Other Aliens Read online

  I woke up. Wan sun. Dove-colored sky. Thick clouds floating beyond my big windows.

  Snow covered the orchard, trees glittering with ice. I felt a surge of elation as I drank in the beauty, but then a pulse of pain brought back the endless night. The first thing I saw was a veiny blob of gelatinous meat stuck to my left thigh, blood all over the sheets. The baby, I thought, dead, and my heart plummeted. But the newborn, slathered with white vernix that looked like mineral sunscreen, lay curled between my knees, its umbilical cord attached to the blob. The other thing was my placenta, I realized, recalling a second series of contractions, pushing something out—a twin, I’d thought, a reasonable explanation for my hugeness. And then I’d passed out.

  Now I sat up, heart pounding, afraid to touch the baby, expecting the chill of dead flesh. The newborn was the size of a rabbit, not dangerously small, its head elongated into an alien cone by the birth canal, pale hair greased to its soft skull. Arms. Legs. Feet. Fists. Eye slits encased in puffy bags. Swollen labia. A girl.

  “Adelaide,” I whispered as I touched her cheek.

  Her rosebud mouth opened and emitted a warm wheeze of breath.

  Adelaide’s birthday snow did not thaw. More snow fell, and I was anxious to have her checked by a doctor, even though she appeared to be a fully developed newborn. I also needed to address the legal complexities of her origins and acquire a birth certificate—all of which meant contacting Xander. Instead, I settled into hibernation mode, stationed on the couch with my feeding pillow, a jug of spring water, my tablet chock-full of gothic romances. I still dreaded the moment when Adelaide latched on—the burning nipples, the raw sear of pain that ran up my milk ducts with her first fierce suck. And then I felt hot prickles on my areolas, probably from the rash that had flared the day after she was born. But the pain subsided as I settled into an oxytocin dream, gazing down at the glowing face, her skin peachy and semisheer, a hint of muscle tissue flexing like goldfish under ice.

  I kept the woodstove blazing, and when I looked out at the snowy orchard, I imagined live creatures buried under snow: bears snoring in underground dens, whistlepigs curled in musky holes, frogs burrowed into the muddy depths of ponds, their blood frozen. I remembered that endless conversation with Xander in the bar, thoughts zagging between us like lightning from cloud to earth.

  Why didn’t I contact him? Why didn’t he contact me?

  I lay listening to the drip drip drip of thawing snow, Adelaide curled against my belly, snuffling for my teat. She mewled as she wormed her way up my abdomen. She was strangely strong for three months, her gray eyes glossy and alert as she zeroed in on her target, my tender areolas, inflamed with a fresh rash. I’d read on the Internet that some women suffered from overly sensitive breasts, that it sometimes took a month for them to toughen up, that all the lanolin in the world wouldn’t help—but I was three months into feeding. I worried that I was allergic to Adelaide’s saliva, some alien chemical from her father’s DNA, and that she was allergic to something in my milk that stippled her cheeks with tiny bumps. I knew that infants were born with all of their teeth, beastly little choppers buried beneath their rosy gums. Some babies broke them early; others were born with a few teeth in their mouths. I slid my finger along her dental ridge, looking for nubbins of bone. Drool spilled from her bottom lip as she smiled.

  Adelaide nosed my nipple. I braced myself as she opened her mouth wide like a snake unhinging its jaw. Enveloping half my breast, she latched on. I winced, gripping a pillow. First came a sensation of stinging nettles. Next came a tingling burn, deep in my breast tissue, that worked its way up my milk ducts and through my nipple. And then, at last, an opiate burst of love, infant fused to my body like some glowing celestial appendage.

  I would kill for her. I would pinch off pieces of my own heart and drop them into her adorable, gaping mouth.

  I massaged her plump shoulders, felt crusty patches of eczema. I ran my fingers along the delicate knobs of her spine and took a deep, drunken whiff of her musk-sweet hair. Melting icicles sparkled on the eaves. A single hawk spiraled in the flame-blue sky.

  Adelaide unlatched, cooed, lifted her head from my bosom, and smiled. Pink milk dribbled from her mouth, turning darker: red. The color of passion, panic, blood, and love; poppies and rubies and severe terror alerts; communion, fire, mercury, wine. My heart raced. I opened her mouth, searching for wounds. And then I saw a spreading red blot on my T-shirt. I checked my nipples: still intact. But the surrounding skin was crosshatched with tiny cuts, some of them still seeping.

