by Ted White
I hadn’t gone far when I glimpsed a building through a gap in the trees ahead. I stopped and peered at it for a better look. I couldn’t see much, however, so I went on.
The stream twisted, made a deep bend, and then I found myself staring at a rustic sort of dwelling which might have come right out of an earlier century—maybe even pioneer times.
It was built of weathered wood in a small clearing just ‘above the stream, its uncovered siding silvered and warped by age and exposure. Its roof, low and peaked, was shingled with splits of a darker wood. It stood on stubby footings that looked almost like the stumps of felled trees; its underside was open. Cut firewood was stacked along and just under one side. Blue smoke drifted lazily from its stone chimney, curling slowly up and then flattening into a layer of thin haze only yards above the gable.
Someone’s refuge in the country. I debated approaching it; I feared taking the chance of going inside it. But I did. I climbed the wooden plank steps to its porch almost furtively, and pushed against the old hinged door. It moved open.
The house had no electricity; the large single room was lit by a burning lamp of some sort. There was also a fire in the fireplace, but it was half coals. A woman was sitting in a chair, doing something with her hands and moving her shoulders rhythmically. She had her back to the door, and to me.
The fire in the fireplace sprang up, and the lamp guttered. But she must have already heard me, or felt the breath of cool damp air against the back of her neck. Her face in shadow, she half turned. “Who is it?” she asked in a curiously muffled voice.
“I’m sorry,” I said, hesitantly. “I didn’t mean to intrude—I mean, to just walk in, but I saw the smoke from your chimney, and….”
“Come in, then, Mr. Dameron,” she said. She turned the rest of the way. The light silhouetted her puffy lips, and cast a highlight on a livid bruise that ran along her jawline.
“Hello, Lora,” I said. An elevator in my gut began to sink.
“Come in,” she repeated, her swollen lips blurring her words. “Close the door, please. It’s damp and growing chilly out.”
I closed the door and moved further into the room. I could feel the heat from the fireplace, but it was like an unreal phantom, nibbling at the edges of my chilled reality. It didn’t warm me. I was very cold.
She saw me better then, as I entered the pool of light shed by her lamp, and her expression seemed to melt and change. “What’s happened to you?” she asked. The softness had returned to her voice.
I shrugged. “I was in the woods. In the rain.”
“I can see that. But your clothes—they look like you ran into an old barbed-wire fence! And you’re covered with mud and dirt! You look like a wild man. Have you been in the woods all this time?”
“All which time?”
“Since… since you ran away.”
“No,” I said. “That was—days ago.” I couldn’t tell how many days. I always lose my sense of time when I leave Earth. I glanced at my chronometer. It was broken. It had stopped at 15:52. Hours ago.
“Well, you look like you’ve been out there for days,” she said.
“Just a few hours,” I said. “But it felt longer.” I sidled up near the fire, putting my back to it. “I didn’t expect to find you here,” I added.
“I can understand that,” she said. For a moment anger flooded her eyes. Then it washed away. “But now,” she said, “we’re both here. Full circle, you might say.”
“I—I’m sorry,” I said, “about what I did to you, I mean.” I couldn’t keep my eyes off her face. “I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“No, but you did,” she said. “Why, Mr. Dameron? Why did you hurt me?”
I felt my shoulders sag. I was losing my last dregs of energy. “I don’t know exactly,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” she said. Her hands had returned to her lap and a peculiar garment which she seemed to be weaving with two thin sticks and a ball of heavy thread or twine. Her hands moved with a rhythm and life of their own. She seemed to ignore them.
“I’d like to,” I said, “but how can I trust you?”
She looked up and her eyes met mine. “Don’t you think that’s a peculiar question for you to ask, Mr. Dameron? Who, after all, has trusted whom? And who has broken that trust?”
Chapter Twenty
“You’re an alien,” I said.
“I’m not,” she said.
“Somewhere inside your body,” I said, “an alien parasite has nestled itself. It has extended itself in ganglion-like threads throughout your body … including your brain. And it controls you. It thinks for you. It is you. And it—you—the others, they’re starting to take over…”
“No,” she said. “You’re wrong. You’re completely wrong. I am myself, the same person I always was. I’m just better now, more whole, more complete. I’m a better person; I’m not a different person. Don’t you know that yet?”
I wanted to believe her. I wanted, desperately, to understand her and to believe her. And I wanted the warmth of the room and of her own personality to displace the terrible cold that inhabited my body. I shivered a little as I spoke, and I bit my words out: “How can I believe you?” I asked. “How can I trust you, knowing what I do?”
“What do you know?” she asked in turn. “Lab tests, medical reports? Do you even know all that was in them?”
I shook my head. “But I know what I saw.…”
She shared my memory for a moment and her face paled. The bruise was very ugly. “You killed it,” she said. “I made it and gave it to you, and you killed it.”
“Can you blame me?” I cried out. I felt my own guilt, my own anguish, tearing loose from me. I felt hysterical. I was shivering uncontrollably.
“Tell me why,” she demanded. “Tell me why you did it.”
“I—couldn’t help myself,” I said. My teeth were chattering.
