Ellen Datlow - Alien Sex

Edward Bryant began writing professionally in 1968 and has published more than a dozen books, including Among the Dead , Cinnabar , Phoenix Without Ashes (with Harlan Ellison), Wyoming Sun , Particle Theory , Fetish (a novella chapbook), and The Baku: Tales of the Nuclear Age . He first focused on science fiction and won two Nebula awards for short stories in 1978 and 1979. While he still occasionally dabbles in science fiction (such as his 1994 story “The Fire That Scours”), he gradually strayed into horror. Most of his work is now in the horror genre, as with his series of sharply etched stories about Angie Black, a contemporary witch, the zombie story “A Sad Last Love at the Diner of the Damned,” and other marvelous tales.

Most of his horror fiction will be reprinted in an upcoming retrospective.

WHAT DO ALIENS WANT?

Their burnished black ships, humming with the ominous power of a clenched fist, ghost across our cities. At first we turned our faces to the skies in the chill of every moving shadow. Now we seem to feel the disinterest bred of familiarity. It’s not a sense of ease, though. The collective apprehension is still there—even if diminished. For many of us, I believe, the feeling is much like awaiting a dentist’s drill.

Do aliens have expectations?

If human beings know, no one’s telling. Our leaders dissemble, the news media speculate, but facts and truths alike submerge in murky communications. Extraterrestrial secrets, if they do have answers, remain quietly and tastefully enigmatic. Most of us have read about the government’s beamed messages, all apparently ignored.

Do humans care?

I’m not really sure anymore. The ships have been up there for months—a year or more. People do become blasé, even about those mysterious craft and their unseen pilots. When the waiting became unendurable, most humans simply seemed to tune out the ships and thought about other things again: mortgages, spiraling inflation, Mideast turmoil, and getting laid. Yet the underlying tension remained.

Some of us in the civilian sector have retained our curiosity. Right here in the neighborhood, David told us he sat in the aloneness of the early morning hours and pumped out Morse to the silhouettes as they cruised out of the dark above the mountains and slid into the dim east. If there were replies, David couldn’t interpret them. “You’d think at least they’d want to go out for a drink,” David had said.

Riley used the mirror in his compact to send up heliograph signals. In great excitement he claimed to have detected a reply, messages in kind. We suggested he saw, if anything, reflections from the undersides of the dark hulls. None of that diminished his ecstasy. He believed he was noticed. I felt for him.

Hawk—both job description and name—didn’t hold much with guesses. “In good time,” he said, “they’ll tell us what they want; tell us, then buy it, take it, use it. They’ll give us the word.” Hawk had plucked me, runaway and desperate young man, literally out of the gutter along the Boulevard. Since before the time of the ships, he had cared for me. He had taken me home, cleaned, fed, and warmed me. He used me, sometimes well. Sometimes he only used me.

Whether Hawk loved me was debatable.

Watching the ships gave me no answer.

I attempted to communicate every day. It was a little like what my case worker told me about what dentists did to kids’ mouths before anyone had invented braces. When he was a boy with protruding teeth, my case worker was instructed to push fingers gently against those front teeth every time he thought of his mouth and how people were making fun. “Hey, Trigger! Where’s Roy?” Years of gentle, insistent touches did what braces do now.

I tried to do something like that with the alien ships. Every time I fantasized smooth, alien features when I shivered in the chilly wake of an alien shadow, I gathered my mental energies, concentrated, shot an inquiring thought after the diminishing leviathan.

Ship, come to me … I wanted it to carry me away, to take charge, to save me from any sense of responsibility about my own actions in my own life. I knew better, but that didn’t stop the temptation.

Once, only once, I thought I felt a reply, the slightest tickling just at the border of my mind. At the time it was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, more a textural thing: slick surfaces, cool, moist, one whole enclosing another. (A fist fills the glove. One hand, damp, warm: the wrist—twists.)

I tried to describe the sensation to some of the people on the street. I’m not sure who disbelieved me. I know Hawk believed. He stared at me with his dark raptor eyes and touched my arm. I danced skittishly away.

“You fit, Ricky,” he said. “You really do.”

“Not like that,” I answer. The conversation has taken place in many variations, in many bedrooms and on many streets, and still does. “No longer. No more.”

Hawk nods, almost sadly, I think. “Still going to leave?”

“I’ll dance again,” I say. “I’m young.” Dancing was the only thing the therapists ever gave me that I loved.

“You’re that,” he agrees. “But you’re out of shape.” His voice is sad again. “At least for dancing.”

“I can get back,” I say helplessly, spreading my hands. “Soon.” I try to ignore the fact that, as young as I am, I’ve abandoned my best years.

“I wish you could do it.” The tone is as gentle as Hawk’s voice ever gets. “It’s the sticks, kiddo,” he says. “You’re a runaway on the skids, just off the street, in the sticks.”

I don’t like being reminded. He makes me remember every foster home, every set of possible parents who threw me back in the pool.

Hawk nods toward the stairs. “Come up.”

I look at the darkness beyond the landing. I look at the faceted rings on the knuckles of Hawk’s right hand. I stare at the floor. “No.” I feel the circle tighten.

“Rick…” His voice shines dark and faceted.

“No.” But I follow Hawk up the steps and into freezing alien shadows.

I’m planning my escape. I keep telling myself that. But that’s all I do. Plan. If I left, I’d have to go someplace. There’s nowhere I’ve ever realistically wanted to go.

Come, ships …

At one time I thought about hitching to Montana. I’d seen Comes a Horseman on late-night TV. Then I made the mistake of turning to Hawk and mentioning my plan. He raised his head from the pillow and said, “Ricky, you want to be a dancer again and go to Montana? You’re maybe going to dance for the Great Falls Repertory Ballet?” I pretended to ignore the mockery. Someday I would leave. Just as soon as I made up my mind.

I gave up the Montana idea. But I still plan my escape. I’ve saved a few hundred dollars in tips waiting on tables at Richard’s Coffee Shop. I have a dog-eared copy of Ecotopia and a Texaco road map of Oregon. I think Portland’s probably a whole lot larger and more cosmopolitan than Great Falls. Certainly more cultural. Oregon seems familiar to me. I read a tattered paperback of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest in that fragmented past when I bounced from home to home, always waiting for them to tell my case worker I wasn’t quite what they wanted.

If I really wanted to go, I’d leave. Right? Hawk jokes about it because he simply doesn’t believe me. He doesn’t know me. He never did find the passage to my mind.

Tonight I’m at a party at David and Lee’s apartment. There are plenty of times when I wish I had the kind of relationship with someone, loving and supportive, that the two of them share.