by K. W. Jeter
“I want you to be abso-lute-ly certain about our interest in acquiring your services.” Vogel once again extracted his checkbook from inside his jacket. He flipped it open and scribbled rapidly with the same glittering fountain pen. “There. Try this one on for size.” He held the filled-out check across the table.
Without daring to touch it, Albert regarded the blue rectangle of paper. “What . . . what is it?” He knew it was a check; he just wanted to be sure what it was for.
“Well, Albert, let’s think of it as payment for an option on your talents. Our company isn’t the only one in the business of predicting consumer responses . . . though of course, we like to think we’re the best. But we just want to make sure that even if you don’t come to work for Precognosis, you won’t act as a picker for any of our competitors. Fair enough?”
He wasn’t exactly sure what the human meant, but he couldn’t resist any longer. Curiosity drove his hand forward, to take the new check from Vogel’s hand. He turned it around, so he could read the number written out beneath his own name . . .
He found himself looking up at the restaurant’s ceiling, the intricately worked carpet beneath the back of his head. The faces of Dierdorf and Vogel and one of the waiters floated above him. What was he doing on the floor?
“Are you all right?” Dierdorf gripped his forearm and helped him up. The waiter took his other arm. Now there really were people glancing over from the tables nearby.
“I’m . . . I’m fine.” Albert nodded slowly. “I must have . . . slipped off the chair. That’s all.”
A little gap opened inside his memory, covering the second or two from when he had looked at the check Vogel had written, to finding himself flat on the restaurant floor.
And in that gap, he hadn’t been in the restaurant at all, but far away. Floating above the dark ocean that had once frightened him. Something had come sailing across the white-laced waves, and he had recognized it as the karabla, the sacred boat of the Tenctonese faith. But strangely, the gentle deities of Celine and Andarko hadn’t been aboard the small shining craft; instead, it had been the human figure of Santa Claus, laughing deep behind his beard, and opening up the sack slung from his shoulder, reaching in and tossing out handfuls of round golden shapes . . .
That had been all he had seen, in that quick non-moment. But it was enough. Sitting back down, Albert picked up the check that had fluttered to the tablecloth, held it up, and looked at the row of elegant zeroes marching across the upper right corner, even more than there had been on the first one.
“Now remember, that’s just an option payment.” Dierdorf’s voice came from both near and far away. “Your salary and profit shares and stock options would be considerably higher . . .”
He didn’t bother to listen. Suddenly, he wasn’t afraid anymore. He couldn’t wait to take the check home and show it to May.
C H A P T E R 5
“YOU TOLD HIM WHAT?” Susan turned away from the kitchen counter, where she had just deposited the dishes brought in from the dining room table. The water rushing into the sink sounded an odd counterpoint to the amazed note in her voice.
George felt equally taken aback; he hadn’t expected the look his wife gave him now. In his hands were the two glasses, his and Susan’s, the insides coated with a film of sour milk; he had returned home as his family had been finishing supper without him. He hadn’t been hungry; his stomach roiled unhappily from the ghastly snack bits, little scraps of irradiated lung and spleen sealed in plastic, that he’d eaten—against his better judgment—while he’d been at the bar with his partner Sikes.
“It was simply the best advice I could give him.” He reached past Susan to set the glasses down. “I’m sure it’s a hard situation for Matt to face, but he has to do it.”
“Do what?” Their daughter Emily looked up from the open dishwasher, where she had been carefully placing the knives and forks in their designated bin. “What’re you talking about?”
They had completely forgotten about the girl’s presence, and that she might be listening to what they were saying. “Emily, honey—” Susan took her by the shoulders and pointed her toward the doorway. “Why don’t you go upstairs and do your homework? We’ll take care of the dishes.”
“I don’t have any homework.” Emily dug in her heels. “I did it already.”
“Then why don’t you go up to your room and think about tomorrow’s homework?”
George flinched inside, hearing the tone in his wife’s voice: seemingly mild and calm, but with the words actually strung along a taut steel wire.
