Alien Terrain

by Iris Astres

  What he felt was happy. A new beatitude quite different from the pleasure he was used to had his mind sluggish. His heart brimming over with new feeling.

  Raj had spent his life with women. Always as a part of sexual devotion—a service sown, a bounty reaped. He’d never before known feminine companionship. Jane’s company made him feel a new self emerging. Her presence seemed to seep beneath his skin in ways a thousand intimacies never could. She was so open to him and so vulnerable. Together they’d experienced her first time feeling pleasure with a man. He didn’t have to ask. He knew. They’d both been marked by it.

  He looked at her and saw her jaw was slackening the way it did when she was worried she’d said something wrong. “I’m not complaining obviously.”

  “About what?”

  “Your cum.”

  Raj clasped her arm with deep regret for having left the question hanging. “It’s my training,” he said quickly. “No one in service ever ejaculates inside a woman. With the exception of the mouth, ejaculation during penetration is reserved for couples.” Couples. Raj said the word and thought the word and knew with blinding certainty the word applied to him and Jane.

  “Come here.” He beckoned her a little closer, and when her face was next to his, he cupped it with one hand. “I’ve never come inside a women in my life, but if you ask me to, I will. Would you like that?” Desire for her shuddered through him like a gust of air through candlelight. She witnessed it and cast a longing look toward the bedroom.

  “Would you like something else?” she asked. “The pantry’s well stocked, but there isn’t much that’s fresh. I wasn’t thinking I’d have company.”

  “Are you sorry?” he asked softly.

  She touched his face and smiled that unpracticed smile that almost had him off his chair and on his knees declaring, You and no one else. You above all else and always. The ancient rite of coupling.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  Again she glanced toward the bedroom. “What do you usually do after ten hours of sex?”

  “Shower,” he said. “Then have a snack and go to bed.”

  “Is it okay to do it in reverse?”

  “I love it in reverse,” he said with a great leer.

  They rose and cleaned up. After which they washed each other’s bodies. The sound of running water brought exhilaration. And then there was the soapy water sluicing over her wet skin. His cock was hard. She washed it for him, hand over soapy hand. And even though he could have lifted her and fucked her then and there, he waited, both of them left on the simmer until they’d dried themselves and crawled back into bed.

  When Jane asked, “Do you want to sleep?” the sweetly tentative question closed around his heart.

  Raj shifted toward her in the darkness and let his burning body answer for him.

  Chapter Ten

  Not all the ladies Jane had given solace to were dead. The one Bill had been directed to was by all accounts just damn close to it. He’d have to say the tidy trailer park he’d pulled into was as good a scenario for checking out as any one he’d seen. They had the old folks in a row of double-wides with pretty desert plants blooming their hearts out all around. And there were therapeutic animals too. He’d found a scrawny gray cat circling the doorway of the trailer where Lois Grant was said to live. Bill bent down and scratched the unsuspecting creature right behind the ears. Then he picked him up and rang the bell.

  By the time the old woman had made it to the door, the cat in his arms had done enough struggling to get the message that it wasn’t going anywhere. It was still now. Not happy, but not moving. In that respect it was already a damn sight smarter than Rick Bard had ever been.

  “Is this your cat?” He smiled at the old lady, and he meant it in his way. She was what you’d call high functioning. Dressed up in tan slacks and a cotton top with gold buttons on the pockets. No depressing housecoat for this broad. He had to hand it to her.

  “Misty.” The woman looked distraught, which was good news. Their conversation shouldn’t take more than five minutes if the creature in his arms meant something to her. “What happened?”

  “She’s okay,” he said with his best look of fatherly concern. “Just a little spooked I think. Why don’t you let me lay her down somewhere?”

  “Anywhere.” The lady stepped aside, motioning into the tidy living room. A radio in the kitchen was playing a crackling version of some ancient rock and roll. Something about a girl named Prudence coming out to play. Dancer surveyed the setup in the trailer while the woman shut the door.

