Other Aliens

by Bradford Morrow

  The matriarch sat by a purple lithium fire, wearing a holographic farthingale, a neo-Elizabethan trend that rich celebs from my mom’s generation had sported thirty years ago. Only her face and hands were exposed, her skin crinkled and darkly translucent, flashes of bone and veins and tensed sinews, though she had lush, bioengineered lips. She wore a tall fuchsia beehive wig, slightly crooked. Her throne was gilded, upholstered in dirty red velvet. A weaselly hound slunk around her feet. Its head popped up. Its eyes bugged out. An old-fashioned robot.

  The room was a weird mix of GM “living furniture,” mostly of the furry variety, and ancient pieces of neon 1960s rococo revival that Xander had already complained about. The air smelled of musk, dust, and some weird medicinal odor.

  “Come closer, young lady; I don’t bite.” She motioned for us to sit.

  We sat down on the sofa—warm, pungent, like sinking into the flank of a cat. Ada turned her head away from her grandmother and nuzzled my breasts.

  The old woman sniggered. I wondered how I could feel an intense revulsion for her while enjoying an effortless kinship with her son.

  “Quite the little family already.” She simpered.

  “Mother, please,” Xander hissed.

  A servant appeared, a sky-man dressed in a silk tunic, and offered us raw beef wrapped in slivers of pickled beet. He poured wine from a dusty bottle into goblets with snakes etched into the rims.

  “Aged four hundred years,” said Xander’s mother. “And the goblets are not nano, but real gold plate from the 1990s.”

  Xander rolled his eyes, but I savored the thick burgundy, which tasted of figs and copper, some dark mineral I couldn’t place.

  “Mickimoo, Mama, now, pease,” said Ada.

  “I’m glad to hear her talking,” said Xander’s mother, “though I’m surprised she’s not using verbs.”

  “Mother,” said Xander.

  “Don’t you think she’s rather small for her age?”

  “You know earth children develop more slowly in the early years, but when we hit adulthood, we’re all pretty much on par.”

  Xander’s mother snorted at this. “Did the transfusion help?”

  “Yes,” said Xander. “Both mother and daughter are doing much better.”

  “So you run a blueberry farm?” Absurdly, Xander’s mother pulled out a lorgnette and examined me through the glass. “How quaint. Do they still use the term hippie down there?”

  “Yes,” I said, “though I’m not sure I qualify.”

  “Mickimoo, mama, pease, pease, now,” said Ada.

  “Do you mind?” I asked.

  “Of course not.”

  The old woman watched with interest as Ada latched on, smirking when I tried not to wince.

  “Well, Xander certainly qualifies as a hippie.” She removed her eyepiece. “He has romanticized the earth ever since his father first took him camping. He likes to tromp around in the mud and smell the flowers, but I prefer the clouds.” She gestured toward the window, a rectangle of yellow fog.

  Ada and her father romped out on the deck while I sulked inside, wheezing into my ozone mask. Something was wrong with the ship’s air-filtration system. My lungs felt squeezed. I suffered headaches and nausea. Isabelle, the family doctor, had diagnosed mild ozone poisoning and a sensitivity to the methane emitted by the ship’s bacterial mold-cleaning mechanism, along with a vitamin D deficiency. She advised me to avoid the deck, told me to wear my mask inside, urged me to take a trip to earth and pop two D3 capsules per day.

  Imagining ripe fruit dropping from bushes, I longed for my blueberry farm, felt panicky about abandoning it, but it was currently too sunny for Xander there, and perhaps for Ada now that she’d adjusted to sky-weather. I had dreams about walking through my orchard, sunlight on my face and arms, dreams of basking naked on the lawn at noon until my freckles glowed like flecks of copper.

  We were planning a trip to the Tierra del Fuego National Park, waiting for the right conditions, a solid month of misty weather, and I longed for the feel of soil beneath my feet.

  Reclining by the window in a hovering chair, I watched Ada emerge from the clouds, taller and running already, her semisheer skin glistening. Xander jogged after her, leaned in to tickle her one last time, and then they hurried in, careful to close the portals quickly.