  I put her in a bath to relax her, easing her down into the seat of her aerogel tub. Her wet skin turned opalescent, and I could see the shadowy contours of her organs, dusky pinks and purples. I rubbed her with a warm rag until she glowed with love and grinned. I examined the inside of her mouth in the bright bathroom light. Tracing the ridges of her palate, I felt a prick just behind the dental ridge. I jerked my finger out—the tip bled. Inside the baby’s mouth, small serrated gills opened, revealing wavering cilia the color of pomegranate seeds. And then the gills closed. Adelaide pressed her lips together and smiled.

  April flowers had bloomed, and I needed to spread blood meal and coffee grounds in the blueberry orchard. I needed to get my shop ready for summer. But I felt exhausted. Adelaide was eating fruit and meat paste, but she still nursed every four hours, still had a rash around her mouth and eczema on her shoulders and the backs of her knees. But she was growing strong, clambering around on four legs ahead of schedule, rolling, climbing. I’d set up an electron-vector play fence beneath a plum tree, and I lazed in a lawn chair in the shade, drinking gallons of water, eating canned sardines and rare roast beef and bits of raw cow’s liver that I chopped and stored in cryogenic InstaFreeze.

  I’d lost ten pounds. My skin looked splotchy. My hair was falling out in clumps and the roots of my teeth ached. Self-diagnosing anemia, I took iron supplements, stinking doses of cod-liver oil, and a nanobiotic multivitamin engineered for nursing mothers. When the air cooled in the evening, I took Adelaide inside. Cuddling her on the couch, I pulled up story after story on my tablet: sinister fairy tales, beast fables spiked with death, progressive narratives of empowered princesses and self-actualized robots.

  Adelaide, eyes bright with intelligence, tried to touch the holograms. I thought of Xander circling the earth in his ship, following the thickest masses of cumulonimbus clouds. Perhaps he had a wife up there. That would explain his silence. Or maybe he’d decided that our differences were unbridgeable. There were conflicting theories on the satellite people: they were aliens who’d spliced human genes into their DNA; they were ancient Sumerian aristocrats who had acquired space technology from an alien race; they were inbred Romanian royals with a congenital anemia who’d fled the Great Plague of 1738 in steam-powered blimps designed by a court magician. Some people said they’d inexplicably appeared in the middle of the twenty-first century; others said they’d been orbiting our green planet since 4000 BC. Breathtakingly powerful people, richly neurotic, isolated in vast fortresses of dynastic wealth—had they ever really lived on earth?

  On a foggy day in May, when Adelaide was six months old, she ambled over to my lawn chair, placed her hand on my chest, and said, Mickimoo, Mama. Tall for her age, she’d walked at five months, and soon after started piecing together a rudimentary vocabulary: Mama, moon, mickimoo, ball, tablet, fan, boob. She crawled into my lap, pulled my wrap top open, seized her preferred breast (the left), and latched on.

  I still winced and gritted my teeth. I still clenched my fists for the first few seconds. I still visualized her feeding apparatus: the opening of serrated gills, the deep-rose cilia burrowing into flesh. But I felt flushed with love when the pain subsided. I kissed her silky head. I’d gotten used to bloodstains on my shirt. I knew that ordinary breast milk was manufactured from proteins, sugars, and fats in mothers’ blood, which made Adelaide’s evolutionary quirk not so freakish, really.

  But I had to admit that I felt dep
leted. Pale as a parsnip, ninetyeight pounds, I was going bald and had lost a tooth. After the child fed, I fell into a weird doze—half nap, half swoon. I dreamed of Xander floating down to earth in a cloud, and when I woke up, he was there, standing in the mist at the edge of the forest.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” He rushed around my cabin in a panic, stuffing clothes into a lab-leather bag. Adelaide lurked behind the couch. Her head popped up, groundhog like, huge eyes studying her father, her cheeks chafed and red. She sucked her bottom lip into her mouth.

  “I’ve been meaning to, but—”

  “You’ll need a transfusion, fast. But I can’t get a shuttle for at least two hours.”

