by Judith Field
“Ah, Sergei,” Konetko said as he walked up. To his surprise, Mr. Lowe from the WPA was among the men at the bar, drinking from a mug that looked as big as his head and smiling. Sergei offered his hand, glad to have a chance to show his gratitude.
“Vasily tells me you’re fitting right in, Mr. Androv,” Lowe said over the laughter and ruckus. His handshake was firm and confident, stronger than Sergei remembered.
“I’m glad he thinks so,” Sergei said. “Thank you for the chance, Mr. Lowe. It’s a good job, and I’m grateful.”
Lowe smiled. “You’re welcome, and call me Abe.”
“Hey, Androv,” Konetko said, “I told you I’d teach you how to do a jig, so watch.”
Moving quickly despite his size, Konetko vaulted onto the bar and spun to face the open floor. The ceiling arched surprisingly high for a basement, leaving plenty of room for the Belarussian. His friends started clapping, keeping a simple beat, and Konetko began to dance. He kicked and spun, his legs moving but his trunk staying still, and Sergei was surprised by how agile Vasily was. It wasn’t a complicated dance, but it took concentration and fluidity, more than Sergei expected to see. He paid attention to Konetko’s steps, noting the pattern and number of moves, and thought that maybe, this was one dance he could manage. His feet started to count the beat, shuffling side to side as he rolled his shoulders in time, mimicking Konetko’s dance.
“What the hell,” Sergei said in his native Russian, and came to a decision.
¤
Later that night, as he stumbled to a lonely subway platform after two or three too many beers, Abraham Lowe would marvel at his good fortune. Not only had he successfully placed a man in a job that might give him a new career, he’d had the unmistakable pleasure of seeing two men, bound by common labor, dancing a riotous jig on a battered bar while longshoremen and steelworkers roared their approval. He hadn’t seen a crippled former dancer or a wrestler past his prime, but two steelworkers enjoying a Friday night, in good health and with time on their side. Somewhere, he thought, my rabbi grandfather is smiling at what the golems hath wrought, and with a laugh at his choice of words, he sat down in a dingy subway car to head home.
Brandon Nolta works as a technical editor and computer support professional, when he’s not writing stories, freelancing, being a bum, or making stuff up to amuse his teenaged offspring. His fiction and poetry have appeared in The Pedestal Magazine, Digital Science Fiction, Big Pulp, Perihelion SF and several other publications. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his tremendously patient wife and their minions, and if you must know more, you can follow his occasional adventures on Twitter under @b_nolta.
ALIEN TREATIES
By Randal Doering
PAUL WOKE UP PAINFULLY, his legs stiff and his arms taut, constrained by fabric. He opened his eyes, which hurt in spite of the dim light. His heart pounded like a jackhammer, his body pumped with adrenaline, as if he was fighting a war. He was making bizarre mewling sounds, which he forced himself to stop. Right now he was not hallucinating, except for faint clicking noises off in the distance. These were normal, and he knew they’d fade away if he ignored them.
It took Paul a full minute to remember where he was. He was in a mummy bag, in a cardboard box, in a blind alley in New York City. It was dead of winter, around the end of January or beginning of February. He couldn’t be sure, exactly, since he had been “away” again and had lost time. Paul’s face was in the breathing hole in the mummy bag, the air on his face was freezing cold, and his breath came out in fat clouds of mist.
Paul slid his hand down the inside of his pants and found he had fouled himself while he was away. The heavy stink of feces sickened him. The crap on his legs was old and dried, and there wasn’t much of it. At least that was a blessing. Sometimes he really unloaded while he was away, and it was hell to clean himself and the bag. The Super Bag, Paul called it. Good to minus twenty, and guaranteed to stay warm even when wet with urine. Guaranteed to keep him alive even in the New York winter. It was an artifact of the early days of his illness, when he was running around the city gathering the things he’d need as a newly-minted homeless person, when he still had a few grand in his checking account.
