by Ruby Ryan
I sighed to myself. A small part of me wanted to make it happen. Needed to.
But that's not who I was, deep down. And that definitely wasn't who Jamie was. I couldn't be with someone like him, no matter how gorgeous he was.
Still, the temptation pulsed alongside my heartbeat.
Jamie downed the rest of the beer in one gulp, reached into his pocket and pulled out a crisp hundred dollar bill. He stood unceremoniously and said, "Good night and goodbye, Leslie."
He disappeared from the bar, leaving me alone with his smell of peppery cologne and musk.
"Here's your big tip," I said to Harry at the bar, slapping the hundred down. "Though it's from Jamie, not me. Oh, and he's covering my tab tonight too."
"And here I thought you'd grow generous in your new-found wealth," Harry said.
I wanted to stay and talk to him more, to talk about Jamie and the stupid feelings swirling around my gut, but then Harry was sliding across the bar to take a woman's order. I lingered a bit longer, sipped on my beer, then pushed through the crowd of UFO hunters toward the door.
Normally, I'd talk to Jo. Pour myself out to her the way someone poured out the remains of an unwanted beer, receive a hug and some words of advice, and then commiserate over a glass of wine and gossip about next month's romance novel.
But of course she was gone. And I couldn't contact her unless it was an emergency, lest one of the idiot UFO hunters track my call and find out that she's still here on good ol' planet earth. They probably couldn't tap our phones like that. It seemed ridiculously paranoid for me to even think about it that way. But then again, a lot had happened in the past two weeks that was far more ridiculous than that, and Jo had been insistent on precautions.
I stood in the cold night, wondering what to do to myself.
*
I went into my office and stared at the couch, the chair, the desk piled with paperwork. This was my life, now. And it certainly wasn't going to change. Maybe I should take Harry's advice and go to Rome.
Feeling generous, I unlocked my computer and fired off an email to Stacy, asking that she take $10,000 of my land proceeds and send it to Harry, with a note telling him to tell me how the Coliseum is. He'd come around and try to give it back the moment he found out, but that was a problem for future-Leslie. Present-Leslie didn't care what that woman had to deal with.
Hopping into my police cruiser probably wasn't the best idea after a few beers, but there was something I had to do. Closure I thought I needed.
The two-lane state highway wound back and forth through the woods, tall sentinels on either side devoid of green in these barren winter months. I constantly checked my rear-view mirror, but I was alone at that time of night. As bustling as Elijah had become, nobody went where I was going this late. There was nowhere to go.
Unless, like me, you had a secret to keep.
I pulled off to the side of the road when I was far enough out of town and circled my cruiser on light feet. I bent down--back aching from the effort--and reached under the trunk, feeling around until my fingers wrapped around a small metal box. It came away with minimal magnetic resistance, and I examined it by the red glow of my taillights: a spy-kit GPS tracker I'd seen Bobby attach to my cruiser today, when he thought I wasn't looking. Paranoid nutjobs.
But then again, it wasn't paranoia if it was justified.
I tossed the tracker to the side of the road and hopped back in the cruiser. I did a U-turn, backtracked eight miles until I reached down, then drove in the opposite direction.
The old logging camp was fifteen miles east of Elijah, across the county border which the UFO hunters had somehow group-decided was beyond the extend of the extra-terrestrial visit. The road was rough with disuse, and I had to stop at a fallen tree and walk the final quarter mile in the freezing cold.
I came to a clearing, which appeared empty. But of course it wasn't.
Normally, he knew when I was there and removed Harry Potter's Invisibility Cloak from his craft, or whatever it was he had. But tonight nothing happened. For a desperate instant I felt a pang of regret that I was too late, that he'd already left.
I grabbed a handful of snow, pressed it into a snowball, and launched it into the air. It hit an invisible wall and splattered into pieces.
Relief washed over me in a wave. I wasn't too late.
"Anybody home?" I called out.
The air shimmered like heat coming off a desert road. A round shape slowly materialized, a dull metal color devoid of anything noteworthy except the jutting glass cockpit window on the left side. It stood on three thin legs like a tripod, with only four feet between the undercarriage and the ground. I sighed with relief.
"That trick never grows old," I said out loud as a greeting. "You could have a swell career as a magician, if you stuck around."
Jerix, a scout of the Karak Dominion of Planets, materialized behind the glass of the cockpit. He looked similar to a thick bar of light, like someone was holding a focused flashlight four feet above the ground and pointed it straight down. The Karak descended lightly from the cockpit, passing through the glass and carbon-alloy wall of the craft with alien ease.
Why are you here? he asked me, a note of alarm coming across the link with my mind.
"Can you just, uhh, not do that?" I asked. "It gives me the creeps to hear you talkin' right into my brain."
Jerix's form changed. The photons of his body burst apart like a strong wind had blown through him, rotating and spinning in intricate arcs. The atoms changed colors, a rainbow shimmer in the moonlight that made me hold my breath with wonder. Slowly the atoms coalesced back into recognizable shape, clumping together into a torso and legs and arms, nude for the briefest instant. I felt a butterfly take flight in my stomach in that moment as I admired his form, hips curving above strong thighs, the ridiculously perfect six-pack abs and ridged oblique muscles along his sides, slanting upward to bulging shoulders and arms.
