Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Esc

Ark Ascension





Ark Ascension orbited hundreds of miles above the mutagen infested Earth. Rotation created a one-grav interior in the seven- mile long, seven-mile diameter tube where genetically uncorrupted animals roamed forty-nine square miles of sculpted, planted and artificially lit landscape.

Martin tended the sun.

During the day he plotted ionization graphs, watched for ultraviolet and infrared variances, checked thermal output against projected goals and wrote a report about the largely automated processes. He checked the news one more time. The wolf had not whelped.

At dusk he left his east-end office where stars slowly revolved in one window and seven miles of bluffs, hills and trees stood in the other. Pine smells and wet leaves met him. Gravelly dirt crunched beneath his shoes. The door’s seams vanished into the wall. He took a deep breath and shivered.

The plasma sun dimmed in the west: an Ascension sunset. The sun didn’t disappear below a horizon, but reached the end of its seven-mile trek, then faded as the gasses cooled. A mile above Martin, a hazy moon flickered on to start its night long trip to the western end. He rubbed his upper arms, wishing he’d worn a coat.

He checked his wrist monitor linked to the plasma track and nodded. The moon produced no heat, but it lighted the interior that otherwise would be black as a cave, without a single star to break the inky tapestry.

To the north, a wolf howled. Martin tried to spot it. He wondered if it was the pregnant wolf’s mate. The land sloped up both left and right, but the trees slanted with the slope until they appeared to be horizontal spikes poking from distant cliffs. Then the cliffs continued in a great arc, completing the world’s roof above him. Beyond the moon in the clear evening air, he thought he saw movement. Deer, maybe, or elk; there was a small herd of each, but at this distance it was unlikely. Probably shifting shadows. Not the animals. He seldom saw them, although nearly a thousand roamed the artificial environment. A dozen biologists observed them, of course, and geneticists tested for mutagens, ever vigilant for contagion. Martin didn’t see the scientists much. Their haunted faces and creepy depression bothered him. They acted like the Earth had died. “Catastrophic species shift” they called it. Nothing remained the same, except here in Ark Ascension and the four other Arks just like it.

Martin avoided the crew, fifteen couples, twenty-three unmarried adults and thirteen children. He spent his time at the zero-G axis, fine tuning the sun, tweaking magnetic containments, experimenting with plasma physics.

Sunset and moonrise brought him to the surface. A zoologist, Dr. Kette, the only single parent on board, and her daughter, Robyn, used this observation area too. The door’s mechanical whisper behind told him they were there.

“It’s cold, Mom,” said Robyn, an eight-year-old whose rounded cheeks, dark eyes and a serious expression mirrored her mother.

“Winter time, dear. The animals and plants need the seasons to stay healthy.”

Robyn leaned against her mother’s leg. “It makes me sad. The trees are bare.”

“Not the evergreens.”

The sun’s dull remnant winked out. Only the moon cast light, a cool, silvered sheen that shimmered the grass. Martin took a few steps away from the wall. If he didn’t look up, the illusion nearly fooled him, a full moon on foothills. In the hollows, fog eddied and the temperature dropped. Frost would soon coat rock and branch, bush and earth.

“Can’t you make the sun warmer, Martin?” said Robyn. “Can’t we always have summer?”

Surprised that she’d spoken to him—generally their evening pilgrimages were silent—he said, “Most of the heat comes from the ground . . .”

“As I’ve explained,” said Dr. Kette. She sounded sad too. Martin knew that like the other women she wanted to have more children, but the mutagen hadn’t been identified. No one knew if her babies would be born human. She didn’t know if she’d been isolated in time.

“There’s no snow,” said Robyn. “How can we have winter without snow?”

“We’re in a spacecraft. It can’t snow here. We’ll still have Christmas though. We’ll decorate the apartment.” Dr. Kette didn’t sound convinced. “We don’t need snow for Christmas.”

Robyn stamped her foot. It was half-hearted. Martin knew she couldn’t really throw a tantrum. She was too nice a child for that.

“We can’t even put up colored lights! Four days until Christmas! No snow and no lights.” Robyn’s tears were real.

Dr. Kette sat on the ground beside her. “I miss them too.”

Embarrassed, Martin moved farther away. He’d never had a family. Too much lab time. But the image of Robyn leaning against her mother affected him. He wanted to hold her too, to tell her it would be all right. Dr. Kette cried also. Mother and child displaced, no different from the animals wandering beyond.

After a bit, Martin approached, touched Dr. Kette on the shoulder. “You guys will freeze if you stay out here.”

The woman looked up at him. “We really are a long, long way from home.”

Martin couldn’t do anything about snow. At 5,800 feet to the Ark’s center, there wasn’t air enough for clouds. Winter ground fog was common though. In the fall and spring, when the transition between the day’s heat, the night’s temperature drop and the humidity was just right, it drizzled for a few minutes in the morning, but no snow. He thought about Robyn crying.

A crew meeting the next morning discussed the upcoming holiday. A party was proposed. Debate followed, a dispirited affair. The head of research argued, “Even if we are in exile, we can celebrate—we need a celebration.”

“What is there to be joyful about?” countered Dr. Roam, the head of the medical unit, his lab coat meticulously pressed, his hair combed straight back and tight against his head, like a helmet. “It’s ghoulish for us to be merry while our families on Earth suffer.”

Martin sat in the back of the conference room. He thought about the deterioration of the news. Before they’d left, the worst of the mutagen births clustered in pockets. California suffered, as did Canada’s western coast and Alaska. Martin had heard stories of monstrous polar bear cubs, mewling in the snow, hairless, deformed, abandoned by their mothers. The Midwest and the East were untouched. So the pattern continued the world over: some areas hit hard, others were not. The mutagen spread slowly; it had taken twenty years to get this far. For twelve years the Arks were built, and then, a year ago January, populated with animals from the untouched areas. The crew came from areas with no unnatural births.

As if waiting for the occupation of the Arks as a signal, the mutagen’s progress accelerated. No place was free of it. From the Ark they watched the fear rise. It built. Cities burned, and there were no uncorrupted births. Fish or fowl, beast or man, the babies were not right. Most died, but more horribly, some lived. The crew could hardly bear to look at the pictures.

Against the back wall, the children sat. Maybe they are the last young ones we’ll see, thought Martin. Maybe they’re the end.

Someone else said, “The animals are sterile. Even the rabbits have had no litters. Not even lab mice. We haven’t saved anything by coming here. We should be in fully equipped laboratories searching for a cure. Running away solved nothing.”

People muttered to each other, while the Captain waited for someone to raise their hand.

Dr. Kette said, “We expected most animals would lose a breeding season. That’s a well documented effect of dislocation. It’s too soon to tell, and there is the wolf. She should deliver soon.”

