Space Is Just a Starry Night

by Tanith Lee

Is she going to be — ?

  OK. No. All right. Yes.

  Witness E (Seven)

  Of course I never want him near me again after what he did. Sure we’ve been married three years. So what? Yes, I’ll press charges. Look at me.

  I don’t remember. Yes, there was another bloke. A stranger — so? So what. I don’t remember. I must have done.

  Dept. RUP/sub 3x6: ps

  My profoundest apologies that the encl document did not accompany the (coded) transcript of this report.

  Here then, belatedly, it is.

  (I have to add at this point that whether it will shed any light of logic on the recorded eyewitness reports already transcribed and in your hands, remains to be seen. Those of us here are frankly baffled.

  I will refer to that again at the end of the encl document.)

  Docu 97/77/ Six. Six. Six.

  On the night of July 20 __ (see transcript) a number of emergency calls began to be relayed to this department. They involved urgent requests for all emergency services: police, paramedics and, in some cases, fire fighters.

  The peculiar feature of all these call-outs was the basic similarity of the claims of all the participants. Each seemed to involve an episode which, though variable, mentioned similar events and actions, and, significantly, one particular male person (as described in the transcripts), a youngish man, tall and slimly built, having very long dark hair and dark eyes. All the living victims — some were no longer alive — even those who did not regard themselves as victimized — were in a range of states representing shock, paranoid rage, or extreme exhilaration.

  All reported a fundamentally similar scenario, despite other countless unlike details. However, the occurrences took place on the same evening, across the length and breadth of England. While the times, too, varied (incidents began quite early in the evening and continued to surface until midnight) it is evidently impossible that the same dark-haired man, the main “suspect” — we use this term for want of another — could have appeared in so many widely disseminated areas during so brief a time period.

  I will add that so far, we have been entirely unable to trace him, in this country or elsewhere. This is partly due, no doubt, to the lack of any recoverable DNA or other clue left behind with the subjects of his…visits.

  Also, although sightings of UFOs are not uncommon, on this particular night, no one, apart from the people directly involved, called in with any queries about a fiery falling object, whether thought to be a meteor, a spaceship, or a light aircraft. No unusual reports either of an electric storm or alarming fireworks display.

  The enclosed transcript relays to you only a sample of the huge group of persons who were subsequently interviewed, initially by the police or the ambulance service, and later by ourselves. It is a sample of the most typical reports. Of which, in total, there are to date some six hundred and sixty-six.

  This number may, of course, not arouse any disquiet in the mind of a modern atheist. Nevertheless I am afraid, in order to preserve for the victims, where feasible, a modicum of the anonymity the Law currently prescribes, we have (perhaps frivolously) labeled each and all of them not by an actual name, but by the letter A, in the case of males, and E, in the case of females. Plus a differentiating number — One, Two, etc. You may soon be aware why the letters A and E alone have been selected. And we trust you will overlook any perceived levity on our part. A stands for the Biblical Adam, naturally. And E for Eve, his rib-created partner. As I have said, we have not, here, included every single eyewitness account, but rendered for your consideration the most predominantly recurrent statements, that is, those most representative from all six hundred and sixty-six interviews we were able to garner. (Of those individuals resultantly dead, or in a condition likely to lead to death — both male and female — we do not yet have conclusive figures.) The ultimate consequences of this replicated event remain, so far, unpredictable.

  We shall be very glad to receive your input on this matter. To accept it at apparent (religious?) face-value would seem, shall we say, grotesque. But to ignore so widespread a phenomenon likewise itself poses many problems.

  Code seal and signature attached.

  Appendage PSX: My last thought is, I confess, is this really then what is meant by science fiction? Or, more disquietingly, was it always? I direct your attention to the final words of the final included witness.

  Witness A (Two)

  I’m very sorry I did that to her. Yes, I know she won’t speak to me. I can’t see her. Yes. I’ve never done anything like that before.