And then the moment was gone, and clothes materialized into place, the same jeans and T-shirt he'd been wearing at the bar.
"Why are you here?" Jerix--in the human Jamie form--asked again. His brow furrowed with worry.
"Nothing's wrong," I said, stepping forward. "I wanted to give you this."
He took what I handed him: a chain attached to a piece of plastic in the rectangular shape of Wyoming, with ELIJAH! inked along the bottom next to a star marking our location.
"It's just a silly key chain, but it's damn near the only thing in Andy's store with the town's name on it," I explained.
"Key chain?" The syllables sounded strange on his tongue.
"Well yeah. How else are you gunna spruce up the keys to your fancy spacecraft?" He didn't laugh at the joke, just like every other light-hearted comment I'd tried making in the last two weeks. "In all seriousness, it's for you to remember us by. A small memento of our little town."
I expected him to say something stupid, like I can remember you thanks to my alien photographic memory, or, non-essential objects will be vaporized when I travel at light speed, or, oil-based plastics are banned on my home planet. But Jerix cocked his head in a distinctly human expression and closed his fingers over the key chain with care.
"Thank you, Leslie."
We stood three feet apart, but I could feel the worlds between us.
"One more thing," I said to keep the moment from ending. "All the info you've been gathering. You're not gunna take it home and use it to enslave all of humanity, right?"
A smile crept onto Jerix's face, and in my slightly inebriated condition I wanted desperately to kiss him. "We'll see."
I gave a start. "What?"
And Jerix laughed, a sound that came from deep within his chest, and his smile spread like wildfire across his handsome face.
"Oh my God, you just made a joke," I said. "You waited until the last damn day to get a personality."
"Your human bodies and emotions are intoxicating," he said. "I feel more human with every passing day. Which
is part of why I must leave." The smile slowly faded. "I promise the Karak will not enslave your race."
"That's all any girl wants to hear."
And I could tell he was about to shift back, so I crossed the worlds between us and wrapped him in a hug. He accepted it intuitively, squeezing me close, and his embrace made me feel warm and safe.
I broke the hug first, because if I didn't I might have done something I regretted. Something impulsive. But that wasn't who I was, deep down. I didn't take crazy chances.
So I nodded, said, "Safe travels," and turned away.
I felt Jerix's gaze as I trudged back to my cruiser, alien and human all at the same time.
2
JERIX
I watched Leslie go, and felt a strange human emotion.
I could still feel her pressed against my body, warm flesh mingling with the heat from my own. The touch felt electric, even though I knew it was not. An interesting sensation. A part of my research I had not explored.
I watched her go, and then she was gone, and then I was alone again.
Shifting back to my Karak form, I returned to the cockpit of my craft. The alcoholic buzz from the beer I'd drank with my human body carried over strangely to my Karak form, causing my reactions and consciousness to be alarmingly sluggish. I knew it would not last long, and the elation that came with it was too enjoyable for me to worry.
I turned my focus to my ship's instruments. Forty-nine minutes until my craft would depart. An ideal timing, based on the space debris orbiting the planet chaotically. I would not make the same mistake Arix had made and crash into something in orbit.
And with some time to kill, I shifted back into my human form.
Everything about being human was intoxicating. Their emotions were stronger than anything a Karak experienced. I wondered about that the most: what evolutionary purpose did emotions serve? Perhaps they were a means of non-verbal communication, since humans possessed no telepathy of their own. Emotions guided their facial expressions and actions, another layer of communication beyond mere words.
And of course the need for sexual attraction. Humans were a social species more than any other I had seen on my tours as a Karak scout, relying on companionship and family structure. It was crucial for sexual pairing and reproduction, and critical for development post-birth. An interesting mechanism for creating such framework.
Karak telepathy was easier and cleaner, but I'd learned in my tour that the easiest path was rarely the one that occurred.
I felt a wave of nausea as I tried to stand, side-effects from the alcohol. It was embarrassing that Leslie was able to approach my ship without me sensing her, but this intoxication made it difficult to focus my consciousness on my surroundings. I still had not re-shifted my craft to bend light around it, but I didn't much care right then. Aside from Leslie, no humans had come within three miles of my hiding place. And if one happened to do so now, it was immaterial. I was leaving, and needed no such cover.
And with our directive for stealth already broken, little damage would be caused by more humans witnessing a Karak spacecraft.
Arix had lingered in my consciousness these weeks. I possessed a strange mixture of thoughts about my fellow Karak scout. When I first arrived and learned of his crime, I felt the closest thing to Karak horror. Making contact with the humans was understandable after his craft crashed. He had few choices, then. Learning about their technology and way of life was a natural response, especially since his craft was eventually discovered and captured.
But what he did with the human woman Joanna...
