Ellen Datlow - Alien Sex

August came to us a week ago.

Today he asked to use the special room.

To use it.

I stared at him, unable to speak, and he asked me again.

As I took him to it, I did my best not to look at him, afraid of what I might see.

At the gasketed doorway, he looked back at me tenderly and said, “I’m sorry, Mother, but I must shut the door. I think you know why.”

Yes. I do.

It is not just because of the gases.

It is because of what I might see when he attends to his body, to his needs, and forgets me.

He shut the door gently, and as he did he asked me to set the food and air controls for him. He could not do this himself, he said. (Yes. I remember now. He did not hold the cameras at the tidepools. He did not remove anything from the dredgings of the trawler. He did not pay for anything with his own hand. He did not open doors. He did not prepare food. He ate little, and I never saw it enter his mouth. He was simply a vision—present and loving.)

He has been in there with his proper mix of gases and his nutritive membrane for five hours. The last thing he said to me was: “Don’t worry, Mother. I used a room just like this in quarantine for sixteen months. It really wasn’t so bad.”

How to accept it all? How to accept it without screaming? That August is no clone, that he is not human, that he is not what I see.

That he is but a projection, the gift of illusion, a lie.

That something else entirely lives and thinks there behind the loving face.

As the truth sinks in, I begin to see what the books and tapes dared not explain, what governments must take pains not to reveal, what in my own unwillingness to expose our lives to public scrutiny I kept five experts from telling me.

I begin to understand what the word telemanifestor means—the word heard only once, a single tape, a passing reference buried among information I assumed was much more important. I thought I knew what “tele” meant, in all its forms.

Will I be able to live with this? When I touch his arm and feel the pulse just under the skin, what do I really touch? When he kisses me and says, “I love you, Mother, I do,” what is it that really presses itself against my lips? Bony plate, accordion of fat—how can I not see them?

The scream that first rose in my throat has faded. The August-thing will soon be leaving his special room; I must try to pretend that everything is all right. It will see through the pretense, of course, but I must try anyway. As a gesture. It is intelligent, after all. It has feelings. It is a guest in my house. And I, a representative of humanity, must act accordingly. That is all I can do.

It is clear now. It is clear how the Climagos convinced the jaws and talons and eversible stomachs of their world not merely to ignore them, but to help them build a civilization on its way to the stars:

The Climagos are liars too. They have survived for two hundred million years because of the terrible beauty of their lives.

I awoke this morning to an empty, familiar bed.

It was earlier than usual. A sound had awakened me, I knew.

I listened and soon heard it again.

In the next room, on a small foam mattress, I found it. It stopped its crying as soon as I appeared, and like a fool I spent the first half hour inspecting it.

The “evidence” was there of course. Even neonatal physiognomy couldn’t mute that nose. The eyes would darken, yes, but the complexion would remain the same—only slightly lighter than its father’s.

I changed his Dryper and took him to the garden. Soon, he was cooing and chuckling and pulling up the flowers I’d planted only yesterday. He liked the big red zinnias most, of course, bright suns that they are, and in the end the only thing able to distract him was the sight of a cypress silhouetted against a pale morning sky. (I remember how Willi loved such things, staring for hours at a high-contrast print or a striped toy animal.)

We had played for over two hours when suddenly I remembered my appointment. August and I were going to Gualala for crabs! I’d been promising it to him for days.

What to do? (What would August want me to do?)

It came to me then like a breeze, a waking dream, in a voice that was indeed Augusts. It was so simple.

I rose. I took the baby to the little mattress, kissed it, and left the room without looking back. It did not cry.

Ten minutes later, just as I finished the replanting of the flowers, August appeared. So simple.

He was very striking in his navy-blue one-piece, hailing me from the top of the cedar stairs like a sea captain from centuries ago. I felt frumpy and told him so, but he insisted I looked beautiful, even in my earth-stained shorts.

We had a wonderful time. “Helluva season!” the erudite crabseller crowed, and we took the crabs home for a delicious salad under amplified stars.

The baby is in bed with me tonight. I know what it is, but it doesn’t matter.

August is with me, too, though I cannot see him.

And Jory is wherever he wishes to be.

It has been another day of magic. Jory and I went to a mixer in Fort Bragg this evening, for the first time in years. He was all wit, wisdom, and charisma, free with his engaging tales of Climago and the exciting chases of interplanetary Business.

When we got back to the house, he stopped me and put his hands on my shoulders. I could feel their weight. “I’ve been insensitive as hell, Dorothea,” he said. “I know that. This time, no pheromas!” He laughed, and I couldn’t help but smile. “And no damned sling field or son y lumière either!” Face in a mocking leer, he added, “Unless, of course, you’d like to try some Everslip oil, just to keep things from being too easy.”

“No, no, not the oil!” I cried in mock horror. Then, softly, I said, “I’ve always wanted it easy, always.”

And it was. We made love—miracle of miracles!—in our very own unadorned hoverbed, the opaque ceiling above us wonderfully boring, the unsynched music quaint, the steady lamplight charming, and no stencils to frustrate us.

The new Jory sleeps beside me, and I lie awake, happy. I can hear the sounds, yes. The footsteps, the chairs slithering, the sighs. I hear them in the den, in the distant kitchen—but they do not bother me. A faint voice within me whispers, “That is the real Jory; those are his sounds.” But I answer: “It is only a stranger, a stranger in our house. He does not bother us, we do not bother him. He is really no more than a memory, a dim figure from a fading past, a man who once said to you, ‘My son is coming to live with us,’ when he didn’t mean that at all, when he meant instead, ‘It is my lover who is coming….’”

In the morning, the tiny holes on my chest and arms will ooze for the briefest time. I will touch them lovingly. They are a small price to pay.

In a house like this one, but in a universe far far away, a stranger once said as he wept, “In the end, Dorothea, in the end all of our windows are mirrors, and we see only ourselves.”

Or did he say, “In the end, Dorothea, all that matters to mankind is mankind, world without end, amen”?

Or perhaps he said nothing at all.

Perhaps I was the one who said it.

Or perhaps neither of us said a thing, and no lie was ever spoken.

Every writer knows that fiction tells its marvelous truths by lying, but every writer also knows that language can be used for darker lies too. “When the Fathers Go” is about the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell others. It also offers up Woman as the victim of the Lies that men in our culture build out of the cultural myths that bind them. In this sense, the story is a “feminist” story. In another, we’re all Women—all victims of the Lie—and the story isn’t “feminist” at all.