Dr. Roam said, “Wolf pups would prove nothing. Even if they’re good, it’s only a matter of time before the mutagen breaks out here too.”

“We don’t know that,” offered Dr. Kette.

“Yes, you do!” thundered Roam. “The women know. We have been here eleven months, and there are twenty-seven women among us. Not one pregnancy. The women know we have no reason to celebrate.”

Martin glanced again at the children. Robyn sat near the door. She held a crumpled drawing. A part of it showed through, a Christmas tree with ornaments and lights. As the argument grew, she twisted the paper tight. Her eyes were red, but she never cried. She looked lost.

In the end, they voted for no official celebration.

Later, while in his zero-G work station, Martin adjusted the magnetic fields holding the ionized gasses in place. The biologists suggested the animals might feel more at home if the moon waxed and waned distinctly. He adjusted the monthly cycle according to their numbers.

When finished, he contemplated the length of the Ark. In the middle, the sun glared, intolerably bright, nearly a third of its daily distance across the sky. Around it, trees pointed toward the axis; cliffs, hills, bluffs, stretches of meadow, streams (water pumped from the lakes at their bottoms to springs at their tops) surrounded the light. An unbroken landscape, a whole one—no horizon separating any one part from another. He found this vision comforting, a perfect visual metaphor for life’s unity, and he couldn’t feel Dr. Roam’s despair, or any of the others. Thinking of the children, Martin wrote invitations to a Christmas party at sunset, Christmas Eve. He set the place, the central-Ark observation area, then sent them. He turned back to his equipment. There was work to be done; he had a party to prepare.

Martin arrived early, an hour before sunset. He took a tube transport that traveled on the Ark’s outside. An elevator carried him and the supplies to a flat, sandy clearing overlooking a small cirque. At the hollow’s bottom a lake reflected darkly. A startled mountain goat scrambled from the water’s edge, tumbling small rocks as it leaped to the top. Most splashed through thin ice into the lake, and the goat disappeared into a boulder field.

He’d pressed the kitchen to make candy canes, and hung them from leafless bushes surrounding the clearing. As he hung the last one, the early guests stepped out of the elevator.

Four-year-old Elise, the youngest child aboard, found the first candy. She held the cane out for everyone to see, and soon the other children busied themselves finding more of the sweets, even the Nyuen twins who were thirteen. Talk was muted. Almost mournful. Martin remembered Dr. Roam’s pronouncement, “We have no reason to celebrate.” The adults clustered around the radiant heaters, warming their hands. Robyn solemnly poked through brittle branches, looking for the last of the candy.

Martin crouched beside her. “Where’s your mom?”

Robyn tucked a cane into her shirt pocket. She looked down, scuffing dirt with the toe of her shoe. “She went to see the wolves. She’s been gone all day. I told her it was Christmas Eve, but she had to work.”

“Ah, that’s too bad.” Martin gave her another candy cane from the extras he kept in a pouch. She added it to her collection.

“Thank you. I’ll save them until later.”

“There’s hot chocolate in the thermoses,” he said.

Robyn sighed and headed for the crowd. Now that the candy had been found, all stood near the heaters.

Hilliert, an older biologist, called his son, Brad. “We really have to go, Martin. This was nice of you, but I don’t think we’re in the spirit.” Other scientists nodded their heads. “It’s cold, and we ought to get the kids home.”

Martin glanced at the sun. It had reached the western wall and begun its dimming cycle. Chill stung his cheeks. “I have a surprise, but we have to wait a few minutes. There’s a thermos with hot chocolate that’s mostly rum in my bag over there, if you want to break that out.”

Hilliert raised his eyebrows and put his hand on his son’s head. “We’ll stay a bit longer, Brad. Maybe we could sing a carol.”

Gradually the sun faded out. Long shadows became less and less distinct, and soon the only light came from the heaters glowing orange in the clearing’s middle. Martin stood behind the circle of parents and children, hands thrust deep into his pockets. Robyn tucked her hands into her armpits and didn’t join the singing. They finished two verses of “Good King Wenceslas” before someone said, “It’s pretty darned dark out here, Martin. Where’s the moon?”

He checked his wrist monitor. A counter clicked to zero. To the east, a point of red light appeared. “What is that?” the same voice asked.

Martin turned. At the west end, a green light flickered on. The scientists and their children turned from the heaters and looked up. The first two lights floated quickly to the center of the sky to stop a few degrees apart like a red and green star. Then new lights appeared at each end, a blue one to the east, and an orange to the west. Soon, a line of colored points reached from end to end, much smaller than the moon or sun, not nearly as bright. Martin barely made out his own hands in the diffuse light, and then, following the program he designed, they began to pulse individually from bright to dark and back again.

The elevator door opened, its white light silhouetting Dr. Kette as she stepped out. Robyn cried out, “Mom, look. Christmas lights!” The door closed, and only the colored lights illuminated the world.

A hand touched his leg. “Is that you, Martin?” Robyn said.

“Yes.”

“Mommy came. She came to your party.”

Vaguely Martin could make out Dr. Kette standing beside him; he mostly saw the colors in her eyes as she looked up.

“This is lovely, Martin.”

They stood for a long time. Behind them one of the kids said, “Let’s sing ‘Silent Night,” and they did; their voices filled the clearing.

“Did you see the wolves?” asked Martin.

“Yes,” said Dr. Kette. She held her daughter’s hand. Their breath steamed in the frigid air. “The mother whelped,” she said. “Four perfect pups. They were mutagen free.”

Martin couldn’t tell if she were crying.

In the darkness, in the sky beyond, he saw glitters like stars, and realized the icy ponds and streams on the roof of the world reflected the display. It was an effect he’d never seen. The moon didn’t reflect this way. In the day the sun revealed land and vegetation, but in this light, there were sparkles, red ones and green, blue and orange. Multicolored tinsel strings; long, glass blue lines shading into the orange of frozen creeks; red fog rising into green, rising into blue; green snowy meadows blushing red then yellow; orange mountain ridges transformed; star glisters blinking everywhere—a thousand stars over Bethlehem—shards of Christmas light, changing in the changing night.

The wolves were born whole.

He’d never seen the Ark so beautiful.





Working PushOut





Our dream is your dream

—Burger Land advertisement





I don’t trust my dreams anymore; I don’t believe they’re mine. A busy lunch with customers lined up outside the door and me sliding my hip down the aluminum prep counter’s rounded edge, bagging burgers and fries, grabbing drinks and pushing them out, that’s real. I can trust a lunch rush but not these dreams. Not the stuff inside my head.