  Our camping pod perched in the mist beside Lake Roca, distant mountains swathed in gray mist. The days were short and mostly cloudy, sometimes windy and cold. I reclined in a lawn chair, still weak but feeling much better, my hands crawling crab-like through the grass. I pulled up a clump and sniffed the sweet, pungent roots.

  Ada came running from the lake, clinking her bucket of magic stones. Xander plodded three feet behind her, smiling but tired.

  “I love you! I love you! I love you!” the child shrieked, petting me with her tiny hands.

  She’d just learned the word love, and she always uttered it ecstatically, caressing our faces, gesturing at mountains, birds, and clouds.

  “Poor Mama is sick, but now that we’re on earth you’re going to get better,” Ada said, studying me with her huge, shark-gray eyes.

  “That’s right,” said Xander.

  “Mickimoo, Mama,” Ada whispered. She crawled into my lap, heavy as a five-year-old, dangling long legs into the grass. Gently, she undid my blouse. Gently, she latched on. Gently, she patted my arm as my body tensed from the pain. She closed her eyes and fell into a trance as she sucked my blood. Her face had thinned out; her neck had grown swannish. Her cheekbones had a lovely, elfin curve. But her eczema was back. Her hair had turned lank and dry. And Xander was exhausted, his skin murky. His organs looked shrunken and dark. Our conversations drooped. He complained that his brain stalled, that sometimes the effort of speaking pained him.

  But even so, he wanted to stay two more weeks, and then find another place to camp, the Drift Creek Wilderness on the Oregon Coast, he said, though it would be harder for me to get occasional doses of sun.

  The next day was partly cloudy. Though Xander spent the afternoon hunkered down in the pod, portals shut, he urged me to enjoy it.

  “Go bask,” he said.

  The word bask, coming from his mouth, sounded delicious, decadent.

  I put my chair in a spot of sun and sprawled. I drank beet juice, nibbled chunks of raw lamb liver. As heat infused my body, I felt my muscles relax. I wallowed like a pagan in mystic sunbeams and opened a bottle of chilled chardonnay.

  Adelaide, wearing sunscreen and her Mylar hat, watched me from the shade of her UV umbrella. I could feel her sulking as she stabbed at the sand with her little shovel. But I couldn’t pull myself out of my chair. The wine, the sun, the glittering lake. Sweet grits of sand between my toes. The inexplicable mystery of big water, creatures patrolling its depths.

  I floated. Closed my eyes. Dozed off.

  When I woke up, Ada was standing over me, studying me with her metallic eyes, her face inflamed from the sun. My heart pounded. How long had I been asleep? I swept the child up into my arms and ran toward the pod.

  Ada moaned on her little foldout bed, her face swollen, covered in red boils. It was high afternoon, the pod shut up against the sun’s assault. The air-conditioning smelled pissy.

  Frantic, I paced the small space.

  Xander didn’t blame me; he rubbed my back.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said. “We didn’t know she had a sun allergy.”

  “But we suspected, didn’t we? We know it’s not good for her. Fuck. Why did I drink that wine? Why did I fall asleep?”

  “But I was napping inside the pod myself, completely oblivious.”

  “But you’re not feeling well.”

  As I rubbed nanobiotic ointment into her skin, Ada’s eyes fluttered open.

  “Mama,” she wheezed. “My tummy hurts.”

  “Dear God.” Xander jumped to his feet, grabbed his phone.

  “What?”

  “We’ve got to get her back to the ship fast.”

/>   “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s probably nothing, but it could have gotten inside her.”

  “What do you mean, ‘inside her’?”

  Xander wouldn’t look at me. He coughed. “Into her organs.”

  I collapsed onto the daybed and then leapt up again, walked over to Ada and stroked her hair.

  “Don’t worry,” said Xander, “our medical team knows exactly what to do for this. And you don’t have to come up—Mother still hasn’t had the filtration system fixed. You can stay for another week. It would be horrible to snatch you away after the progress you’ve made. When she’s better, we can go to Oregon as planned.”

  “I can’t abandon her.”

  “You’re not abandoning her; you’re healing yourself, for your own good and hers. And I’ll be with her every second of every day.”

  Xander touched my face and peered into my eyes, which he often described as startlingly opaque.

  “Trust me,” he said. And I did.

