I do see makes no sense. It is too small to be Jory; it is not Jory. Yet I know it is too big for what he described. It is standing upright, and that is wrong too.

I walk toward it slowly, stopping at last.

My mouth opens.

I cannot speak; I cannot scream. I cannot even cry out in terror or joy.

It is a boy. A very real, very human boy.

He is thin, a little too thin, and he has Jory’s hatchet face. He has Jory’s blue-black hair.

He is, I know suddenly, more Jory than our Willi ever could have been.

I feel the tears beginning to come, and with them, the understanding. It is the kind of lie I never foresaw. There was no alien lover, no. Instead, it was a woman, an honest-to-god woman. On the lock shuttles perhaps. Or on Climago itself. A greeter or diplo or runner just like Jory.

This boy, this very real boy, is theirs. The truth is wonderful!

Why Jory felt he had to lie, I cannot say. I would have accepted the boy so easily, so gratefully, without it.

I take another step toward the boy, and he smiles. He is beautiful! (Don’t be vain. You don’t really care whether there’s a chromosome of yours in him, do you?)

A voice intrudes suddenly, and I stop breathing.

“Amazing, isn’t it, Dorothea. Can you guess how they did it?”

I turn to Jory, a plea in my eyes: Don’t ruin it. Please don’t ruin it.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ve talked it over with the boy and everything is fine. He grew up with the truth and is proud of it. As he should be.” He turns to the boy, winks, and smiles. “Isn’t that so, August? You know a lot more about it than your dad does, right?”

The boy nods, grinning back. The grin is beautiful.

Jory is grinning too, saying, “Take a guess, Dorothea. It’s nothing us human beings couldn’t have done ourselves.”

I look at the boy. The world is spinning. Everything I have ever known or accepted is about to become a lie.

“I don’t know, Jory,” I whisper.

No one says a thing, and suddenly Jory shouts:

“Cloning! Simple cloning! Nothing fancier than that. Are you surprised?”

There is nothing I can say.

“On our second night together,” Jory is saying, “she put it so well. ‘It’s the least we can do,’ she told me. ‘A living symbol,’ she said, ‘of our refusal to accept passion’s ephemeral insubstance.’”

“He’s all me, Dorothea!” Jory exclaims, laughing, glowing.

I look at the boy again.

“I’m going to leave you two alone,” Jory says cheerfully, “let you get to know each other better. Our copter is in dire need of a cleaning!”

The father smiles paternally. The father smiles bountifully.

I want to believe him. I so want to believe that this is, at last, the truth.

When I look into his brown eyes, I see a real boy. When I take his hand in mine, I feel one. He is human. He is Jory, and no one else. I am able, yes, to believe that no mother’s chromosomes are in him; I am able to believe what Jory claims.

We start by talking about his trip through the starlocks. My voice shakes for a time, but that is all right. He, too, with his strange, halting English, is unsure of himself. We must help each other overcome the fears. We cooperate; we allow the other to help.

As we say good-night, he whispers to me, “I love you, Mother, I do,” and kisses me. It catches me off guard; I laugh nervously, wondering if his father told him to say it, or if it is just the boy’s own sensitivity.

He looks hurt, and I know now I shouldn’t have laughed.

“I’m sorry, August.” I say it as brightly as I can, taking his warm hand. “I wasn’t laughing at you; I’d never do that. Sometimes people laugh when something surprises them, especially when it’s something nice.”

I squeeze his hand. He squeezes back, and I am filled with emotions I haven’t felt in a long long time.

Jory is with me in bed tonight, the first time in a long time.

“August was in the starlocks?” I say, afraid to ruin the magic, but haunted by a thought.

Jory gets up on one elbow and looks at me sleepily. “Yes, he was. Why?”

“He told me he loved me, and I was wondering—”

His face lights up with a grin. “Hey, that’s wonderful!”

“He’s been through the starlocks,” I begin again. “Would he lie to me, Jory? Would he even know he was lying to me?”

The cheerfulness dies. He stares at me for the longest time.

“August never lies,” he says finally.

I have been awake in the darkness for hours, thinking to myself, thinking about men and boys, fathers and sons, about a man—a liar—who swears to his wife that their son is not a liar. It is a joke of sorts, a riddle. It cannot be solved.

The strange thing is, I wouldn’t mind it if August did lie to me that way.

I could come to love his lies so easily.

Jory is gone again. From the house. From my life. Back to the woods, the beach, the Winkinblinkins and Starmen, the endless worlds spinning within him.

I don’t mind.

I have August. I have the child who in only five days has changed my life completely. We’ve picnicked on the peninsula where the remaining seals sun themselves like lazy tourists. We’ve tramped the tidepool reefs to identify mollusca and to make the Kirlian photographs of their fairylike “souls.” We’ve chartered an oceanographie trawler from Mendocino, and spent the day oohing and ahing over the dredgings. We’ve even found time to attend a fair in Westchester, that ugly, charming little town whose streets are lined with the slick red manzanita boles washed down by the Gualala at its meanest.

Wherever we go, I feel alive, I feel proud, I feel loved. The way people look at us can only be envy. And why not? It should be clear to anyone that August, handsome and devoted son that he is, does enjoy being with me.

It happened five hours ago. I am still shaking. I should move from this chair, but I am afraid to, afraid that if I do I will lose my mind.

August came to us a week ago.

Today he asked to use the special room.

To use it.

I stared at him, unable to speak, and he asked me again.

As I took him to it, I did my best not to look at him, afraid of what I might see.

At the gasketed doorway, he looked back at me tenderly and said, “I’m sorry, Mother, but I must shut the door. I think you know why.”

Yes. I do.

It is not just because of the gases.