  “I’m looking for Jane Bard,” he said with no change to his smile.

  The old girl might be stylish, but she wasn’t much good as an actress. Everything she thought was right there in her eyes. Bill read her panic like a ticker tape: This is a bad, bad man. He’s after little Janey Bard. I have to fight to save her and I will.

  Just as soon as he puts down my cat.

  Bill closed his hand around little Misty’s throat. The woman got the picture and immediately started whimpering. Her arms were moving weakly toward him, two old, veiny claws grasping at thin air.

  “Nice place,” said Bill, taking a stroll into the kitchen. He tapped his fingers on the black door of the microwave and turned to her, cocking his brow. “This thing still work?”

  Old Lois Grant’s white face grew six shades paler.

  Even the cat got in the spirit of the thing and let go with a mournful howl.

  The lady made a choking sound, her hand over her mouth. She looked a little closer to the edge than Bill might like.

  “Just give me the address,” he said. “That’s all I want. Then I put pussy down and hit the road.”

  “The address?” Lois was halfway there already. Already off the Jane Bard team and siding with the cat. He liked that about her. Decided he’d give her a break.

  “I ain’t even gonna hurt her,” he said, with his let-me-level-with-you look. “Hell, I like the girl. Alls I want to do is talk.” It all sounded so smooth, Bill half believed the words himself. He probably didn’t even have to pop the door on the old microwave, but Bill did and it worked a treat.

  Lois started scribbling. A little messy for a granny, but Bill managed to read it just fine. Even better for old Misty, he believed it. He dropped the cat, who made a beeline for the nearest thing to crawl under. His hostess almost fainted with relief. Bill tipped his hat to her and headed off for the day’s next order of business.

  No rest for the wicked, he thought to himself and got back in his truck.

  Chapter Eleven

  Jane had racked her brain to find a way to message someone at the Body House, and there it was all of a sudden—a list of contacts in the kitchen drawer. She’d been looking for a tea strainer and instead she’d found a notepad: nearest doctor, nearest refuel, nearest public message center. The latter, it turned out, was actually in Flowers, only three miles away. Assuming the place still existed, Jane would go there in the morning. If she could, she’d send a message out to Raj’s people. It would be anonymous, untraceable. At least she hoped so. She doubted many of her neighbors did much messaging and certainly not to places like the Body House. If Earth First had found ways to keep track of the brothel’s feed, her sending one from here would be a good-size clue.

  She would still do it.

  He was fine now. It was time for him to reunite with his friends and his life. And she should get on with things too. While she still could.

  Jane took herself through what would happen. They’d come for him and she’d walk with him to the door. A hug, a kiss, a wave from the top of the stairs, and then he’d disappear. The image made her sad. Real sad. Another sure sign it was time for him to go.

  “What is it?”

  Raj’s voice in the dark was a surprise. Jane blinked. Tears spilled out of her eyes and puddled in her ears. How was he awake? She hadn’t moved. She hadn’t made a sound. The darkness all around their bed was thick as ever and the quiet absolute. Still, he
’d caught her thinking taboo thoughts like he could read her mind. He said he couldn’t, but…

  “I miss you,” she admitted.

  “You miss me?” He shifted toward her, sounding curious. “Where have I gone?”

  Jane sniffed and wiped her eyes. “Well, nowhere yet, but I was thinking of you at the Body House.” She turned onto her side and looked at him. “Tell me what it’s like there. Help me imagine the right things.” There was a silence. Long enough for Jane to wonder if she’d crossed a line.

  “All right,” he said obligingly. “What do you want to know?”

  That was a good question. A better question would be what she didn’t want to know. How well could she handle thinking of him as a working prostitute? “Do you have your own room?” she asked. Logistics should be a safe place to start.

  “I have two rooms.” Raj settled on his back and Jane did too, listening intently. “A sitting room and bedroom.”

  “No roommate, then.”

