Aliens Among Us

by Gardner Dozois

  "I want her," he said. "I'm not going away without her." He stood up without knowing why.

  "There's been others said the same thing. I would go, you know, to the meetin' in the regular way; come back next month, and the fella'd be waitin'."

  The old man was drawing himself to his feet, his jaw outthrust belligerently. "They'd see her," he said, "and they'd talk a lot, just like you, about how good they'd take care of her, though there wasn't a one brought a lick to eat when he come to call. Me and Janie, sometimes we ain't et for three, four days—they never take account of that. Now here, you look at her."

  Bending swiftly, he took his daughter by the arm; she rose gracefully, and he spun her around. "Her ma was a pretty woman," he said, "but not as pretty as what she is, even if she is so thin. And she's got sense too—I don't keer what they say:"

  Janie looked at Paul with frightened, animal eyes. He gestured, he hoped gently, for her to come to him, but she only pressed herself against her father.

  "You can talk to her. She understands."

  Paul started to speak, then had to stop to clear his throat. At last he said: "Come here, Janie. You're going to live with me. We'll come back and see your father sometimes."

  Her hand slipped into her shirt; came out holding a knife. She looked at the old man, who caught her wrist and took the knife from her and dropped it on the seat behind him, saying, "You're going to have to be a mite careful around her for a bit, but if you don't hurt her none she'll take to you pretty quick. She wants to take to you now—I can see it in the way she looks."

  Paul nodded, accepting the girl from him almost as he might have accepted a package, holding her by her narrow waist.

  "And when you get a mess of grub she likes to cut them up, sometimes, while they're still movin' around. Mostly I don't allow it, but if you do—anyway, once in a while—she'll like you better for it."

  Paul nodded again. His hand, as if of its own volition, had strayed to the girl's smoothly rounded hip, and he felt such desire as he had never known before.

  "Wait," the old man said. His breath was foul in the close air. "You listen to me now. You're just a young fella and I know how you feel, but you don't know how I do. I want you to understand before you go. I love my girl. You take good care of her or I'll see to you. And if you change your mind about wanting her, don't you just turn her out. I'll take her back, you hear?"

  Paul said, "All right."

  "Even a bad man can love his child. You remember that, because it's true."

  Her husband took Janie by the hand and led her out of the wrecked bus. She was looking over her shoulder, and he knew that she expected her father to drive a knife into his back.

  They had seen the boy—a brown-haired, slightly freckled boy of nine or ten with an armload of books—on a corner where a small, columniated building concealed the entrance to the monorail, and the streets were wide and empty. The children of the masters were seldom out so late. Paul waved to him, not daring to speak, but attempting to convey by his posture that he wanted to ask directions; he wore the black cloak and scarlet-slashed shirt, the gold sandals and wide-legged black film trousers proper to an evening of pleasure. On his arm Janie was all in red, her face covered by a veil dotted with tiny synthetic bloodstones. Gem-studded veils were a fashion now nearly extinct among the women of the masters, but one that served to conceal the blankness of eye that betrayed Janie, as Paul had discovered, almost instantly. She gave a soft moan of hunger as she saw the boy, and clasped Paul's arm more tightly. Paul waved again.

  The boy halted as though waiting for them, but when they were within five meters he turned and dashed away. Janie was after him before Paul could stop her. The boy dodged between two buildings and raced through to the next street; Paul was just in time to see Janie follow him into a doorway in the center of the block.

  He found her clear-soled platform shoes in the vestibule, under a four-dimensional picture of Hugo de Vries. De Vries was in the closing years of his life, and in the few seconds it took Paul to pick up the shoes and conceal them behind an aquarium of phosphorescent cephalopods, had died, rotted to dust, and undergone rebirth as a fissioning cell in his mother's womb with all the labyrinth of genetics still before him.

  The lower floors, Paul knew, were apartments. He had entered them sometimes when he could find no prey on the streets. There would be a school at the top.