“Oh, all right.” Emily knew what that tone meant as well. She lifted and dropped her shoulders dramatically, and headed for the door. There she turned around and studied her parents. “Is this something to do with Uncle Matt?”
His daughter’s narrow-eyed gaze seemed to pierce right through George. “Why would you think that, sweethearts?”
“Because—” Emily wrinkled her nose. “You smell like an ashtray.”
He raised a hand and sniffed the cuff of his jacket. She was right.
“You always smell like an ashtray after you’ve been out drinking with Uncle Matt.”
“That’s quite enough, young lady.” Susan pointed sternly toward the stairs beyond the doorway. “Scoot.”
George felt subtly chastened, as though his older daughter and his wife had somehow conspired to expose some failure of his. The smell of stale tobacco smoke—which of course meant a bar—there were no other public places left where smoking was allowed—marked him like some Earth-style Biblical curse. He couldn’t remember which of the human progenitors it was supposed to have been, Cain or Abel, with the mark of ashes on the brow. No, that’s wrong, he told himself. That’s the other, some Jewish thing. Maybe; he couldn’t be sure right now. The glass of sour milk he’d had at the dining room table, on top of the ones he’d downed while he’d been sitting beside Matt on the wobbling bar stools, had muddled his thought processes.
Of course, it had all seemed like a good idea before. When Matt had called him from the pay phone next to the bar’s restrooms, there had been little choice but to go out and have this steer session with his partner.
“Bull,” Matt had corrected him when he got there. “It’s a bull session. Bulls’re bigger’n steers.” Matt had already been drinking; his words had started to blur together. “Bulls’re for big problems. Like I got.”
It had been the same bar they had both been at earlier that day; George had felt trapped in a time loop, something from one of those old Twilight Zone episodes that Emily had developed a craze for watching on the cable’s Sci-Fi Channel. He had felt the same claustrophobic twinge, the sense of the walls with their faux-neon beer and sour milk signs closing in on him. Out of loyalty to his partner, he had climbed up onto the bar stool beside Matt and ordered a round. Then, as both he and Matt sat hunched over their glasses, he had listened, according to the ancient traditions of Earthly male-bonding ritual, to Matt’s problems.
Or the one problem, really. Cathy’s pregnancy.
Standing now in the kitchen with his wife, George watched as Susan looked up toward the ceiling. They both could hear Emily’s bedroom door opening, then closing. Which meant that they were effectively alone, except for the gurgling and cooing of their other daughter Vessna, still in her expensive, genuine wicker Moses basket out in the dining room. Those baby noises were the only sounds that came to them from the vast, empty reaches of the house.
Susan turned her steeliest glare toward him. The gloves are off, thought George. Whatever that Earth expression was supposed to mean.
“So let me get this straight.” Susan folded her arms across her breasts. “Matt told you that Cathy is pregnant.”
“Well . . . yes.” George nodded. “And it’s apparently true. That’s what the doctor had told Cathy.”
“And then you told Matt . . . that he should leave Cathy.”
He could see that they were approaching, as the marriage counse
lors on the afternoon talks shows would put it, the core issue of their disagreement. He could also feel—weirdly—the bright-lit walls of the kitchen closing in on him, the way the darker ones in the bar had done.
“Of course I told him that.” He kept his voice carefully modulated, so that it embodied the spirit of sweet reason. That way, he hoped—and with good cause; it had worked in the past—Susan would be pulled, as though by celestial mechanics, into the same rhetorical orbit, and the spat between them would be avoided. “That was the most rational position to take.”
It wasn’t working this time; he could see two little simmering sparks right at the centers of Susan’s eyes. Or he had seen them for a moment; his wife’s eyes had narrowed to slits as she looked at him.
“Would you care to tell me,” Susan said icily, “just where you got this bright notion about interfering in Matt and Cathy’s lives?”
