Other Aliens Page 16

  She stood from the table so suddenly that her chair toppled over backward with a smack.

  “You disgust me,” she spat.

  Mason glanced up with a startled look.

  “I want no part of whatever type of life you plan to have after tomorrow,” she said, walked out of the café, and drove home alone.

  Back at the house she changed into baggy sweatpants and a shirt that had been washed and dried so many times that the fabric was soft and wispy, an outfit that generally gave her great pleasure to wear, but which of course now she was too angry to enjoy. She had meant what she had said. She hadn’t planned to say it, but she didn’t regret saying it either. She was done with him. She was livid. She grabbed a bag of caramels, popped the cap from a stout, and sat down at the table in the kitchen with the lamp on to eat and drink and enjoy it, not just out of spite for him, but out of spite for all postcorporeality. She was still sitting there when headlights swung into the driveway and a key rattled in the door and in walked his father, who could see that she was in no mood to talk, so kissed her head, patted her shoulders, and then went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. Snoring soon filled the house, but she was too restless to lie down, too wired on beer and sugar, so she cleaned instead. She scrubbed the toilet, she scrubbed the tub, and she scrubbed the grime that had formed around the faucet of the sink, trying to avoid thinking about him, which she couldn’t, so eventually she gave up. She thought about him. She wandered the house in the glow of the streetlights coming through the windows, inspecting the contents of cabinet drawers and closet shelves, examining different mementos from his life. Here were the stuffed animals that he had tolerated sleeping with. Here were the action figures that he had endured playing with. Here were the hand casts that he had complained about posing for even after having finished posing. And, oh, here, this was the container full of messages he had written to her at school during lunch. She peeled the lid from the container with a sense of awe. When packing lunches, she had always slipped a note into each lunch box. And at a certain age he had begun writing her back, shutting a reply into his lunch box for her to find when she opened his lunch box to empty out the used bags later that afternoon. His messages had been written on scraps torn from the corners of notebook paper, using whatever type of utensil he had favored at the time. Crayons, then colored pencils, eventually markers, and gel pens as a teenager. The messages had never said anything memorable, just remarks about his classes, or comments about his schoolmates, but she had loved those notes. None of his brothers had ever written her back.

  She remembered now, that was the last thing he had said to her at the café before becoming engrossed in his screen. He had been explaining the logistics of the operation. He had smiled, “I’ll message you after it’s finished.”

  She dozed off on the couch at some point during the night and ended up with an arm and a leg dangling over the side and her face pressed into the crack between a pair of cushions. His father woke her just before leaving for work. Rain was drizzling. She brushed her teeth, tied her hair back, threw on some eyeliner, put on some lipstick, and got dressed in her uniform for the motel. By then the rain was a downpour. The wipers on her car needed to be replaced, and her breath was fogging the windows, so she could hardly see as she drove. She felt terrible. Mason would be at the clinic by now. Nobody had gone with him. She should have kept her mouth shut the night before. She had just been so angry, but even if his choice was abominable, he was still her son. The guilt was awful. The wipers thocked back and forth. She swiped at the fog with the cuff of a sleeve. Her pulse sped up as she made the decision. She had to go. She was terrified by the thought of being there for the transition, the moment when his body would be suddenly empty, the moment when his mind would be suddenly gone, but she needed to hold him one last time before she lost him. She drove past the motel and merged onto the highway.

  The clinic was locked. After buzzing her in, the receptionist asked for her identification and checked a list for her name and then led her down an empty hall into the operating room, where he had already been sedated. Tears welled in her eyes. The procedure was under way. She wouldn’t have a chance to say goodbye. A machine enclosed his head completely, with the rest of his body extending out of the machine onto a gurney. His palms were crossed over his chest. A neon-pink plastic wristband identified him for the operators. Aside from a pair of plain white boxers, he was naked. Seeing him in there like that was so upsetting that she almost turned to leave, but instead she wiped the tears from her eyes and forced herself to take a seat on the stool next to the gurney. She leaned her umbrella against the wall, she set her purse on the floor, and then she held his hands in her hands. The operators nodded at her, and then went back to work, adjusting dials and skimming scans. There was nothing to do but wait, and the wait was terrible. The constant feeling of dread that she had been living with since his announcement was so much worse than ever before. Rain pelted the roof. Indicator lights blinked. The operators murmured to each other. She kept wondering whether the moment had passed, waiting for some sign that the transition had occurred, but there was no way of telling. Her muscles were tensed. Her teeth were clenched. And her dread just kept building.