Lunch is over. Two o’clock to three-thirty. Orders will pick up after this until we’re into the dinner crowd. Of course, I’ll be home. That’s Howard Fisk’s shift. I’m sitting in back by the newly delivered produce talking to VJ. The green smell from hundreds of heads of freshly cut lettuce overpowers the old burger grease and detergent odors. He’s sipping coffee that he sweetened with half a dozen packs of sugar. I offered to pay for it. As always, he said, “Put it on the Visa,” pulled from his frayed overcoat a card that’s held together with masking tape, and put it on the table between us. I’m listening to the orders through my earphone in case they need me up front: “Ten Bigs down, please,” says someone. The reception is tinny; voices indistinguishable. “Four with cheese.” Someone else says, “Six cokes, two diet, one no ice.” A long pause. The dead air hisses quietly. Then, “Carter’s a hog.” I grimace. Seven employees have transmitters. Four of them come from Lincoln High where I taught history last year. I can’t tell who said it.

VJ says, “Voices in your brain, Carter?” He hunches his right shoulder up and rests his ear on it. A gray-streaked lock of hair hangs over his eyes.

“Always,” I say. He may be a bum, but I can tell him anything. What will it matter? He listens. Lots of times he asks questions, too. Always interesting ones. Nothing about how many sixteen ounce cups I’ll need for the next week, or how many gallons of fry oil. Most of the street people I give coffee to are good listeners.

I tell him about Howard Fisk, about how much I hate him. I tell him about the stuff inside my head.

VJ asked me about the dreams before I ever mentioned them. A month ago, right after they hired Howard, VJ said, “What’d you dream last night?” And that was kind of funny, because I never dream, but when he asked I remembered that I had dreamed that night. I’ve dreamed regularly since then, too.

In the dream I am sitting by the cases of lettuce, like I am now, doing preinventory, marking my sheet with a pencil, which Howard Fisk will erase before he writes his count in pen, and then I’ll signature each total in ink after I’ve confirmed his work. Triple check. I purposely miscount sometimes to find out if Howard actually does his job. Only, in the dream, I’m seeing myself rather than being myself. My hair is thinning on top. My shoulders are brutish, hands fat, fingers grossly squat, belly sagging onto my lap, white shirt greasy, black pants greasy, black shoes greasy. A funhouse mirror version of myself. A troll me. In real life I’m . . . husky, not like this vision.

I hit the dream me with the lyepit pole, a heavy steel rod with a hooked end we use to pull the broiler parts out of the lye each morning. My head wraps around the pole. No blood but lots of hamburger grease. I strike myself again and again, pounding myself into a flat, slickly shining blob.

I woke up, my T-shirt bunched under my armpits, my blankets tangled around my feet. I went into the bathroom and toweled the sweat off my chest and back. I put baby powder between my legs to keep them from sticking together.

I told VJ about the dream, and he said, “Tell me something mean about yourself.” I thought about it for a while, then said, “The nice thing about managing a Burger Land is I can fire sixteen-year-olds for being immature.”

I learned about sixteen-year-old immaturity in my brief teaching career. “You’ve got to learn from the past,” is what I said my first day in American History at Lincoln. I was wearing a suit that I’d bought just for teaching. Thirty-two sophomores sitting at their desks stared right through me. That was my best day at the school. At the end of the third week, someone had written my name under the hugely fat caricature of Boss Tweed on the bulletin board. The principal asked me to quit at the end of the year.

I fired my first employee the third day after I took the day manager’s job. Her name was Femi and her parents were Nigerian. She had burned a basket of fries.

“But, Mr. Carter, you told me to fill the napkins.” Her huge lower lip trembled. Her hair net pulled kinky hair tight away from her forehead. Her dark skin looked dusty to me. She would be a junior at Lincoln High in the fall. I’d seen this act before, the quivering voice, the sincerity, the dropping of the head. All high school students adopt it when they blow a responsibility.

“Food in the fryer comes first,” I said. We went back and forth for a couple of minutes, then she got belligerent. That’s step two in the immature person’s repertoire of tactics.

She shouted, “You tell me to do one thing and I’m doing another. Am I supposed to be telepathic?”

Some of the lunch crew on break were watching us. Howard Fisk had come in to pick up his paycheck. He held his little woman, hands up to his mouth, and looked pained. There’s got to be respect. I fired her.

She said, “I hope you can’t sleep at night,” and flipped me off when she stomped out the back door.

In the summer the day crew has thirty to thirty-five teenagers working. I fired one every four or five days. At the time, nights were great.

VJ says, “How is your wife?” His face is dirty, but the coffee has cleaned his top lip, which is red and chapped. I tell him.

Tillie and I don’t make love. She shares an apartment with a nurse, and I see her twice a month when she picks up her check at the end of my shift. I’ll see her tonight. I’m tense, thinking about seeing her. I check my fly all the time, as if I’m afraid she’ll come in and I’ll be exposed. Usually she comes through the employee door, doesn’t smile, talks in monosyllables, wears nice clothes I didn’t buy her. She’s lost weight since we separated.

Last time we talked I said, “How are you doing, Tillie?”

“Fine.”

“Car running okay?”

“Yes.”

“I was thinking of taking some graduate courses at the university. Maybe something towards an M.B.A.”

“Good for you.”

“Do you want a burger?”

“No. Thanks.”

She went out through the dining room, talked to Howard Fisk, who was eating his dinner before the night crew came in. She always talks to Howard. I watched her through the one-way mirror in my office. She ate one of his onion rings. He didn’t look at her. Kept his head down. When she went out the front door, he smiled at her and half-waved. She smiled back. She hasn’t smiled at me for years.

VJ says, “I stay away from women.”

Despite the almost palpable odor of lettuce, and the underlying hints of lye, cooking meat, old grease, soaps, Styrofoam, cardboard and plastics, VJ smells like an alley, a reminder of trashcans, a wetgutter. I think the women stay away from him.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” I say, and I go up front to see how they are doing.

The secret to running a fast food franchise is knowing what the customer wants before he can think to ask you for it. Most of the time I work pushout. The rush adrenalizes me. People lined up out the door. Green-screened television monitors filled with orders. Voices whispering in my earphone. My hands flying. Burgers out from under the heat lamps and into the bags (mayonnaise makes the waxy paper wrappings slick). Fries fresh from the vats hot enough to blister if I held them that long. Drinks all in order, all in a row.

I’ll say something like, “That’s two quarter pound Burger Land burgers, three small fries, a small coke, a small lemonade and a coffee.” I’ll place the two bags on the counter. The order might have flickered onto the monitor eleven seconds ago. I’ve timed myself. During the rush I average fourteen seconds an order.

I’ll say, “Would you like some ketchup with those fries?” I throw a package in. Some people want the condiments, some don’t. I’ve got a feel for condiments. Hardly anyone asks me for something before I ask them if they want it. The owner, Mr. White, told me that I’d have to read their minds if I was going to be good. In the rush, when I’m on automatic and my analytical side has shut down, I can. I’m good at clearing my mind.

