Aliens Among Us

by Gardner Dozois

  "Listen, I've seen your transcript. There's not a doubt in my mind that you can understand the specifics."

  She looks at him, and twists her mouth into a derisory smile. He probably thinks he's being flattering. All her A's, and Advanced Placement and a double major in biology and English. Adults are always pretending that sort of thing is "impressive." Right. But she's still just a nineteen-year-old female. Which is to say, she's somebody to be browbeaten and manipulated and sidetracked from everything important.

  His eyes scan the beach fronts, and he lifts his hand to his brow to shield his eyes from the sun. Pat wonders whether he sacrificed wearing shades on the walk—protection from the wicked UV rays bombarding them—so as to seem more accessible. He points to a concrete bench at the foot of some stairs not far from them. "Shall we sit for a bit?" he proposes.

  Pat is glad for the chance to get the bag off her shoulder, so she shrugs and follows him into dry, loose sand. When they are settled, well above the high-tide mark (toward which the dirty-foamed water line is inexorably creeping), Sam, staring out at the water, begins: "I'm not sure how much you've been told. So what I'm going to do is tell you the story as it unfolded in the file they faxed me last night." Pat thinks of the photos, and her throat closes painfully. The very existence of such a file, and its being faxed who knows how many times to who knows how many people. . . .

  Sam draws a deep breath. "That there was a problem first became apparent during your office visit to your gynecologist, to be fitted with an IUD." He looks at her. "It occurs to me from the things you've been saying that you might feel more comfortable talking with a woman, Pat. But I have to say that I assumed you wouldn't mind my being a man for the simple reason that you chose a male gynecologist."

  Pat snorts. "Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a woman? Everybody wants them. And there aren't that many of them. So if you're in a hurry you don't have much choice. You know?"

  Sam nods. "I see. Well, the problem is, we're in something of a hurry here, too, and all the principal investigators in this case are men. And like women gynecologists, women epidemiologists are hard to come by in a hurry, too."

  Pat crosses her arms over her chest. She has to bite her lip to keep from flinging at him her own intention to become a medical researcher.

  "But to continue." Again Sam gazes out at the water; and Pat does the same. "It seems your doctor initially diagnosed you as having a case of what is known as androgen-dihydrostestosterone deficiency. Which, in plain English, is a genetic condition that often does not become apparent until adolescence, in which the male sex organs make a late appearance in an individual that had previously been mistaken for female."

  "That's interesting," Pat remarks. Some of the waves arc coming in crooked. It amuses her to see them crash into one another from odd angles. "And I have to say it's the first time I've heard of it." She smiles bitterly. "You see, my doctor never bothered to share his diagnosis with me."

  "Well there were tests he was having done," Sam says quickly. "I'm sure he was just waiting for confirmation. But then when both the chromosomal analysis and blood chemistry reports came in, everything got much more complicated. Because, you see, the first startling thing was the discovery that your sex chromosome was polyploid." Sam looks at her. "To be specific, instead of having an ordinary diploid chromosomal pair, you've somehow got a quadriploid, a double pair. Given all the biology you've had, I assume you understand what I mean by that."

  Pal frowns. "Except that it sounds like gibberish. I mean, how could I possibly have four sex chromosomes?"

  That's one of our mystery questions," Sam says drily. "Of course polyploidism is not completely unknown—in nonhuman species. Mostly in plants. Often engineered. And in such cases the mechanisms of reproduction are asexual. But that's neither here nor there."

  "So I can think of myself as becoming like a plant?" Pat retorts.