  I can’t describe it. Can’t you try to fucking understand? She was lying on the bed with him. She was naked. He was — he was inside her. She was holding him in her arms —

  I couldn’t handle it. You didn’t see. And there was this light in the room. Like a sort of bloody gilding. The whole scene looked like a pornographic oil painting from the Italian Renaissance.

  I don’t remember what he looked like. Just another man. Some kid, twenties maybe. God knows.

  He just moved away from her. There was something then. He was — what? what? — sinuous, something sinuous about how he moved. That I do remember. He moved like — a trained dancer, an athlete — no, like an animal. Like a big cat. A panther. Or a snake.

  I know I hit her.

  I’m sorry.

  I never did anything like that before with anyone.

  No, it wasn’t really because she’d fucked him. It what she said. She said I can see inside you.

  Witness E (Two)

  Yes, I could, I could see all through him. Through everything. No I can’t explain. I would if I could, wouldn’t I? I mean all this fucking talk, this interrogation, when I’m covered in bruises, and I’m still pretty articulate, aren’t I? OK? If not very pretty. Ha. Ha.

  I don’t know now what it was.

  It was as if I knew everything there was to know, the heights, the depths, yesterday, tomorrow, the beginning, the end — Oh —

  Shit.

  I need the plastic thing — the bowl — It’s your fault, all these questions — get the fucking sick bowl before I throw up all over —

  Witness A (One)

  She gets off of the bed and she says to me, I seen the stars.

  That’s what she says.

  She doesn’t mean — I don’t know what — I know —

  I don’t know what to do, do I. I turn to him like a fucking dope, but somehow he’s not there no more. But there’s something. I can feel it too.

  There’s this ringing in my head, and this terrific smell, a good smell — no, not good, can’t be, can it. But it’s clean, sweet — only it’s drowning me.

  I suppose she called you. Or someone. That’s all I remember, mate. The lot. But I won’t forget none of it. And I ain’t been drinking, I told you. Test me.

  Witness E (Three)

  It was like looking through glass. You know, a glass case, perhaps. You can see everything so clearly, but you can’t touch it. If you try, you trigger the alarm.

  But I do remember there was a tree. It was very tall, dark but golden, both at once. We were lying high up in it. And this beautiful scent — no, more of a taste, really.

  Witness E (Twenty-four)

  He said to me, “You are here.” And then we made love. It was never like that before. Won’t ever be again. I saw into this huge light. Only it was black, a black light. And for a moment, just after my climax, I knew that I was God. I know this sounds insane, but I don’t think I’m insane. It was only for a moment.

  Witness A (One)

  I’m afraid of her, now. Don’t want to see her again. Don’t want to see any of you, neither. I wish you’d all fuck off.

  Witness E (Three)

  When he came running back, the alien man — my lover — was gone. But I suppose it must have been obvious, to him. I mean, the man I lived with. I wasn’t in any tree at all, but lying there on the ridge naked. I must have looked — well. I suppose it was obvious. It was to him. H
e began to shout and yell at me. He seemed to be speaking in another language. But I could see right through the universe, start to finish, even if it was behind glass. I’m such a coward normally, I’ve said, haven’t I. But when he ran at me his first blow never even touched me. I drove my knee into his stomach — let’s be truthful, into his genitals. And I ripped at his eyes. I am terribly sorry. I understand he may lose his right eye. But I knew he might have killed me otherwise, and frankly, I think you know that too, don’t you?

  When I hurt him I felt nothing. Or rather, all I could feel was what I’d felt when the alien had sex with me. This incredible blissful opening to all things, in the most amazing way. And that lovely, delicious scent. I can still smell it. That taste of fresh-cut apples.

  Written in Water

  It was a still summer night, colored through by darkness. A snow white star fell out of the sky and into the black field half a mile from the house. Ten minutes later, Jaina had walked from the house, through the fenced garden patch, the creaking gate, toward the place where the star had fallen. Presently, she was standing over a young man, lying tangled in a silver web, on the burned lap of the earth.

