Aliens Among Us

by Gardner Dozois

  Moving leisurely but with purpose, she went into the bathroom and, except from her shins down, out of Slim's range of vision. There he heard the same faint domestic sounds he had once detected outside her door, as she washed her underclothes. She emerged in due course, went to the wardrobe for some wire hangers and took them into the bathroom. Back she came with the underwear folded on the hangers, which she hooked to the top of the open wardrobe door. Then she took the deflated integument which lay crumpled on the bed, shook it again, rolled it up into a ball and took it into the bathroom.

  Slim heard more water-running and sudsing noises, and, by ear, followed the operation through a soaping and two rinses. Then she came out again, shaking out the object, which had apparently just been wrung, pulled it through a wooden clothes-hanger, arranged it creaselessly suspending from the crossbar of the hanger with the bar about at its waistline, and hung it with the others on the wardrobe door.

  Then she lay down on the bed, not to sleep or to read or even to rest—she seemed very rested—but merely to wait until it was time to do something else.

  By now, Slim's bones were complaining again, so he wormed noiselessly backward out of his lookout point, got into his shoes and a jacket, and went out to get something to eat. When he came home an hour later and looked, her light was out and he could see nothing. He spread his overcoat carefully over the hole in the closet so no stray light from his room would appear in the little slot in the ceiling, closed the door, read a comic book for a while, and went to bed.

  The next day, he followed her. What strange occupation she might have, what weird vampiric duties she might disclose, he did not speculate on. He was doggedly determined to gather information first and think later.

  What he found out about her daytime activities was, if anything, more surprising than any wild surmise. She was a clerk in a small five-and-ten on the East Side. She ate in the store's lunch bar at lunchtime—a green salad and a surprising amount of milk—and in the evening she stopped at a hot-dog stand and drank a small container of milk, though she ate nothing.

  Her steps were slowed by then and she moved wearily, speeding up only when she was close to the rooming house, and then apparently all but overcome with eagerness to get home and . . . into something more comfortable. She was watched in this process, and Slim, had he disbelieved his own eyes the first time, must believe them now.

  So it went for a week, three days of which Slim spent in shadowing her, every evening in watching her make her strange toilet. Every twenty-four hours, she changed bodies, carefully washing, drying, folding and putting away the one she was not using.

  Twice during the week, she went out for what was apparently a constitutional and nothing more—a half-hour around midnight, when she would stand on the walk in front of the rooming house, or wander around the block.

  At work, she was silent but not unnaturally so; she spoke, when spoken to, in a small, unmusical voice. She seemed to have no friends; she maintained her aloofness by being uninteresting and by seeking no one out and by needing no one. She evinced no outside interests, never going to the movies or to the park. She had no dates, not even with girls. Slim thought she did not sleep, but lay quietly in the dark wailing for it to be time to get up and go to work.

  And when he came to think about it, as ultimately he did, it occurred to Slim that within the anthill in which we all live and have our being, enough privacy can be exacted to allow for all sorts of strangeness in the members of society, providing the strangeness is not permitted to show. If it is a man's pleasure to sleep upside-down like a bat, and if he so arranges his life that no one ever sees him sleeping, or his sleeping-place, why, batlike he may sleep all the days of his life.

  One need not, by these rules, even be a human being. Not if the mimicry is good enough. It is a measure of Slim's odd personality to report that Celia Sarton's ways did not frighten him. He was, if anything, less disturbed by her now than he'd been before he had begun to spy on her. He knew what she did in her room and how she lived. Before, he had not known. Now he did. This made him much happier.

  He was, however, still curious.

  His curiosity would never drive him to do what another man might—to speak to her on the stairs or on the street, get to know her and more about her. He was too shy for that. Nor was he moved to report to anyone the odd practice he watched each evening. It wasn't his business to report. She was doing no harm as far as he could see. In his cosmos, everybody had a right to live and make a buck if they could.

