Ellen Datlow - Alien Sex

For years I dreamed of a career somehow related to the magical sciences of megafarming. What I really wanted, of course, was a way never to leave home—a career to protect my narrow affections, first loves, prized childhood memories of a mother and father who worked happily for The Farm. My father, the loud, proud administrator; my mother, the taciturn gene-splicer whose love of her work showed clearly in her quiet eyes.

The last time I saw The Farm was the eve of Jory’s departure. I was twenty-eight years old. The machines were still incredible—the immense nuclear combines, the computerized “octopus pickers” and “dancing diggers.” The land was just as awesome—the dark pH-perfect soil stretching from horizon to horizon. But it was boring now. How could this be the world I’d romanticized for so long?

The career I finally chose to pursue—at the clear-thinking age of fourteen—was veterinary medicine. Not the anthropomorphic-pet kind (which I knew was glutted with practitioners), but the animal-husbandry kind (about which I knew absolutely nothing).

I made it as far as my fourth year of undergraduate studies, and then the world changed. I discovered people, and the dream of veterinary medicine began to fade.

One day I discovered a young man named Jory Coryiner and never dreamed the dream again.

I met him at one of the dinners my parents gave for the Huddleston Industries trainees. There were twelve this time—the usual fifty-fifty split of women and men—and Jory was impossible to miss: dark, cocky, intimidating, haloed with heroic rumors—in all, the most magnetically masculine thing I’d ever encountered in my cloistered Iowan life.

He disliked me intensely at first, I know that now. And with good reason. He knew who I was, and dreaded the inevitable patronizing. I persisted. Here was a young man all were talking about, a young man who’d won a fertboss traineeship not through federally imposed quota-tokenism but through his own impressive record, and for some reason I felt chosen, destined to understand him—his obvious need for a wall, tough carapace, calciferous shell, to hide behind.

How it happened, I can’t say. After an hour’s efforts, he softened. By the end of that hour, I felt I had glimpsed what few others had—the real reason for his chitinous ways: he was the son of a “welfare gloryhole” and he believed he wore that stigma for all to see in the melanin of his skin.

He was wrong, of course. To most men and women, his complexion was charismatic, magical, superior to their own. My own parents certainly never thought twice about my seeing him. But he never understood this. He still doesn’t, and now, it is too late.

I should have seen it. I should have realized that the son of two mothers and two fathers—a boy shuttled back and forth from “step’nt” to “step’nt” throughout childhood—might perceive families in a different way. That a man from a Glory Ghetto who had struggled to escape the dark badge of its dependency might never stop struggling. That the moat might never dry up, the walls never crumble, the carapace never see a shedding no matter how much love fell upon it.

Were there alternative worlds in your eyes even then, Jory—places where Hiroshima never rose toward heaven, where the Jurassic Sea never dried, where the Visigoths held Italy for over five centuries?

I do not know. I lied to myself then, too.

When you told me you had contracted as a runner for Quanta, you took two hours to explain it. When you were through, you did not want to hear any of my questions. Fait accompli. You wanted no chinks, no soft underbelly through which your resolution might be undermined.

You said you were doing it because of your great boredom—and because of the money, the fortune you’d have when you returned. The fertboss position was driving you crazy, you said. Even with the antidepressants The Farm’s headmeds were giving you (I knew nothing of this), your days were leaden with despair, you said.

You said, too, that you’d talked it over thoroughly with three who’d just come back. Two greeters and a diplo —three men. They were colorful talkers, yes, even a little strange at times, but they weren’t crazy, not at all. And they were very happy they’d gone.

Willi, who was eight then, said the only thing he could have: he didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want to give up his school, his teams, his clubs, his counselor, his center, his world. I had no choice. I had to respect it. He would not be our son fifteen years later when Jory returned and I awoke, but it was Willi’s life, too, and to take him with us to a future where he would have only the two of us was all wrong. I believe that still. I do.

My mother was ill. She probably would be for the rest of her life. He could not stay with them. It was Clara and Bo, our friends from Cedar Falls, who at last agreed to take him. He would live with them during the school year until he was eighteen; he would spend summers with Jory’s sister in Missoula or my parents in Cedar Falls. Whichever he preferred.

That was the best I could do, and as I did it, I wept.

You signed your contract. Quanta responded, depositing fifteen years of executive salary with the Citibank trustees. While you slept in the starlocks and did your business on Climago, the capital earned. When you finally returned, you were (like the others) a millionaire and (like the others) so happy.

I slept for you, Jory, because that was my adventure, an adventure I believed was as noble as yours. All around us men and women were doing such things for their departing lovers, and I knew we would meet again—you and I—in a distant, idyllic future, to begin life anew like a modern Adam and Eve.

I slept for you, and my sad but loving parents paid for the suspension care without complaint, though they knew they were burying me.

I’ve seen my father only once since I awoke. Mother is dead. He had nothing to say.

I will not do that to him again.

Time marries. Time reconciles. “It is a recombiner like no other,” as my mother used to say quietly. It has only been two weeks since Jory’s announcement, and I have already begun to believe, to accept what I know cannot be true.

I must be prepared. I cannot afford not to be. If what Jory claims is true, if indeed we are about to have a visitor, I must begin to prepare this house physically—and myself psychologically—for its arrival. Whatever it may be.

After all, the notion of a visitor is, in its own way, appealing. Anything that makes the days feel different is, in its own way, appealing.

I give it the better part of each day. I give it so much that the headaches are excruciating. But they are a small price to pay for being prepared.

1. I’m actually quite qualified to receive the creature, whatever it may be. I received a decent formal training in biology, zoology, and physiology, and I’ve educated myself in recent years in invertebrate and marine biology, malacology, conchology. Jory would be the first to admit this, I’m sure.

2. If the creature is indeed intelligent, I cannot afford to make it feel unwanted. Jory will insist, I am sure, that it remain with us indefinitely, and I will have to abide by that as graciously as possible.

If the creature is intelligent and feeling— if it is indeed from a race driven by an aeon-spanning need to help, to cooperate, to “care”—there is reason, is there not, to assume that some day I will be able to feel something resembling affection for it?

If it survives, of course.

I cannot guess his exact needs. I can only prepare for a variety of contingencies. I know, for example, that Climagos do not need daily intakes of atmosphere, that their integumentary system is “closed,” that they require infusions of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and other elements only occasionally—once a week, say. And though the notion doesn’t reconcile easily with hemophagia, their nutrional needs (according to the one reference tape I’ve been able to locate) follow a similar periodicity.