  “Who are you?” said Jaina. “What’s happened to you? Can you talk? Can you tell me?”

  The man, who was very young, about twenty-two or -three, moved his slim young body, turning his face. He was wonderful to look at, so wonderful Jaina needed to take a deep breath before she spoke to him again.

  “I want to help you. Can you say anything?”

  He opened a pair of eyes, like two windows opening on sunlight in the dark. His eyes were beautiful, and very golden. He said nothing, not even anything she could not understand. She looked at him, drinking in, intuitively, his beauty; knowing, also intuitively, that he had nothing to do either with her world or her time.

  “Where did you come from?” she said.

  He looked back at her. He seemed to guess, and then to consider.

  Gravely, gracefully, he lifted one arm from the tangle of the web and pointed at the sky.

  He sat in her kitchen, at her table. She offered him medication, food, alcohol, and caffeine from a tall bronzed coffee pot. He shook his head slowly. Semantically, some gestures were the same, yet not the same. Even in the shaking of his head, she perceived he was alien. His hair was the color of the coffee he refused. Coffee, with a few drops of milk in it, and a burnish like satin. His skin was pale. So pale, it too was barely humanly associable. She had an inspiration and filled a glass with water. The water was pure, filtered through the faucet from the well in the courtyard, without chemicals or additives. Even so, it might poison him. He had not seemed hurt after all, merely stunned, shaken. He had walked to her house quietly, at her side, responding to her swift angular little gestures of beckoning and reception. Now she wanted to give him something.

  She placed the glass before him. He looked at it and took it up in two finely made, strong, articulate hands. They were the hands of a dancer, a musician. They had each only four fingers, one thumb, quite normal. He carried the glass to his mouth. She held her breath, wondering, waiting. He put the glass down carefully, and moved it, as carefully, away from him. He laid his arms across the table and his head upon his arms, and he wept.

  Jaina stood staring at him. A single strand of silver, left adhering when he stripped himself of the web, lay across his arm, glittering as his shoulders shook. She listened to him crying, a young man’s sobs, painful, tearing him. She approached him and muttered: “What is it? What is it?” helplessly.

  Of course, it was only grief. She put her hand on his shoulder, anxious, for he might flinch from her touch, or some inimical thing in their separate chemistries might damage both of them. But he did not flinch, and no flame burst out between her palm and the dark, apparently seamless clothing that he wore.

  “Don’t cry,” she said. But she did not mean it. His distress afforded her an exquisite agony of empathic pain. She had not felt anything for a very long time. She stroked his hair gently. Perhaps some subtle radiation clung to him, some killer dust from a faraway star. She did not care. “Oh, don’t cry, don’t cry,” she murmured, swimming in his tears.

  She drove into the morning town in her ramshackle car, as usual not paying much attention to anything about her. Nor was her program much changed. First, gas from the self-service station, then a tour of the shops, going in and out of their uninviting facades: a tour of duty. In the large hypermarket at the edge of town, she made her way through the plastic and the cans, vaguely irritated, as always, by the soft mush of music, which came and went on a time switch, regardless of who wanted it, or no longer did. Once, she had seen a rat scuttle over the floor behind the frozen meat section. Jaina had done her best to ignore such evidence of neglect. She had walked out of the shop stiffly.

  She had never liked people very much. They had always hurt her, or degraded her, always imposed on her in some way. Finally she had retreated into the old house, wanting to be alone, a hermitess. Her ultimate loneliness, deeper than any state she had actually imagined for herself, was almost like a judgment. She was thirty-five and, to herself, resembled a burned-out lamp. The dry leaf-brownness of her skin, the tindery quality of her hair, gave her but further evidence of this consuming. Alone, alone. She had been alone so long. And burned, a charred stick, incapable of moistures, fluidities. And yet, streams and oceans had moved in her, when the young man from outer space had sobbed with his arms on her table.

