Aliens Among Us

by Gardner Dozois

  Now the bald man in the navy silk suit opens the manila folder he's been persistently fingering. Dr. Johns, she sneers to herself. Wagner. Prurient jerks extraordinaire. Much, much worse than the doctor at the hospital. Whether they are as bad as the federal official who'd coerced her into submitting to the exam and photography remains to be seen. The vibes she is getting off Wagner, though, make her feel, in her gut, that they might be worse.

  "I told you," she insists. "He said to call him Joshua. If he mentioned his last name to me, I don't remember."

  Wagner shakes his head and sighs. "I can't believe a bright young lady like you could be so careless. You know you can't tell these days what you might be getting into, don't you? There's some pretty nasty STDs out there, raging out of control. Besides AIDS. You do know that, Patty, don't you?"

  The doctor, now standing, leans over the table and arranges half a dozen or so photos—all 8½ by 11 inches—down the center of the table. Pat stares at the little tuft of gray, like feathers, gracing the top of his shiny pink dome. He sits down and glares at her. "You've got a problem with denial," he announces. "But you can't deny these." He takes a stapled sheaf of pages from the folder and waves them at her. "Your DNA has mutated. Your blood doesn't match any known type, even though your medical records say you are type O. And your sex chromosomes now have three Xs and one Y. Which is to say, strictly speaking you're not a woman." He points at the photo nearest her. "And take a look at the eruptions of tissue, there." His words are coming through his teeth, as though he's almost too furious to talk.

  Face aflame, she jumps out of her chair and grabs wildly at the photos. "How dare you," she seethes as she gets a look at her own pubic hair in larger-than-lifesize glossy black and white. "How dare you slimeballs turn my body into sleaze!" She wants to rip the photos to shreds and burn them. Her genitals, on public display. For creeps like these!

  The doctor goes for the photos, to protect them, and Wagner for her—to slam her back into her chair and keep her pinned there by the shoulders. "Now Patty, I want you to calm yourself," he says.

  "Take your filthy hands off me!" she spits, struggling to twist out of his hold.

  "You're not going to get hysterical on us, are you?" he says.

  The cold spot of fear inside her—that first appeared yesterday—spreads. When she refused to let them examine her, the federal guy also warned her against "getting hysterical," saying that if she did they'd have to give her something to calm her down. Totally cowed, she went along with everything, the crowd of masked witnesses, the cameras, everything.

  "These photographs are the property of the federal government, young lady," the doctor scolds. "Perhaps you weren't aware of it, but intentional destruction of government property is a very, very serious offense. One you could go to prison for."

  She folds her arms across her chest. "Government property," she sneers. "Of sleaze. I can just imagine."

  "Important scientific evidence," the doctor snaps.

  "Sleaze," she repeats. "Made and distributed without my permission, and definitely against my will."

  The doctor looks over her head at Wagner. "People used to say that about Sigmund Freud, you know. But then there have always been people with minds too small and narrow to accept Science."

  "And maybe Freud really was just a dirty old man," Pat mutters. She glares at the doctor, who looks as though he'd like to slap her—and ignores (as best she can) the increase of pressure on her shoulders. "Consider, after all, whose side he took in rape and incest cases."

  The doctor's eyes lift, presumably to exchange knowing looks with Wagner. "This is intolerable," he says. "We have about two dozen important questions it is essential she answer. And she hasn't answered even one of them yet."

  The room is suddenly so quiet that Pat can hear the surf of the ocean through the double panes of glass behind her. The doctor's eyes are still focused over her head, so she guesses the men are involved in some sort of silent communication.

  "It's really, you know, that Patty here doesn't yet understand just how serious this situation is," Wagner finally says. His hands lift from her shoulders. For a few seconds she hears him moving around behind her. "And, you know, girls her age are sometimes painfully embarrassed about anything to do with sex." His manly chuckle rumbles briefly. "Especially with men our age." His face is suddenly right next to Pat's. "Am I right, Patty?"

  Embarrassed, right. You stupid boob.