  She was bracing for the moment of the transition, squeezing his hands with a tight grip, breathing so fast that she was slightly dizzy, staring at his body, when she became aware of a faint beeping coming from a monitor on the machine. The sound made her think of her phone, tucked into the breast pocket of her uniform with the volume on high. She actually would know when the transition had occurred, she realized. When he messaged her, her phone would chime. She glanced down at her uniform, looking at the bulge her phone made in the pocket, and when she did, the strangest thing happened. She felt a burst of joy. Excitement so intense that a shiver passed through her. This sense that she wasn’t about to lose him forever, but instead was finally about to meet him, truly meet him, for the first time. The feeling confused her, but the longer she stared at the pocket expecting her phone to chime at any moment, the stronger the feeling grew, until she was nearly overcome with anticipation. His hands were still warm, but whether the life had left his body yet didn’t matter. She felt certain of that suddenly. It wasn’t him. It never had been.

  Blind Spot

  Paul Park

  “The thing is, you can’t tell the difference. At least not from the outside. Because of interbreeding and genetic manipulation.”

  “What are you saying now?”

  “It’s a moral difference. That and perception. They have sharp ears, for one thing. Hear things from far away. Walk past a house from the outside, just along the garden walk, hear what people are saying around the corners. Hear people in their bedrooms.”

  “That’s quite funny, the thing you do.”

  “What?”

  “Using the same word in different ways so close together. ‘From the outside.’ ‘Difference.’ ‘Walk.’”

  “That’s what I meant,” he said. “They’re very sensitive.”

  By “garden walk” he meant the crazy paving next to the stone wall, chest-high. There were hollyhocks. By “around the corners,” he meant because the bedroom faced the street. The stone wall was in the back. You got to it across the meadow through the butter and eggs.

  “Please go on.”

  “Because they are reptilian originally, they have a nictitating membrane. Some of them do. It’s very quick. It slides across. Yellowish, I suppose.”

  Or else he meant because the bedroom was on the first floor, the windowsill high above the ground. The house itself was yellow stucco with a tile roof.

  “No.”

  “I’m telling you. It was in the book. Long tongues. They smell through their tongues.”

  Roses among the hollyhocks around a corner of the wall.

  “And you can’t figure out by looking?”

  “What do you mean? They can see through walls.”

  “I mean by looking at them.”

&n
bsp; “Not anymore. It’s been too long. They could be you or I. Thirty-six hundred years is their planet’s orbit, and now the first ones have assimilated. But guess what?” he said. “They’re coming back.”

  An older man, he stood by the window, looking out onto the street. Gauze curtains. The other one lay on his back across the saffron bedspread. Tufted chenille. He smiled. “Go on,” he said, “pull it again. Pull it harder.”

  “I’m telling you, they started everything. This was in Mesopotamia. Before that we were just living in caves. I’m speaking of the wheel, written languages, agriculture. They were technologically advanced. They’d have to be, coming from outer space. But not just that. They could see the whole past, the whole future, the whole world laid out. Worlds beyond worlds. Like it was written in a book.”

  The older man’s name was Roland Styce. He had been born in Wales. He was a big man, unshaven. For seven years his psychiatrist had been prescribing him a combination of serotonin inhibitors—most recently fluoxetine—to treat his symptoms, with an antipsychotic (Zyprexa) to stabilize his moods. Sometimes, though, he tried to do without. As now, for example. Since his midtwenties he had worked as a teller in a bank. He was forty-seven.

  The younger man lay propped up on his elbows. He had less time behind him. And even barring any sort of cataclysmic interruption, he had less in front of him as well. Soon, he would work another tattoo into the pattern on the inside of his left arm, an image taken from a tarot deck. He would spend six years in jail. Soon after, he’d be dead.

  Even excepting some sort of violent interruption, he would be dead in nine years’ time. He would die in the hospital, in the city of Leeds, not a hundred kilometers from the stucco house. Leeds is in the center of the United Kingdom. Above it, in the night sky, there is no trace of the twelfth planet as it approaches perihelion. You can scarcely see the stars.

  “What’s the problem then? Maybe they can help us sort out some of this mess.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” said Roland Styce. “They don’t care anything about us. They’re very cruel.”

  Despite his years of service to the Midland Trust, he had never once been promoted, because of his low intellect. His flesh had a pasty look to it. His hands were large and fat, with fingers like moist rolls of uncooked dough, painted with egg white, dusted with red spots of pepper, and then sprinkled unaccountably with hair, according to the recipe of some deranged pastry chef. They were a masturbator’s hands. No one touched them voluntarily to say hello: his superiors in the bank (he had no inferiors) avoided greeting him, preferring instead to touch him vaguely on the shoulder, which, though disgusting in its own right, a wobbly pudding of tufted flesh, at least had the advantage of being clothed. No one had liked him in a long time.

