Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

It’s growing in thick and fast. I’m proud of it; I can hardly keep my hands off my face. The treatment, the hormones, they started it, but it’s my follicles that have risen to the call, that are putting forth this rich growth, this life on my face.

Lelana’s boyfriend comes over to pick her up Friday night and looks startled when I answer the door, the first open look of surprise I’ve seen. She must not have told him. She hurries past me and ushers him out of the apartment building. I sit through the afternoon watching arena football on cable. It’s cute how they run around the small stadium wearing skintight uniforms bare up to the knee. After the game I watch two old black-and-white romance movies. I realize Lelana has come back in without my noticing, only when I hear a sullen rattle of pots and pans in the kitchen. Two commercial breaks later, the door to her room shuts firmly.

I wake with my fingers buried in the short thick growth of my beard, and, comfortable, sleep again.

It’s beautiful, all the colors I thought it might be, an autumn beard of brown and red and sparkles of blond. I experiment with the best eye makeup to complement it. The sink is crowded with pencils and trays of powder and tiny tubs of cream in every color of brown, russet, charcoal. It is a month since I started growing the beard, and it is better than I ever hoped it would be. As I start to work on my face, I wonder idly where Lelana is. Around.

When I finish with my eyes I take a small scissors and carefully trim my beard until it is perfect.

I wear tight black pants and a clinging dark blue top, open in a small keyhole at the chest but with a turtleneck against which the beard glows. I shopped for the outfit for days. I brush my beard, I fluff it, I look at it from all angles in the mirror. I run my fingers quickly through my hair and go out the door.

Everyone looks at me at the club. Everyone.

I dance alone on the floor for an hour. For two hours. Then the men, tentatively at first, then in growing numbers, begin to crowd around me. I pick and choose from them. Too weedy, too loud, hair too limp. Finally I let one dance with me, slow, his breath warm and moist in my beard.

Lelana is not in the apartment when I take him home. I kiss the man and feel my beard catch on the angles of his smooth, naked cheeks, his lips. We do not need to talk. One hand tangled in my beard, the other on my breast, he lets me press him down against the bed. As he gasps, he pulls at my beard, pulls at my real and living beard.

When I send him home, I have not asked his name. I sleep with sweat and kisses in my beard and dream nothing at all.

In the morning, I shave.

Sometimes you lie half-asleep and the first line of a story floats into your mind, like a dream that forgets you must be fully asleep before it can come into the room, and as enigmatic and self-evident as any dream.

It doesn’t happen often enough.

This is a story about dealing with the pain from the alien by playacting the alien, incorporating the alien. It isn’t a difficult concept. People have been doing it for as long as we’ve been human. Children do it when they put on their mothers’ shoes. Adults do it, sometimes with less awareness. We take in change and survive. I think this is probably an optimistic story.

But I’m never sure about these things.

Gwyneth Jones has been a writer and critic of genre fiction for many years. Honors include two World Fantasy awards, the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Science Fiction Research Association lifetime achievement award for science fiction criticism. Recent publications include: Imagination/Space: Essays and Talks on Fiction, Feminism, Technology, and Politics and The Universe of Things. She lives in Brighton, England, and is currently working on a new genre novel.

THE EARTH WALLS OF the caravanserai rose strangely from the empty plain. She let the black stallion slow his pace. The silence of deep dusk had a taste, like a rich dark fruit; the air was keen. In the distance mountains etched a jagged margin against an indigo sky; snow streaks glinting in the glimmer of the dawning stars. She had never been here before, in life. But as she led her horse through the gap in the high earthen banks she knew what she would see. The camping booths around the walls; the beaten ground stained black by the ashes of countless cooking fires; the wattle-fenced enclosure where travelers’ riding beasts mingled indiscriminately with their host’s goats and chickens… the tumbledown gallery, where sheaves of russet plains-grass sprouted from empty window-spaces. Everything she looked on had the luminous intensity of a place often visited in dreams.

She was a tall woman, dressed for riding in a kilt and harness of supple leather over brief close-fitting linen: a costume that left her sheeny, muscular limbs bare and outlined the taut, proud curves of breast and haunches. Her red hair was bound in a braid as thick as a man’s wrist. Her sword was slung on her back, the great brazen hilt standing above her shoulder. Other guests were gathered by an open-air kitchen, in the orange-red of firelight and the smoke of roasting meat. She returned their stares coolly: she was accustomed to attracting attention. But she didn’t like what she saw. The host of the caravanserai came scuttling from the group by the fire. His manner was fawning. But his eyes measured, with a thief’s sly expertise, the worth of the sword she bore and the quality of Lemiak’s harness. Sonja tossed him a few coins and declined to join the company.

She had counted fifteen of them. They were poorly dressed and heavily armed. They were all friends together and their animals—both terror-birds and horses—were too good for any honest travelers’ purposes. Sonja had been told that this caravanserai was a safe halt. She judged that this was no longer true. She considered riding out again onto the plain. But wolves and wild terror-birds roamed at night between here and the mountains, at the end of winter. And there were worse dangers; ghosts and demons. Sonja was neither credulous nor superstitious. But in this country no wayfarer willingly spent the black hours alone.

She unharnessed Lemiak and rubbed him down: taking sensual pleasure in the handling of his powerful limbs; in the heat of his glossy hide, and the vigor of his great body. There was firewood ready stacked in the roofless booth. Shouldering a cloth sling for corn and a hank of rope, she went to fetch her own fodder. The corralled beasts shifted in a mass to watch her. The great flightless birds, with their pitiless raptors’ eyes, were especially attentive. She felt an equally rapacious attention from the company by the caravanserai kitchen, which amused her. The robbers—as she was sure they were—had all the luck. For her, there wasn’t one of the fifteen who rated a second glance.

A man appeared, from the darkness under the ruined gallery. He was tall. The rippled muscle of his chest, left bare by an unlaced leather jerkin, shone red-brown. His black hair fell in glossy curls to his wide shoulders. He met her gaze and smiled, white teeth appearing in the darkness of his beard. “ My name is Ozymandias, king of kings … look on my works, ye mighty, and despair … Do you know those lines?” He pointed to a lump of shapeless stone, one of several that lay about. It bore traces of carving, almost effaced by time. “There was a city here once, with marketplaces, fine buildings, throngs of proud people. Now they are dust, and only the caravanserai remains.”