Paul unzipped the sleeping bag and got out, gasping at the cold air. It had to be around zero degrees. He felt around under the Super Bag and found the sack of clean clothes he had left for himself and the empty garbage bag for dirty stuff. He quickly undressed and cleaned himself up as best he could with baby wipes. Sometimes when he was away he threw all his possessions out of his box, and Katie gathered them up and, when the fits passed, put them back. He wondered how bad this latest attack had been and how many times Katie had rescued him.
Without ceremony Paul pitched his soiled pants out of the box, to be thrown away. No washing machine in the world could handle that mess. The rest of his clothes, and the Super Bag, got stuffed into the garbage bag, for laundry. Paul scraped at himself with the baby wipes, cleaning up his legs and rear end, dumping the used wipes out of the box, with the pants. At least it wasn’t windy. It was about seven in the morning, dark but brightening in the east. The air was clear and cold. There were four inches of new snow on the ground, and he’d have to kick that away so it didn’t melt on the warmer days and soak his box.
After clean-up Paul switched to the clean clothes. He wished like hell he could arrange a shower before putting on the clean stuff, but such was not to be. He couldn’t walk into a homeless shelter caked with feces; they’d kick him right back out. It would all have to wear off in his clean clothes, and he’d stink.
Back when he still had health insurance, when his condition was new and he was fighting it with drugs and psychotherapy, his psychiatrist told him that late-onset schizophrenia attacked people in different ways. Some had constant noise in their heads but no lost days. Others, like Paul, had a more severe version of the condition, and he suffered periods of days at a time when he was unable to function. He sat and drooled, babbled to himself, lay there and gibbered at passers-by. Thank God he wasn’t the wandering sort of schizophrenic. He stayed put in his box, where Katie could keep an eye on him. He’d been out on the mean streets of NYC for three years now. This was his third winter.
Paul got out of his box and looked at the boxes on either side of his. Jonathan, farther in the alley, and Katie, closer to the sidewalk, were still there. Paul had led an expedition to a local dumpster where they retrieved the boxes for all of them and covered them with garbage bags and taped the bags on. Back then they were just street people, sleeping on the sidewalk until Paul spied the dumpster and its treasures. They moved their finds into the alley and took it over, and so far it had worked out fine. Jonathan, a dour fifty-something former electrician gone to homelessness after a bad divorce, had a tendency to pile junk outside his box, but he was farthest in the alley and couldn’t readily be seen from the street. In the early days Paul got on Jonathan about the mess, and in retaliation Jonathan stole Paul’s wallet when he was away and didn’t give it back for six weeks. Paul got the point: if you can’t defend yourself, don’t go to war.
Then there was Katie. Katie was around thirty-five but looked like she was fifty; ten years on the street had been hard on her. A former art school student trying to make it as a freelancer, she got into trouble with drugs and ended up homeless and unable to get back in the game. Katie had some sort of mental condition herself. She muttered to herself and groaned, snarled at Paul and Jonathan a lot, barked like a dog from time to time. But she was lucid through it all, she didn’t go away like Paul did. Once Jonathan threatened to take her wallet, like he had Paul’s, and Katie went and got the cops and showed them Jonathan’s refuse pile, and they got on him for littering and threatened him with a ticket that they all knew he had no means of paying. After that Jonathan let Katie be. For his part, Jonathan, who could throw a scary tantrum, ran off the other homeless who came to steal their sleeping bags, and the teens who came with broken bottles and baseball bats to beat
up the homeless. So it went, in their blind alley.
Now that Paul was cleaned up, he became aware that he had a crushing headache, and the voices were just off to the periphery of his mind. This was the usual state of things; he hardly noticed anymore. The headache was a bad one, a throbbing skull-buster that made tears run out his eyes. He used to take aspirin for these headaches, but he’d learned that aspirin didn’t help, so now he saved the money and gritted down. When he was away he was outside such headaches; when he was lucid he was in constant pain. Such was his life.
“You must be back,” Katie called from inside her box. She didn’t like to come out on the cold days, she just talked to him from inside her box.