  “No roommate,” he agreed. “There are common rooms for socializing. We take our meals together, for example.”

  “What does it look like? Your room, I mean.” This was good. She felt a little better. “Is it personalized? Generic? Did you bring things from home? Do you mind my asking all of this?”

  “Not at all.” He pulled her close to him, the way he always did now. She draped a hand over his chest, a leg over his thigh. “I did bring some things from my planet. Ceremonial objects—sacred books, statues. The rest of it is, as you say, generic. More modernized. Not such an interesting homage to time gone by as what we live in now.”

  “Right,” said Jane, looking around her. An homage to time gone by. That was one way to put it, she supposed. Another way would be a bunch of run-down shit holes, but maybe it was homey in its way. It felt like home to her. She’d spent most of her life in the old world. Long enough to know nostalgia wasn’t really a primary focus in the Opted Zone. Just making do with what was left of life.

  Her parents had been led here by idealized ambition. They’d taken their one child to the pristine boonies so she could live away from the techno-fantasy that was city life and reconnect with what was real: real food, real books, real conversation with real people, face-to-face. They’d gathered up like-minded thinkers, most of whom had also been shipwrecked when all the universities had collapsed. Together they’d cofounded Human, an institute of cooperative learning.

  It was a collective college modeled on the image of the guru on the hill. Her father traded master classes on romantic poets for washed windows, while her mother taught ballet for bushels of organic kale. The good days she’d remembered had been good. True believers had rushed to join them, excited and grateful to be involved. Everyone had been so nice and earnest. It had been a kind of paradise.

  Gradually, however, the world’s outcasts had found their way into the lawless zone and it had all gone wrong. Imperceptibly at first, the way man-made disasters always get their start.

  Her parents had explained away the lack of equitable trade. A “testing of the waters” is what they’d called it. With no other repercussions for theft and violence than a look of hurt surprise, however, things quickly fell apart. At the end of the third year, the golden age of Human was over. The school was overrun with bodyguards, watchmen, enforcers, and signs with fixed fees TO BE PAID AT TIME OF SERVICE. Everything they’d disliked in the old world came to find them, except for safety and convenience—that they never had.

  In short, Human had been a big mistake. Sad according to her mother. Understandable according to her father. Jane was the only member of the household who had taken deep, unshakable offense at the disintegration of her parents’ dream.

  “The world would not survive without mistakes.” That’s what her father said to comfort her. “Mistakes are reason’s failure over hope, passion, and love. Without them, we’d lose all of our poetry and art along with our best love affairs and at least half the little babies.”

  Jane tried to believe her father, but deep down she knew she liked the safety of reason better than books, poetry, and art. Keats and Pushkin and de Musset could all go to hell if it meant she could finally live life certain she was in the right of things.

  “And how does the job work?” She turned to Raj, ready to hear about sex now. Next to Human’s rise and fall, how bad could a brothel be?

  “Why not let me take you there?” Raj reached down for her hand. “I’ll show you everything you want to know.”

  Jane pulled both hands in to her chest and shook her head. “I’m not the brothel type,” she said.

  “What type are you? Where are you going?”

  “North,” she said.

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “I have a friend in geo-region two. Before you ask, it’s someone Rick would have no way of knowing. She was the daughter of one of my old ladies years ago. A woman I took care of who died. We’ve been messaging each other from Saint Mary’s. She has a restaurant that I can work at. That way I can make money and stay off-grid for even longer. Maybe forever if I qualify for a protective name change.”

  “I could come there with you.”

  What? Her heart was racing at the thought. What did he mean he’d come? As her protection? Out of curiosity? No matter how she looked at it, it made no sense, and so she said, “They’ll know that you’re a Bod.”

  He said nothing to that. It was a true enough objection to a strange idea. Even if there were a why, a reason he wanted them to go together, it would be dangerous to be seen out together. Too much about him was startling for the world not to notice.

