Ellen Datlow - Alien Sex

James turns from the window and shakes his head.

“You’ve got to go, Tommy. Whistle will be here soon. You know she doesn’t like you.”

“I know, I know,” says Tom, smiling. He walks over to his best friend, James, and reaches up to touch his shoulder. Tom nods his head a bit, shakes it ruefully, squeezes the broad, hard collarbone, and says, “I just had to come by and say something, all right? I just had to say it. You mean too much to me, you know. You understand? You mean too much to me.”

Tom leaves.

James cries, gets over it, gets back to packing; the Oxford Guide to English Literature, some magazines, his old Norton Anthology so he’ll have “The Waste Land” and “Prufrock” and The Red Badge and some Faulkner and some Kerouac and some Barth and some Updike and some time to sit back down and cry a bit more. Hard tears. So alone. So very alone.

He stops that nonsense. He rises and looks down at the bag. Quite full.

If he can only get the air out of the ball, he reasons, he can collapse it and take it along. He knows they’ve got air where he’s going, the Pashi breathe it. He can always build a rim and fix up some sort of net. He can always find ten feet high.

He gets the needle in and ten-year-old air hisses out. He looks at the ball as it whistles out the air from ten years back. Tom’s signature is right there where he’s looking, right under James’s own name and the scrawl that says “Kennedy Hawks, State Champs, 1989.”

The ball doesn’t flatten the way James hoped it would. Funny, but then he’d never deflated a basketball before. Seems odd, but he hadn’t.

He pushes, squeezes, even stands on the ball, but it doesn’t seem to help much. The ball clearly won’t fit into the bag unless he takes out a lot of the books, and he can’t do that.

Finally, he takes the obstinate ball and places it on top of the bag, hoping that Whistle will let him bring it along anyway. Surely when he tells her what it means to him she’ll let him bring that one extra thing. Surely.

But, later, she doesn’t. She insists, and he leaves it behind, leaves it on the coffee table, partially collapsed, so that it seems to flatten against the glass tabletop the way the Sun did for them as it set. Under the flattened part, hard against the glass, are the two signatures.

The Bendaii arrived the next day. About noon.

I read a piece in The Nation about Subic Bay in the Philippines and the problems that have existed there over the years as a result of the U.S. military presence—particularly prostitution and the shocking trade in Filipino brides. Shortly after that I saw a documentary on Douglas MacArthur that detailed the U.S. relationship to the Philippines during World War II.

That led me to wonder how we would react, as a nation and on a more personal level, if some greater power established a military outpost here the way we have done in many places around the world. It’s a topic I’ve found myself writing about in several stories in magazines like Analog and Isaac Asimov’s.

In this particular case, I also wondered how we would react if that greater power abandoned us to the enemy the way we abandoned the Filipinos.

There is a narrow brutality to that sort of imperialist thinking—we seem so willing to sacrifice others for our welfare—how would we handle the reverse of that? How would the great power’s arrival corrupt us? And what might be the final outcome of that corruption? “War Bride” tries to speak to these questions.

Harlan Ellison’s published works include over 1,700 short stories, novellas, screenplays, teleplays, essays, and a wide range of criticism covering literature, film, television, and print media. He was editor and anthologist for two groundbreaking science fiction anthologies, Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). Ellison has won several awards, including the World Fantasy Award and multiple Hugo, Nebula, and Edgar prizes. Visit http://harlanellison.comfor more information.

WHEN THEY UNSCREWED THE time capsule, preparatory to helping temponaut Enoch Mirren to disembark, they found him doing a disgusting thing with a disgusting thing.

Every head turned away. The word that sprang to mind first was, “ Feh! ”

They wouldn’t tell Enoch Mirren’s wife he was back. They evaded the question when Enoch Mirren’s mother demanded to know the state of her son’s health after his having taken the very first journey into another time/universe. The new President was given dissembling answers. No one bothered to call San Clemente. The Chiefs of Staff were kept in the dark. Inquiries from the CIA and the FBI were met with responses in pig Latin and the bureaus were subtly diverted into investigating each other. Walter Cronkite found out, but after all, there are even limits to how tight security can get.

Their gorges buoyant, every one of them, the rescue crew and the medical team and the chrono-experts at TimeSep Central did their best, but found it impossible to pry temponaut Enoch Mirren’s penis from the (presumably) warm confines of the disgusting thing’s (presumed) sexual orifice.

A cadre of alien morphologists was assigned to make an evaluation: to decide if the disgusting thing was male or female. After a sleepless week they gave up. The head of the group made a good case for his team’s failure. “It’d be a damned sight easier to decide if we could get that clown out of her… him… it… that thing!”

They tried cajoling, they tried threatening, they tried rational argument, they tried inductive logic, they tried deductive logic, they tried salary incentives, they tried profit sharing, they tried tickling his risibilities, they tried tickling his feet, they tried punching him, they tried shocking him, they tried arresting him, they tried crowbars, they tried hosing him down with cold water, then hot water, then seltzer water, they tried suction devices, they tried sensory deprivation, they tried doping him into unconsciousness. They tried shackling him to a team of Percherons pulling north and the disgusting thing to a team of Clydesdales pulling south. They gave up after three and a half weeks.

The word somehow leaked out that the capsule had come back from time/universe Earth 2and the Russians rattled swords—suggesting that the decadent American filth had brought back a decimating plague that was even now oozing toward Minsk. (TimeSep Central quarantined anyone even remotely privy to the truth.) The OPEC nations announced that the Americans, in league with Zionist Technocrats, had found a way to siphon off crude oil from the time/universe next to our own, and promptly raised the price of gasoline another forty-one cents a gallon. (TimeSep Central moved Enoch Mirren and the disgusting thing to its supersecret bunker headquarters sunk beneath the Painted Desert.) The Pentagon demanded the results of the debriefing and threatened to cut throats; Congress demanded the results and threatened to cut appropriations. (TimeSep Central bit the bullet—they had no other choice, there had been no debriefing—and they stonewalled: we cannot relay the requested data at this time. )

Temponaut Enoch Mirren continued coitusing.

The expert from Johns Hopkins, a tall, gray gentleman who wore three-piece suits, and whose security clearance was so stratospherically high the President called him on the red phone, sequestered himself with the temponaut and the disgusting thing for three days. When he emerged, he called in the TimeSep Central officials and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, quite simply put, Enoch Mirren has brought back from Earth 2the most perfect fuck in the universe.”