  But fear is gaining on anger. She feels too exhausted to shove his face away, or scratch it, or do any of the other things popping into her head every second he's bent over her. "Yeah," she says, "that must be it." She coughs delicately and scoots her chair to the right. "No offense, but I think I must be allergic to your cologne." And she puts her hand to her mouth and hacks loudly, to disguise the giggles suddenly shaking her.

  Wagner's breathing gets considerably heavier, but he moves out of her face. She wonders how he's going to get back at her. (There's no doubt in her mind that he will: he's just that kind of guy.) A scenario involving drugs starts playing through her mind. Is there, she wonders, really something called truth serum? Can they shoot her up with a drug that will make her babble indiscriminately?

  She just can't stand the idea of reviewing her sexual relations with Joshua for creeps like these. And she doesn't believe they have valid reasons for prying inside her head. What she does with another person is none of their business It's her body. Which is sacred ground. Off limits. And no one's concern but her own.

  The walls and windows resonate with a fast rapping on the door.

  "The CDC has arrived," Wagner mutters, presumably to Dr. Johns.

  The door swings open and a blond giant fills the threshold. The thought flicks through Pat's head that the blond has been imbibing a Wonderland cocktail labeled drink me. "Elliott Hardwick, CDC," he booms. "Apologies. My plane was late."

  Though blonds are not Pat's type, she has to admit the man is a knockout. "A pretty boy," Ulrike would call him. He exudes energy and good health. You can see it rippling beneath his soft loose Pima cotton shirt, shining out of his purest of thick-lashed blue eyes, bursting out from his smile. She watches him shake hands, first with Baldie, then—leaning across the table—Wagner. She loves his salmon pink suspenders, she thinks they're perfect for the black jeans and pearl gray shirt. She only wishes he wore at least one gold ring in his ears.

  "And this," the knockout says, crinkling his eyes in a major heat storm of a smile, "must be Patricia Morrow." He thrusts his hand at her. "How do you do. I'm Elliott Hardwick. Everyone calls me Sam, I hope you will, too."

  He's overwhelming her. On purpose, she thinks. But she gives him her hand to shake.

  "And what do you go by?" he wonders. "Patricia, Pat, Patty, or something entirely different?"

  The blue eyes are like something out of a book, of the trashy romance sort. Amused, knowing, powerful . . . Also, he's still holding her hand after shaking it. She blushes, and clears her throat. "Pat," she says. "I go by the name Pat."

  He nods, squeezes her hand and lets it go. It's almost a relief when he takes his eyes off her to swing his attache case onto the table and open it.

  Wagner walks to the end of the table, rounds it and walks back up the other side to the center. "If I could have a word with you outside, Sam," he says, jerking his head towards the door.

  Elliott "Sam" Hardwick flashes his smile all around. "Sure, Bill," he says in such an easy way that Pat wonders if he has a West Coast background. "But you know, before we settle down to the hard work of eking out the story, what say we take a little break. My working style is just a little bit different." He winks at Pat. "I'd like, for one thing, if it's okay by her, to stretch my legs for a bit on the beach." He beams at Pat. "I bet you're up for a walk, Pat, am I right?"

  Baldie makes a nasty sound in his throat. Pat shoots a quick glance at him. He looks as though he's swallowed something disagreeable, but though he tamps together the sheaf of photos with undue violen
ce, he says nothing.

  Pat shoves back her chair, grabs her bag and stands up. "Damned straight I'm up for it," she tells Sam.

  He nods at her bag. "You don't need that."

  Pat looks at Wagner, then back at Sam. She slings the strap of the bag over her shoulder and quickly rounds the table. Somebody ransacked her house last week. Her doctor was indignant when she suggested he might know who had done it. They're all sleaze, even Gorgeous Sam. And she knows she'd be a fool to forget it.

