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

WAR BRIDE ^{RICK WILBER}

JAMES PACKS HIS BAG.

Ahab, Huck, Yossarian, Nick Adams, even Hornblower goes in, along with six toothbrushes, a handful of postcards with various sunsets and palm trees and bathing-suited blondes, and four like-new baseballs. He would like to pack his basketball, but it just won’t fit.

He needs them—the books, the cards, the baseballs. He won’t be coming back, and he’s picked the things that will last the longest and serve him the best.

But no clothes. Whistle made that perfectly clear. No clothes. The Pashi can’t stand those Earthie clothes, and James won’t need them where he’s going. Whistle will take care of James’s attire, as she takes care of most everything else.

He does pack his prosthetic lengthener. Whistle has promised him an operation once they reach the home world, and then he won’t need the lengthener anymore. But the trip will take weeks, James has been told, so the lengthener comes along.

James stands, his head nearly touching the light fixture in the apartment’s living area. James is very tall, nearly seven-foot-three. The Pashi are even taller, and thin, but James is about as big as Earthies get, and Whistle has developed a real fondness for him. That’s why Whistle has decided to bring him along, now that the Pashi are leaving.

James looks out the sliding glass doors toward the Gulf of Mexico. The Pashi landing rigs and comm relays are just visible on the horizon line. That’s why Whistle bought James this apartment on the seventh floor, Gulf Boulevard, St. Petersburg Beach; so they could see the rigs and towers against the setting sun when Whistle came to play with her American pet.

Whistle is beautiful, in her own damp Pashi way. James knows he is lucky to have been chosen by her, lucky to be able to pack his one small bag with anything he can think of that will last forever on another world. Lucky guy, he tells himself forcefully, trying to make the sentiment stick. Lucky guy.

James has not always felt so lucky, so wanted. For most of his life, James has felt alone. He thinks about his loneliness as he looks out the sliding glass doors. All the years of it. Too tall, too many books or too much basketball, too many stares and too many expectations. Only Tom has found the way through all the incongruities, all the implausibilities to be his friend. In all those twenty-eight years, only Tom has been willing to think of James as a friend instead of a marketable product with a few esoteric quirks.

James tries to staunch his thoughts of Tom. Tom, his good and only friend Tom, will die tomorrow with the rest of them, with everyone, when the Pashi leave.

Whistle has explained it to him. The rest of his race, all the Earthies here who don’t have Pashi lovers ready to whisk them away, are going to die tomorrow.

It will be about lunchtime in St. Petersburg, and Tom will be having a grouper sandwich and order of fries about then if he can afford it. James tries not to think about that.

Tonight the Pashi leave. The great benevolent Pashi who brought so much to the world, who opened wide the doors to all those cosmic possibilities and the promise of trade with a hundred Pashi worlds strung like pearls through the whole spiral arm of the galaxy.

Of course it couldn’t all happen too quickly, the Pashi explained. The Earthies would have to be patient as the details were worked out. And there were certain adjustments that would have to be made to accommodate the Pashi presence on Earth. Economic adjustments. Military adjustments.

Whistle had explained it all to James just last night. She was very sorry about it all. The promises hadn’t worked out. If only the Bendaii hadn’t come quite so soon…

But the Bendaii were coming. The Pashi comm towers had done their job, detecting the approaching enemy. So now the Pashi had to leave. This small planet, this little place where they had built their advance base, had done its job, and now the Pashi had to leave. There weren’t nearly enough Pashi to defend against the Bendaii. To stay would be suicidal. So tonight the landing rigs would send the ships home from their bases around the planet. And tomorrow the Bendaii would arrive.

There is a knock at the door. James thinks it must be Whistle, a good two hours early. Very unlike Whistle to be early.

But it isn’t Whistle, it’s Tom.

James tries to smile as Tom walks in. His best friend, Tom. High school, state champs, college, final four, two years in the CBA—best of friends, the quick guard with the uncanny passes and the giant with the soft hook.

And then came the Pashi and there was no more play for pay now that there was work to be done for the benevolent Pashi. Tom had found a job waiting tables. James found Whistle.

Tom doesn’t say anything at first. He just looks at James and then walks past him into the room where he notices the nearly packed bag.

He looks, reaches into the bag to grab a paperback. Laughs.

“Books and baseballs?” he asks, and turns to look at his best friend. “Your Pashi want to get to know all about our way of life or something?” Tom chooses to ignore the sight of the lengthener, its tip just visible, crowded in with the baseballs.

James doesn’t know how to answer this. Whistle has made it very clear that James is to tell no one about the Pashi leaving. If James told, Whistle would know. Whistle always knows. And then James wouldn’t get to go himself.

James doesn’t want to die tomorrow when the Bendaii destroy the landing rigs and comm towers. Whistle has told James about the Bendaii and the struggle the Pashi have been involved in for generations. The Bendaii, Whistle said, are very thorough. James got the message.

Tom walks away from the bag and over toward the kitchen nook, where he opens the refrigerator door, takes out a bottle of Harp, opens it, and takes one long gulp.

“Ah,” he says, “the privileges of prostitution.”