  “Can’t we do it down here?”

  “They wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  I still hadn’t acquired a birth certificate. Adelaide had not been DNA scanned, iris matched, microchipped. Technically, she didn’t exist.

  But there she was, fat cheeked and lovely, toddling up to me and placing her hand on my breast.

  “Mickimoo,” she said, a look of yearning mischief in her eyes. Playful. Sweet. Heart melting.

  “No.” Xander swept her up in his arms. “We can’t risk it.”

  Her face crinkled with rage. A few silent heaves, and then she broke into an animal roar.

  At dusk we waited in the field beyond the orchard. I sat in a lawn chair, Adelaide nestled against me, whimpering. Xander paced and studied the sky. I had no strength for words, and he was too anxious to talk. The fog had retreated into the forest, sucked down into its black core. A half-moon floated. Wisps of cloud drifted. Stars materialized. At last, the ship popped up just beyond the horizon. Billowing like a stingray, its tail emitted a blue plume of exhaust.

  In seconds it hovered above us, vast, blotting out the moon. A valve opened in its silvery underbelly. A diamond-shaped shuttle spun down and landed in the meadow, poised two feet above the dewy grass.

  I woke up in a dim room. Warm tubes snaked around my arms, pumping fluid into my veins. No furniture beyond my medical recliner and some hideous, puffy biotech chair. Nano-engineered jade walls radiated a soothing light—I’d seen walls like this in high-end catalogs, and I had to admit they were beautiful. I heard music—neoprimitive electronica, Sanskrit chanting, echolocating whales, and whispering wind.

  How long had I been on Xander’s ship? I remembered stepping into the shuttle, feeling woozy when it started up, passing out during its spinning ascent. And Adelaide: where was Adelaide? I tried to sit up, felt resistance—no straps, some kind of force field. I screamed.

  Xander rushed in, holding Adelaide. She looked comfortable, relaxing in the crook of his right arm. But when she saw me she erupted into wild twitter, kicking and laughing and flailing to be near me.

  “Mama, Mama, mickimoo!” she shrieked.

  “Why the fuck am I strapped down?” I hissed.

  “Strapped?” Xander smirked, a twitch of orange musculature.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Calm down,” he said. “You have to be perfectly still when you get the juice. That’s all.”

  He studied the monitor attached to my IV.

  “Dr. Isabelle says you’ve got to have 62.3 more NCGs, and then we can unplug.”

  “Mama, mickimoo!” shouted Adelaide.

  “Just a minute, Addy.” Xander rubbed her back. “Mama’s got to have a few more glugs of Zoblen.”

  “Which is?”

  “Hybrid plasma product. She won’t be allergic to your milk anymore, and most importantly, you won’t be anemic. Ah, there we go.”

  “Milk?”

  “Essentially.” Xander avoided my gaze.

  “And it’s Ada, not Addy,” I said. “The preferred nickname, I mean. Though I usually call her Adelaide.”

  “Ada, of course. Much prettier.” Xander smiled, tapped the touch screen, and I felt the warm tubes uncoil.

  We lounged on the front deck at dusk, a vast expanse of engineered obsidian that sparkled with drops of dew. We were in the belly of a cloud. Thick clots of pink vapor floated, obscuring the sky.

  “Mother picked out these tasteless chairs.” Xander patted the side of his biotech chaise: an ergonomic sweep of engineered flesh upholstered in living beaver fur. Warm, plush, pliable from high lipid concentrations, the chair cradled my spine. “The fur’s moisture resistant,” he added, “but sometimes gives off a musky smell, even though that gene was supposedly deleted.”

  “I do detect a hint of moist rodent,” I said, “which I actually find comforting, earthy.”

  We fell into conversation, sank into a bubbling whirl of words. We talked about human pheromones, the gut revulsion we suffered at the sight of certain people, the kinetic connection we’d felt talking in the bar the night after we’d first met, the joys of a truly collaborative conversation, thoughts like tree roots intertwining in arcane depths of soil, branches mingling among clouds. We talked about curdy clouds viewed from earth, sunlight etching gray convolutions with pink glow. About staring down at masses of mist at night, cities shimmering beneath. About moving through the belly of a cloud, the feel of thick vapor on the skin—an alien feeling for me.

