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

He was starting to wander.

“What about that girl in the bar, did you see her again?”

He came back from somewhere.

“Oh, yes. I saw her. She’d been making it with the two Sirians, y’know. The males do it in pairs. Said to be the total sexual thing for a woman, if she can stand the damage from those beaks. I wouldn’t know. She talked to me a couple of times after they finished with her. No use for men whatever. She drove off the P Street bridge…. The man, poor bastard, he was trying to keep that Sirian bitch happy single-handed. Money helps, for a while. I don’t know where he ended.”

He glanced at his wrist again. I saw the pale bare place where a watch had been and told him the time.

“Is that the message you want to give Earth? Never love an alien?”

“Never love an alien—” He shrugged. “Yeah. No. Ah, Jesus, don’t you see? Everything going out, nothing coming back. Like the poor damned Polynesians. We’re gutting Earth, to begin with. Swapping raw resources for junk. Alien status symbols. Tape decks, Coca-Cola, and Mickey Mouse watches.”

“Well, there is concern over the balance of trade. Is that your message?”

“The balance of trade.” He rolled it sardonically. “Did the Polynesians have a word for it, I wonder? You don’t see, do you? All right, why are you here? I mean you, personally. How many guys did you climb over—”

He went rigid, hearing footsteps outside. The Procya’s hopeful face appeared around the corner. The red-haired man snarled at him and he backed out. I started to protest.

“Ah, the silly reamer loves it. It’s the only pleasure we have left…. Can’t you see, man? That’s us. That’s the way we look to them, to the real ones.”

“But—”

“And now we’re getting the cheap C-drive, we’ll be all over just like the Procya. For the pleasure of serving as freight monkeys and junction crews. Oh, they appreciate our ingenious little service stations, the beautiful star folk. They don’t need them, y’know. Just an amusing convenience. D’you know what I do here with my two degrees? What I did at First Junction. Tube cleaning. A swab. Sometimes I get to replace a fitting.”

I muttered something; the self-pity was getting heavy.

“Bitter? Man, it’s a good job. Sometimes I get to talk to one of them.” His face twisted. “My wife works as a—oh, hell, you wouldn’t know. I’d trade—correction, I have traded—everything Earth offered me for just that chance. To see them. To speak to them. Once in a while to touch one. Once in a great while to find one low enough, perverted enough to want to touch me—”

His voice trailed off and suddenly came back strong.

“And so will you!” He glared at me. “Go home! Go home and tell them to quit it. Close the ports. Burn every god-lost alien thing before it’s too late! That’s what the Polynesians didn’t do.”

“But surely—”

“But surely be damned! Balance of trade—balance of life, man. I don’t know if our birthrate is going, that’s not the point. Our soul is leaking out. We’re bleeding to death!”

He took a breath and lowered his tone.

“What I’m trying to tell you, this is a trap. We’ve hit the supernormal stimulus. Man is exogamous—all our history is one long drive to find and impregnate the stranger. Or get impregnated by him, it works for women too. Anything different-colored, different nose, ass, anything, man has to fuck it or die trying. That’s a drive, y’know, it’s built in. Because it works fine as long as the stranger is human. For millions of years that kept the genes circulating. But now we’ve met aliens we can’t screw, and we’re about to die trying…. Do you think I can touch my wife?”

“But—”

“Look. Y’know, if you give a bird a fake egg like its own but bigger and brighter-marked, it’ll roll its own egg out of the nest and sit on the fake? That’s what we’re doing.”

“You’ve only been talking about sex.” I was trying to conceal my impatience. “Which is great, but the kind of story I’d hoped—”

“Sex? No, it’s deeper.” He rubbed his head, trying to clear the drug. “Sex is only part of it, there’s more. I’ve seen Earth missionaries, teachers, sexless people. Teachers—they end cycling waste or pushing floaters, but they’re hooked. They stay. I saw one fine-looking old woman, she was servant to a Cu’ushbar kid. A defective—his own people would have let him die. That wretch was swabbing up its vomit as if it was holy water. Man, it’s deep… some cargo-cult of the soul. We’re built to dream outward. They laugh at us. They don’t have it.”

There were sounds of movement in the next corridor. The dinner crowd was starting. I had to get rid of him and get there; maybe I could find the Procya. A side door opened and a figure started toward us. At first I thought it was an alien and then I saw it was a woman wearing an awkward body-shell. She seemed to be limping slightly. Behind her I could glimpse the dinner-bound throng passing the open door.

The man got up as she turned into the bay. They didn’t greet each other.

“The station employs only happily wedded couples,” he told me with that ugly laugh. “We give each other… comfort.”

He took one of her hands. She flinched as he drew it over his arm and let him turn her passively, not looking at me. “Forgive me if I don’t introduce you. My wife appears fatigued.”

I saw that one of her shoulders was grotesquely scarred.

“Tell them,” he said, turning to go. “Go home and tell them.” Then his head snapped back toward me and he added quietly, “And stay away from the Syrtis desk or I’ll kill you.”

They went away up the corridor.

I changed tapes hurriedly with one eye on the figures passing that open door. Suddenly among the humans I caught a glimpse of two sleek scarlet shapes. My first real aliens! I snapped the recorder shut and ran to squeeze in behind them.

Michaela Roessner has published four novels and contributed shorter works to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction , OMNI , Room magazine, and other assorted quarterlies and anthologies. Her novel Walkabout Woman (1988) won the William L. Crawford Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

Recent publications include a bestiary chapter, “The Klepsydra,” in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (2011). Roessner teaches creative writing in Western State Colorado University’s master of fine arts program and online classes for the Gotham Writers’ Workshop. Visit www.brazenhussies.net/Roessnerfor more information.