  He was the kind of man who said most things twice. “We’re like nothing to them. Every single one of us could die.”

  “I don’t get that,” said the younger man. “You said we were all mixed in now. Interbred for two hundred generations …”

  “They don’t care about themselves!” Styce interrupted. “They’re cannibals on Niburu. That’s their home planet. We were nothing but slaves to them, slaves to mine gold, which they used to make heat and light. Most of them were eight feet tall. We worshipped them as gods. You can see in those Sumerian bas-reliefs in the British Museum.

  “I read about it in a book called The Twelfth Planet,” he continued after a pause.

  The younger man grimaced, then stretched out his jaw and snapped his teeth together. Yellow and discolored, they made a satisfying snap. In nine years, barring any sort of incomprehensible calamity, he would die of an intracranial neoplasm in the city of Leeds. “So we’ll have to fight them then,” he said. “We’re not as helpless this time around.”

  “Perhaps not. They do have an advantage, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They can read minds.”

  All day he’d been afraid. That morning he had woken as if under a dim, inchoate nebula of doubt, riven with anxiety as if by spears of light. “The Twelfth Planet,” he had muttered to himself as he had blundered out of bed into his slippers: this mania of his, gathering now, was a way of struggling against these feelings by a process of deflection, the way you might squeeze your thumb with a nutcracker as a cure for seasickness.

  The younger man saw nothing of this. He saw an older fellow, overweight, standing by the window, just beginning to unbutton his shirt. He scarcely listened when the fellow spoke: “The light is dim where they are. Most of the time, except for the foci of the ellipse, you see, they don’t have a setting or a rising sun. They seed their atmosphere with molecules of gold, which reflect light from the rifts in their own oceans, the volcanic activity there. The light is always dim, so they don’t sleep.”

  “What are you, an astronomer then?”

  “No, I work at the Royal Bank of Scotland. I’m the chief teller there in town,” which was a lie.

  “That’s all right,” said the younger man.

  Roland Styce turned toward him. “There is one advantage, though. A blind spot, if you will.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s because of the way they reproduce in an abnormal way. Because of their reptilian nature, and the way they go into a stasis without sleeping. They don’t understand anything about love. You know, what we call love. It’s like a blind spot. It enrages them.”

  “Well, that’s all right then.”

  The garden wall was low, about five feet, and faced with yellow stone. Beyond it, and beyond the raised beds, the grass spread flat and featureless to the back steps, like a lava field abraded into greenness under the acid rain.

  The door was locked and barred. Solid oak, imported from Poland. On the other side, a tufted Oriental carpet ran the length of the hall, various living rooms on either side. Mr. Styce had inherited the house from his mother in 2016. She had died of an aneurysm that same summer.

  Along the way down the corridor, you smelled a number of competing fragrances, more intense at intervals if you licked your lips. Sawdust. Lemon furniture polish. Then you went past the kitchen’s open door, the sealed cabinets full of sealed jars of Indian chutneys and pickles. A bowl of onions. Some wilted flowers. The stair rose up and turned a corner to the first floor. A skylight shone west above the landing, and the air was pricked with motes of gold.

  These people, these creatures, sealed up like jars or cans, struggling to see or know or understand even a little bit, how could you not open them and spill them out? Caught in a spacial moment, how could you not twist them, stretch them out beyond their capabilities? Some broke open and rose up higher and higher until you could see the world and time and space spread away.

  Yet up there, behind that closed door, two men embraced on a yellow bed.

  Favored by Strange Gods: A Selection of Letters from James Tiptree, Jr. to Joanna Russ

  With an introductory note by Nicole Nyhan

  James Tiptree, Jr. was born on a typewriter. He was the secret invention of Dr. Alice Bradley Sheldon, a behavioral psychologist who lifted “Tiptree” from a jar of marmalade and covertly wrote under the name for nearly a decade. Tiptree debuted with Birth of a Salesman in the March 1968 issue of Analog and rapidly gained a reputation for his bold, original voice and fast-paced interstellar adventures. A coruscating experimental talent, Tiptree rose to the upper echelons of SF at a time when a new generation of transgressive writers was beginning to claim the genre as serious literature, including J. G. Ballard, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, Samuel R. Delany, and Joanna Russ. Tiptree’s name was recognizable to most SF enthusiasts within a couple of years, but his “real” identity remained a mystery. Until 1977, Tiptree refused to attend live events or answer personal questions, and could only be contacted through P.O. Box 315 in McLean, Virginia.