  Sam clears his throat. "I'm going to assume you mean that as a joke." His folded hands tug isometrically against his right black jean-clad knee, which he's raised a little above his left. "To continue. Your doctor had good reason to doubt his diagnosis, even before seeing the first batch of lab reports. For one thing, he knew from his examination that your female sexual and reproductive organs were all fully developed and morphologically normal. For another, because you were being fitted with an IUD, you were menstruating at the time of the examination. So right from the start there were reasons to doubt the diagnosis." Sam glances at her. "But one can hardly blame him for the mistake. Intersexes are usually discovered at birth, and forced into one sex or the other. An ob/gyn would be understandably fuzzy about the possibilities. So. Your test results start trickling in. The tissue sampled is indeed discovered to be male genital cells. Which seems to confirm the diagnosis. But your blood chemistry shows something else. First, that your sex chromosomal pair is not a pair, but one pair of each sex. Second, that your blood is no longer type O, as it had been when you donated blood in a drive at UCSD last fall. So, given all these mysteries, your doctor takes more blood from you, orders more tests, and seeks consults from colleagues in three different fields of specialization. And the new tests show estrogen in your blood." Sam grins at her. "And you know what that means, don't you?"

  Pat snatches a quick look at him, then concentrates again on the water. "Sure. It means that my ovaries are working. Because estrogen is produced primarily in the ovaries, just as testosterone is produced in the testes."

  "Right. So your doctor sees there's a problem, but a rather intriguing one. He—and one of the three specialists he's consulting—decides that you have two separate problems, unrelated. His idea is that you're an odd, hitherto unobserved case of intersex, a true hermaphrodite, manifesting organs of both sexes that are not only morphologically correct, but—as we now think will be the case—functionally correct. Which would be quite an interesting phenomenon, since intersexes on the whole tend to be sterile."

  "But there's the problem of other cellular changes," Pat says when he pauses.

  "A coincidence, your doctor believes," Sam chuckles. He has a pleasant, not unduly "manly" chuckle. Pat decides, though it doesn't compare with any of Joshua's so-infectious giggles, chortles and belly laughs. "But, needless to say, not what the hematologist thinks."

  Pat crosses her legs, and catches herself mentally bracing for the squashing of her balls. She has half a dozen times in the last two weeks, on moving incautiously, been afflicted with horrible abdominal cramps. This time, though, the shift goes off safely, and the sensation of that extra bit of flesh pressing against sexually sensitive places is strictly pleasurable.

  "The endocrinologist is also not so certain. And the oncologist is positive it's not."

  "Oncologist!" Pat exclaims. "Are you saying this growth is cancerous?" The thought has not before occurred to her, for no one has said anything about changes other than in her blood type, her chromosomes and her genitals. But she sees now that she should have been worried about such a possibility all along.

  Sam lays his hand over hers. "The indications are good that this is a controlled, directed growth, Pat. We can't be sure, of course. But the theory everyone's going with now is that the new genetic material is directing the growth." He sighs. "But that leaves open the question as to whether there have been other chromosomal changes. And, most important, what caused the change in your DNA to start with."

  Pat snatches her hand away. "Well, it just burns me up that that damned bastard never mentioned any specialists, any doubts, any problems. Until yesterday I thought it was some kind of freak endocrine problem. That's what he led me to believe! And that once the so-called 'new tissue' had 'fully developed' it would be removed, and everything would be hunky-dory!" Her hands clench into fists. She'd like to pummel him. He's one of them, even if he is finally telling her some of the truth. (To manipulate her!) And it only makes matters worse that she's feeling excessively attracted to him—and in spite of the resentment. (And so what that he knows how
to dress? That proves nothing. Her parents' generation's mania about judging people by hair and dress attest to that!)

  Sam raises his legs, and staring at his bare toes, wriggles them. Even his feet are strong and shapely (though white white). "He's older, isn't he," Sam says. "Well, his generation was taught that women especially want doctors to be God. That you don't tell patients more than you have to, especially when you're not a hundred percent certain of what you think you know." He sighs, and lowers his legs. "You want to get your blood pressure up sometime, you should read through the ob/gyn journals of the nineteen fifties and sixties." He sweeps the air with his hand. "But to continue. Ongoing, intensive work is being done on your blood. The leading theory currently is that there's a virus at work." He shrugs. "The big breakthrough, though, came last week. When it was confirmed that your blood is infectious." Frowning, he looks her in the eye. "Did they tell you this part? That every blood sample put into contact with yours showed the same signs of alteration? Namely, the blood type altered, and an extra chromosomal pair was added. An XY pair for female blood, and an XX pair for male blood."