  A confused, frightened-looking woman stood in an otherwise empty corridor, a disheveled library book lying open at her feet. As Paul pushed past her, he could imagine Janie knocking her out of the way, and the woman's horror at the savage, exultant face glimpsed beneath her veil.

  There were elevators, a liftshaft, and a downshaft, all clustered in an alcove. The boy would not have waited for an elevator with Janie close behind him. . . .

  The liftshaft floated Paul as spring water floats a cork. Thickened by conditioning agents, the air remained a gas; enriched with added oxygen; it stimulated his whole being, though it was as viscous as corn syrup when he drew it into his lungs. Far above, suspended (as it seemed) in crystal and surrounded by the books the boy had thrown down at her, he saw Janie with her red gown billowing around her and her white legs flashing. She was going to the top, apparently to the uppermost floor, and he reasoned that the boy, having led her there, would jump into the downshaft to escape her. He got off at the eighty-fifth floor, opened the hatch to the downshaft, and was rewarded by seeing the boy only a hundred meters above him. It was a simple matter then to wait on the landing and pluck him out of the sighing column of thickened air.

  The boy's pointed, narrow face, white with fear under a tan, turned up toward him. "Don't," the boy said. "Please sir, good master—" but, Paul clamped him under his left arm, and with a quick wrench of his right broke his neck.

  Janie was swimming head down with the downshaft current, her mouth open and full of eagerness, and her black hair like a cloud about her head. She had lost her veil. Paul showed her the boy and stepped into the shaft with her. The hatch slammed behind him, and the motion of the air ceased.

  He looked at Janie. She had stopped swimming and was staring hungrily into the dead boy's face. He said, "Something's wrong," and she seemed to understand, though it was possible that she only caught the fear in his voice. The hatch would not open, and slowly the current in the shaft was reversing, lifting them; he tried to swim against it but the effort was hopeless. When they were at the top, the dead boy began to talk; Janie put her hand over his mouth to muffle the sound. The hatch at the landing opened, and they stepped out onto the hundred-and-first floor. A voice from a loudspeaker in the wall said: "I am sorry to detain you, but there is reason to think you have undergone a recent deviation from the optimal development pattern. In a few minutes I will arrive in person to provide counseling; while you are waiting it may be useful for us to review what is meant by 'optimal development.' Look at the projection.

  "In infancy the child first feels affection for its mother, the provider of warmth and food. . . ." There was a door at the other end of the room, and Paul swung a heavy chair against it, making a din that almost drowned out the droning speaker.

  "Later one's peer group becomes, for a time, all-important—or nearly so. The boys and girls you see are attending a model school in Armstrong. Notice that no tint is used to mask the black of space above their air-tent."

  The lock burst from the doorframe, but a remotely actuated hydraulic cylinder snapped it shut each time a blow from the chair drove it open. Paul slammed his shoulder against it, and before it could close again put his knee where the shattered bolt-socket had been. A chrome-plated steel rod as thick as a finger had dropped from the chair when his blows had smashed the wood and plastic holding it; after a moment of incomprehension, Janie dropped the dead boy, wedged the rod between the door and the jamb, and slipped through. He was following her when the rod lifted, and the door swung shut on his foot.

  He screamed and screamed again, and then, in the echoing
silence that followed, heard the loudspeaker mumbling about education, and Janie's sobbing, indrawn breath. Through the crack between the door and the frame, the two-centimeter space held in existence by what remained of his right foot, he could see the livid face and blind, malevolent eyes of the dead boy, whose will still held the steel rod suspended in air. "Die," Paul shouted at him. "Die! You're dead!" The rod came crashing down.

  "This young woman," the loudspeaker said, "has chosen the profession of medicine. She will be a physician, and she says now that she was born for that. She will spend the remainder of her life in relieving the agonies of disease."

  Several minutes passed before he could make Janie understand what it was she had to do.

  "After her five years' training in basic medical techniques, she will specialize in surgery for another three years before—"

  It took Janie a long time to bite through his Achilles tendon; when it was over, she began to tear at the ligaments that held the bones of the tarsus to the leg. Over the pain he could feel the hot tears washing the blood from his foot.

