Ellen Datlow - Alien Sex

The autonomous room was finished two weeks ago. The shipment of blood components arrived yesterday. I still have questions, dozens of basic ones, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I’ve used every possible tape available through interlibrary banks and manufacturer listings, and I will not risk further exposure by contacting more “experts.”

These remaining questions would worry me if Jory seemed at all anxious. But he is calm. He must feel we’re prepared.

We argued today about who should copter in to SFO to get him. I insisted that both of us should, but Jory said no, that would be unfair to both “the boy” and me. I did not understand this, and I said so. Jory said only, “I need some time to prepare him.”

I resent it, being excluded. Am I jealous already?

Jory took the copter to SFO this morning. I’ve been spending the day putting finishing touches on the special room, and on the refrigeration units with their blood substitutes and pharmaceutical stocks, all of which should allow us to control any Terran disease to which the poor thing might be susceptible. (I’ve done my homework. I’ve mustered up enough courage to phone two more exos—both at UC San Diego—to get the chemoprophylactic information we need. And I did it without making them suspicious, I am sure.)

They’re here and I never heard them arrive! I’ve been too involved in last-minute scurrying.

I try the covered patio first, expecting Jory’s voice, but I hear nothing. I start to turn, to head back toward the south patio, imagining that Jory has perhaps carried him down the cedar stairs toward our bedroom.

I see something, and stop.

A figure—it is in shadows under the patio beams. I cannot see it clearly, and what I do see makes no sense. It is too small to be Jory; it is not Jory. Yet I know it is too big for what he described. It is standing upright, and that is wrong too.

I walk toward it slowly, stopping at last.

My mouth opens.

I cannot speak; I cannot scream. I cannot even cry out in terror or joy.

It is a boy. A very real, very human boy.

He is thin, a little too thin, and he has Jory’s hatchet face. He has Jory’s blue-black hair.

He is, I know suddenly, more Jory than our Willi ever could have been.

I feel the tears beginning to come, and with them, the understanding. It is the kind of lie I never foresaw. There was no alien lover, no. Instead, it was a woman, an honest-to-god woman. On the lock shuttles perhaps. Or on Climago itself. A greeter or diplo or runner just like Jory.

This boy, this very real boy, is theirs. The truth is wonderful!

Why Jory felt he had to lie, I cannot say. I would have accepted the boy so easily, so gratefully, without it.

I take another step toward the boy, and he smiles. He is beautiful! (Don’t be vain. You don’t really care whether there’s a chromosome of yours in him, do you?)

A voice intrudes suddenly, and I stop breathing.

“Amazing, isn’t it, Dorothea. Can you guess how they did it?”

I turn to Jory, a plea in my eyes: Don’t ruin it. Please don’t ruin it.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ve talked it over with the boy and everything is fine. He grew up with the truth and is proud of it. As he should be.” He turns to the boy, winks, and smiles. “Isn’t that so, August? You know a lot more about it than your dad does, right?”

The boy nods, grinning back. The grin is beautiful.

Jory is grinning too, saying, “Take a guess, Dorothea. It’s nothing us human beings couldn’t have done ourselves.”

I look at the boy. The world is spinning. Everything I have ever known or accepted is about to become a lie.

“I don’t know, Jory,” I whisper.

No one says a thing, and suddenly Jory shouts:

“Cloning! Simple cloning! Nothing fancier than that. Are you surprised?”

There is nothing I can say.

“On our second night together,” Jory is saying, “she put it so well. ‘It’s the least we can do,’ she told me. ‘A living symbol,’ she said, ‘of our refusal to accept passion’s ephemeral insubstance.’ ”

“He’s all me, Dorothea!” Jory exclaims, laughing, glowing.

I look at the boy again.

“I’m going to leave you two alone,” Jory says cheerfully, “let you get to know each other better. Our copter is in dire need of a cleaning!”

The father smiles paternally. The father smiles bountifully.

I want to believe him. I so want to believe that this is, at last, the truth.

When I look into his brown eyes, I see a real boy. When I take his hand in mine, I feel one. He is human. He is Jory, and no one else. I am able, yes, to believe that no mother’s chromosomes are in him; I am able to believe what Jory claims.

We start by talking about his trip through the starlocks. My voice shakes for a time, but that is all right. He, too, with his strange, halting English, is unsure of himself. We must help each other overcome the fears. We cooperate; we allow the other to help.

As we say good-night, he whispers to me, “I love you, Mother, I do,” and kisses me. It catches me off guard; I laugh nervously, wondering if his father told him to say it, or if it is just the boy’s own sensitivity.

He looks hurt, and I know now I shouldn’t have laughed.

“I’m sorry, August.” I say it as brightly as I can, taking his warm hand. “I wasn’t laughing at you; I’d never do that. Sometimes people laugh when something surprises them, especially when it’s something nice.”

I squeeze his hand. He squeezes back, and I am filled with emotions I haven’t felt in a long long time.

Jory is with me in bed tonight, the first time in a long time.

“August was in the starlocks?” I say, afraid to ruin the magic, but haunted by a thought.

Jory gets up on one elbow and looks at me sleepily. “Yes, he was. Why?”

“He told me he loved me, and I was wondering—”

His face lights up with a grin. “Hey, that’s wonderful!”

“He’s been through the starlocks,” I begin again. “Would he lie to me, Jory? Would he even know he was lying to me?”

The cheerfulness dies. He stares at me for the longest time.

“August never lies,” he says finally.

I have been awake in the darkness for hours, thinking to myself, thinking about men and boys, fathers and sons, about a man—a liar—who swears to his wife that their son is not a liar. It is a joke of sorts, a riddle. It cannot be solved.

The strange thing is, I wouldn’t mind it if August did lie to me that way.

I could come to love his lies so easily.

Jory is gone again. From the house. From my life. Back to the woods, the beach, the Winkinblinkins and Starmen, the endless worlds spinning within him.

I don’t mind.

I have August. I have the child who in only five days has changed my life completely. We’ve picnicked on the peninsula where the remaining seals sun themselves like lazy tourists. We’ve tramped the tidepool reefs to identify mollusca and to make the Kirlian photographs of their fairylike “souls.” We’ve chartered an oceanographie trawler from Mendocino, and spent the day oohing and ahing over the dredgings. We’ve even found time to attend a fair in Westchester, that ugly, charming little town whose streets are lined with the slick red manzanita boles washed down by the Gualala at its meanest.

Wherever we go, I feel alive, I feel proud, I feel loved. The way people look at us can only be envy. And why not? It should be clear to anyone that August, handsome and devoted son that he is, does enjoy being with me.

It happened five hours ago. I am still shaking. I should move from this chair, but I am afraid to, afraid that if I do I will lose my mind.