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

She shrugged again.

Oh, I’ve botched it, he thought. What an idiot. He felt a pain coming back, a pain like poison, without a focal point but shooting through his heart and hands, making him dizzy and short of breath.

At least she doesn’t hate me, he thought, squatting to touch her hand.

She bared her teeth.

Douglas froze. She slid away from him and headed for the trees.

He sat alone at home and watched the newscast. In a small midwestern town they burned the issues of the magazine with Annie’s story in it.

A heavy woman in a windbreaker was interviewed with the bonfire in the background. “I don’t want my children reading things that weren’t even written by humans. I have human children and this godless ape is not going to tell its stories to them.”

A quick interview with Dr. Morris, who looked even more tired and introverted than usual. “The story is a very innocent tale, told by an innocent personality. Annie is not a beast. I really don’t think she has any ability for, or intention of, corruption…”

He turned the television off. He picked up the phone and dialed one of Therese’s friends. “Jan, have you heard from Therese yet?”

“No, sure haven’t.”

“Well, let me know, okay?”

“Sure.”

He thought vaguely about trying to catch her at work, but he left earlier in the morning and came home later in the evening than she did.

Looking at her picture on the wall, he thought of when they had first met, first lived together. There had been a time when he’d loved her so much he’d been bursting with it. Now he felt empty, but curious about where she was. He didn’t want her to hate him, but he still didn’t know if he could talk to her about what had happened. The idea that she would sit and listen to him didn’t seem realistic.

Even Annie wouldn’t listen to him anymore.

He was alone. He’d done a big, dumb, terrible thing and wished he hadn’t. It would have been different if Annie had reciprocated, if somehow they could have become lovers. Then it would have been them against the world, a new kind of relationship. The first intelligent interspecial love affair…

But Annie didn’t seem any different than Therese, after all. Annie was no child. She’d given him all those signals, flirting, then not carrying through. Acting like he’d raped her or something. She didn’t really have any more interest in him than Dr. Morris would in Vernon. I couldn’t have misunderstood, could I? he wondered.

He was alone. And without Annie’s consent, he was just a jerk who’d screwed an ape.

“I made a mistake,” he said aloud to Therese’s picture. “So let’s forget it.”

But even he couldn’t forget.

“Dr. Morris wants to see you,” the secretary said as he came in.

“Okay.” He changed course for the administrative office. He whistled. In the past few days, Annie had been cool, but he felt that everything would settle down eventually. He felt better. Wondering what horrors or marvels Dr. Morris had to share with him, he knocked at her door and peered through the glass window. Probably another magazine burning, he thought.

She signaled him to come in. “Hello, Douglas.”

Annie, he thought, something’s happened.

He stood until she motioned him to sit down. She looked at his face several seconds. “This is difficult for me,” she said.

She’s discovered me, he thought. But he put that aside, figuring it was a paranoia that made him worry. There’s no way. No way. I have to calm down or I’ll show it.

She held up a photograph.

There it was—a dispassionate and cold document of that one moment in his life. She held it up to him like an accusation. It shocked him as if it hadn’t been himself.

Defiance forced him to stare at the picture instead of looking for compassion in Dr. Morris’s eyes. He knew exactly where the picture had come from.

Vernon and his new telephoto lens.

He imagined the image of his act rising up in a tray of chemicals. Slowly, he looked away from it. Dr. Morris could not know how he had changed since that moment. He could make no protest or denial.

“I have no choice,” Dr. Morris said flatly. “I’d always thought that even if you weren’t good with people, at least you worked well with the apes. Thank God Henry, who does Vernon’s dark-room work, has promised not to say anything.”

Douglas was rising from the chair. He wanted to tear the picture out of her hands because she still held it up to him. He didn’t want to see it. He wanted her to ask him if he had changed, that it would never happen again, that he understood he’d been wrong.

But her eyes were flat and shuttered against him. “We’ll send your things,” she said.

He paused at his car and saw two big red shapes—one coppery orange, one chocolate red—sitting in the trees. Vernon bellowed out a groan that ended with an alien burbling. It was a wild sound full of the jungle and steaming rain.

Douglas watched Annie scratch herself and look toward chimps walking the land beyond their boundary fence. As she started to turn her gaze in his direction, he ducked into his car.

Angrily driving away, Douglas thought, why should an ape understand me any better than a human?

About “Her Furry Face”: I had been interested in chimpanzees after reading Jane Goodall’s books, and this carried over to an interest in language-using apes such as Lucy and Koko. My first glimmering of the story was to write something funny and satirical about an orangutan who became a celebrity best-selling author. As with many stories, two ideas collided and made something more complete. I had a character in mind whose roaming lover found everything about her irritating and everyone else wonderful. However, I couldn’t quite grip the point of it all. So Douglas became a bridge between the two characters, but in my view the most interesting because of his tragic inability to love in a real way.

Rick Wilber is a novelist and short story writer whose work often focuses on the impact on cultures overwhelmed by colonizing aliens of one sort or another. His long-running S’hudonni Mercantile Empire series of stories began with the arrival and departure of the Pashi aliens in “War Bride,” and continues through a number of other short stories in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , and elsewhere.

The Sweep , Wilber’s novel about the colonizing Pashi aliens, is forthcoming. Wilber is also a journalism professor at the University of South Florida and is administrator of the influential Dell Award for undergraduate writers in science fiction and fantasy. Visit www.rickwilber.netfor more information.

JAMES PACKS HIS BAG.

Ahab, Huck, Yossarian, Nick Adams, even Hornblower goes in, along with six toothbrushes, a handful of postcards with various sunsets and palm trees and bathing-suited blondes, and four like-new baseballs. He would like to pack his basketball, but it just won’t fit.

He needs them—the books, the cards, the baseballs. He won’t be coming back, and he’s picked the things that will last the longest and serve him the best.

But no clothes. Whistle made that perfectly clear. No clothes. The Pashi can’t stand those Earthie clothes, and James won’t need them where he’s going. Whistle will take care of James’s attire, as she takes care of most everything else.

He does pack his prosthetic lengthener. Whistle has promised him an operation once they reach the home world, and then he won’t need the lengthener anymore. But the trip will take weeks, James has been told, so the lengthener comes along.