  Pat gasps. "That's incredible!"

  Sam snorts. "You could say that."

  Which explains why they hauled her off to the hospital yesterday and wouldn't let her out of their sight.

  "But of course the next mystery—beyond etiology and the like," Sam resumes, "is how the thing was transmitted to you. According to your file, when questioned yesterday you swore up and down that the only needles ever stuck into your body were of legitimate medical provenance. And we know from visual examinations that your hymen is still intact, that you have no vaginal or anal tearing. . . ." Sam clears his throat. "Don't you see, Pat. We need to know if this thing was transmitted sexually. Or if not, just how it was transmitted." He presses his lips together. "Your roommate's blood test has come up negative, so we know it can't be entirely casual, say through aerobic or dermal contact."

  Pat thinks of how he put his hand on hers a few minutes ago—he's obviously confident he couldn't catch "it" from her in that way. "I don't understand what you're asking me." Her voice comes out small. And her cheeks, damn them, are burning again.

  Sam executes a long elaborate ritual of cracking all the joints on his knuckles one at a time. "You were being fitted for an IUD, presumably because you intended to have sexual intercourse." He frowns fiercely as he finishes the knuckles on the right hand and starts on the left. "You know, Pat, I feel compelled to interject here that if you're going to be having sexual intercourse you should be using a condom. Since there's more than simply contraception at stake."

  "I told them all already," Pat snaps (wanting to ask him whether he uses condoms every time he has sex). "I was only seeing one man, Joshua. And I decided to get fitted just in case we did decide to. . . have sex. It wasn't that we were necessarily going to. But that I wanted to be prepared in case we did."

  "Your roommate says you were out most nights over the last five months."

  Pat swallows. It drives her nuts that Ulrike has been dragged in. Testing her. Asking her questions. And telling her what? That she, Pat, is carrying some new plague virus no one has ever seen before? The thought enrages her. "Yes," she seethes, "yes I slept with him. As I already told the others, with pajama bottoms." She glares at him. "Pretty damned funny, isn't it. That a man and woman who aren't married would sleep with one another without screwing. A real pair of freaks, right?"

  Sam rises and plants his bare foot on the concrete bench, just at the edge of her skirt. "Why do you say that?" he wonders. Pat stares out at the ocean. The waves, it seems to her, are getting smaller. "What I'm really asking is, was there anything sexual? Did you, for instance, kiss?"

  Pat's eyes fill with tears. "Yes," she answers. "Yes, we kissed. A lot."

  "And petted?"

  Her throat chokes with emotion. "Yes, if that's what you want to call it." Even though she's so furious she wants to destroy something, tears overflow her eyes.

  "Genital petting?"

  She stands up and crosses her arms over her chest. "I don't want to talk about it anymore," she announces.

  "Pat. You know how sexually transmitted diseases are passed. You have to know what I'm asking and why. Don't you?"

  She turns her back on him and the ocean. For a few seconds she listens to the surf beating on the sand and distant rocks. When she closes her eyes she can almost imagine she is on Torrey Pines Beach. She can almost imagine Joshua is nearby, his fingers ready to touch hers, his arms ready to enfold her when she presses herself close.

  But Joshua is gone. And she is here, on this private beach, with an "investigator" wanting to know the details of her sex life with him. She hates them, all of them, for picking at her, for prying into her private self, for frightening Joshua away. A month ago everything was beautiful and life was a constant high.

  She opens her eyes to the glare and turns and faces him. "His semen never touched my lips," she spits out. "I never even saw his penis. Okay? But he . . . we had . . . cunnilingus." Her tongue trips over the word, so technical, so nothing to do with the real thing. She stares out at the water. "And I had no cuts or sores in the pubic area at any time. Is that what you wanted to know?"

  The world is silent, except for the surf and the cry of a gull circling overhead. Then, "Yes, Pat. And I thank you. You can be sure now that no one's going to ask you any more questions about sex."