James doesn’t protest for a change. There have been certain advantages to being the lover of a Pashi diplomat, imported beer in these hard times has been among the least of them. James doesn’t even drink the Harp anymore, anyway. He just keeps it here for Tom. James has acquired a taste for the salty, thick ooze the Pashi drink. James can’t whistle the tune that names the stuff, he just calls it ooze. Whistle laughs at her pet for that, and then strokes his head for being so cute, and then tells him to get out the lengthener, and then…

Tom is talking.

“So what’s the bag packed for, Jimmy? Seriously, is your Pashi trying to catch up on some American classics?”

“Some of the books are British,” says James.

Tom laughs, drinks.

“Damn, boy, you’re taking all of this a little too seriously, aren’t you? They’re going to leave someday, you know, and you’ll get left behind. That’ll be that.”

He points his Harp at James.

“Listen to old Tommy, now. You’ve got to keep your head on straight on this one, Jimmy. Don’t dive off the deep end on me here, all right? Remember who you are. Remember what you are.”

“Tom,” James says. “Tommy.” And he takes one step toward his friend, one step toward him and away from the door and the view of the rigs.

But Tom turns away to open a wood veneer cupboard door and finds some Mexican peanuts, right there where they sit next to the Brazilian breakfast cereal and the Venezuelan pretzels. Most things are imported these days.

“Listen to me, Jimmy,” Tom goes on to say through the crunch of the nuts. “It’s tough times right now, and you’ve found a way to get through them. That’s great. I understand. Hell, I even stand up for you when people talk. I understand, I really do.” And he takes another drink of the Harp, finishing off the bottle in one long pull.

“But there’s a big ‘but’ here, pal. I’ve been watching this happen for six months now, and you’ve gone from making the best of a bad thing to, to”—and he searches for the right word while he fishes another Harp out of the refrigerator—“to, I don’t know, something really strange. It’s like you really like the big blue webber.”

James can’t stand to hear the Pashi called that. He admits that there is that bluish tint to their fair skin, and that there is a webbing between the toes and fingers. “But what would you expect of an amphibious race?” he has said to Tom in the past. He has told his friend that he’s offended by the nicknames that Earthies use for the Pashi, especially the American Earthies, who have so much to look forward to for having helped the Pashi.

Tom has laughed at that sort of thinking in the past, and knows James will be angry for the names, and so Tom uses them anyway, trying purposefully to shock his friend, the recipient of those high, arcing passes that led to all those stuffs and happy screams and TV time.

James turns away from Tom and walks over to the window that is to the left of the sliding glass doors. It will be sunset in another two hours. Whistle will come then, just before the Sun goes down.

Whistle will come and then the two of them will watch the orange sky and Whistle will talk of home. The Sun will seem to flatten a bit as it enters the water, and then it will quickly sink. If they are lucky, very lucky, they will see a quick bright flash of green. And then it will be gone. And then they will leave, the chauffeured floater taking them out to the rigs where they’ll board, lift off, and leave. Whistle said it would only take about an hour. Sunset will be about 8:30. By 10:00 James figures he will be on his way. Gone forever.

James turns from the window and shakes his head.

“You’ve got to go, Tommy. Whistle will be here soon. You know she doesn’t like you.”

“I know, I know,” says Tom, smiling. He walks over to his best friend, James, and reaches up to touch his shoulder. Tom nods his head a bit, shakes it ruefully, squeezes the broad, hard collarbone, and says, “I just had to come by and say something, all right? I just had to say it. You mean too much to me, you know. You understand? You mean too much to me.”

Tom leaves.

James cries, gets over it, gets back to packing; the Oxford Guide to English Literature, some magazines, his old Norton Anthology so he’ll have “The Waste Land” and “Prufrock” and The Red Badge and some Faulkner and some Kerouac and some Barth and some Updike and some time to sit back down and cry a bit more. Hard tears. So alone. So very alone.

He stops that nonsense. He rises and looks down at the bag. Quite full.

If he can only get the air out of the ball, he reasons, he can collapse it and take it along. He knows they’ve got air where he’s going, the Pashi breathe it. He can always build a rim and fix up some sort of net. He can always find ten feet high.

He gets the needle in and ten-year-old air hisses out. He looks at the ball as it whistles out the air from ten years back. Tom’s signature is right there where he’s looking, right under James’s own name and the scrawl that says “Kennedy Hawks, State Champs, 1989.”

The ball doesn’t flatten the way James hoped it would. Funny, but then he’d never deflated a basketball before. Seems odd, but he hadn’t.

He pushes, squeezes, even stands on the ball, but it doesn’t seem to help much. The ball clearly won’t fit into the bag unless he takes out a lot of the books, and he can’t do that.

Finally, he takes the obstinate ball and places it on top of the bag, hoping that Whistle will let him bring it along anyway. Surely when he tells her what it means to him she’ll let him bring that one extra thing. Surely.

But, later, she doesn’t. She insists, and he leaves it behind, leaves it on the coffee table, partially collapsed, so that it seems to flatten against the glass tabletop the way the Sun did for them as it set. Under the flattened part, hard against the glass, are the two signatures.

The Bendaii arrived the next day. About noon.