I walk behind Ashmid, a scrawny seventeen-year-old with hairy arms. He’s dropping raw, red patties onto the broiler belt.

“Broil dem burgers, yeah, yeah,” he sings over and over under his breath.

If I say, “Go wash the tables, Ashmid,” he’ll say, “Yasuh, boss.”

“Tote that bale,” I say.

“Yasuh, boss.”

Janet Sims, staring absently into an empty fry bag, stands next to the shake machine.

“How’s the dining room?” I ask.

“Fine, sir.”

“Straw dispensers?”

“Filled, sir.”

A large mustard stain shaped like a breast discolors her uniform pant’s blue and white pinstripes.

“Go clean something,” I say.

“Yes, sir.”

For the moment the lobby and parking lot are empty. I send two of the boys out to sweep the sidewalks.

VJ says when I sit back down, “How tight’s the ship?”

“Tight. Lazy day.”

“So, tell me another dream.”

“I don’t want to,” I say. “Tell me one of yours.”

“I know what my dreams mean.”

“So do I.”

“No, you don’t.”

VJ is like this. He tells me I’m wrong, and I don’t get mad.

“Okay.” I remember another dream.

This one starts where I’m driving a bus in the fog and I see myself walking down a street, Orchard Avenue. The steering wheel is huge and horizontal. I lean over it and crank hard to steer up the hard bump of the sidewalk. The bus snaps off parking meters; slams aside parked cars. The me on the sidewalk looks up, turns, lumbers away, thighs too fat to run. Dead end. The me on the sidewalk turns, covers his face. I squash me into a blue dumpster. Big splash of hamburger grease on the windshield, just my hands visible at the bottom of the glass, like five-tentacled octopi.

I start laughing, and then someone touches my shoulder. It’s Tillie. She takes my hand and leads me down the aisle; the sun breaks through the fog and slants through the windows. Dust motes circle slowly. She stops at a huge bench seat, schoolbus green vinyl, sits down, lays back, pulls her skirt up. Her pubic hair is black, straight and vast, like a porcupine has curled up between her legs. But Tillie’s real hair is tightly curled and thin. I told her once she ought to just shave, for all there is.

She says, “Climb on the bus, sailor.”

VJ says, “Climb on the bus?”

“Yeah.”

“Then what else happens?”

“That’s it. That’s the end of the dream.”

“And that’s what’s bothering you?” He tilts his head off his right shoulder, moves in a complicated convulsion that switches his head tilt from the right to the left shoulder, a mirror image of his former position.

“Yeah. Sort of.” I can’t tell him about the other stuff that’s started happening when I’m awake. I mean, most people have dreams, but this other stuff seems crazy. Most people believe street people like VJ are insane, because they dress weird or they’re dirty or they mumble to themselves, but I’ve found them to be just like anybody else. I don’t want him thinking I’ve flipped.

He starts humming the Burger Land theme song. “You deserve a dream today,” he sings. I pour him some more coffee. A wind blows the back door shut with a loud squeak and rain splatters against the roof. “How come you don’t have Burger Land dreams?”

That’s scary that he would ask that, because Burger Land is part of what I can’t tell him about. So I say, “You don’t dream what you do. You dream what you want.”

“Exactly.”

“You think I want to kill myself and make love to a woman who looks like my wife but isn’t anatomically correct?”

“Maybe. What do you want?”

I think about Howard Fisk.

Howard Fisk took the night managing job when Mr. White promoted me. The night job is really a split shift and I was glad to give it up. Howard Fisk comes in every morning at nine and inventories produce. Takes an hour. Then we have a meeting and I go over the last night’s receipts with him and he takes the money to the bank. Sometimes he has to exchange cash for change and he brings that back. At four he comes in, eats dinner and starts his shift at four-thirty. I don’t know what he does in the middle of the day.

“Why aren’t our dinners bigger, Howard?” I asked once.

“The kids work hard.” He wouldn’t look up at me.

“Lunch was huge yesterday. Twenty-two hundred bucks. Biggest of the five stores, but you brought in eight hundred for the rest of the day.”

He shrugged his shoulders and hung his head. He’s a little guy, thirty-five, my age. Single. Ex-Navy man. He’ll never be day manager though. Too wimpy. Afraid of everyone.

I tried to get him fired.

“Look at this, Mr. White.” I held up a chart with a night receipts graph that looked like a pyramid starting at the bottom when I took over the nightshift, peaking the week before I changed to days, and dropping off since Howard Fisk took over. “We’re losing money.”

He said, “You’re not losing a thing.” I shut up about Howard Fisk. Mr. White will figure it out eventually.

Above the door into the back room, just out of the customers’ sight, a sign says NO PERSONAL MUSIC PLAYERS IN THE PREP AREA. That’s my rule, but I know Howard lets the night crew use them anyway.

Howard Fisk is a doormat. He makes me queasy. He looks at me when I’m not paying attention, but I’ve never caught him at it.

I pushed him into a corner. He tried to stand up straight, but I kept bouncing my hands off his chest. I’ve got this problem with physical confrontations. I mean, I like them. So I go to a group counseling session once a week. It’s part of my separation agreement.

“Howard,” I said, “if you don’t enforce this rule, then what will the employees think?”

“I don’t know.” He tried to sidle away from me. I pushed him again. I must outweigh him by a hundred pounds.

“They’ll think I’m a fool, Howard. We don’t want that, do we?”

“No,” he said.

I wanted to hit him, I mean really belt him, over and over, but I backed off. “Good,” I said.

VJ’s waiting for me to answer.

“Oh, you know, the usual stuff: make a million dollars, get laid a lot, kill Howard Fisk,” I say.

“What does Howard Fisk want?” he says.

“Who cares?”

“What does he dream about?”

I don’t know how to answer that. He finishes his coffee.

VJ says, “I’ve got to go now. It’s almost four o’clock.” If he’s not at the shelter by nightfall, they won’t let him in. I fill a thermos with coffee for him. He fills his pockets with sugar and ketchup packets.

Howard comes in and orders dinner. I see him talking to Rideth at the register. Rather than saying anything to him, I inventory the walk-in freezer. Wisps of steam waterfall off the sides of the fifty pound boxes of fries. I’m hot, and the cool air feels good. In the semidark I start a daydream, which is what I wasn’t able to tell VJ about. My vision doubles, like a migraine, and then I hallucinate.

