Robert Silverberg - The Alien Years

He was crying. Great blubbering racking sobs were coming from him. Peggy put an arm around his shoulder and bent close to him, while signaling fiercely with her other hand for Ronnie to get himself out of the room.

“Hey,” Peggy said softly. “Hey, now, Anse!”

Once or twice a month, more often if he could manage to scrape up the gas, Steve Gannett descended the mountainside from the ranch and made his way down the battered and dilapidated highway that was Route 101 as far as the city of Ventura, where Lisa would be waiting for him downtown, near the San Buenaventura Mission. Then they would continue on together in her car along the Pacific Coast Highway, past the abandoned Point Mugu Naval Air Station and on into Mugu State Park itself. They had a special place there, a secluded woodsy grove up in the hilly inland part, where they could make love. That was the deal, that he drove as far as Ventura and Lisa would drive the rest of the way. That was only fair, considering the current tight gasoline quotas.

It still amazed Steve that he had a steady girl at all. He had been such a lumpy, ungainly, nerdy kid, fat and awkward, good for very little except working with computers, at which he was very good indeed. Like his father Doug, he had never fitted very well into the Carmichael family, that tribe of crisp, strong, hard, cold-eyed people. Even when they were weak—the way the Colonel was weak, now, getting so old and vague, or Anse was weak, hitting the bottle whenever he thought nobody was looking—they were still somehow strong. They would give you a look with their blue Carmichael eyes that said, We come from a long line of soldiers. We understand what the word ‘discipline’ means. And you are fat and sloppy and lazy, and the only thing you know how to do is fool around with computers. Even his twin cousins Mike and Charlie had given him that look, and they were only little boys.

But Steve was half Carmichael himself, and by the time he had been living at the ranch a few years that part of his heritage had at last started to show. The outdoor life, the fresh mountain air, the need for everyone to put in some hours of hard manual labor every day, had done the trick. Gradually, very gradually, the baby fat had burned away. Gradually his coordination had improved and he had learned how to run without falling on his face, how to climb a tree, how to drive a car. He would always be chunkier and less agile than his cousins, his hair would always be floppy and unruly and his shirt-tails would always have a way of working their way out of his pants, and his eyes would never be icy Carmichael blue, but always that mousy Gannett brown. Still and all, by the year he turned fifteen he had shaped up in a way that surprised him immensely.

The first real sign that he might actually be going to have a life came when Anse’s daughter Jill allowed him to take some sexual liberties with her.

He was sixteen then, and still hideously unsure of himself. She was two years younger, a slim leggy blonde like her mother Carole, handsome, athletic, lively. It would not have occurred to Steve that anything might happen between them. Why would such a gorgeous girl—and one who was his cousin, as well—be interested in him? She had never given the slightest sign of caring for him: had, in fact, always been cool toward him, remote. He was just her nerdy cousin Steve, which is to say, nobody in particular, simply someone who happened to live at the ranch. But then, one hot summer day when he was far up the mountain by himself, in a sheltered rocky place out beyond the apple orchard where he liked to come and sit and think, Jill appeared suddenly out of nowhere and said, “I followed you. I wanted to see where you went when you went off by yourself. Do you mind if I sit down here?”

“Suit yourself.”

“It’s pretty up here,” she said. “Quiet. Real private. What a great view!”

That she had any curiosity about him at all, that she would give even a faint damn about where he might go when he went off by himself, astounded and bewildered him. She settled down beside him on the flat slab of rock from which he could see practically the entire valley. Her proximity was unsettling. All she wore was a halter and a pair of shorts, and a sweet, musky odor of perspiration was coming from her after the steep climb.

Steve had no idea what to say to her. He said nothing.

Abruptly she said, after a time, “You can touch me, if you like, you know.”

“Touch you?”

“If you like.”

His eyes widened. What was this? Was she serious? Cautiously, as if inspecting an unexploded land mine, he put his hand to her bare knee, gripped it lightly with his fingertips a moment, and then, hearing no objections, moved his hand upward along her long smooth thigh, scarcely allowing himself to draw a breath. He had never felt anything so smooth. He reached the cuff of her shorts and paused there, doubting that his fingers would reach very far beyond that point. And in any case he was afraid to risk the attempt.

“Not my leg,” she said, sounding a little annoyed.

Steve looked up at her. Thunderstruck, he saw that she had opened the clasp of her halter. It slid down to her waist. She had lovely breasts, white as milk, that thrust out straight in front of her. He had seen them before, spying on her one night last summer through her window, but that had been from fifty yards away. He stared now, goggle-eyed, astonished. Jill was looking at him expectantly. He wriggled closer to her on the rock and slipped his right arm around her, bringing his hand up so that it cupped the smooth taut undercurve of her right breast. She made a little hissing sound of pleasure. He gripped a little tighter. He did not dare touch the hard little nipple, fearing it might be tender, fearing he might hurt her. Nor did he try to kiss her or do anything else, though his whole body felt ready to explode with desire.

They sat there that way for a long while. He sensed that she might be as terrified as he was, as confused about what the next move ought to be. And finally she said, shrugging his hand away and primly pulling the fallen halter back into place, “I’d better go now.”

“Do you have to?”

“I think it’s a good idea. But we’ll do this again.”

They did. They made appointments to go up to the high outcropping together, elaborate schemes for traversing the routes from opposite sides of the hill. They progressed in easy stages to the full exploration of her body, and then his, and then, one utterly astounding autumn morning, to his sliding himself inside her for a few seconds of gasping excitement followed by a headlong tumble into explosive ecstasy, and then a longer, less frenzied repetition of the act twenty minutes later.

They did it five or six more times that season, and on a dozen or so very widely scattered occasions over the next couple of years, always at her instigation, never at his. Then they stopped.

The risks were becoming too great. It wasn’t hard to imagine what the Colonel would say or do, or her father, nor his, if she turned up pregnant. Of course, they could always get married; but they had both heard dire stories about the evils of marriage between cousins, and in any case Steve had no great yearning to be married to Jill. He didn’t love her, so far as he comprehended that word, nor did he even feel much affection for her, only gratitude for the sense of confidence in his own maleness that she had given him.

He was disappointed when it ended, but he had never expected it to last anyway. He understood, by then, what had led Jill to him in the first place. It wasn’t that she found him attractive—oh, no, hardly that. But the hormones had begun to flow freely through her ripening body, and he was all there was for her at the ranch, the only male under forty other than her brothers and baby Anson. He had always sensed that she was merely using him, that she felt nothing whatever for him. He was convenient, that was all. Almost anyone else would have served in his place. That she had wonderfully transformed his own sorry life by giving her luscious self to him was incidental. It had probably never occurred to her that she was doing any such thing.