  Pat hefts her bag to her shoulder and they head back for the institute. Sam tells her about how backwards he was, compared to her, doing his required premed courses as an undergraduate (Princeton, '72). As they walk Pat watches the waves rip crookedly to shore. Never has she missed Joshua as much as she does now.

  The four of them pile into the shiny gray Mercedes parked in the circle drive just outside the front entrance. Pat and Sam sit in the back. Wagner drives. And Shelley, introduced as "support" (the designation given on the institute photo-badge pinned to her dress), rides shotgun with a laptop in her lap and a radio clipped to one shoulder. (Overkill, Pat thinks, noting the cellular phone in the dash.) It is Sam's idea that Pat would feel more "comfortable" with a woman present during meetings that are not "one on one." At lunch he told the story of how he had had his "consciousness raised" a couple of years back, when, dining out, he had overheard a group of women talking at a nearby table. One of them had told how she had been in an elevator that morning with six men, the lone woman for a twenty-floor ascent, and of how creeped-out she had been. The others had then chimed in with similar tales. The conversation, Sam, said, had "struck" him. He said that before then he had always assumed women felt unsafe with single men rather than a crowd, since by his logic a woman could always count on at least one man to come to her rescue against the depredations of another. . . . Wagner and Johns had rolled their eyes, but agreed to assign Shelly to "chaperon duty" (as they keep calling it). Shelley looks and acts so Vanna White, though, that Pat has so far taken little "comfort" in her presence.

  The car is comfortable and she knows she should be glad for the chance to get out, but Pat is in such an aftermath of confusion that all she can think is that a) it is weird to be going out driving when she is really basically a prisoner, and b) her parents would not approve of the car. As they pass through the outer set of gates she fantasizes flinging open the door and running, and yelling that she's been held prisoner against her will. But at once the idea strikes her as crazy. She imagines that anyone who happened to be around to hear (and there are only cars in this neighborhood, certainly no pedestrians that she's yet spotted) would assume her to be a paranoid schizophrenic and simply ignore her claims. She thinks that is how she herself would likely react were she in their shoes.

  They drive south down La Jolla Boulevard. Pat snatches glimpses of the water as it repeatedly enters and leaves their line of vision. They are going to Hillcrest, they told her. Supposedly to look for Joshua.

  She has the feeling that what just happened on the top deck was important. Ce
rtainly it upset Wagner. If only she could have some time to herself to think. But the wine at lunch and all these people constantly surrounding her make it just about impossible.

  Lying on the chaise lounge, headphones feeding her a much-needed hit of Sinead's power passion, she fell asleep. Stuck in that hospital isolation unit, she hadn't slept much during the night. And she wasn't used to drinking wine at lunch. The Big Boys were all inside, having a meeting. (She could just guess about what.) Shelley, nearby, sat at a white metal table, under an umbrella, tapping a keyboard—presumably keeping her under surveillance. Still, closing her eyes and listening to Sinead, she could almost believe she was lying in the sun at Torrey Pines Beach. The wind felt the same on her skin, and the air smelled of the same salt sea. It was, therefore, natural that she fall asleep and dream . . . about Joshua.

  In the dream they were on Torrey Pines Beach after dark, lying on Joshua's old chenille bedspread. The remains of a wood fire smoldered nearby. The pounding rhythm of the surf engulfed them, the way it sometimes did. And Joshua's hands were caressing her balls and penis, and his tongue was sliding between her labia, making her close to crazy with sensation. She pressed her hands against the sides of his head, tight. And then slipped her index fingers into his ears. She thought she might be making a lot of noise, but Sinead kept belting out Nothing compares, nothing compares to you, again and again and again.

  "Pat!" a voice—not Joshua's—dragged her out of the dream.

  "Jesus God it's gross! It makes me sick to my stomach, kind of like that creepy feeling I got in sophomore English class, having to look at Mrs. Anderson's flat-as-a-washboard no-titness from two to three o'clock every fucking afternoon. Only this, man, this is really, really sick!"