I still shuddered to think of it, though the idea no longer pained me as it originally had. A lifetime of training to become a Karak scout, decades spent on his tour around the galaxy investigating his assigned planets and the species contained within. And on his final planet, Arix threw aside all the oaths he had sworn, the duties to all Karak and the great Dominion Lord.
Was human sex truly so mesmerizing?
Two weeks in a human body had tempted me greatly. Not only with curiosity for Arix's decision, but with my own primal human desire. The time spent with Leslie, specifically, left me confused to the point of disheartened.
And tonight, when she hugged me...
The feeling in my sexual organ was a shock. It tingled with lust, the desire to remove her clothing and touch her body and press myself into her sex and feel her from within. And something in my human brain told me she wanted the same thing, in that same moment, with the same urgency as I.
And in my intoxicated state, I almost relented.
That realization scared me most of all. Like Arix, so close to completing me tour, such transgression would have dishonored me completely. One drawback--and benefit, truly--of our telepathic communication was that Karak could not lie. A human could commit an atrocity and simply keep it to themselves; I had no such luxury once among my kind.
I shook off the thought of Leslie. I had been among the humans for too long. It would be good to return home.
Remaining in my human body, I reached out into my craft's computer and sent a communication request. I felt the pulse leave my ship and travel west, over the mountains in the human state of Idaho, far beyond what I could do with my consciousness alone, curving north until it found an identical Karak scout craft nestled in the foothills of the snowy mountains. Instantly, in the level of immediacy as a beam of light, I felt Arix's bond.
Brother, he said, surprised and pleased at the same time.
How fares you? I asked.
I fare wonderfully.
The emotion that traveled through the bond was entirely alien, a human feeling for our human bodies. But it was warm and comforting, like donning a thick jacket on cold night.
Love, pure and powerful.
I have completed my study, I said. I leave tonight for Karak. Our superiors will know of what you've done.
You could not have stopped me, Arix said, and we both knew it to be the truth. If I must accept the consequences of such a decision someday, then so be it.
Do you not have any regrets? I wondered at him.
My only regret, Arix sent slowly, is that I did not discover Joanna sooner. You must find yourself a human woman, Jerix. You will know what I mean, if so.
The way he casually spoke of his disgrace was an alarming note by itself, to say nothing of the action itself. A human metaphor crawled into my mind: like a drug addict who thought only of the needle. Arix was addicted, hopelessly and completely.
I wished I could record such a note in my details of this species, but I did not want to disgrace Arix further. Perhaps some future day.
I wish you the best with your new mate, is all I sent back.
What will you do now that your tour is over? Curiosity and excitement passed through the bond.
I sent my own excitement back at him. I have thought much about this during my tour. I believe I will become a settler.
Truly?
Exploring new worlds has been an honor, but I feel the deeper desire to spread the Dominion's influence to them as well. I believe I can lead an entire settling expedition on my own.
You always were more sure-minded than I, Arix thought. You will do well as a settler. Take care, buddy.
The last word was a human thought, pressed roughly into the Karak consciousness bond we shared. Still in my human body, I chuckled out loud in my spacecraft.
Take care, brother.
I severed the connection.
Thinking of Arix during the past week always filled me with regret and shame, a shared dishonor that I may have prevented, but communicating with him left me feeling different. I could sense the love in his thoughts, the unique human bond he shared with Joanna.
Drug-like emotion or not, I was content for him.
I turned my focus inward: becoming a settler for the Dominion. That filled me with excitement. Similar to my scouting tour, but with far more permanence and importance. With my exemplary record as a Karak scout, I would be giv
en a planet and settler group of my choosing. The anticipation of such a choice filled me with light.
I wonder if Karak bodies experience hangover. Perhaps, since the thoughts and emotions from shifted bodies lingered long after shifting back. I smiled to myself, a purely human response, and decided I did not care.
The only thing I cared about now was returning home and beginning my new life. Spreading greater glory for the Karak Dominion, wherever that may be.
*
The departure was smooth and uneventful. My photon body was pressed backwards into its magnetic encasement, but only to mild discomfort. On a computer monitor I watched the ground fall away below me, snow and trees and then mountains taking up the view, and then the curve of the planet could be seen on the too-far horizon.
Anyone nearby would be able to see my departure; a streak of light moving across the sky like a shooting star in slow motion. That excite up the UFO hunters Leslie detested. But my scout craft was not detectable by radar or other tracking mechanisms, and I rose into a parking orbit gracefully, at a precise altitude to avoid human communication satellites and other long-abandoned space debris.
A messy species, these humans.
After running a series of system checks to ensure there was no damage from leaving the planet's gravity well, I initiated the transfer sequence. The pulsing of my ship's ion drive was a steady hammering, and on the map I saw my expected orbit stretching into longer and longer ovals, until eventually it broke apart from the planet entirely.
The ion drive would continue pulsing until I was moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, then initiate the cross-galaxy drive. No stasis needed for the short trip home; a paltry three earth days and I would be in Karak orbit, decelerating and descending to the planet proper.