“Yeah. How long?”
“Eight days. You weren’t thrashing a lot this time, just babbling. No throwing things out.”
“Good to hear. I have to do laundry. You?”
“Went to the shelter four days ago, everything’s clean. Could use a coffee, though.”
“Yeah. Wallet?” He always gave his wallet to Katie when he knew he was going away, so he didn’t throw it out.
Paul’s wallet appeared at the slit in Katie’s box; she shoved it through the slit and it fell on the snow. Paul scooped it up and put it in his pocket. He gathered up his stuff and prepared to take off for the laundry, when Katie said something surprising:
“Guy came to see you. Said he’d be back.”
“Social worker?” The outreach people had tried to get Paul onto social services; they didn’t seem to get that he often wasn’t lucid enough to use such services. There were facilities for people with conditions as severe as his, but those were full, and in three years there had never been an opening. Paul had long since fallen through the cracks.
“No,” said Katie. “You’re going to like this. Said he’s a space alien. Said he has a deal for you, when you come back.”
Paul let out a bark of a laugh. “Another New York nut,” he said.
Katie chuckled. “Good luck with that coffee.”
¤
Paul got his puffy coat from Katie, pulled the gloves out of the pockets, and put them on. The coat smelled of Katie, which wasn’t a bad smell, but was thick because she had used the coat for a pillow. He was still weeping because of the pain in his head, and it was such a cold day the tears froze on his face. He dumped his garbage and used his ATM card to get a twenty from his slowly-dwindling account. Then it was laundry and a visit to the thrift store for a new pair of pants. He stopped at a soup kitchen for breakfast, filling his belly for free. On the way back to his cardboard box Paul bought a coffee for Katie and another for himself. All the chores took hours, and the sun was well up by the time he returned.
“Haven’t seen Jonathan in two or three days,” Katie said. “I’ve been sleeping a lot, though.”
Paul looked and saw a pile of refuse outside Jonathan’s box. “Looks like he’s in.”
Katie snorted. “Anything for me?”
Paul had four ones left from the twenty he got out of the ATM, and he handed them to her. “Appreciate your looking out for my stuff while I was away,” he said.
“Sure.” She was sitting in her box, with the flaps open, and now she looked up at him with those pale blue eyes. He almost didn’t like looking at her, she looked so old and tired, even now when she was fresh from sleep. “Your fits are getting longer, Paul. You’re going to starve. I gave you water while you were out, but you wouldn’t eat. You never eat.”
“Had breakfast,” he said. “Full belly, now.”
“They need to get you into a facility.”
“Fat chance.” The conversation died right there, with Katie giving Paul a wary look. Paul’s fits used to be a day or two, then three days, then four or five. Now they were eight days, once nine. Paul was on a binge and starve cycle, eating everything he could get hold of when he was lucid and then losing weight when he was away. He knew this was bad for his body, but there wasn’t much to be done for it.
“I’m going to the shelter to take a shower,” Katie said. “Watch my place, so Jonathan doesn’t take a dump in it or something?”
Paul waited for Jonathan to shout out a curse or otherwise defend himself, but the third box in the row was silent. “I’ll watch your stuff,” he said. “Go.”
Katie pulled a handbag out of her stuff and took off, leaving Paul to kick the snow away from his box. With the sun up it felt warmer, though he’d be surprised if it was twenty degrees. He was just finishing snow removal when a short man, no taller than five-foot-four, approached him. This fellow had a black crushed felt overcoat and a black scarf, as well as a black cap. He wasn’t wearing gloves, and his hands were out of his pockets; he certainly hadn’t come from very far away, like that. As he got closer Paul could see he was from India; this was confirmed by the man’s sing-song English as he said,
“Paul Ackerby? Former computer programmer, now mentally ill homeless?”
Paul looked the fellow up and down. He had a thin moustache with pointed ends that were quite long and looks like little tentacles, and his eyes were smaller than the norm, and so dark they looked black. They were almond-shaped, as well. “And who would you be?” he said.