She shook her head as if to clear it from a bad dream, then looked up at me again. “You’re still cold,” she said, as if surprised.
“Y-yes,” I said. I was shaking badly.
She rose from her chair, neatly placing her work on it. She came closer to me. “You’re still wet,” she said. “Wet and filthy,” she added, in an aside. “We’ve got to get you out of those rags and cleaned up.” She reached out and before I could stop her, she ripped my tunic right off me. It was already in soggy tatters; it all but fell apart in her hands. “Come on,” she said. “Get the rest off.”
I turned to watch her as she went to a cupboard of some sort and took down a large plastic tub. It was three feet in diameter, and at least two feet deep. She put it on the floor next to my feet. “You can help,” she said. “Get those things off your feet and take off your kit.”
I bent over and slipped loose the lacings on my bootlets. They were wet and caked with mud. My feet, when I touched them with my fingers, were dead cold, and numb. I couldn’t wriggle my toes at all. My ankle was swollen and bruised.
Lora reached inside the fireplace and swung out a metal arm, from which hung a steaming kettle. At my questioning glance, she said, “I keep water hot. It’s nice to have; you never know when you’ll need it.” She gave her words an ironic emphasis.
Strangely, the chill had already lessened its hold on me before she finished undressing me and had me stand in the empty tub. She dipped a towel of some sort in the kettle and wrung it out. I watched her do it, and although steam drifted up from the mouth of the kettle, the fact that she’d handled the towel left me unprepared for the scalding heat of it. She threw it over my shoulders, and I almost screamed.
She paid no attention to my reactions, but began rubbing and sponging me with the towel, starting with my head and neck—all but suffocating me in its steamy folds while she cleaned my face—and then working down. She did it swiftly, competently, and without apparent emotion, pausing only to frequently rinse and wring out the towel again. Water trickled down my legs and collected in the tub at my feet.
A
t first the wet warmth only penetrated my outer layers: a stinging heat, it became gradually a deeper, more relaxing warmth. Blood returned to the shell of my skin and left it pink and flushed. Electrical pins kept pinching at my feet as the water rose around them.
She washed me, scrubbed me, and rubbed me, and somewhere along the line the chills left me, and I became very drowsy, almost stuporous. I have the vague memory of being told to lift my feet, and then of setting them down on something dry. My next memory is that of lying in a bed. It was warm and cosy in the bed, and when I shifted my weight from one shoulder to the other, I encountered another warm body. It felt soft and comfortable, and I felt no alarm as I drifted back again into sleep.
I had a dream. It was long and involved, and most of it I can’t remember, but I do recall that it concerned my mother. I was very young, and yet, as is the way with dreams, I was a grown man at the same time. My father did not appear in the dream, but I had a sister. We shared a room and slept together, in the same bed. The part I remember is this. We were lying on our sides, facing each other, and we were kissing. Long, slow, oral kisses. Our tongues were touching and I felt at once very wicked and very delighted. My sister’s tongue pulled back from mine and I knew she was going to do something. I didn’t know what it was, but I was feverish with anticipation. Then, suddenly, our mother entered the room, throwing on the lights and confronting us. She was very angry, and she shouted at us and called us names. We’d jerked apart of course, and I felt disappointed and angry because my mother had spoiled it—whatever “it” was to have been. I wanted to scream back at her, but then she told us that we were evil and that because of that she was going to give us away. She was going to give us to a den.
I woke up tense and rigid, Lora’s hand on my arm.
“What is it, Tad? What’s wrong?”
Across the room the gray dawn looked wan in the undraped, unpolarized windows. The room was cold. I pulled the heavy covers back up over my shoulders. “A—dream,” I said. “That’s all. Just a dream.” I felt as if something had happened to me—or was about to happen… something profound. Somewhere deep inside me, something had been resolved. I’d made a decision.
“What were you dreaming about?”
I couldn’t look at her. “You, I think. You were my sister. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe it does.” She yawned and stretched, raising her arms over her head, then quickly slipping back under the covers. “Maybe you’ve made a decision,” she said. Her words came so close to my own thoughts that they startled—me.
“What decision is that?”
“That you can trust me. Did you feel that way about me in your dream—when I was your ‘sister?’”
“Yes,” I said reluctantly.
She rolled over and stared at me. Our eyes were on a level when I turned my head toward her. We were separated by only a foot or so. “I didn’t betray you, Tad,” she said. “I had plenty of opportunity if I’d wanted it.”
“Betray me, how?” I asked, feeling deliberately obtuse.
“However you expected me to,” she replied, the corners of her mouth turning up in a brief smile. “However it was you thought a—an alien would betray you.”
I felt a sense of déjà vu as I turned over to lie on my side and face her. I was coming too close to acting out my dream—and I had no mother near now to put a stop to it. “Maybe,” I admitted. “But tell me what it means.”
“Come on, now,” she said. “You’re the man with the talent, remember? You’re the man they send out to take an intuitive measure of circumstances. Don’t tell me your intuition doesn’t work on your private time as well.”
“What’re you driving at?”
“Just this: Do you really think I’m some sort of alien demon, bent on world conquest? Really?”
