Харлан Эллисон - Alien Sex - 19 Tales by the Masters of Science Fiction and Dark Fantasy

There wasn’t a cockroach in the world who could claim the same.

Scott Baker was born in Chicago. After living in Paris for twenty years, he now lives in Pacific Grove, California. His first novel, Symbiote’s Crown , received the French Prix Apollo award in 1982. He won a World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction in 1985 for “Still Life with Scorpion,” and has been nominated for that award three other times.

Baker has worked on several French films, including Litan , for which he co-authored the screenplay. Litan won the Prix de la Critique (Critic’s Prize) at the Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival in 1982.

AT FORTY-THREE, LAURENT St. Jacques (né Lawrence Jackson, he’d changed his name in hope of improving his image after the third and last college at which he’d taught French failed to renew his contract) was tall, willowy, elegant, and thoroughly unattractive, as he himself was only too aware. He liked to think of himself as a rationalist and freethinker and idolized Voltaire, though unlike Voltaire he usually kept his opinions to himself and was thus able to avoid their consequences. His wife, Veronica, was slight, somewhat angular, and aggressively healthy; she was five years younger than he, and Catholic. They both taught at St. Bernadette’s School in Jamesburg, California: St. Jacques was responsible for French and Italian while she taught geology and coached the swim team. Their marriage was not particularly happy: she stayed with him because the Church said it was her Christian duty; he stayed with her because, even though she irritated him most of the time, he was comfortable and had long given up hope he could do any better by leaving her.

They had no children, to her disappointment and his satisfaction.

Despite his wife’s faith, the name he’d chosen, and the religious context in which St. Jacques underwent his transformation into an incubus (St. Bernadette’s School being run by the Sisters of Sanctimony, a splinter group of nuns still awaiting the Church’s official recognition of their order), there was nothing in even the slightest way Satanic about what happened.

Some years before, the U.S. Army had secretly and erroneously disposed of a small quantity of radioactive wastes and outmoded neurological toxins in the same abandoned mine shaft where the navy had previously dumped the supposedly harmless byproducts of an unsuccessful experiment in breeding a new strain of wheat rust to be used against the Soviets. The army finished filling in the shaft and the land was sold to a commune of Christian organic farmers, none of whom, of course, was ever told anything about the uses to which their farmland had been put. They, in turn, used it to grow the various grains for their seven-grain, guaranteed all-organic bread. This bread tasted so much better than anyone else’s seven-grain bread that it was an immediate commercial success, all of which the farmers attributed to the workings of a munificent God.

By the late eighties the bread was so renowned that a distributor was selling it to health-food stores nationwide—after, to be sure, surreptitiously treating it with various chemical preservatives to make sure it stayed fresh-seeming on the shelves long enough to make its distribution commercially viable.

By itself the bread would have been insufficient to bring about the changes that made Laurent St. Jacques an incubus. An opened loaf, however, had been sitting on his pantry shelf for a week, ever since his wife had taken out a slice to finish up the sandwiches she was making for Mother Isobel, who’d stopped by for tea. (Mother Isobel was the nun who ran both the Sisters of Sanctimony and St. Bernadette’s School, as well as the person who’d hired St. Jacques and his wife; she was also, and not at all incidentally, Veronica’s older sister.) In any case, during the time the bread had been sitting open on the shelf it had developed a spot of some blue-green mold that looked like, but wasn’t, penicillin. St. Jacques saw the mold spot while fixing breakfast for Veronica and himself and, priding himself on his manly and rational lack of squeamishness, merely scraped as much mold as he could off the bread before toasting it, then hid what was left by buttering the toast and smearing it with green apple jelly. Because, though he wasn’t squeamish, he knew quite well that his wife was.

As usual, she merely picked at her breakfast, so he ended up eating most of her toast in addition to his own.

Some of the mold, which had already been getting pretty strange as the result of its diet, survived the toasting process with a few minor, but significant, alterations, and then survived the effect of St. Jacques’s digestive juices. It took up residence in his body where, without doing him any harm, it flourished and grew and eventually interacted in quite complicated ways with his nervous system.

All of which explains how he came to be an incubus, if not the actual physics and biochemistry of the process.

The first night after the mold he was hosting had completed its work, St. Jacques was looking for a book with which to put himself to sleep when he overheard Veronica discussing Edgar Cayce over the phone with somebody who could only be her sister. Fearing the worst—both women had a tendency to go on periodic New Age astrological, dietetic, and spiritualistic binges despite their outwardly almost excessive practicality—he got down his copy of The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud and took it into the bedroom. Whenever he found himself being assaulted by the Forces of Unreason, St. Jacques retreated into the works of Freud, Zola, Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, and, of course, Voltaire until the crisis passed.

Which it always did, sooner or later, when Mother Isobel finally realized what should have been obvious from the start: that whatever she was so excited about was in direct contradiction to the teachings of her Church.

St. Jacques had fallen asleep, still reading his Freud, before Veronica joined him. Thus, when he found himself, after a momentary vertigo and a sudden, horrible falling sensation—as though he were falling with ever-increasing speed through the back of his head—reliving the day over again in exact and precise detail, while at the same time remaining totally conscious of the illusory nature of the events he was reexperiencing, he accepted it all as a dream brought on, quite logically, by the interaction of his reading and the psychological reality that reading had so well described. The fact that he was experiencing everything reversed, backward, up to and including not only the words he’d heard and spoken but his very thoughts, while at the same time thinking about what he was reexperiencing normally struck him as just another example of the wondrous and baffling—though ultimately rationally explicable—workings of his unconscious mind.

He’d never imagined a dream could feel so real. Every detail, every sound, odor, physical sensation, seemed to be really taking place, even though reversed. Finally, though, after what must have been nine subjective hours, he found himself getting unbearably bored. It was about two in the afternoon and nothing strange, interesting, or in any way dreamlike was going on: he was just sitting behind his desk, fidgeting a little, while he listened to a class of fourteen-year-old girls answer the questions he was posing them about irregular verbs not only backward, but incorrectly. His mind had been wandering when he’d first experienced the class period, and it was embarrassing and even somewhat painful having not only to listen to the girls with their horrible accents and ridiculously wrong answers, but to be going over his remembered self’s repetitious and futile erotic daydreams again. At the moment he was having the one in which Marcia—the tall, tanned girl with the long, smooth blonde hair and slightly too-large Roman nose, sitting alone in the back of the classroom where he’d had to put her because she was such a disciplinary problem—caught his eye, smiled mischievously at him while she licked her lips the barest instant with the tip of her tongue, then started to unbutton her school blouse a button at a time while he somehow found an immediate excuse to let everyone else in the class out early, but of course asked her to stay behind—