“Call me Sanjay.”
Paul had worked with lots of programmers from India and knew this to be a common name.
“Are you a social worker, Sanjay?”
The man grinned so wide and toothy it was startling, and Paul actually took a step backward. For just a split second, Sanjay was gone, and something wholly different was in his place. Paul blinked, cleared the strange image from his mind, and saw only the India man again.
“I’m an explorer,” said Sanjay. The grin disappeared, and he looked serious.
“You mean social explorer, right? Anthropologist studying the homeless, that sort of thing.”
“More like that than you’d think.”
“What can I do for you today?” Paul didn’t really want to talk to an anthropologist, but all that was waiting for him was watching Katie’s box, then reading an old paperback he had stashed away. Talk killed time.
“I’m an explorer from a distant world, Paul Ackerby. I am here on earth as an official diplomat from my people to yours. What you saw a moment ago was my true form, not this image I’m projecting.”
Paul remembered the strange thing he thought he saw. It looked like a huge eel the size of a man, solid and scaly with two pairs of tentacles curling out from its mid-section. It was wearing a silver, metallic vest or body armor. Its head was large and had a wide mouth full of needle teeth, and it had two small red eyes.
“That’s me,” Sanjay said. “An alien electric eel.” Again, the too-wide smile.
“Neat trick,” Paul blurted. Suddenly he was disoriented and spin-headed.
“We must talk, Paul Ackerby.”
“Just Paul. If you’re here from another world, why aren’t you talking to our president, or the United Nations?”
“My business is with responsible citizens, who so far have been giving me a hard time.”
“Why would an alien diplomat be talking with regular citizens and not the top brass?”
“Well, we want to bypass a long, drawn-out political process,” Sanjay said cheerfully.
Paul stared. The image of the eel was burned into his eyes, Sanjay and the eel occupied the same space. As Sanjay grinned, the eel grinned. As Sanjay moved his hands, the eel moved its tentacles. Paul noticed Sanjay had a black valise in his left hand.
“What is your business, then?” he asked.
“I have in this valise a contract I want you to read, then put your signature on. It signs the human race into five centuries of slavery, in return for certain concessions in the future. It’s how we bring new members into the Conclave.”
Paul couldn’t think of a thing to say. This guy was obviously nuttier than a fruit cake, but. But there was this eel, and this body armor, and this grin that any fool could see didn’t fit a human face. So he just stood there, mind f
rozen, as his breath puffed out in clouds.
“As I said, I’ve approached others with this offer, but they’ve…blown me off, as you say.”
“Others,” Paul said weakly. He couldn’t get over the eel; was he hallucinating? Sure wasn’t like any hallucination he usually had. Usually it was just noises, not images.
“Doctors, engineers, scientists, programmers. They all think I am mad, even seeing my true form. Or they think they’re going mad. None will look at the contract. So now I’m trying you.”
“Why would anyone sign such a thing?”
“The key was those concessions I mentioned. Plus, of course, you personally would be extremely well-compensated for your efforts on our behalf.”
“What do you eat?” Paul said. Those long teeth looked sharp.
“Fish, what else? Big seafood fan. Not people, I assure you.”
“So. You said no one else would sign, and now you’re trying me. Why?”
“How are your people treating you, Paul? Getting lots of help from homo sapiens, in your difficulties? Fun having a severe mental illness, crapping yourself every few weeks, living in a box winter after winter, while the system says it can’t do anything to help?”
Hot anger surged in Paul. He hadn’t felt this in years, but it used to make him mad as hell that he was locked in this Catch-22: without being lucid he couldn’t get on the system that would supply him with the means to keep him lucid. In the early days he got as far as getting drugs for his condition, but when he was out he threw them away. He needed someone to help him stay on the drugs, and that meant institutionalization, and there was no room at the inn.
“Yeah, fun,” he muttered, and Sanjay nodded.
“If not for Katie giving you water when you’re out, you’d already be dead.”