I’m sitting in the dining room and I can see my hands cradling a burger. I’m bringing it up to my mouth. My fingers are skinny, bony and small, like a child’s. I know that I’m really in the freezer, but I’m also eating a burger. The red checkered print on the Formica table top picks up the red in the molded plastic bench seats. In my hallucination the dining room is empty. I’m thinking about Burger Land’s latest television commercial. The camera pans the walls of a cluttered apartment kitchen where a middle-aged man works on a blueprint of a house, his house, on a tiny table. His pregnant wife tiptoes in behind him carrying a Burger Land takeout tray with two Styrofoam Big Burger boxes and two drinks on it. The camera cuts to the blueprint where the man is penciling in a word, “nursery,” on one of the rooms. The wife looks over his shoulder and sighs. She puts down the tray and they embrace. The focus softens and “Let our dream be your dream” scrolls on the screen.

In my hallucination I think, “People who can’t dream deserve this.” I look up from my burger and my tiny hands and into the rainstorm that is pelting the darkened parking lot. My face is reflected in the glass. It’s Howard Fisk’s face.

I’ve been dreaming Howard Fisk’s dreams.

I shake my head and fall backward against the wall of the freezer. My shirt sticks for a second, pulling out of my pants, as I slide down to sit on the woodslat floor. I toss my clipboard away from me. I shiver, then roll onto my hands and knees and retch loudly once. Nothing comes up. My cheek presses against the frosted wood. In my earphone someone says, “Two Big Cheeses, two large fries and an apple pie to go.” My elbow is pushed up against a cardboard box stiff enough that when I move away it crackles. My breath fogs the air each time I exhale. I imagine my body stiffening, so much meat.

I’m really cold. The employee door creaks open and I hear Tillie ask in the prep area, “Have you seen Carter?”

I push myself up, tuck my shirt in, check my fly. This stuff that’s inside my head, I’ve got to deal with it. It means something.

I’ll go into the dining room and have some onion rings with Howard. Tillie can find me there. Maybe the three of us can talk. I’m not very likable—I know that now—but that doesn’t mean I’m a bad person.





Notes From the Field





So much human language is untranslatable. After I’d scanned and tagged my latest subject, she talked non-stop.

She started by saying, “I don’t do this often. It’s my rule to get to know someone before we . . . you know . . . sleep together.” And she continued as she pulled up nylons, wiggled into a short-skirted black dress and adjusted her hair. My equipment recorded it, of course, for later analysis and synthesis with the rest of the field data. She told me about her sisters and how they were married, “Except Susan, who has been living with this realtor in Seattle for two years, so she’s practically engaged,” and then went on about her job while she reapplied makeup. When she went into the bathroom, I checked the tag’s status; the monitor showed it had already attached itself to the Fallopian tube, where it would stay, transmitting data for about six months until it broke down into undetectable biological components.

Upbeat, bright, until she was ready to go, she asked me what about half of them do. “Will I see you again?” Her face seemed poised, carefully blank.

I shrugged. A useful gesture, communicating messages in a wide range.

She took a deep breath, a shuddery one, and looked away, which often means the subject is on an emotional edge. I hadn’t seen it coming. I hardly ever do. Reading human facial expressions is my hobby, not part of my mission, but I don’t feel I’m very good at it. She looked around my apartment, at the art prints in frames, at the expensive stereo equipment, at the new furniture, which reinforced my masquerade as a young business executive, and said, “Don’t mind me. It’s all blather.”

I’ve discovered humans in the bars are often lonely, a little desperate. The sex is an amelioration.

Blather: In this context, probably meaning language that covers or replaces the message the sender would prefer to communicate. Although all human languages possess words used in this way, there is no Lasarént equivalent.

The last Lasarént abduction of a human for examination and tagging occurred in 1967 near San Antonio, Texas. The three other extrasolar races quit the practice before 1964. They attracted too much attention. Memory adjustments weren’t perfect. That’s the nature of technology, imperfection. So the plan to study humanity entered its second phase, infiltration. Still, abduction stories appeared in the tabloids. For a while there was considerable bickering among the four races about who was cheating, but it became evident that human behavior is often delusional.

My first field experience coincided with our last abduction. The human lived in Tremaine, an hour’s drive from San Antonio along a twisting, graveled road. We stalled his truck, anaesthetized him and moved him to an exploratory vehicle. Some tests require a lively nervous system, however, so he was brought near consciousness. He looked at us from the table, eyes half closed. “Jesus, Mary, son of a bitch. It’s the goddamned Rapture.”

I’ve been in the field ever since, over thirty years.

Rapture: In this context, probably meaning a religious experience of being transported to heaven. Some confusion here over his use of the article “the” instead of the more commonly expected, “a.” Other terms for this include “the final reward,” and “coming home.” See “euphemism.” Beyond that, the utterance resists translation.

For three weeks I’d been collecting information and tagging specimens in singles bars in the Old Town area of Sacramento when I ran into a Trosfrilla operative. My bioenhancements and cosmetic surgeries, some of them quite radical and painful, allowed me to pass as a male human. I had the more difficult task of studying females. Lasarént field operators disguised as females, using similar techniques in tagging males, reported as many as three or four specimens a night. One evening I attracted two females to my apartment at the same time, which nearly overloaded my scanning equipment, but other nights I only collected notes. In other countries, of course, we use practices appropriate for their cultures.

A converted riverboat, the Sleepy Jean Grill and Suds, permanently docked near the Port of Sacramento, was the next bar on my schedule. A place couldn’t be visited too often, or I might have to deal with a previous contact a second time. There is no scientific need to scan the subject twice once it has been tagged, but females I’d met previously often ruined my chances for a new encounter by talking until the bar closed. I parked in the lot, and crossed a gang-plank over the water to enter.

Inside, the bar stretched the length of the narrow room and was made of weathered barn planks, heavily varnished. Neon beer signs flashed behind Venetian blinds. No cover. A local hangout. Hard to get to if you didn’t know it was there. Grill behind the bar to the side, where a cook flipped burgers and fried potatoes. Lots of cooking odors, beer and a mossy undertone from the river. Red lights. A small dance floor flanked by large speakers at one end, a pair of pool tables at the other. Tables in between. In a larger singles bar I’d have better luck attracting someone, but I had plenty of data from those venues. Now I was more interested in atypical cases.

The lights caught my attention—they were nearly the hue of the spring time Lasarént sky—and the water smells reminded me of my birth den in the bank of the far Hydrash. Before the crowd arrived, I could feel the current flowing beneath the boat, rubbing the aged wood. As soon as I entered, I knew I would return. I took a table in the middle and asked the waiter for two place settings. It was one of several techniques to interest women, the empty chair. Some women can’t resist a single man, nicely dressed, aesthetically pleasing (we’d spent years perfecting attractive proportions in the lures—a fractionally small shift in eye placement, nose size or teeth arrangement can make a lure successful or a failure—my human face had been altered numerous times). She can’t resist if it’s obvious his date has not arrived.