  While Sam "snatches a quick briefing" from the Dynamic Duo, Pat waits outside. Scanning the beach, she wonders if there's any point in trying to run. Her guess is that most of the homes (if that's what they are) overlooking this beach are encased in heavy-duty security fences. But supposing she did get up to the street. She doesn't know the terrain in this La Jolla neighborhood. Buses aren't frequent. And taxis simply don't cruise residential areas looking for fares at ten a.m.

  A sudden gust of wind makes her full skirt balloon up. Surely you must have noticed, her doctor had chided her for not having come in "at once." And now she's afraid to wear pants or any close-fitting skirts, except with a long loose shirt or sweater that could be counted on to keep the line of her crotch well disguised. As for what is there . . . it makes her queasy every morning when she wakes and finds all of it there, between her legs, crowding and sweat-making, scary because if you move or touch yourself the wrong way it can hurt, and making it so damned involved to pee, every morning its presence inexorable, something to be gotten used to all over again, like a bad dream about losing a body part that on waking turns out to be true. . . .

  It can all be removed, quite easily, they say. Only they want to wait, to see just how far "it" develops. . . .

  Every morning she's nauseated with revulsion, yes . . . but sometimes, especially in the evening, after a day of having accepted it, a perverse excitement breaks out of her, and she knows that though she wants it removed so that she can at least look normal (even if her blood and DNA will never again be), there's something powerful about the experience, too. And sometimes a secret voice in her head says there's something neat about being a freak. (If only she hadn't gone to the doctor in the first place.) And sometimes that voice whispers to her that there's a reason, there's a meaning in it all, that it's not just an accident of nature but a special event, fated to her in particular. . . .

  And of course Joshua hadn't thought the changes in her genitals in the least bit odd. (Though of course he'd only seen the early stages.) And so she had in turn thought that maybe so much stimulation and excitement just naturally caused certain (small) changes, which she thought of as swellings. (But that was before everything had gotten out of hand.) It had made a weird kind of sense to her when she thought of all that blood suffusing those tissues for hours and hours and hours.

  Such matters had always been mysterious to her. And so she had told herself that just because people didn't talk about the enlargement of the urethra and swelling just below it didn't mean such things weren't commonplace. It's not as though she had ever read any sex manuals or descriptive pornography that could be counted on to reveal such mature-audience side effects. And ever since she had been a little girl, she had been discovering that where sex and reproduction are concerned, the weirdest most unthinkable things often turn out to be true.

  There still lurks in the back of Pat's mind the weird superstitious thought that the cause of the virus is to be found in the hours and hours of "messing around." A book that Ulrike had shown her, warning about such perversity, claimed that sexually stimulated women suffer "congestion" when they fail to achieve "deep vaginal orgasm," which (it claimed) can come only from "proper heterosexual intercourse." Ulrike's concern had been so embarrassing. It had gotten so that Pat hated to come home mornings and face the question Well, did you finally do it? Have you lost the Big Vee? And so she had mostly let Ulrike think they didn't do much besides, well, cuddle and sleep.

  Alter about fifteen minutes Sam opens the door above and comes out onto the top deck. He waves at her, then starts down the stairs, past the middle deck and the hot tub, to the deck set on stilts into the sand. There he stops to remove his Birkenstocks and the beautiful salmon socks that match his suspenders. When he straightens up he gestures her to join him. Pat sighs, but heaves the bag back onto her shoulder and trudges over the bit of beach between them and up the bottom flight of stairs to the deck.

  "Gotta say that after twenty days of Atlanta's temperature inversion, this is purely fantastic," he says, tossing a tube of sun block at her.

  She catches it, looks at the label, then up at the sky. "The sun isn't hitting the water yet," she points out. "I really think this is overkill."

  "If you knew the stats that I know," he remarks, "you'd never be caught out in UV rays without it."

  She nods at his golden-tanned face. "But you go in for tanning salons?"

  His eyebrows shoot up, and then he laughs. "Oh, you're referring to my face. Believe me, it only goes down as far us my neck. From the slopes. Got this great package deal, for weekend skiing this winter."

  Pat sighs and rubs some of the #12 cream into her face. She will humor him. But she wishes she weren't so attracted to him. On top of Joshua, it makes her feel like a nymphomaniac. Sam may be a dish, but pretty boys aren't ordinarily her type.

