The replica of Levi replied, "In your time scale, my age would be measured in billions of years."
Olivia, overcome and struck with total awe, sank into a chair facing him. "Billions!" she said breathlessly. "I can't even begin to wrap my mind around the idea of any living thing being that old. To live that long and never die..."
The entity said, "What you think of as death is a change from one state to another, from living matter to its component chemical compounds, and information. Nothing is lost. The only difference between you and us is that our change of state is a conscious, voluntary process."
Olivia said, "Most of us would disagree with you about that. We've spent thousand of years being afraid, terrified of that process, making up all sorts of mythologies and fables and superstitions around it. Not being able to control things the way you do...frightens us."
The being asked, "Is that why you hesitate to let me perform the unclothed act on you with our organs, even though your memories say it is so pleasurable and you desire it so much?"
For the first time Olivia wanted to laugh, but stopped herself. "We're going to have to find a different way to communicate that idea," she said. "That's another thing we like to try to control. Sometimes I think we want to control it too much."
And for the first time, the being used her name. "Olivia...?"
She felt something react and stir inside her at the sound of the stranger in Levi's body speaking her name in Levi's voice. Even Levi himself never called her by her first name; he always called her "Professor Monroe." She was unsure of herself, uncertain about her reaction, as she said, "Yes...?"
The being said, "I see in your memory that you have a very great, very deep love of where I come from. You love space, the stars, as much as you love the feeling of what this form and others like it can do to you. This feeling is something you have had all your life: wanting to watch the stars and other planets, wanting to know what is outside your Sun's family of worlds, wanting to know everything about the universe. This desire occupied a great deal of your life, except for times when there was one certain...man. Yes, sometimes there was a man who was as important as the stars. The last one was called..."
She finished for him. "Clive. You know about Clive."
"Yes...Clive," said the being. "The feelings that are strongest in your recent memory are about Clive. They were eclipsed behind your thoughts of this form, which is the way I chose to appear to you first because you put it in front of your memories of Clive to block them. But you made Clive as important to you as the stars."
The entity stood up from the sofa. Nervously, Olivia asked, "What are you doing?"
Levi's face smiled, and as Olivia watched, his form dissolved back into a coil of sparkling light that twisted up and out of the lab clothing that he wore. The clothing fell to a heap on the carpet, and the coil of light resolved itself, taking on form and detail once again until it appeared not as Levi Adams but as a vibrantly beautiful and naked Clive Shea, with Clive's thick and ample member suspended between its legs and Clive's round and succulent sac behind it. In Clive's voice the being said, "This was the form that you most enjoyed and desired to join with your body. If you like, I will use this form to join with you instead of the one you call Levi."
The entity studied Olivia's reaction to his offer. He watched the strange mixture of emotions playing and clashing across her face. She looked shocked, excited, aroused, pained, sad, angry. She opened her mouth to speak, but could not. She closed her eyes and turned her head away. She appeared ready to cry. She covered her mouth and hugged herself, and whispered, "Oh my God..."
"Why do you respond in this manner?" the entity asked. "My offer of intercourse in this form should please you. At this moment you should be aroused."
With tears streaking her cheeks, Olivia whipped her head back around to face him. "It should? It doesn't work that way. You're made up of memories that you can transform into. My species is made up of memories that we carry around inside us. Sometimes they feel wonderful and sometimes they hurt. Right now I'm looking at you and seeing what I loved most in the world. When Clive was the way you are now, and we went to bed, and he made love to me and was inside me, it was the most beautiful thing in the world to me. It was my joy. It was my happiness. And then he was gone, and he gave the love that he gave to me to someone else, and I had nothing left but remembering how wonderful he was and how he'd never make me feel that way again, and knowing there was someone else and he was making her feel the way he made me feel. And it hurt me. It was the most terrible hurt I've ever felt, and I still feel it whenever I think about him. And now here you are. Here you are, using his body, telling me you want to do those things to me with his body when you're not him. And if I let you, it would feel... I don't even know how it would feel, because it would look like him and feel like him, but it wouldn't be him! You can make yourself look like any human I've ever met, but you don't even know what humanity is! You don't know what human love is!"
