Though you wouldn’t persuade Johnny to believe that.
She wondered how soon before the drug wore off (not the one she’d taken); and he started to think again. He would remember the rifle. Stupid panic, to have let him see it. She would have to do some nifty handwaving to get around that. But she would have help. Poor child, he’d been so much on his dignity at first—and rightly so—but here he was with his hand in the honey jar all the same. It was so easy, she ought to be ashamed. She was ashamed. She could only tell herself (fearing it was nonsense) that one day it might be possible to explain.
Leaning on the page she turned to look at Johnny, his bare arms startlingly white, vulnerable and pitiful as a child’s despite the deep curves of muscle. Under the influence of Oneiricene, drug that infects the waking world with the loose poetry of dreams, she saw a white hound lying there: clean-limbed, earnest-eyed, eager and absurdly faithful. The muscle-shadows of his power a dapple of urgent words. A lamed hound is a murdered hound. One more betrayal couldn’t hurt him. She had not wronged him. Johnny was beyond harm.
On the bedside cabinet lay a crumpled 3D snapshot of a little girl (better put that away again…) A sprig of creeper in a toothglass of water, the blue flowers already faded. What a dog’s life he’d been living. Johnny Guglioli, friend of roaches, with his leper’s bell and his chastity. The power of American New Age morality astounded her. To think, she murmured, I used to wonder how the devil people could hope to sell Coca-Cola with no sugar in it and no caffeine.
“I believe in pleasure,” said Braemar.
2
THE ALEUTIANS
i
At ten fifty eight a.m. (STZ10) on the fifteenth of July, 2038, Colonel Hebron Everard, commander of USAF base St Francis, Cape Copper Ridge, Alaska was in his public office with his PR. They were about to take Access Hour. The Colonel, an ethnic Slav at the end of a routine career, had regarded this command as a peaceful prelude to retirement. He’d never been very wide awake, politically. The Revolution had plunged him into acute, almost precancerous depression. There had been no enemy across the cold straits for a generation. But barely ten miles away there was a new town of some one and a half million people, a sprawling de facto arcology of plastic burrows, decrepit clapboard and half-empty power starved towers. If revolutionary violence broke out in St Francis, Everard’s duty was clear and horrible.
Major Louis Parker, the commander’s PRO and (in the modern structure)second in command, was a stocky Afro American with a wife and two children on the base; Everard was a childless widower. He had a reputation among the men for cautious and intelligent kindness. As they waited for the floodgates to open, he listened patiently to Everard. St Francis town—the blue lit burrows paved in spongy carpet tile that smelt always of stale beer and vomit, the miserable population, the mindless murders. There was nothing for the people to do, besides drink and watch fabulous animations in the movie theatres. Or else stay at home and spy on each other through the soap nets. They lived on handouts. They didn’t go outside. No one stopped them, but there was nowhere to go, no fuel to spend.
The base had been at action stations, all overground duties suspended, since the State of Emergency was declared. The bunker’s main screen window showed an idyllic scene: burrows and silos overgrown with nodding flowers, like the peaceful ruins of some long-dead civilization. Only the all-weather strip, and the perimeter fence, spoiled the illusion.
“It’s the death of capitalism,” said Everard. “Okay, Communism had to go first. But there’s too many people, that’s the beginning and end of it. No system can survive. We’re going to see the Dark Ages return, Lou, right here in the USA.”
The revolution, which had at first seemed such an ebullient success, had suffered a few mood swings in the last weeks. But the arcologists were unlikely to stampede, and almost certainly there would be no order to harm them if they did. Very shortly Parker expected to hear that the President had finally surrendered, and the phony civil war was over. But Everard was beyond reason in these moods.
An aircraft appeared, coming in to land. It touched down silently, a black and white checkered spaceplane without visible ID. Both men stared at it, and slowly, as if drawn up on strings, rose to their feet. Six people left the plane. Nothing else stirred.
“Oh, my God.”
“Systems failure,” stated Parker. “Excuse me Sir—”
The plane had not registered, did not register, on horizonless radar. It did not exist, it had never been in the sky. But there it stood.
There was no eyes-on human surveillance outside, closer than the main gates. There was nothing on the board to show that any man on duty had noticed this invasion. Parker did not raise the alarm. Six figures crossed the window. A full frontal view of them, starred by frisking lines, showed at bunker access.
“Who are you?” said Parker. “What do you want?”
The man was wearing a light brown coverall, again without any ID. He was unarmed, unaugmented, carried no communication devices.
“Access,” he explained, in nasal and oddly uninflected English. “This is Access time. Isn’t that right.”
The visitors all wore light brown coveralls, but each of them had added some form of decoration. One wore plastic clamshell fragments knotted in her hair, another had a “sealskin” tunic strung with fringing and beads; and so on. They were uniformly slender limbed but bulky in the trunk. Their hair was dark and lank, their skins medium light. They had no noses. They came into the colonel’s office smiling grotesquely, showing their open hands, the fingers pointing downwards.