  Motherhood, Etc.

  L. Timmel Duchamp

  Here's a sly and fascinating story that suggests an ingenious new reason why you shouldn't hang around with an alien in hiding if you should happen to meet one: something might rub off . . .

  New writer L. Timmel Duchamp has become a frequent contributor to Asimov's Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and has also made sales to Full Spectrum, Pulphouse, Starshore, Memories and Visions, The Woman Who Walked Through Fire, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

  The room has a long, glass-topped conference table, the room's windows look out on the ocean, but the chair to which they direct her puts her back to the view. The man wearing a black-and-white polka-dotted tie identifies himself as Wagner. He introduces the bald man facing her across the table as Dr. Johns. Wagner asks most of the questions. The other man stares moodily over her shoulder, at the ocean.

  "He called himself Joshua," she answers the first question. And: "I liked him because he was different," she answers the second.

  The man across from her jerks his eyes off the ocean to stare at her. She blushes. Already she has made a mistake.

  "Different, I mean, from all the other guys I'd ever gone out with," she amends. "He liked to talk about real things. And he listened, too. A lot. He had a cute laugh." She looks down at her hands, folded tightly and whitely together. "And the most wonderful brown eyes."

  She gets stuck there, does not want to go on. Her eyes skim the walls, looking for the video camera. They are clever about these things, but she thinks she has found it, embedded in a metal sculpture. The bead of red light gives it away.

  An "interview," is how they'd billed this ordeal. No one used the word interrogation. And no, they said, she was not under arrest. Though she cannot of course go home. If she were reasonable, she would understand why.

  They kept telling her to be reasonable. To consider "the implications." They said that the interview . . . would help. Would help them, the "authorities." Who would know best what to do, much better than she. Who was only an inexperienced, nineteen-year-old . . . female. Who was in no position to judge the danger, to understand the stakes. She must trust them.

  Right.

  Wagner prompts her. He has moved to her side of the table. He perches on it, uncomfortably close to her. One of his feet rests on the chair to her right. The cuff of his somber black pant leg is rucked up. The black sock underneath looks as though it could be silk. Probably, she guesses, it goes all the way up to his knee. Certainly it covers his calf. She's sure that the skin of his leg is dead white. And crawling with coarse red hair. The hair on the hacks of his hands and knuckles, certainly, is coarse red. And plentiful. Probably it covers his body.

  "We saw one another just about every other night for a month before I first stayed over with him," she replies to the next question. She swallows, and looks away from Wagner's looming bulk, and wishes she could get away from him. He wants all the details, "Everything," he says. Like the prurient evangelist con artist who corners the timid into confessing all sin, all filth, all wickedness in their hearts. So she elaborates, "Yes, we slept together when I stayed over. In pajamas. Both of us. And wearing underpants."

  >God, Ulrike, he's so weird. I mean, he said I couldn't sleep with him unless I'd keep my underpants on and wear at least the bottoms of the pajamas. He says he doesn't want to spoil our emotional relationship, which is what he says will happen if we rush ahead with the sexual side of things. He says he knows from past experience. And that I have to trust him.

  Telling it to Ulrike had (at the beginning, at least) made it seem all quite wonderful, an exemplar for what "normal" should be. But it hadn't felt "normal." It would be middle-of-the-night dark when Joshua's lips and fingers woke her. She'd hear his breathing, and her own, and other noises she knew involved her (or his?) genitals—sexual noises she couldn't identify. And little sounds coming from her own throat, that she couldn't mute, because of the explosive sensations rippling in wild, lingering streams of movement through her body. All the while a small observing part of her tried to visualize—as though to watch—what was happening, tried to fit it all into the fictional and theoretical ragbag that constituted her "knowledge" of Sex. His hands are now there, doing this, the detached observer would note. His right thigh is there. And his genitals are . . .

  But little of it fit. And his genitals . . .