Once Olivia's outburst spent itself and she sat there, panting and tearful, grasping the arms of the chair as if to tear them off, she fell silent and the entity studied her once again. A look came over him, a look that Olivia read as a sad kind of contemplation. How could he stand there that way, in Clive's form, naked and erect, offering her the most wonderful thing on Earth and not knowing what it was he was offering, as if Clive's body were only a uniform to wear, as if his tool were exactly that, just a tool and not an extension of the heart?
At length, the being said, "I believe I understand. Love is not only physical, of the body. It is a form of energy. And like all energy it cannot be destroyed, only changed to the energy of other emotions--or redirected to another partner. The love that you felt for Clive, and the desire that you felt for his body and his organ, no longer exist in their original form. They have changed and must be redirected."
Breathlessly, Olivia nodded. "It's something like that, yes."
"Then you could feel love and desire for me, and provide me with a physical experience of what I find in your memories, if I were to manifest another form?"
"I don't know. You have me confused now. You're standing there that way, and I don't know what to feel."
"Your feelings were not as conflicted when I expressed myself as Levi," said the entity. And in a flash and a twinkling that made Olivia jump and blink, he stood naked in front of her as Levi Adams once again. "I will have intercourse with you in this body, then. Shall we go to your bed and begin?"
Olivia sighed. She would want to laugh if it were not all so bizarre. "You're still not understanding completely. Remember what you said before about needing intimacy? If I let you make love to me as Levi, it still wouldn't be right, because then we'd become intimate, but it would be... It would be like an illusion, not something real. I'd feel as if it were an illusion making love to me, because there already is a Levi Adams. You're not him, even if you use his shape. I don't want to be made love to by an illusion."
The being frowned, pondering. "Intercourse with a preexisting form would have the feeling of something false, something untrue."
"Yes!" said Olivia.
"I understand," said the entity.
Olivia watched the alien in Levi's shape, wondering what he would do next as he fell silent, shut his eyes, and let his head roll back as if offering up a prayer to the unseen infinite. He was so intent on offering himself to her, on experiencing human sex. If she continued to resist him, what would he do? Would he take all of her memories of men she had seen and known, and disappear to seek out some other woman and sleep with her? She felt a sudden sting of fear at the precariousness of the situation. If this was what he meant to do, she had no way to stop him. She might have just released an alien being into the world to seek experience with another woman, possibly any number of other women. Her only hope of controlling this creature who could be any beautiful man she had ever seen or lain with, was to give the creature what he wanted--and let him try to give her what she wan
ted.
She now felt as frightened as she had when the coil of light first unfurled in her lab. She was about to rise from the chair and try to talk the form of Levi Adams into not doing anything else--when it suddenly turned back to the phallic shape of glittering light. But this time it was different. This time, within the tube of glowing energy there were pulses and ripples of brilliance that coursed up and down its length. rolling and flowing and reflecting back on themselves. Oh no, she thought. What is he doing now? It now occurred to her to wonder how this life form reproduced. Perhaps he could divide his energy into multiple forms at once. Perhaps he was preparing to split off into other entities, and at any moment she might be faced with not one but several beautiful naked men, each one seeking her favor. Oh my Lord, what have I done? she wondered, fearfully. What have I just let loose on the world?
All at once, the rippling of energy within the phallic form subsided, and the energy form resolved itself back to flesh and blood and stood before Olivia as a naked man again. This time, however, there was a very startling difference. She gasped and raised a hand to her mouth to stifle another yelp like the sound she had made when the alien first appeared out of the MRI.
Olivia found herself now faced with a being who was Levi Adams--but not Levi Adams. And Clive Shea--but not Clive Shea. And Bruce Foster--but not Bruce Foster. He was all of them, and yet none of them. The body was unmistakably Clive's, fully developed as a man in his mid-to-late thirties. The hair was Levi's blond hair turned a shade darker. The eyes were absolutely Levi's, and she saw both Levi and Clive in the excruciatingly handsome face. The hair dusting the forearms, legs, and chest was Bruce's body hair. She remembered seeing him at the swimming pool at a faculty party; Bruce's body was haired exactly that way. And the long, thick member suspended under the dark bush of pubic hair at his crotch was what Clive had thrust deep inside Olivia three times a night for so many nights. What now faced Olivia looked as if some cosmic chef had thrown the DNA of Clive, Levi, and Bruce into a blender and whipped them together. It was all that Olivia could do to breathe a dazzled and inarticulate, "Oooh..."