The empty chair is a passive technique. It depends on the women coming to me, as do several other ruses such as reading a book, or taking notes. A tape recorder on the table will sometimes work, or a camera. What doesn’t work is looking unoccupied. A man who clearly just waits is shunned. Scanning the bar doesn’t work either. A man looking for a woman never finds her. There are active techniques too. Many of them. Almost all involve some pretense for conversation, not just, “Nice weather we’re having, don’t you think?” but anything that asks the woman to contribute something of her own. Even something as simple as, “Great jacket. Where’d you get it?” can be a beginning. After that, the evening scripts itself around drinks, dancing, more conversation until it’s obvious she is willing to come to my apartment. Often there needs to be an excuse to go, either to see the art prints, or to admire the view from the balcony, or to listen to music. Rarely will either of us be straight-forward: “Let’s go somewhere private for sex.” Humans are interesting in this behavior. Important matters to them aren’t discussed directly.

I’ve been among the humans for years, “sleeping together” numerous times. Never have I discussed my matters of importance. We have no middle ground.

“Sleeping together” does not involve sleeping. It is sex, often times on a bed (which is used for sleeping too!) but one female told me we’d “slept together” when we didn’t make it past the clothes closet. Fortunately the scanning equipment covers the entire area equally well.

I was part way through a salmon steak, which I’d developed a taste for, when the woman sat at my table.

“I hate to eat alone, do you mind?” she said. Blonde hair cut short. Dark eyes, hard to see the color in this light. According to human conceptions of physical beauty, I guessed that she didn’t have to eat alone often. She was almost six feet tall, my height. Slim. Plain, blue shirt worn loose. White pants. White boots tucked under the pant’s legs. Not standard dress for a singles place, but the Sleepy Jean wasn’t typical, as I said. Two motorcycle types at the bar watched her for a moment before turning back to their drinks.

“Not at all,” I said. “Have you ordered?”

She brushed hair off her forehead. “Don’t mind if I do.”

Normally, meeting a woman is not this easy. Even though the bars exist for social interactions, humans are wary at first. They don’t trust each other. It seemed clear to me, though, that this one was bound for my apartment, so I field-scanned her. A tiny unit on my wristwatch would tell me if she’d been tagged before and give me an overview of her suitability for our studies.

She was Trosfrillan, one of the other extrasolars, which explained her height. How they got a nine-foot tall, six limbed creature into this package amazed me. My modifications, painful as they were, were not as drastic.

“Damn!” she said, looking at her own watch.

We didn’t speak for a while. The Trosfrilla study humans in much the same manner as we do. They are interested in travel patterns. Mating rituals. Work/recreation ratios. Sleep/wake cycles. Biochemistry. The normal field data for any species. Past difficulties prevent us from sharing our findings, though there is now some effort to consolidate the work. Our races evolved on different planets in the same system. There had been wars in our past. We were competitors.

I looked around the bar again. The motorcycle guys hunched over their beers. A couple shot pool at a table at the bar’s far end. Beneath me, the floor moved subtly, responding to the river’s flow.

“My name’s Arlyss,” I said. My Lasarént name would damage a human throat.

“Trudy,” she said. “Have you been down long?”

“Off and on for thirty-some years. I haven’t been off-world for eleven years now.”

The waiter came by and took her order. I ate more salmon. The mimicked human gestures came almost naturally to me, often times revealing my emotions in ways I would never display when in my Lasarént body. I found myself smiling. It had been a long time since I had talked to someone without pretending. “Yourself?” I said, when the waiter left.

“Only five. I’d been doing Seleneological surveys when this opportunity came up. It was a change.” She shifted in her seat. “I’m uncomfortable in this form.”

I nodded. Gravity was wrong. Not all that different, only 1.2 heavier, but it was wrong. A different molten core beneath me. A different wash of magnetic influences. The stars at night, wrong.

She didn’t wait for her meal. “I have to go. Quotas.”

I felt a unfamiliar urge within me as she rose. A few more people had entered the bar, taking other tables, all humans who could never know who I was. Their faces moved strangely, in their human way: too many horizontal lines, when they closed their mouths or eyes, the eyebrows, the hair line, all oddly horizontal. It frightened me to recognize their feelings in their faces—that I couldn’t really remember what a Lasarént face looked like. I wanted her to stay. She wasn’t Lasarént, but we shared a sun. “Why did you come here?” I said. The bar was small. Even when it was full, it would be as unlikely a place for her work as it was for mine.

She pushed her chair under the table. I noticed her fingers. Their sculpting was perfect, nails exactly human-like. The Trosfrilla have six fingers on their manipulating hands. She lost part of herself for this transition too. “The river reminded me of home.” She floated her hand away and indicated the whole bar. “The light—did you notice?—it’s like Trosfrilla.”

“I saw,” I said, but she was already striding away. The bikers watched her again.

Clearly I made her uneasy. If she wanted to scan and tag a human, she would be as successful here as she would be anywhere else. It wasn’t the quota that drove her away. It was me. I wondered about Trosfrillan morality. Did she consider her work embarrassing? Was this a perversion in her eyes?

Bestiality: Sexual relations with an animal. Humans consider this to be of the lowest sort of behavior. The background for this revulsion is untranslatable. Is there a Trosfrillan equivalent?

As it turned out, I made a contact that night, a woman playing pool by herself. I put quarters on the rail, shot eight-ball with her until closing.

Pool is an elegant game, maybe one of the best of the human recreations. I get lost in the velocities and angles, the cue in my hand, the felt’s smooth plain, the ball’s muted click. We played evenly. She set up for a shot then stood back each time, as if she were shooting it twice. Called her bumpers. A rhythmic pattern she never varied. She clicked her tongue appreciatively when I made a good shot. After a while, I got the impression she didn’t care about the score. She watched the rolling ball like I did, as a physics demonstration. Something beyond personality. Humans startle me sometimes with their depth, and I wished I could talk to her about myself. Last call for drinks surprised me.

We left together, and she said, “Where’s your car?” I’d scanned her earlier. Twenty-seven years old. She showed evidence of having borne children. Impossible to tell more until she was at the apartment, where the equipment was better.

She didn’t talk as we drove away, but she looked out the window. Her unsmiling reflection flickered in the streetlights. Her breathing was even, hands still in her lap. “You have protection?” she said when we pulled into the parking lot.

I nodded. Of course it was designed not to interfere with my measurements or the placing of the tag. Human diseases didn’t threaten me, and I sterilized myself between encounters to not spread contagions. I’m the definition of “safe sex.”

Later that night I drove her back to the Sleepy Jean. After she shut the car door, she leaned in the window. “My name’s Margaret.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m Arlyss. I forgot to ask.”

“I thought you should know.”