  Yet his curiosity, its immediacy taken care of, did undergo a change. It was not in him to wonder what sort of being this was and whether its ancestors had grown up among human beings, living with them in caves and in tents, developing and evolving along with homo sap until it could assume the uniform of the smallest and most invisible of wage-workers. He would never reach the conclusion that in the fight for survival, a species might discover that a most excellent characteristic for survival among human beings might be not to fight them but to join them.

  No, Slim's curiosity was far simpler, more basic and less informed than any of these conjectures. He simply changed the field of his wonderment from what to what if?

  So it was that on the eighth day of his survey, a Tuesday, he went again to her room, got the bag, opened it, removed the box, opened it, removed the ream of paper, slid the blue band off, removed the covering sheets, took out the second Celia Sarton, put her on the bed and then replaced paper, blue band, box-cover, box, and bag as he had found them. He put the folded thing under his shirt and went out, carefully locking the door behind him in his special way, and went upstairs to his room. He put his prize under the four clean shirts in his bottom drawer and sat down to await Celia Sarton's homecoming.

  She was a little late that night—twenty minutes, perhaps. The delay seemed to have increased both her fatigue and her eagerness; she burst in feverishly, moved with the rapidity of near-panic. She looked drawn and pale and her hands shook. She fumbled the bag from under the bed, snatched out the box and opened it, contrary to her usual measured movements, by inverting it over the bed and dumping out its contents.

  When she saw nothing there but sheets of paper, some with a wide rectangle cut from them and some without, she froze. She crouched over that bed without moving for an interminable two minutes. Then she straightened up slowly and glanced about the room. Once she fumbled through the paper, but resignedly, without hope. She made one sound, a high, sad whimper, and, from that moment on, was silent.

  She went to the window slowly, her feet dragging, her shoulders slumped. For a long time, she stood looking out at the city, its growing darkness, its growing colonies of lights, each a symbol of life and life's usages. Then she drew down the blind and went back to the bed.

  She stacked the papers there with loose uncaring fingers and put the heap of them on the dresser. She took off her shoes and placed them neatly side by side on the floor of the bed. She lay down in the same utterly relaxed pose she affected when she made her change, hands down and open, legs a little apart.

  Her face looked like a death-mask, its tissues sunken and sagging. It was flushed and sick-looking. There was a little of the deep regular breathing, but only a little. There was a bit of the fluttering contractions at the midriff, but only a bit. Then—nothing.

  Slim backed away from the peephole and sat up. He felt very bad about this. He had been only curious; he hadn't wanted her to get sick, to die. For he was sure she had died. How could he know what sort of sleep-surrogate an organism like this might require, or what might be the results of a delay in changing? What could he know of the chemistry of such a being? He had thought vaguely of slipping down the next day while she was out and returning her property. Just to see. Just to know what if. Just out of curiosity.

  Should he call a doctor?

  She hadn't. She hadn't even tried, though she must have known much better than he did how serious her predicament was. (Yet if a species depended for its existenc
e on secrecy, it would be species-survival to let an individual die undetected.) Well, maybe not calling a doctor meant that she'd be all right, after all. Doctors would have a lot of silly questions to ask. She might even tell the doctor about her other skin, and if Slim was the one who had fetched the doctor, Slim might be questioned about that.

  Slim didn't want to get involved with anything. He just wanted to know things.

  He thought, "I'll take another look."

  He crawled back into the closet and put his head in the hole. Celia Sarton, he knew instantly, would not survive this. Her face was swollen, her eyes protruded, and her purpled tongue lolled far—too far—from the corner of her mouth. Even as he watched, her face darkened still more and the skin of it crinkled until it looked like carbon paper which has been balled up tight and then smoothed out.

  The very beginnings of an impulse to snatch the thing she needed out of his shirt drawer and rush it down to her died within him, for he saw a wisp of smoke emerge from her nostrils and then—

  Slim cried out, snatched his head from the hole, bumping it cruelly, and clapped his hands over his eyes. Put the biggest size flash-bulb an inch from your nose, and fire it, and you might get a flare approaching the one he got through his little slot in the tin ceiling.