"Is this form now acceptable for intercourse?" the being asked in a voice that mixed the voices of Levi and Bruce.
"You're beautiful," said Olivia. "You're... You're... I don't even know what to call you. Do you have a name?"
The being contemplated her question. "Name: a word that identifies a thing. Proper name: A name that identifies an individual human. I have no name. Do you wish to select one for me?"
Olivia ruffled her hair with her fingers, almost wanting to laugh. This was almost like dealing with a child. The being knew everything that she knew and far, far more--but he still knew so little. He could process all the information of a lifetime, but had no personal context in which to frame any of it. She considered for a moment, searching her own memory for some name that held some significance for her, since she was the alien's only context for his entire existence on Earth. Perhaps there was some name that meant something to her... In a moment she had it. She looked up at him and said, "Lowell."
The alien rolled his eyes, thinking, searching for an association. He fixed his eyes back on her with a light of understanding and said, "Lowell. For Percival Lowell, astronomer, who interpreted the shadows on the surface of your neighboring planet Mars as a vast system of canals constructed by an advanced civilization and popularized the idea of 'Martians'. Until Mars was found to be lifeless, the word 'Martian' was a synonym for 'alien,' also popularized by the story of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. You have whimsically associated me with Martians because I am extraterrestrial."
Now Olivia did permit herself a smile and just the tiniest laugh. "Yes. I was making a metaphor."
"Very well," the being said. "My name shall be Lowell."
"I'm happy to meet you, Lowell," said Olivia, strangely more at ease than she had felt since the moment that the creature--whom she now no longer saw as a "creature"--first appeared in her lab.
"Olivia," said Lowell, "I have observed in your memory that a human male at times offers a female a gift prior to initiating sexual relations. I should thus like to offer you a gift."
Olivia's eyebrows arched. Just the sight of Lowell, naked and ready for her, was an ample gift in and of itself. What more--besides the experience of sex with a being from the stars who was only just experiencing human physicality--could he offer her in the way of a gift? "What do you mean?" she asked.
"I should like to offer you your dearest desire, other than a physical union with this body. Let me show you where I came from and some of what I have seen...out there."
Olivia's jaw dropped. Her mind went into a spin of pure wonder. Could Lowell actually do such a thing? Could he somehow actually take her out to where he had been, out to where he came from? What he was offering her was the dream of every astronomer who had ever lived. She gulped. A heat of excitement surpassing even sexual desire rose up inside her, filling her like the erection of a lover. "You can do that?" she asked, half-whispering. "How...how can you do that?”
"I can communicate a portion of my own memory to you...if you will touch me." Lowell held out his hand. "Please accept my gift, Olivia. First you will know something of my mind. Then I will give you intercourse with this body. Will you have me in this way?"
Olivia settled into a zone of strangely calm wonderment. She sensed she could trust him, but just to be sure... "My own form won't change?" she asked.
"No," answered Lowell. "Only the information of my memory will enter you...until we lie together in your bed. Then I shall enter you physically."
Taking deep breaths, preparing herself, Olivia reached out to Lowell. "All right," she said. "I accept your gift."
Smiling at her acceptance, Lowell stepped forward and clasped Olivia's hand. For a moment there was only the sensation of palms pressed together, the encirclement of his strong but gentle fingers, his flesh transformed from energy against her flesh, and the warmth that it brought. Then, something like a jolt of electricity raced though Olivia's body. She gasped, spasmed, tossed back her head...
...and then she was no longer in her apartment.