I stayed in the parking lot, listening to the river. It started to rain. Big drops slapped against the windshield and splattered on the upholstery. A stream of muddy water crossed the parking lot to empty into the river between the anchored boat and the shore. The lights had been turned off, but the beer signs still glowed, glinting redly in the rain pools. I hadn’t thought of Lasarént for years, not like this.

I once read a bumper sticker on a truck parked outside a Chicago dance club: “Save time: go ugly early.” No translation available.

The next night, at Shatterday’s, a huge singles lounge in north Sacramento, I saw Trudy again. She was on the crowded dance floor, as far as I could tell, by herself. Now that I knew she was Trosfrillan, I could see it in her movements. Their backs have twinned vertebrae. Even in her near perfect human form, she danced distinctly. People gave her room. More than a few watched her, men and women.

I held my beer tightly, waiting for it to warm to a drinkable temperature. Even though I had been in the bar for an hour, I’d made no attempt to hook up with anyone. I contemplated the music, which is not artistic to my ear, but I find it beautiful that they have music. It tells me perhaps we will get along when this race breaks free from its planet, when we reveal ourselves to them. There has to be something worthwhile in a species that devotes so much time to music, and invented pool. And they dance, of course, which speaks well for them, even when it’s clear that much of the dance I see is variations on mating rituals. All posturing and invitations.

Trudy’s dance had none of that in it. Pure movement for the love of movement. The Trosfrilla have hierarchies of dance, achievement levels that take years to master, as do the Lasarént. In the mythology of encounters between our two races, there is a story of a war settled by a long dance. They danced the peace in, goes the tale.

“Do you want to dance?” said the woman. Short, a bit plump by human standards. I checked my watch. Young. Twenty-one. Untagged. Her friends sat at a table a few yards from mine, hiding their giggles. I don’t believe they thought she would have the courage to ask me. She danced well, for a human. At least she moved energetically. The song ended, and we waited for the next. She kept her hand on mine to keep from losing me in the crowd. We danced again. I made frequent eye contact. Responded to her changes in posture. Human dance: postures and invitation. I read her. She read me. Others jostled us. The music pounded in its numbingly unchanging beat. As always, I felt disconnected. I didn’t know her. She would never know me. No point of synchronicity in our lives. I could imagine her in my apartment in an hour or two, trying to close the distance. For me, what happened in the apartment was clinical.

What a fruitless pursuit on her part, even if I was human. I’d seen the same kind of face before. Sad, under the laughter. What would be the best she could hope for? That I wouldn’t leave her at the end of the evening? That I wouldn’t be in another bar on another night dancing with someone else? And then what would she have? Humans don’t meet in the mind as do the Lasarént. She would never press her back into the muddy wall of a den on the banks of the Hydrash, side by side with the family line. She’d never know ecstasy as the fleshy tendrils grew between us, from back to back, burrowed in, transferred genes and nutrients and emotion. She would never touch minds with her den mates in orgiastic communion all winter long.

I almost walked away from her. But a hand pressed against my thigh, and a voice whispered in my ear, “How do you handle the loneliness?” I turned. It was Trudy, already dancing away into the crowd.

What loneliness? I thought. I am a scientist on a mission. My work is my companion. We danced more. I bought the plump woman drinks.

At the apartment, she clung to me after I’d tagged her. “I was afraid I was too ugly for you,” she said.

I told her truthfully, “You are as beautiful as any woman I’ve seen.”

“You wouldn’t kid a kidder?” she said, and tears wet my chest when she pressed her face there.

“You wouldn’t kid a kidder”: To lie to someone who lies. This is one of many funny/sad utterances humans use, like “He has a face only a mother could love,” and “She’s built for comfort, not for speed.” Emotionally untranslatable.

The next night I sat in Bullsnappers until closing. Twice women asked me to dance. I declined. Sitting back, I watched the bar’s rhythm. Men and women in groups, leaning over tables, lined up at the bar, standing besides one another at the edge of the dance floor, mostly not talking, but together. Loud music. Too loud for conversation, but sometimes someone would touch another’s arm, and they’d push their heads together. She’d shout something. He would nod.

People got up, danced, sat down. Patterns emerged of touch and laugh and movement. Strobes flashed in the ceiling, and I watched the dance floor. Legs rearranging. Pelvic rotations. The sinuous flow of a skirt’s edge around a twirling woman. Bass beat, down deep, bouncing in my chest. No pause between songs, and the pattern started again. Hands on backs, shifting. Thighs pressed against thighs under tables. A kiss on a cheek. A bathroom door opened, and harsh light silhouetted the figure coming out.

It was all too loud, chaotic, and . . . alien. I couldn’t integrate here. Hadn’t integrated for so long I wasn’t sure I could. Nothing felt right. I left cash on the table and pushed my way to the exit. Faces blurred. Strange faces loud with horizontal lines and teeth and darting eyes, watching each other, watching me, and knowing nothing.

Outside, I breathed raggedly. Barely made it to my car. At the apartment, hands shaking, I ran a diagnostic. Maybe one of the implants was breaking down. Maybe, after all this time, my Lasarént immune system was rejecting the grafts, or it could be an acquired allergy. I had too many symptoms, but the equipment reported nothing wrong. Everything normal. For the first time in my field experience, I sedated myself and remained unconscious for several days.

On a Wednesday night, I returned to the Sleepy Jean. Same red lights. Same soothing murmur under the boat. No one in the bar besides the bartender, a cook and myself. I took notes idly about peanut shells on the floor, and how they cracked underfoot, about lingering odors beneath the obvious ones: perfumes, sweat, detergents, petrochemicals. The chair’s surface was cool and smooth, and I realized for the first time that it was an imitation of leather.

Around the room, numerous fakes and imitations. On the walls, old movie posters, but, on close inspection, not the originals. Baseball mitts hanging from the ceiling, just like ones I’d seen in several other bars to provide “atmosphere,” along with old road signs, car license plates, a pair of snow shoes, a boat oar, a stuffed peccary, several fishing poles: all pretending to be random, as if the bar grew to be this way instead of being designed. The beer mugs done in an old-fashioned style. The bartender dressed as a riverboat captain. Fakes. I scribbled into my notebook. So much of the integral human experience involved fakery, which was no different from what happened between them. For years I’d watched them come into bars, pretending to be at ease or happy or interested or interesting, and it all covered something else. Like their language.

I put my notebook down and shut my eyes. If I ignored the glassy clink behind the bar, shut out the alien cooking smells and odd gravity; if I concentrated on the river’s swishy passage under the boat and the dim red light through my eyelids, I could almost imagine faraway Lasarént. What season was it there? Would the rivers be running high now on their winding flow to the shallow seas? Would the hills be oozy and wet under the reddish sun? I licked my lips, tasted the river’s moisture on my tongue. Rested my head on the chair’s back to feel the moving water better.