  She supposed, wryly, that the normal human reaction to what had happened would be a desire to contact someone, inform someone of her miraculous find, her “Encounter.” She only played with this idea, comparing it to her present circumstances. She felt, of course, no onus on her to act in a rational way. Besides, who should she approach with her story, who would be likely to credit her?

  But as she was turning on to the dirt road that led to the house, she became the prey of sudden insecurities. Perhaps the ultimate loneliness had told, she had gone insane, fantasizing the falling star of the parachute, imagining the young man with eyes like golden sovereigns. Or, if it were true…. Possibly, virulent Terran germs, carried by herself, her touch, had already killed him. She pictured, irresistibly, Wells’s Martians lying dead and decaying in their great machines, slain by the microbes of Earth.

  Last night, when he had grown calm, or only tired, she had led him to her bedroom and shown him her bed. It was a narrow bed, what else, fit only for one. Past lovers had taught her that the single bed was to be hers, in spite of them, forever. But he had lain down there without a word. She had slept in the room below, in a straight-backed chair between the bureau and the TV set that did not work anymore. Waking at sunrise, with a shamed awareness of a new feeling, which was that of a child on Christmas morning, she had slunk to look at him asleep. And she was reminded of some poem she had read long, long ago:

  How beautiful you look when sleeping, so beautiful

  It seems that you have gone away….

  She had left him there, afraid to disturb such completion, afraid to stand and feed parasitically on him. She had driven instead into town for extra supplies. She wanted to bring him things; food he might not eat, drink he might not drink. Even music, even books he could not assimilate.

  But now — he might be gone, never have existed. Or he might be dead.

  She spun the car to a complaining halt in the summer dust. She ran between the tall carboniferous trees, around the fence. Her heart was in her throat, congesting and blinding her.

  The whole day lay out over the country in a white-hot film. She turned her head, trying to see through this film, as if underwater. The house looked silent, mummified. Empty. The land was the same, an erased tape. She glanced at the blackened field.

  As she stumbled toward the house, her breathing harsh, he came but through the open door.

  He carried the spade that she had used to turn the pitiful garden. He had been cleaning the spade; it looked bright and shiny. He leaned it on
the porch and walked toward her. As she stared at him, taking oxygen in great gulps, he went by her and began to lift things out of the car and carry them to the house.

  “I thought you were dead,” she said stupidly. She stood stupidly, her head stupidly hanging, feeling suddenly sick and drained.

  After a while she too walked slowly into the house. While he continued to fetch the boxes and tins into her kitchen like an errand boy, she sat at the table, where he had sat the night before. It occurred to her she could have brought him fresh clothing from the stores in the town, but it would have embarrassed her slightly to choose things for him, even randomly off the peg in the hypermarket.

  His intention had presumably been to work on her garden, some sort of repayment for her haphazard, inadequate hospitality. And for this work he had stripped bare to the waist. She was afraid to look at him. The torso, what was revealed of it, was also like a dancer’s — supple, the musculature developed and flawless. She debated, in a dim terror of herself, if his human maleness extended to all regions of his body.

  After a long time, he stopped bringing in the supplies and took up the spade once more.

  “Are you hungry?” she said to him. She showed him one of the cans. As previously, slow and quiet, he shook his head.

  Perhaps he did not need to eat. Perhaps he would drink her blood. Her veins filled with fire, and she left the table and went quickly upstairs. She should tell someone about him. If only she were able to. But she could not.

  He was hers.

  She lay in the bath, in the cool water, letting her washed wet hair float round her. She was Ophelia. Not swimming; drowning. A slender glass of greenish gin on five rocks of milky ice pulsed in her fingers to the rhythm of her heart.

  Below, she heard the spade ring tirelessly on stone. She had struggled with the plot, raising a few beans, tomatoes, potatoes that blackened, and a vine that died. But he would make her garden grow. Oh, yes.

  She rested her head on the bath’s porcelain rim, and laughed, trembling, the tips of her breasts breaking the water like buds.