  "Are you saying," the bald man grates, impatiently tapping the closed manila folder on the table before him, "that you ever saw his genitals? Even once? That you never felt them with your hands? And that you didn't think it abnormal that after five months' sleeping together you still had not had intercourse with him?"

  He sounds incredulous.

  There is no way she's going to tell these men that only now and then had she managed to cop a feel, a vague fleeting touch to his genitals before Joshua had maneuvered them out of her reach. Joshua had claimed that her touching him there would turn him on too much. Timidly, she had suggested that since he used his fingers (et cetera) to bring her to orgasm, that she should do the same for him. How can she explain? In the night, she did think it weird. But she couldn't know for sure, because she'd never slept with a man before. And besides, Joshua always made her feel, well, weird for wanting more. Isn't it enough? he'd ask her. How can you miss what you've never known? Don't you enjoy what we do?

  Sometimes they spent half the night coming. She recalls that one night he got up three times to change his underpants. (It is unreal remembering, with Wagner looming over her and Dr. Johns looking cold and dissatisfied and writing in a small thin script on the yellow pad to one side of the manila folder. They keep saying they want her to tell them everything. Imagine having them write that down. Three pairs of underpants. They'd probably ask her what his come smelled like. And whether it left stains.)

  He had made her feel that wanting to touch his genitals was . . . immodest. Or at the least premature. Which was totally weird, considering all their discussions about Freedom and Being and the need to find Meaning in the face of an utterly random Universe. . . .

  These men, she thinks, would feel comfortable with the archaic terminology she and Ulrike had used to discuss it. "Virginity," "hymen," and an "unnaturally prolonged state of innocence." And "clitoral versus vaginal orgasm. . ." They giggled when they used such language. But it was the only way she had known how to talk about it to Ulrike.

  Now Wagner presses Dr. John's incredulity. She knows He must have figured out he's found one of her most vulnerable spots.

  "Look," she says, "I'm nineteen. I'd never been with a man before. Sure, maybe I thought something might be a little strange. But hey, when you're new at it, all sex is weird."

  Wagner lays his freckled hairy paw on her neatly (but tensely) folded hands. The touch of it, even the sight of it makes her want to throw up. Talking about sex in general and about her and Josh
ua in particular with these creeps is obscene. "You're making me feel like an old goat, young lady," he says with one of those man-style chuckles (utterly unlike Joshua's frank crackups).

  "But intercourse, you must have known that vaginal intercourse is the normal point of sexual relations," Dr. Johns lectures her. He raps his knuckles on the manila folder. "It says on your transcript that you've had three psychology courses. You can't expect us to believe you didn't know something was wrong!"

  She is blushing again. And not only can she not stand a second longer of Wagner's touch, but her hands have started trembling. Chagrined, she snatches them away and buries them in her lap. Then she scoots her chair back from the table and glares up at him, though he's definitely too close for comfortable eye contact. (But what distance would be comfortable? A thousand yards?)

  "What are you accusing me of?" she demands. "I've never heard that people have a legal obligation to report men who don't take every available opportunity to fuck a willing woman! I have a right to know what you think I've done wrong," she adds, though without faith that they're going to be willing to grant her any "rights" whatsoever, however de rigueur they were supposed to be.

  "Now, Patty," Wagner remonstrates. "You know we're not accusing you of anything. We're talking public health, public safety here. We're talking viruses. Patty, communicable viruses. We're talking a virus that this guy whose name you won't tell us passed to you." He leans forward, so that his thickly freckled face is right up in hers. "Now I thought your doctor explained all that to you. Am I right?"

  Patty. On top of everything else, their calling her that just about made her want to scream. But no way was she going to tell them. They'd probably just go on calling her that to bug her. And besides, as she'd long ago figured out, if adults you didn't know called you something you didn't ordinarily answer to, a name that was basically alien to you, it meant you were just that much more private from them, and that every time they used the hated name it reminded you of what jerks they were to call you something without first finding out what it is you wanted to be called.