Olivia could feel neither her own body nor Lowell's. She was floating and flying with no physical sensation at all. And all around her, everywhere, were stars. She was surrounded with stars of every description: red dwarfs, white dwarfs, yellow stars like the Sun. Supergiants in red, giants of blue and white. Stars in binary pairs, stars in clusters. Huge stars wheeling in orbit of black holes, with gouts of plasma curling massively off of them and disappearing, swallowed up in the singularities that the holes clutched inside them. Pulsars, rotating and flashing in the quickest, most steady rhythm in the universe. She swooped through a panoply of stellar bodies until something loomed into view, something as bright as a star, but different: a planet orbiting a binary system. It was a world made up entirely of crystal, with a vascular system of lights throbbing beneath its surface like the veins, arteries, and bloodstream of a living body. From off the surface of the planet of crystal came points of living light, rising and and whirling into space like the down blown from a dandelion. And Olivia sensed Lowell's recognition of these forms. This was his planet. These were members of his species. They were a dandelion down of energy, flying off of a planet that was a colossal, sparkling, spinning jewel in space. Lowell was showing Olivia his home.
Her thought-form followed the glittering down of energy forms flying out from their home planet, and went back out into space with them. They escorted her to other planets across a vast swath of the galaxy. They showed her mighty planets of gas where life forms made of carbon and phosphorus, resembling the limbs and branches of trees, glowed and strobed to each other like bioluminescent fishes talking with light in the deep ocean. They took her to a liquid planet where enormous schools of creatures that resembled glowing eels were chased, herded, and gobbled up by creatures that were like manta rays the size of cruise ships with tails like immense sea serpents. She saw a
metallic planet with hundreds of satellites. She saw clusters of stars, each one held in its own gigantic cage of solar panels, and swarms of satellites swirling around the encaged stars like the cloud of electrons around an atomic nucleus, and recognized these places as the civilizations of beings vastly older than humanity, who knew things that might not dawn on the human mind for thousands of years.
Olivia saw only the tiniest particle of the tiniest drop of the ocean of the universe, but it was enough to satisfy her need to know the cosmos for as long as she lived. She drank it all in, and slowly her mind became a haze of awareness of how truly immense and how truly marvelous the universe was. She was overtaken with bliss, and her mind was filled with what she could only describe as the perfection of knowledge. She seemed to float that way forever. She did not know how long it was before she opened her eyes--her physical eyes--again and found herself back in her apartment, sitting in her chair, holding hands with the naked Lowell, still standing beautiful before her.
Keeping her hand in his, Olivia rose from where she was sitting and a smile like that of a Buddha spread upon her face. Lowell smiled back. They needed no words. All that they needed now was their feelings. She sensed that Lowell had traveled inside her being as she had traveled inside his. From commingling with her mind and her memories, Lowell had thus learned the expression of human love through human sex. His smile was the preamble of his ultimate offering to her. She accepted this offer as she had accepted the other, and let him pull her to him and into a kiss.
Of all the first kisses in human experience, surely none was ever as wondrous as the moment that Olivia's lips at last met Lowell's. In that first press of his lips she felt the awakening passion of a young boy, the ardor of an experienced man claiming his desire, and the tenderness of a lover giving his life to his love. Somehow, in some intuitive way, he truly had become Clive, Levi, and Bruce--Olivia's fantasy and her reality--all at once. She gave herself into the kiss and enwrapped Lowell's fantastically beautiful nakedness with her arms, playing her hands up and down the body that he had created just for her, taking in the perfection of his flesh and muscle and the texture of the hair that covered them so lightly and so sensuously. Lowell deepened the kiss and she felt his being open itself up to her with the rolling of his tongue into her mouth. He leaned her backwards almost into a dip, and after a dizzying moment of kissing that way, he bought her back upright again. Very reluctantly, Lowell broke the kiss, but kept his face close to hers, penetrating her eyes with his until she turned her eyes downward to what strained between his legs. It was as long and luscious as Clive's had ever been, and a bead of man-honey had welled up at the tip. Olivia reached down to touch Lowell's glans, and she felt a little jolt leap suddenly from there and pass through his body. "Oh!" Lowell breathed in reaction to her touch at his sensitive place. He watched her lift her fingertips to her mouth and touch them with the tip of her tongue, lightly tasting the male nectar that she had collected. He smiled at the pleasure on her face. "I want to taste yours," he whispered. "Take me to your bed."
AREA 69: An Alien Invasion Romance Novel Page 3