  He sat grunting in pain and watching, on the insides of his eyelids, migrations of flaming worms. At last they faded and he tentatively opened his eyes. They hurt and the afterimage of the slot hung before him, but at least he could see.

  Feet pounded on the stairs. He smelled smoke and a burned, oily unpleasant something which he could not identify. Someone shouted. Someone hammered on the door. Then someone screamed and screamed.

  It was in the papers next day. Mysterious, the story said. Charles Fort, in Lo!, had reported many such cases and there had been others since—people burned to a crisp by a fierce heat which had nevertheless not destroyed clothes or bedding, while leaving nothing for autopsy. This was, said the paper, either an unknown kind of heat or heat of such intensity and such brevity that it would do such a thing. No known relatives, it said. Police mystified—no clues or suspects.

  Slim didn't say anything to anybody. He wasn't curious about the matter any more. He closed up the hole in the closet that same night, and next day, after he read the story, he used the newspaper to wrap up the thing in his shirt drawer. It smelled pretty bad and, even that early, was too far gone to be unfolded. He dropped it into a garbage can on the way to the lawyer's office on Wednesday.

  They settled his lawsuit that afternoon and he moved.

  Residuals

  Paul J: McAuley & Kim Newman

  Born in Oxford, England, in 1955, Paul J. McAuley now makes his home in London. He is considered to be one of the best of the new breed of British writers (although a few Australian writers could be fit in under this heading as well) who are producing that sort of revamped, updated, widescreen Space Opera sometimes referred to as "radical hand science fiction," and is a frequent contributor to Interzone, as well as to markets such as Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction, When the Music's Over, and elsewhere. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Award. His other books include the novels Of The Fall, Eternal Light, and Pasquale's Angel, two collections of his short work, The King of the Hill and Other Stories and The Invisible Country, and an original anthology coedited with Kim Newman, In Dreams. His acclaimed novel, Fairyland, won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award in 1996. His most recent books are Child of the River and Ancient of Days, the first two volumes of a major new trilogy of ambitious scope and scale, Confluence, set ten million years in the future.

  Kim Newman made his original reputation as a film critic, is a commentator on films on British television, and has published several books of film criticism, including Nightmare Movies and Wild West Movies. Of late, though, his career as a fiction writer has also shifted into high gear—and he has published a number of novels in the '90s, many of them gaming novels published under his pseudonym of "Jack Yeovil." Novels published under his own name include The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, and Anno Dracula. He has also published a critical study, Horror: 100 Best Books, written in collaboration with Stephen Jones, and an original anthology, coedited with Paul J. McAuley, called In Dreams. He won the British Science Fiction Award for his story "The Original Dr. Shade," and has been a frequent contributor to Interzone, and to various British anthology series. His most recent books include the critically acclaimed The Bloody Red Baron. He lives in London, England.

  In the wry but suspenseful story that follows, they join forces to spin a thrilling tale of secret alien invasion, warn us to keep watching the skies, and examine some of the unexpected consequences of world-shaking events, some of which may not even arise until years down the road . . .

  On his way out, the motel guy switches on the TV and the AC without bothering to ask if I want either. The unit over the door rattles and starts to drip on the purple shag carpet. On a dusty screen, a cowboy hunkers down over the Sci-Fi Channel station ident, squinting from under a Stetson. It ought to be like looking at myself because the cowboy is supposed to be me. But it's not.

  The Omega Encounter is always playing somewhere on a rerun channel, I guess, but here and now it's like an omen.

  I'm still living off the Omega residuals because it's my version of what went down, officially adapted from the "as told to" book Jay Anson did for me. Nyquist sold Starlight, the book Tom Fuckin' Wolfe wrote with him, for twenty times as much to Universal.