“Now, I’d hardly call it interfering. Matt asked me for my help; that’s why I went to talk with him. What else could I do?”
“And this is your idea of helping? To split the two of them up?”
“There is a certain moral issue involved here.” He heard the anger rising in his own voice, and took a deep breath in an attempt to throttle the emotion back down. “Cathy is pregnant; that is the undeniable fact of the matter. The doctor went back over his records and his test procedures, to make sure there was no mistake. So now we all have to reconcile ourselves to the implications of that fact.”
“Implications? What implications?” Susan set her hands on her hips. “She’s pregnant. Big deal.”
“ ‘Big deal?’ ” He stared at her in amazement. “I can’t believe I just heard you say that. It is a big deal. For better or worse, Matt and Cathy have had an interspecies sexual relationship—”
“Oh, that’s very nicely put. How romantic. I had thought that perhaps the two of them just happened to love each other.”
George sighed. This wasn’t going to be easy; he felt as if he had wandered into a mine pasture. Or something like that. “Nevertheless, Susan; there is simply no biological way that Cathy could have gotten pregnant by Matt. So the first implication is that she has been having a sexual relationship with someone else.”
“People . . . make . . . mistakes.” Each of Susan’s words was like the rap of a hammer against his forehead. “That may not be biology, but it’s also a fact. These things happen.”
“Perhaps so. But becoming pregnant didn’t just ‘happen’ for Cathy. She is a Tenctonese female, the same as you. Susan, you’re the mother of our three children; you know it’s different for us. We may live on Earth now, but something like this will never be as simple for us as it is for humans. It’s not a matter of a mistake, or a little indiscretion on Cathy’s part. Besides the other sexual partner, whoever the Tenctonese male might have been, there’s the binnaum that’s necessary to complete the fertilization of the ovum—so presumably Cathy must have deliberately made the arrangements for one.” George fell silent for a moment, wondering who the binnaum could have been. For his and Susan’s last pregnancy, the one that had given them their daughter Vessna, the sacred duties had been performed by Albert Einstein, the custodial technician from the police station. Albert, like all binnaums, was sometimes a bit slow on the uptake—to put it mildly—but surely he wouldn’t have done something like this behind the back of his friend Sikes. That was also impossible.
He reassembled his thoughts, back to the tense discussion between himself and his wife. “And then . . . and then there’s the matter of the transfer of the fetus, from Cathy to the biological father.” Little more needed to be said, as far as he was concerned. Beyond all else, this set the Tenctonese apart from humans: the male of the species gave birth to its young. Matt, more than most humans, was aware of the whole Tenctonese birth process; he had actually assisted in Vessna’s delivery. Male bonding, even between species, didn’t get much tighter than that.
Perhaps—George had to admit it, if only to himself—it was one reason he took Matt’s side in this matter so immediately. It was a question of loyalty, as much derived from what he had become here on Earth as those things brought from the Tencton of his ancestors.
“Cathy would’ve had to arrange for that as well,” continued George. “Between herself and the father of the child.” The sacred vow between a Tectonese woman and her mate, for him to be there when the time of the fetal transfer came round, was more important than even the sacraments of marriage. For a lot of reasons, but also for the sheer practicality of survival: a Tenctonese female couldn’t bring her pregnancy to term, the way a human was able to. Without the father to receive the unborn child, the pregnancy would end with the death of the fetus, and nearly always the mother as well. There was no way that Cathy wouldn’t have known about that; such matters were at the core of Tenctonese existence.
“Well, of course.” Susan certainly knew not just the mechanics of Tenctonese reproduction, but what all these things meant for Cathy and Matt. “Maybe . . . maybe Cathy simply wants to have a child. And this is the only way she could go about it. Matt can’t give her one.”