  “Does it feel nourishing or oppressive?” he asked.

  “A little of both.”

  “Explain?”

  “Nourishing for the skin. Oppressive for the respiratory system.”

  I tried to describe the onset of an ozone headache, the itch in my throat, the feeling that my lungs were shriveling.

  “And sometimes my skin feels soggy. Like I’ve been in a bath for too long.”

  I held sleeping Ada in my arms, breathing her sweet scalp scent through my ozone-filter mask. We’d started calling her Ada the week before, when I’d woken up from my transfusion—our first awkward collaboration as parents. And now Xander reached for my hand.

  “We’re pulling out of the clouds,” he said.

  I held my breath as the ship swooped down, out of the troposphere. I was drunk, floating six miles above the equator. The sky sparkled with stars. The pocked moon glowed.

  “Come on.” Xander squeezed my hand. “Walk to the brink with me and have a look at your planet.”

  “Isn’t it your planet too?”

  “Technically.”

  When he stroked my arm, I felt a warm slither of lust in my groin. I wanted to fuck Xander, retract from our illusory physical fusion, and then lie in bed and whisper in the dark until we affected a CG lightning bolt that left us exhausted enough to sleep.

  We stood up, wedged Ada into the depths of my chair, and covered her in a blanket.

  There was no visible railing at the edge of the deck, only an electron force field, which Xander liked to lean into while I cowered in my chair.

  “Come on,” he said, pulling me toward the abyss.

  Arms wrapped around each other, we walked to the edge. My stomach dropped as I peered down at Ecuador: the glittering of Quito, the darkness of forests, mountains and valleys and swathes of smog.

  “See that.” Xander pointed at a darkish spot. “That’s La Mitad del Mundo, the middle of the world.”

  He eased down my ozone filter, exposing my nose and mouth.

  “You don’t need it at this altitude.”

  He kissed me for a long time.

  “Mama, mickimoo, now.” Ada head-butted my chest.

  “Say please,” said Xander.

  “Pease.”

  We laughed as she seized my breast. I winced. Gritted my teeth. And then: love, joy, light. Her eczema was gone. She’d grown at least two inches. Her hair had thickened into lilac curls. Xander said it was the rich cloud air, the high humidity, not to mention the nutritionally potent baby food she’d been eating, handmade by his mother’s chief chef. Ada’s skin glowed with a moist sheen, pearly, slightly more translucent—just as it had looked in the bath at home.

  I lay on Xander’s bed: a sleek platform of engineered teak, the mattress stuffed with biofeathers. His apartment was organic
contemporary. He liked “neonatural” fibers, a mix of nano-engineered stone and wood, lab-leather and horn, textiles from GM animals, and what he called “earth pieces,” odds and ends he’d purchased directly on the ground, mostly handmade—a hemp pillowcase from South Africa, jute rugs from India, pottery from Peru. His dining table was a floating disk of turquoise with an invisible electromagnetic base. He had robot domestics; an army of small, supple cleaning units; and an ironic android valet with a cheesy British accent. He complained that his mother still kept human servants. I didn’t ask what he meant by “human.”

  “She’s very old-fashioned,” he said. “And rather blunt, especially since she’s been sick. Don’t take it personally.”

  “You’re scaring me.”

  “It’s just dinner. It’ll be over quickly.”

  “I wish we’d done this earlier. It’s been, what, a month? And the pressure just keeps building.”

  “It’s not you, promise. She’s ill. Father’s dead. I’m her only child. She’s been pretty isolated over the last decade.”

  I’d hated his mother ever since he’d told me that she was the one who’d kept him from returning to earth, that she’d suffered a number of fake illnesses while keeping their ship in high-frequency sky-zones that blocked communication with the outside world. A manipulative old hypochondriac, she’d endured faux liver failure, a heart attack that turned out to be hypertension, and an endless series of imaginary gallstones.

  Xander approached the bed with a bowl of plums, organic, fresh from a farm in Afghanistan. He wore goat-silk pajama pants and I could see the bony glint of his rib cage, twin pink lungs nestled within it, a flicker of his throbbing heart. I put my hand on his thigh, an easy gesture, and rolled against him, breathing in the smells I craved.