  Jane squinted in the darkness but could only see the shape of him, beautiful and ominous like distant hillsides in the dark.

  “I should let my brethren know that I survived. That’s only right. Beyond that, I’m completely free. None of my belongings are so precious that we’d have to go back to the Body House at all if you object.”

  “I don’t object.” Jane reached her hand out, found his arm, and followed it up to his chest, where she pressed her palm to what she thought must be his heart. “I’m sure it’s a good place. I’m only slightly jealous of those fifteen thousand women you were fucking in there.”

  To her surprise, that made him laugh. A low rumbling started midway down his torso and took on life until it thundered through him. Jane waited while he rode it out. Eventually, Raj stretched himself and sighed, luxuriating in the afterglow of his amusement.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You,” he said, pulling his face back into place, “jealous of a thousand women.”

  “Fifteen thousand. And how’s that funny?”

  He laughed again. Enough, thought Jane. She sat up, looking down on him. “Tell me why that’s funny.”

  “Because you’re so much bigger than all that. It’s like an avalanche saying it’s jealous of the houses it’s just buried. Or a tidal wave possessive of the world swimming inside it.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You have destroyed my past, dear Jane. All that’s left of me is what you’ve made.”

  She stared at him.

  “Shall we go to geo-region two together?” he asked, patting her good-naturedly.

  “Destroyed isn’t a nice word.”

  “It’s wonderful,” he countered. “I never dreamed of such delicious devastation.”

  Jane let herself be pulled into his arms. He kissed her, and she wanted him.

  “How did I destroy you?” she made herself ask.

  “By being who and what you are.”

  “Raj”—Jane struggled back upright—“could you make sense? I don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “Just don’t be jealous,” he said, beating down another laughing fit.

  Fine. Jane lay down on her back. Somewhere deep inside she did understand. The past for both of them was much too far away to matter. “I’m not really jealous,” she admitted. “And I really do want you to tell me all about the s
ex.”

  “All you had to do was say so,” Raj said reasonably. “Where shall I begin?”

  “At the extremes.” Jane gave in to her enthusiasm for the subject. “The really freaky stuff. Start with that and work your way toward the mildly bizarre.”

  “Extreme,” said Raj, folding his arms behind his head.

  “What’s the weirdest thing somebody’s asked you for?” she prodded. “The strangest thing you’ve ever done?”

  RAJ HAD THE answer in an instant. “This,” he said. “What you and I are doing now is the strangest thing I’ve ever done by far.” Jane raised herself on her hands. Something made him think she’d turn the light on. Happily, she changed her mind. He liked the inky black that enclosed all their conversations. He was getting used to it. Dependent on it, some might say. “The shared meals, the shared bed, the shared confidences. On my planet this counts as extreme perversion,” he explained.

  “You’ve never played house before?”

  “I’ve never shared my bed with any woman. Or my breakfast, come to that. I’ve never let one save my life or nurse me back to health.”

  “So you think warming my cold toes and sharing secrets in the dark is kinky?”

  “God yes.” He grabbed her, pulled her down beside him, slid his body over hers. “Kinky and beyond.”

  As an incredibly arousing violation of the man he thought he was, he’d have to say it qualified. He was certain that he loved her. He was puzzled and intrigued. The incongruity of his emotions caused a tiny tickle in his mind that only went away when he was fucking her. He told himself again Jane was his future. All he’d ever want was more of the rapturous same.

  Coupling on Backus was a rare event. The details of those who indulged were cloaked in secrecy. Beyond a certain idle curiosity, he’d never had the faintest notion of engaging in the practice. For one thing, it was for the very young or very old, definitely not for temple lovers. But now, despite his past, he saw it as his destiny. The transformation was a little scary. Unaccustomed fear made him want sex like never before. It also helped him see with crystal clarity why couples on his planet were protective of their state. There was a vulnerability in his relationship that he’d describe as embryonic. Precious, unfolding, to be protected at all costs.