One of the six was a child about ten years old. He perched himself at the communications console to the right of the commander’s desk. He ran his hands over the keypads: an odd gesture, as if he were stroking a pet animal. Then he went in slickly, never pausing for a second.
Louis Parker watched, fascinated, still unsure what kind of incident he was facing. Public access—livespace—was such a sensitive concept right now that he would tolerate almost anything in this hour, in this contained space. A bunch of naked feminists could come in and spray graffiti over the walls, over himself and the colonel too: in fact, they’d done it. At this incredibly delicate juncture…. He told himself the kid could do no harm, no chance of him starting World War Three. The Big Machines could look after themselves. They had to, no one else in charge!
The others stood around. They didn’t speak, but their faces kept twitching. It was a little eerie: they seemed evidently insane. But there were no pre-violence indicators. The child accessed a gift catalogue, the commander’s morning paper, and the LANDSAT gazetteer. When he’d finished with LANDSAT he stood, swallowing a split-lipped grin as if he thought it might give offense. He shrugged his narrow shoulders.
“Thank you very much,” he said, in the flat adenoidal English.
Parker smiled warmly.” Glad to oblige, kid. What were you looking for, by the way?”
The six noseless visitors joined hands, and began to dance.
Louis Parker stared. Belief came over him in a rush, irrational but complete. The dance over, they calmly turned to leave.
“Wait!” yelled Parker, “Wait a moment. Can one of you kindly tell me in plain English—just what is going on!”
The one in the sealskin tunic was, by all non-verbals, their leader. He raised his eyebrows.
They walked out.
On one of the small screens a disconcerting image flickered. Commander Everard and the chief alien arranged armchair to armchair against a blue curtained backdrop. A ruddy aging blond, with the eyes of a worn-out peasant farmer, faced an olive, noseless savage. Some Public Domain trawler company had scooped, and was pasting up a news item. It whisked away.
Colonel Everard was shaking all over. He looked sick as a dog, as if the room had been pumped full of nerve gas.
“Got to get them back,” Parker told hims
elf, subvocal. “The girl, the one like a pretty girl with the clamshells in her hair. She’s their weak link, sexual favors bimbo. We could turn her.”
It was the way he had been taught to assess terrorists.
“Oh, Lou,” gasped Everard, sweat standing on his pasty face. “Oh, Lou… The aliens have landed!”
There was a knock on the door, a startlingly immediate and physical sound. Parker hesitated a split second: slapped the pad. The visitor with the clamshells marched in and stood, fists balled at her sides, within a foot of him.
A small red object, a little bug, crept out from under her hair. She put up one hand and absently tucked it into her mouth. The distraction seemed to calm her.
She turned about, she marched out. She had not spoken a word. Parker saw that from Everard’s face, and knew what had happened to him.
“What?” he yelled. He recoiled from the closed door. “What!”
Outside, through the screen, the checkered spaceplane quietly took to the air.
Parker recovered, dizzy and stressed but in control again. The systems failure, the odd aircraft, would be explained somehow. He knew about the noseless people. It was a Francistown cult, an algal bloom of the hopeless ocean, few months old. People had their noses cut off, ate no solid food, and became spiritually pure, or whatever. Maybe it was a feminist thing, nose equals penis. Which made you wonder about the noseless men.
Colonel Everard was looking dog-eyes at his PR; a scared hound to his master. Parker laughed shortly. “No such luck, Heb. No demigods are going to come and haul us out of the shit. It’s a hoax. Listen to me. We’re going to rub the camrecord for the last hour, including what I’m saying now. Nothing happened, okay? We don’t want the media all over us. Let’s get through with the revolution shall we, before we move on to alien invasion.”
The alien girl left another note for Johnny at the Planter’s Bar. This time, the meeting went smoothly. Since Johnny wouldn’t touch any of her coralin-based equipment, Braemar bought a “dead” camcorder and stock, locally produced but still ridiculously expensive. The hotel terminal in her room had a port for the adaptor. It processed the images: constructing statistical approximations of the information unavailable to a flat lens. She sat on her bed, remote in one hand, taking Johnny and his alien apart frame by frame: obverse profiles, upward angles, backviews. Braemar had once saved her own life by exploiting a housewife’s tv science of pop-anthropology: explaining to her fellow-housewives the far-reaching implications of a bride’s behavior at an English middle class wedding. She turned that science on the alien. She was trying to find answers—in gesture and glance and dress—for the questions that might be so vitally important.
What kind of people are these? What do they respect, what do they value? What do they fear?
She soon gave up looking for the zip-fastener. The alien kept her overalls on, and her brown cloth baseball boots with the ankle ties. She did not, if one could express it so, mug “alien life form” in any way; she didn’t ham it up at all. But she was entirely convincing.