  They walk for a while along the water line, then pause to look out at the lusciously turquoise water. They may not have as long a stretch to walk as they would at Torrey Pines, but this beach is certainly a lot more private. "I gather," Sam begins, "you've gotten into a pretty adversarial relation, shall we say, with my colleagues." When Pat snorts, Sam grins at her. "Right. You don't have to say anything. But what I want to say about that is that all that's just a problem of communication. We're basically on the same side, Pat. Now I'm not saying it's all their fault, but my guess is that your, well, negative reactions are probably due to their not leveling with you, not explaining what we do and don't know, and what you know and can tell us that we need to know—and, maybe most important, why we need to know."

  Pat's heart starts racing. "Look, I just don't think any of this is anybody's business but my own!" she exclaims. "Okay, my body's fucking up. I understand that. But I'm not a danger to anyone. I haven't done anything wrong. Whatever my relationship with Joshua is is my own damned business!"

  Sam puts his back to the surf. The sun that pours onto his face makes his eyes sparkle the same lush blue of the water. "Pat, can I ask you to do something for me?"

  He gazes intensely down into her eyes, and Pat has to swallow several times. Even in the throes of so much magnetism, she's practically squirming at her own reaction. She's convinced she's so transparent he's deliberately manipulating her. She wishes she could say Fuck you! and stomp off down the beach. But she can't. She's too interested in milking every second out of him she can. Instead, she says, "Will I be allowed to go back to classes when the new quarter starts next week?"

  It makes her mad to hear the childish pleading anxiety in her voice. How could her voice so betray her, when she was feeling snarlingly surly at the very second the words came out? And it doesn't help when Sam lightly touches her shoulder and says: "I wish I knew the answer to that, because if I did I would tell you. But for one thing, I've just been brought in on this, so I can't begin to guess how things are going to go. Certainly we'll do everything we can to keep from disrupting your life any more than necessary. But I also have to add, Pat, that the answer depends a great deal on you. On how quickly we can get the most important questions answered. . . ."

  Blackmail, Pat thinks. Covert, but intended. The bastard.

  Pat drops her bag to the sand and shoves her hands into her skirt pockets. She wonders if all this would have been avoided if she'd gone home over break. But she and Joshua had planned to have an entire week together, and she hadn't been able to bring herself to tell her parents he'd (apparently) canceled. . . .

  Better yet if she hadn't gone to the doctor to get
an IUD in the first place. Then it would be just her—and Joshua's—little secret.

  "No, Pat, please," Sam says quickly, seemingly reading her lace if not her mind. "It's not going to help if you get pissed at me for telling you the truth. As I said before, what we have here is a mystery. A very frustrating and serious mystery. And though some of the answers will be hard to find, others of them, of almost equal consequence, are there, inside your head, if only you would give them to us."

  Pat's hands, still in her pockets, ball into fists. "You say they're important. But what I know is that everybody wants me to surrender my privacy, just like that." Her face burns as she remembers the photos and Wagner's questions and sly innuendo. "Because to you people, it's nothing. Like I have no rights. Like I'm this pornographic object you're all screwing over!"

  Her outburst both embarrasses her and further fuels her rage. She can't remember ever talking to an adult this way before, except of course her parents and their co-members in the collective. Close to tears, she picks up her bag and taking big rapid strides resumes her progress up the beach. If the water weren't so cold she'd walk straight out into the surf, to hide.

  "Pat, wait, please!" The wind whips Sam's words at her. "Please, if you would just stop for a minute and let me tell you what we need to know and why." He's caught up with her, and has her by the arm. "I know it would put a whole different spin on what you've been perceiving as a reckless invasion of your privacy."

  Pat stops. Her breath is coming fast. She stares down at the sand. The man talks like the baby-boomer he is. "Right," she gasps. "I've heard it all already, from those goons up there." She jerks her head back up the beach. "They're grossed out. And they think I might be contagious!"