It is because of what I might see when he attends to his body, to his needs, and forgets me.

He shut the door gently, and as he did he asked me to set the food and air controls for him. He could not do this himself, he said. (Yes. I remember now. He did not hold the cameras at the tidepools. He did not remove anything from the dredgings of the trawler. He did not pay for anything with his own hand. He did not open doors. He did not prepare food. He ate little, and I never saw it enter his mouth. He was simply a vision—present and loving.)

He has been in there with his proper mix of gases and his nutritive membrane for five hours. The last thing he said to me was: “Don’t worry, Mother. I used a room just like this in quarantine for sixteen months. It really wasn’t so bad.”

How to accept it all? How to accept it without screaming? That August is no clone, that he is not human, that he is not what I see.

That he is but a projection, the gift of illusion, a lie.

That something else entirely lives and thinks there behind the loving face.

As the truth sinks in, I begin to see what the books and tapes dared not explain, what governments must take pains not to reveal, what in my own unwillingness to expose our lives to public scrutiny I kept five experts from telling me.

I begin to understand what the word telemanifestor means—the word heard only once, a single tape, a passing reference buried among information I assumed was much more important. I thought I knew what “tele” meant, in all its forms.

Will I be able to live with this? When I touch his arm and feel the pulse just under the skin, what do I really touch? When he kisses me and says, “I love you, Mother, I do,” what is it that really presses itself against my lips? Bony plate, accordion of fat—how can I not see them?

The scream that first rose in my throat has faded. The August-thing will soon be leaving his special room; I must try to pretend that everything is all right. It will see through the pretense, of course, but I must try anyway. As a gesture. It is intelligent, after all. It has feelings. It is a guest in my house. And I, a representative of humanity, must act accordingly. That is all I can do.

It is clear now. It is clear how the Climagos convinced the jaws and talons and eversible stomachs of their world not merely to ignore them, but to help them build a civilization on its way to the stars:

The Climagos are liars too. They have survived for two hundred million years because of the terrible beauty of their lives.

I awoke this morning to an empty, familiar bed.

It was earlier than usual. A sound had awakened me, I knew.

I listened and soon heard it again.

In the next room, on a small foam mattress, I found it. It stopped its crying as soon as I appeared, and like a fool I spent the first half hour inspecting it.

The “evidence” was there of course. Even neonatal physiognomy couldn’t mute that nose. The eyes would darken, yes, but the complexion would remain the same—only slightly lighter than its father’s.

I changed his Dryper and took him to the garden. Soon, he was cooing and chuckling and pulling up the flowers I’d planted only yesterday. He liked the big red zinnias most, of course, bright suns that they are, and in the end the only thing able to distract him was the sight of a cypress silhouetted against a pale morning sky. (I remember how Willi loved such things, staring for hours at a high-contrast print or a striped toy animal.)

We had played for over two hours when suddenly I remembered my appointment. August and I were going to Gualala for crabs! I’d been promising it to him for days.

What to do? (What would August want me to do?)

It came to me then like a breeze, a waking dream, in a voice that was indeed Augusts. It was so simple.

I rose. I took the baby to the little mattress, kissed it, and left the room without looking back. It did not cry.

Ten minutes later, just as I finished the replanting of the flowers, August appeared. So simple.

He was very striking in his navy-blue one-piece, hailing me from the top of the cedar stairs like a sea captain from centuries ago. I felt frumpy and told him so, but he insisted I looked beautiful, even in my earth-stained shorts.

We had a wonderful time. “Helluva season!” the erudite crabseller crowed, and we took the crabs home for a delicious salad under amplified stars.

The baby is in bed with me tonight. I know what it is, but it doesn’t matter.

August is with me, too, though I cannot see him.

And Jory is wherever he wishes to be.

It has been another day of magic. Jory and I went to a mixer in Fort Bragg this evening, for the first time in years. He was all wit, wisdom, and charisma, free with his engaging tales of Climago and the exciting chases of interplanetary Business.

When we got back to the house, he stopped me and put his hands on my shoulders. I could feel their weight. “I’ve been insensitive as hell, Dorothea,” he said. “I know that. This time, no pheromas!” He laughed, and I couldn’t help but smile. “And no damned sling field or son y lumière either!” Face in a mocking leer, he added, “Unless, of course, you’d like to try some Everslip oil, just to keep things from being too easy.”

“No, no, not the oil!” I cried in mock horror. Then, softly, I said, “I’ve always wanted it easy, always.”

And it was. We made love—miracle of miracles!—in our very own unadorned hoverbed, the opaque ceiling above us wonderfully boring, the unsynched music quaint, the steady lamplight charming, and no stencils to frustrate us.

The new Jory sleeps beside me, and I lie awake, happy. I can hear the sounds, yes. The footsteps, the chairs slithering, the sighs. I hear them in the den, in the distant kitchen—but they do not bother me. A faint voice within me whispers, “That is the real Jory; those are his sounds.” But I answer: “It is only a stranger, a stranger in our house. He does not bother us, we do not bother him. He is really no more than a memory, a dim figure from a fading past, a man who once said to you, ‘My son is coming to live with us,’ when he didn’t mean that at all, when he meant instead, ‘It is my lover who is coming….’”

In the morning, the tiny holes on my chest and arms will ooze for the briefest time. I will touch them lovingly. They are a small price to pay.

In a house like this one, but in a universe far far away, a stranger once said as he wept, “In the end, Dorothea, in the end all of our windows are mirrors, and we see only ourselves.”

Or did he say, “In the end, Dorothea, all that matters to mankind is mankind, world without end, amen”?

Or perhaps he said nothing at all.

Perhaps I was the one who said it.

Or perhaps neither of us said a thing, and no lie was ever spoken.