Johnny took the alien’s hand. The creature allowed him. There were three rather short fingers, a thumb, the stub of a fourth finger. With the “thumb” locked in a fist, pads on the outer surfaces formed a thick horny paw. The nails were trimmed claws. The skin of hands and face looked faintly scaly, with visible pores: goosebumped like chicken skin, but no trace of down. He felt her forearm through the cloth, laid his own beside it.
“This is the pentadactyl limb!”
The alien observed his awe with mild amusement. Braemar saw her wondering, Why shouldn’t an arm be like another arm? When Johnny ingenuously offered to trade nakedness, the alien was at first overcome with mirth: then suddenly deeply wary.
What was that anxiety? Not sexual, not simply sexual anyway.
They called her “Agnès.” It was the only name she offered aloud, and Johnny reported no other. Confusingly, she sometimes seemed to use it to “name” Johnny as well as herself. It would do for the moment. So would “her” gender. The alien still seemed feminine to Johnny. Braemar accepted his attribution: but it had taken a very few frames to convince her this certainly was no woman. “She” had not been aware that the name “she” borrowed was a girl’s name. The reaction to Johnny’s probing—are you female? was odd. “She” did not appear to misunderstand, or to find the question alien. She was embarrassed for Johnny, no sense of taboo broken, just a minor social gaffe. Johnny was continually embarrassing her. She didn’t want to believe how easily he was impressed.
Johnny wanted to know: “Why have you come here?”
She saw that Johnny was dissatisfied. She shrugged in disappointment.
Braemar read body language: emotion and unconscious habit. No voice spoke in her mind. The alien’s facial gesture was swift and delicate: Braemar could not identify any organized system of sign. On the tape, Johnny spoke aloud and the alien rarely spoke at all. When the conversation became intellectual she had to rely on Johnny’s notes. As far as she could judge, the gaps in the dialogue were filled with reasonable likelihood by the “telepathic” communication Johnny reported. But how much did that mean? Maybe nothing at all.
(‘inside’ and ‘outside’; sic; Johnny’s notes.)
Not a word of this for Braemar, only an impression of unshakeable youthful earnestness.
“What is this ‘Self’?” asked Johnny.
The alien spoke, plain English: one stiff intense phrase.
“The self is God.”
She briefly covered her face: Braemar read, obviously, reverence.
Oh, it was for all the world like a serge-wrapped sweating missionary, communing with a wondering savage. Johnny’s wonder, the alien’s amused calm. Is the laughter, laughter? Is evasion, evasion? Is reverence, reverence? Is sexual attraction, attraction? Johnny was still uneasy about the telepathy business (and who could blame him). He approached the subject cautiously.
“Agnès, can you explain to me how do we understand each other? How do you make me understand you? Have you learned my language or am I—uh—doing my own translation somehow?”
Oh, now that worried her. Again, not seriously but socially. The missionary becomes a tourist, a tourist briefly afraid that this attractive bit of local talent is wanting in his wits.
Agnès was puzzled (reported Johnny). Puzzled tone.
On Braemar’s screen the alien suddenly dismissed her doubts and became radiant. (a break in transmission, said Johnny’s notes).
Agnès made no noises, no throat-clearing: none of that mechanical, casual humming and hawing the Deaf have to suppress in social intercourse with the hea
ring. They are naturally silent, Braemar noted; and thought of animal comparisons.
There was a vertigo that could strike Braemar: a kind of horror, when looking at Agnès made her feel herself on the brink of some ultimate dissolution. She was attempting to find meaning, where no meaning of hers could exist. At moments she could taste Johnny’s initial terror, bile in the mouth. When this fugue came she would leave the interview tapes and think of glory: how the outcast eejay and the obsolete housewife were going to astonish the world with their noseless tourist.
They even had an alien artifact. Agnès refused to take Johnny back to the ship with the same firmness as she refused to remove her clothes; but she’d given him a present. It was a piece of rag-paper, grainy and rough, torn from the kind of child’s jotter that you could buy in any street corner supermarket in Fo. An abstract pattern of color covered it. The coloring medium might be ordinary wax crayon, for all Braemar could tell, but in the alien sweeps and dashes she discerned (was this imaginary?), talent and skill. The alien is an artist. The eye attached to the word-filled mind finds it extremely difficult to come to any image “empty”: simply to see. The farther a human artist strays from representation, the more literary a picture becomes, not less. Agnès did not struggle with the paradox. She called this a poem.
The coralin “maker disc,” which held the original record of Braemar’s whole working life (and plenty of room for another few working lifetimes), was actually a cassette of incredibly fine tape, laid with filaments of the Blue Clay. She transferred the reprocessed Agnès interviews to this disk as she studied them, and added Johnny’s audio notes: a rough mix. The whole could be refined into 360 smoothness later. Not over-produced—they’d be careful to preserve the scrubby edges of romance.
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