  There's a little skip where there used to be a shot of a fly-blown, bloodied rubber cow carcass. It could be a censor cut or a snip to reduce the running time. When E.W. Swackhamer directed Omega, there were thirteen minutes of commercials in an hour of TV; now there are eighteen, so five minutes of each hour have to be lost from everything made before the nineties.

  I don't unpack, except for the bottles of Cuervo Gold Tequila I bought at the airport, and sit up on the bed, watching two days of my life processed and packaged as a sixteen-year-old movie-of-the-week.

  It's gotten to the part where I find the first of the mutilated cattle. I'm showing one to Mr. Nyquist, played by Dennis Weaver the way he plays McCloud, shrewd and up-right. To tell the truth, Nyquist was always half bombed even before it all started, and had a mean streak in him that was nothing to do with drink. The bastard would hit Susan when he was loaded, going off like a firecracker over the slightest thing and stomping out, banging the screen door hard, leaving her holding her cheek and me looking down at my dinner. He was crazy even then, I guess, but still able to hold it down.

  The movie makes me a lot more talkative than I ever was around Nyquist. Susan is Cybill Shepherd in her post-Last Picture Show, pre-Moonlighting career slump. I am Jan-Michael Vincent in his post-birth, pre-death career trough.

  I watch until I follow the slime trails in the grass and see the lights of the mothership off in the distance hovering above the slough, and then I flip channels because I can't stand to watch anymore.

  They didn't have the budget to do the aliens properly on TV and only used long shots, but I still don't want to watch. I can take the expensive computer-controlled models in the movie because they're too real in the way Main Street in Disneyland is too real. So perfect a reproduction it doesn't fool anyone for a second. But show me a couple of out-of-focus midgets jumping around inside silvered plastic bags in slow motion with the setting sun behind them, and my imagination fills in the blanks. The sour reek. And the noise the things made as they hopped around, like they were filled with Jell-O and broken bones.

  QVC is less of a blow to the heart. I drink tequila out of the bathroom glass and consider calling a toll-free number to order a zircon chandelier. Then I drink some more and decide against it.

  Despite Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford (as Nyquist), and five million preinflation bucks of ILM, Starlight: The Motion Picture was a box-office disappointm
ent. By the time the effects were developed, Omega had spun off a mid-season replacement series with Sam Groom (as me) and Gretchen Corbett that got canceled after three episodes. The aliens were old news, and everybody knew how the story came out. In Starlight, I'm rewritten as a codger farmhand who sacrifices himself for Boss Man Ford, stealing the film with a dignified death scene. Richard Farnsworth got an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, but lost out to the gook in The Killing Fields.

  I give up TV and call my agent, using the room phone because my mobile doesn't want to work out here in the desert, all that radar, or the microwave signals they send to the secret Moon colony (ha ha), and I tell him where I am. He says to watch my ass, and that when I get back he thinks he might have another hardware store commercial lined up ("fix your Starship, lady?"). It's just for New York cable, but it'll pay the rent a while. He doesn't think I can pull off this reunion, is what it is, and I tell him that, and then I hang up and I watch an old Saturday Night Live for a while.

  I was on one show for about five minutes, in a Cone-head episode with Dan Ackroyd and Jane Curtin. Can't hardly remember that night—I was drunk at the time—but now I guess those five minutes are always showing somewhere, just like everything else that ever went through a transmitter. If aliens out there have been monitoring our broadcasts like they did in old movies to explain why they speak perfect English, just about the first question we'd ask them was if they taped those lost episodes of The Honeymooners. I watch Chevy Chase do Jerry Ford falling over just about everything in the studio set, and drink some more tequila, and fall asleep a while.

  It's been a long day, the flight out from New York delayed two hours, then a long drive through Los Angeles, where I've never driven because I was chauffeured around when all the deals were in the air, and which is ten times more packed with traffic than I remember, and out into the high desert along Pearblossom Highway with all the big trucks driving in bright sunlight and blowing dust with their headlights on.