  I watched their shuttle whir up into dusky clouds. I could barely make out the ship, hovering beyond a cumulonimbus mass. When I saw it dart over the lake and disappear beyond the horizon, I felt something inside me shrivel, some organ or gland, obscure but essential, drained of vibrant juice. Clutching my gut, I released the deep keening moan of a bereft whale.

  I sat on the windswept shore, cormorants circling above the water. My phone bleeped. When I tapped the Real-Deal icon, Xander and Ada popped up on the beach: Ada still in her bed, Xander standing behind her, both of them smiling. Her pustules were drying up. She looked even older than she had yesterday.

  “I can almost touch you, Mama.” Ada reached toward me. “I can see the lake.”

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “Better and better. The doctor gave me more medicine.”

  “How’s the formula working out?” I couldn’t bring myself to say blood product.

  “She doesn’t love it,” said Xander, “but it’s enough to keep her going until we have you back.”

  “It’s yucky, Mama. I want mickimoo.”

  I felt flickers of pain in my breasts. I’d been pumping, of course, with an intricate device that extracted trickles of blood.

  “How do you feel?” Xander asked me.

  “Physically OK, I guess. But lonely, depressed.”

  “What’s ‘depressed’ mean?” asked Ada.

  “Kind of a grown-up thing,” said Xander.

  “I’m grown-up.” Ada laughed.

  “Just a little sad,” I said, “because I miss you two.”

  “But I’m sending the shuttle for Mama on Wednesday,” said Xander, “and we’ll all be together again.”

  “Hip hip hooray,” shouted Ada, tossing her robot bunny into the air.

  Xander moved closer. In the hologram, his flesh looked even more spectral, but his words came through, warm and thick, and we sank into conversation again, talking of Ada’s progress but then drifting off into speculative chatter—his mother’s recent rash of illnesses, the morphogenesis of microorganisms, mind-altering bacteria. Though the conversation was grim, we lost ourselves in its intricacies. And then we sat sighing. And then we hung up.

  Late Tuesday night, strong winds shook the camping pod, and I thought I heard beasts rustling outside in the night. I imagined storybook wolves in tattered pants, frisking on their hind feet, fangs dripping with cartoonish saliva. I checked the portal: locked. I picked up my laser gun and aimed it at the light fixture.

  My phone bleeped. It was Xander. When his face materialized, frowning, my stomach dropped. If Ada had taken a turn for the worse, I’d never forgive myself for staying behind; I would die if—

  “It’s not Ada,” he said. “It’s Mother.”

  Good, I almost blurted, but I forced my face into a semblance of sympathy.

  “She’s dying for real this time,” he said. “Cancer. Isabelle insists she could go any day now, and Mother wants to fly to the Peruvian rain forest. She—”

  Xander’s shoulders heaved. He emitted a convulsive croak. I’d never seen him cry before.

  “She wants to pass on the deck of the ship with a view of the Amazon, if that can be managed, weatherwise.” He sniffed. “That’s where she met Father. We’re already headed over there. And we can’t backtrack to pick you up. Too risky. She’s very close, so it won’t be long.”

  And then he couldn’t speak.

  The old woman was dying, and I imagined slapping her so hard that her wig tumbled off her bald head. But Xander was weeping. When I reached out to touch him, my hand passed through his skull.

  Three weeks later, the old woman was still dying, no doubt enthroned on the deck as Xander and a dozen servants fussed over her. Of course I talked to him and Ada every day, but both of them seemed distracted. Xander kept conversations short and practical, promising that we’d be reunited soon. Bewitched by the troop of robotic monkeys her grandmother had given her, Ada darted in and out of the frame. Shockingly tall, she looked like a coltish little girl. And she hadn’t asked for mickimoo in five days.

  “Hola madre.” She materialized beside my chair. “I’m learning to speak Spanish.”

  “Impressive,” I said.

  “Did the boy deliver the food?” asked Xander.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yesterday.”

  He’d arrived on an old-fashioned bicycle, a child no older than nine, with jewellike eyes set into pockmarked skin. I’d tried to talk to him, but he shook his head. “No Ingles,” he muttered before pedaling away.

  “Why don’t you fly back to West Virginia?” Xander asked me. “Check on your farm.”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Let’s give it another week.”