I stayed that way for a long time.

Footsteps thudded on the floor. I felt them, and I scrinched my eyes tighter, trying not to break the feeling, but a chair scraped back, and someone joined me at my table. The problem with the vacant chair is it invites company. I thought about sending the person away. Another specimen for the database didn’t seem that important right now. What would be the use of one more tagged woman, moving through her life, tracked by invisible Lasarént field scientists? What would be the good of me committing one more act of human fakery?

It was Trudy.

“I expected to find you here,” she said.

I touched her hand. “That’s good work.”

She held it up to herself, fingers straight. “They hurt all the time, you know.”

I didn’t, but I said I did.

The bartender asked her if she wanted something, and she ordered a beer. When he turned away, she said, “Enzyme treatments make it palatable—even my digestive system was changed—but they drink it too cold.”

“Mine too. When I started, all the food was shunted to a storage stomach. I emptied it after meals, but they decided that was too cumbersome—shipping food to me twice a month—so I have earth-analog bacteria implants and a processor that converts it for me.”

“Ouch,” she said. “All that biologically?”

“Most. I’d attract a lot of attention in an Earth hospital if they X-rayed my insides, though.”

She laughed. I admired the perfection of her guise. No evidence of vestigial scales. The missing limbs. The loss of height. The loss of eye stalks. Trosfrilla biotechs must be true artists.

The door opened and a dozen men and women poured into the bar. A coed softball team, wearing black and yellow T-shirts, talking excitedly.

I didn’t want her to go again. The players settled around two tables, calling for beer and pretzels. One of them plugged money into a juke box, and the Sleepy Jean suddenly became noisy and too crowded.

“Can we go someplace quiet?” I asked.

She nodded. What thoughts were going through her Trosfrilla brain? We were no longer enemies, technically, but she could learn nothing about Earth people from me. I could learn nothing from her. Our conversation made no scientific sense. We’d gain nothing from it. She was not a human woman. I could take no readings or plant a tag. Still, I wanted to stay with her.

She followed me in her car to my apartment. I turned the equipment off before she entered. No point in letting my superiors know I’d entertained a Trofrillan operative.

I said, “Can I get you something to drink?”

Trudy moved into my apartment unlike anyone who’d entered before. She dropped the human role; her feet slid across the carpet, more like her own gait, and her hands went to her jaw line that she rubbed hard. She said, “Water is fine, if it’s warm.” The heels of her hands ground into the side of her face. “It hurts all the time, here. I’ll be glad to go home.”

I poured the water and one for myself. Through the door I could see her examining my things. She pushed aside an art print to study the thin plate of scanning equipment behind.

“What’s your range?” she called.

“About fifty feet.”

She grunted and let the print swing back into place.

“Do you have any music?” she said. “Real music?”

I had several CD’s of recordings I’d made from Lasarént. The stereo couldn’t do the full tonal range justice, but it captured the mutating harmonics and asynchronous rhythms well. We sat beside each other on the couch. Through my picture window the sun set, a red sunset, and I smiled at that. Trudy stayed motionless, her fingers curled on her thighs, her wrists bent slightly, like a Preying Mantis. I smelled nothing Trosfrillan on her, only shampoo and perfume.

Around us the human city teemed with its activities. In the building, doors slammed—I felt their distant echoes—feet pattered down the hallways. Outside, traffic pushed past, all individually guided, most cars holding only one person. Busy. Horns and engine noise beat against the glass. A siren whining. But in my apartment, the red sun bathed everything warmly, and the music currents swept by, gentle and chaotic, like the river beneath the Sleepy Jean, like the far Hydrash. My scanning equipment was off. My position was no longer clinical. I wasn’t collecting.

Trudy rubbed her face again. Underneath the mock skin (Beautifully engineered! Only a well equipped lab that knew what to look for would be able to detect its extraterrestrial origin), I guessed her reshaped skull ached along its alien lines. She grimaced, a very human gesture of pain.

“Here, let me,” I said. In the kitchen, I filled a pan with warm water and found a washcloth. She watched me soak the cloth, then press out the excess moisture.

“I don’t think we should,” she said. Her hand rested on my forearm. “Thank you for the thought, though.”

Still, she didn’t resist when I placed the cloth against her cheek, let the warmth rest there for a moment, and then pushed my thumbs gently into the muscles. Her dark eyes locked on my own. When I went back to the bowl to reheat the cloth, she sighed and shut her eyes. I straddled her on the couch so I could massage both sides of her face equally. She moved her head against the pressure, so I could tell where she wanted it. Gradually, the apartment darkened, and the red sunset behind me went from vermillion to purple to sable. My thumbs kneaded her cheek bones, pushed into the ridge of her jawbone, circled under her ears—the skin caressed the covered bones, a whole tiny landscape of knobs and valleys and smooth plains, over and over.

She said, “Do you miss winter on Lasarént?”

My back ached with memory’s loss. The den filled and dark and close. The hormonal changes engendered in the moist soil and shared air, and the timeless eruption of tendrils in my back, burrowing through the mud, finding other tendrils, growing and intertwining until we joined, all of us, in one organism; one birthing, breathing, thinking organism that waited out the winter in warmth and communion and unity. The integration.

I couldn’t say anything, but swallowed the human sob in my throat while my thumbs orbited endlessly on her face.

Her hands went to my shirt, unbuttoning. In the darkness I saw her eyes glinting, staring again at me. I massaged the skull above the ears; her hair tickled my wrists. She held my ribs and pulled me closer, her breath hot on my chest, then she reached around and put her hands on my back.

“Here?” she said, her voice mellow against the music.

“Higher,” I said, and moved down so she could reach.

The Trosfrilla know our anatomy; they know us. One can’t go to war for generations without learning of the enemy, and she knew. She knew. Her fingers traveled up and down beside my back bone, digging until she found the buried tendril-pods, chemically suppressed, but still there, sensitive to stimulation, and she rubbed them gently.

When the music ended, I fell away, exhausted.

We breathed deeply in the now silent room, city lights glittering beyond the window, the traffic slowed to its night time murmur.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Does it hurt as bad?” I touched the side of her face.

She didn’t look at me. “Not as bad. And you?”

Of course there had been incomplete satisfaction in what she’d done, not like a full nesting, but she knew the tendril-pods were there. She’d touched them and reminded them they were alive.

“That felt good,” I said. “Thanks.”

Trudy rose from the couch, and I knew she was leaving.

She got to the door before I said, “Will I see you again?”

By the dim city light, she paused, her back to me—things remained that way for many heart beats—then she shrugged.

“Why?” she said.

I tried not to weep, my alien form overwhelming me with reflexive emotion, and I suddenly understood something human.

“Don’t mind me,” I said. “It’s all blather.”