“Well, I—”
“Forget the diagrams and schematics and lab-test reports you’ve heard about. Forget everything except me. Just me, Tad. Am I alien?”
I moved’ my head against the pillow. “No,” I said. “You’re not.”
“You know I’m not, don’t you?” It wasn’t really a question; she was driving the point home.
I agreed. “I guess so.”
“Well, then. Maybe you’d better rethink some things.”
“Tell me.”
“Maybe you’ve got it all wrong. The whole setup, from beginning to end, Bjonn and all. Maybe you’ve been completely wrong. Could you accept that?”
I closed my eyes. “I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “I just don’t know. How could I be completely wrong?” I felt painfully naked, and I clutched at the covers for protection.
“Think about it; that’s all,” she said. “Just think about it. Think it through again. New data. Integrate it.”
My clothes were shot. She’d cleaned my bootlets, and they were about all I had left. I put them on, and put on the coat she gave me. It was several sizes too small, and despite the belt it kept coming open in front. I decided it didn’t really matter.
She dressed as I did, slipping easily into a lightweight robe. The fire in the fireplace was roaring, and the room had lost its chill. It was easy to watch her, easy to admire her smooth and-economical movements as she dressed and tended to her chores. But in some strange way I understood the truth of my dream; she felt like a sister to me. There was a bond of affection between us, even an easy intimacy, but it had the familiarity of a close brother-sister relationship—nothing more. That seemed both strange and marvelous to me. I’d never had a sister before.
Some time the previous night she’d put new water in the kettle. Now she ladled out the steaming hot water into two bowls, and then added a powder from a canister. The powder seemed to soak up the water and expand, and as it did so, a strange smell rose from it.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Breakfast,” she said. “High protein corn meal, with algaetes added for familiarity. Come and get it.”
I stared at her without moving.
She carried both bowls to a table on the other side of the room. One chair already stood at the table; she dragged another over to it and sat down. “Come on,” she said. “It’s time you lost a few prejudices.”
“I—can’t,” I said.
She sighed, pushed herself away from the table, and stood up. Then she came to where I stood and put her hands on her hips and looked me up and down. “For a big bold world-saver,” she said, “you certainly are a coward.” She seized my hand and tugged at me. I let her drag me over to the table and put me in the other chair. Sitting at the table’s edge, so close it was almost under my nose, the bowl of “breakfast” steamed its strange smells at me. I felt both dizzy and weak.
“Here,” she said, picking up a narrow utensil with a cupped end. She dipped it into the bowl and raised it to my mouth. “Try it,” she said. “Come on, open up.” As if in sympathetic pantomime, she opened her own mouth wide.
I opened my mouth, and her hand darted forward. The next instant, the food was in my mouth.
It was more granular in texture than the food I was familiar with, and its flavor was at once stronger and more subtle—as if many different flavors of varying strengths were competing for my attention. At first I gagged a little, but I closed my eyes and pretended for a moment that I was home, safe, in my own eating cubicle, and that did the trick. I swallowed.
“There; that wasn’t so bad, was it?” she cooed. “Try some more.”
Obediently, I opened my mouth again, and she quickly shoveled in another load. This time I didn’t gag, and I found it easier to swallow.
“Try it with your eyes open, this time, why don’t you?” she said. I opened my eyes to see the third mouthful of the food hovering before my lips. Without thinking I opened my mouth. “Good boy,” she said, smiling.
“Why don’t you try it now,” she suggested. She handed the eating object to me, and I turned its handle over in my fingers. “It’s called a ‘spoon,’” she said. “A very anc
ient eating device, I’m told.”
“It seems inefficient,” I said, dipping with it into my bowl. “A-tube would be faster, easier.”
“Yes,” she said, “but have you noticed anything different about the taste of this food?”
I nodded.
“Well, that’s because it isn’t in a tube.” She dipped her own spoon and took a mouthful from her own bowl. I watched covertly, from the corners of my eyes. “You taste with your nose as much as you do with your mouth. That is, smell is as important as taste, really. You can only taste four things: sweetness, saltiness, sourness and bitterness. Everything else is really in the odor—in what you smell. But—” she continued to eat while she talked, pausing occasionally “—but, when you get your food from a tube, you never really have a chance to see it or smell it, and besides which, it is deliberately made to have very little flavor. A big-deal change in the ‘menu’ is just a slight change in flavor and texture. They never really change what’s really in your food; it’s always the same thing. Unless you’re rich, of course. But who’s rich?”
I could think of a couple of people. But I didn’t feel like mentioning them. They belonged in another world.
“It’s unnatural, eating from a tube, anyway,” Lora said, nodding in agreement with herself. “It perpetuates the infantile instincts, I think. You get used to sucking at a plastic teat for your nourishment, and since you’re completely plugged in, it’s like you’re still a baby, un-toilet-trained. You just react to the stimuli. You—”
I was squirming. I’d finished most of my bowl of breakfast, and her words had thrown a mental switch somewhere inside me.
“Oh!” she said. “It’s, uh, outside. A little house by itself, around the corner.”
I barely made it there in time.
What was it Bjonn had called me? Compulsive?