  Although I never saw Xander’s mother in the background, I could always feel her presence, a dark, burning force just outside the borders of the hologram.

  “I love you,” whispered Xander, as though he didn’t want her to hear him, and I thought I heard a squawk of laughter.

  I hung up, watched their images scatter into shining pixels. And then I was alone again on the windy beach.

  By the time the old woman died, the pod’s tiny freezer was packed with bags of frozen pink fluid, blood-spiked milk, but I still pumped to keep the juices flowing, anxious for the feel of Ada in my arms, the tug of her sweet mouth, her whole body bristling with need and love. Xander had warned me that he wouldn’t call on the day of the funeral, but still I felt a bitter ache, a longing for word streams that would revive me like a blood transfusion.

  That evening I sat on the cold beach, draped in lab-fur, drinking a decent Malbec from the Maule Valley, something from Ushuaia that the boy had brought. A fox flickered past, turned to stare at me, and then trotted down the beach. A flock of white geese flew over. Out in the black water, some gleaming creature exploded from the surface and dove back into the deep. I got drunk, fell asleep in my chair, and dreamed of Ada floating down from the sky in a ball gown made of clouds.

  “Mama,” she said, landing on the beach. “I missed you.”

  Her cloud dress was tinted with pink. I could see her heart, a lump of convulsive purple meat, glistening behind her rib cage. And then Xander floated down, his lips sewn up with coarse black thread. When he tried to speak, blood oozed from the stitches.

  Xander hadn’t called in days and I was sick again—pale, thin, my hair falling out in dry, matted clumps—the same anemia I’d suffered before. My ankle bones creaked when I walked. I couldn’t keep warm. My teeth felt loose. I’d had to stop pumping, and my swollen breasts throbbed with a sad ache. Yesterday, a freak snow had fallen, setting the record for the season’s earliest. But I had to keep the portal open just in case. Hunkered in the pod, smothered in fur, my whole head inflamed with a sinus infection, I waited. I didn’t want to bother Xander while he was grieving for his mother. I ate pomegranate seeds and spoonfuls of raw pâté. I drank czernina, canned duck-blood broth from Poland, and stared out at the pale sky.

  I was down t
o three tins of meat and a box of crackers when the boy came squeaking through the thawing snow on his bicycle. He left the bags on the portable porch. For all he knew, I was dead, my corpse ripening, filling the pod with noxious gasses. But I was alive. I’d gotten over the worst of the anemia. Though I’d gained a little weight, my breasts hung like empty wine sacks. The sinus infection had lingered for weeks. I still had a croupy cough. But I got up and opened the portal.

  Grieving had given me agoraphobia, and the air stung my skin when I stepped out onto the porch. But the sun felt good. I lingered for a spell before creeping back into the pod.

  As soon as I finished breakfast, I began my Internet search for news. So far I’d found only Xander’s mother’s endless obituary, which spoke of her great family, her love of rain forests, her staggering donations to the cause of deforestation—ironic, given her disdain for actual trees and soil. The article mentioned her funeral, an intimate family affair, but neglected to identify a specific location. Of course I’d reported the missing ship to the Intermediate Air Authority, who’d grilled me on my relationship with the family as though I were suspect. But I knew that I’d never hear back from them. So I searched the hinterlands of the Internet until my eyeballs burned.

  I searched all morning, gave up around eleven, and called them on the stroke of noon as I always did, hoping that today would be different, that Xander would appear before me, bright with chatter, that Ada would run in from the margins and try to wrap her arms around my ghostly neck.

  In a dream I floated down the Amazon in a tiny boat, scanning the sky for ships. Gaudy birds swooped and darted, cawed and shrieked. A purple parrot landed on the stern of my canoe, opened its beak, and emitted an electronic bleep. Bleep, bleep, bleep. The parrot flapped its wings. Its red eyes bulged. Bleep, bleep, bleep.

  I woke up. My phone glowed on the nightstand. I snatched it up.

  Missed call from an unfamiliar number in Sepahua, Peru.

  When I returned the call, Xander appeared on FaceTime, breathless, looking grainy from a bad connection. I placed my hand on my chest. Felt my heart thumping. I took a deep breath.