“Susan . . . I can’t believe you’re saying this.” The last wooziness from the sour milk was evaporated by his wife’s words. He was left feeling slightly stunned. “These are sacred matters. The holy act of procreation . . . the bond between loving partners . . . those things can’t be separated. If it was important to Cathy to have a child, then she should’ve been the one to end her involvement with Matt—before she ever approached a binnaum and a Tenctonese male. Don’t you see what Cathy’s done by betraying Matt’s trust in her? The beginning of a new life is now mired in deception and bad faith. What good can possibly come of it?”
Without answering, Susan turned away, picking up a dirty plate and slamming it into the dishwasher so hard that the racks clattered. She whirled back around to face him. “I don’t care about any of that!” The sparks of anger in her gaze had burst into full flame. “All I know is that Cathy’s my friend—and that it didn’t happen the way you make it sound! She just wouldn’t do that.”
“All right,” said George patiently. “Then how did it happen?”
“I don’t know . . .” Susan rubbed her brow. For a moment, as she looked away from him, he saw the anger in her eyes turn into pained confusion. “I just know it didn’t happen that way, that’s all.” She went on staring out the window above the sink, not seeing the house’s backyard wrapped in night. Her voice softened. “Maybe . . . maybe nothing happened. I don’t know . . . maybe it’s like that story they tell here . . .”
“What story?”
“You know. The one the Christians tell. Remember, we took that class together, over at the university extension?”
“ ‘The Bible as Literature,’ ” said George. “ ‘For Newcomers.’ ” He mainly remembered getting three units for it, toward the general education requirement of his police science degree.
“That’s the one. And there’s the story . . . about the virgin birth and all . . .”
He sighed. “Susan . . .” A shake of the head. “I hardly think you can claim that Cathy was a virgin, even before she hooked up with Matt.”
“Then you tell me what happened!” Susan picked up a damp dish towel from the counter and threw it at him. “But don’t tell me that Cathy cheated on Matt! Because I know she didn’t!”
George looked down at the dish towel lying across his shoes. From the dining room, he could hear Vessna’s wail; the raised voices must have woken her. He glanced up as Susan strode past him and toward the doorway. A moment later, the noise of the crying infant faded as Susan carried her upstairs.
He reached down and picked up the towel, folded it, and hung it on the rail at the end of the counter. Leaning with his hands against the edge of the sink, he looked at his somber reflection in the dark mirror of the window. This little discussion hadn’t gone at all well.
That’s what I get, George thought gloomily, for trying to help peopl
e. He should have known better.
All in all, his batting average could stand some improvement. At this point, with the memory of Susan’s angry words having just about scoured the spots off his head, he honestly didn’t know whether he had helped his partner Sikes or not.
A night breeze rustled the chain of the swing set in the backyard, the faint sound of metal rendered invisible by the dark. There was the whole business about his son Buck to think about as well; that was another little family discussion that had ended badly. When he’d told Susan what had happened—about his last confrontation with Buck—he’d braced himself for an over-the-top reaction from her. And he’d gotten it, a whole evening of raised voices, his and Susan’s combined, like a duet from a bad human grand opera. He would’ve been happy if it had ended like one of those, with her sticking a knife in him. Instead, it’d been worse: tears, Susan weeping into the pillow on the bed, over what was happening to their family. While he had stood there, feeling—as one of his partner’s colorful phrases put it—like ten pounds of primate excrement. After that, silence had set in between the two of them, that had really only ended tonight, with her angry reaction to the advice he’d given Matt.
He supposed that, without Buck’s name having even been spoken, it had been the main reason for his wife being so quick to jump all over him. Susan wasn’t usually like that. And, in some ways, he couldn’t help believing it was something he deserved. Right now, he didn’t even know where Buck was. Though he was sure the kid could take care of himself—not really a kid at all, but a young man now—he still felt a twinge of guilt.
He started to turn away from the counter, to head upstairs and make amends with Susan, or at least try to. Then stopped—he had heard something. Or nothing. He glanced over his shoulder toward the window above the sink.
The rattle of the swing set’s chain had stopped, as though the night wind had died. Or someone had reached out and stilled the chain’s small motion, with a simple touch of the hand.