Rocket Boy and the Geek Girls

by Phyllis Irene Radford

  She had listened to the explanations that first day, but hadn’t understood them very well. Hookworms she had heard about, about how you stepped on them and then they got inside you and crawled up to your stomach — or was that tapeworms? — and lived there. She had explained that it wasn’t worms but a fruit, one of Ned’s nectarines, but she might as well have talked to the wall.

  She had caught up with all the coverage on the Internet. They had picked up her sheets with tongs, and pried up the carpet, and taken all the bedroom furniture away. Everyone in the neighborhood — fifty garden apartment blocks worth of people — had been quarantined. Every square inch of wall and brick and floor was sterilized, and still that wasn’t enough. Their own place, 1201 24th Street, had been dismantled brick by brick, stud by stud, and incinerated.

  The news shows went crazy about it. Laurel thought it was disgusting, the way they zoomed in on the details of how the ashes were going to be encased in molten glass and stored under a mountain in Nevada. She and Ned had chosen that bedroom set at Ikea! It was weird to remember how happy they had been that day.

  She had not asked what had happened to Missy. One look at Ned’s big stupid face that first day, blank with horror under the smear of shaving cream, and she’d known he wasn’t going to be there for her either. She couldn’t imagine now what she’d seen in him. And the way he had exclaimed, “You mean — aliens? Like the ones Sigourney Weaver fought?“ The idea of being with Ned now was vaguely stomach-turning — probably morning sickness.

  Instead she’d phoned Jessie right away, before they took her cell phone. And her sister had come through. Jessie was the smart one in the family: the one who knew how to build pages and host web forums and marshal public opinion about the rights of living things. She had zoomed in, strafing like a fighter plane, dressed in a navy-blue business skirt suit, waving her lawyer credentials and yelling, “You! Gestapo! We have a Bill of Rights in this country, you know!“

  Jessie had gotten her the laptop, and the webcam, and the window, and the other doctors, the ones on her side. More importantly, she had gone to Bloomingdale’s and bought Laurel the most adorable blue striped Donna Karan tankinis, four sets, sizes ten through sixteen, so that everyone could see and share in Laurel’s development.

  “I don’t like to think of it as an invasion,“ Laurel had announced with pride for the camera. “It’s more like a pregnancy.“ She had been the most widely watched live webcast in the history of the world, even more than for Michael Jackson’s funeral!

  But she had been careful to stand at a good angle, not straight on to the cam. When she stood foursquare and looked at herself in the mirror, she could see the difference. A regular pregnant woman looked like she had a basketball inside, round and low. Laurel was getting bigger sort of high and askew, more to the right than the left. The doctors said it was because the liver is on the right.

  Laurel was careful not to look at a lot of things, as a matter of fact.

  Jessie made sure that the website was overwhelmingly positive. It was a pleasure to go over and click on the links about the sanctity of life. Jessie said, the way the laws were written about abortion and patient rights and endangered species, they could barely touch Laurel with a ten-foot pole. All they could legally do was observe her.

  Once the forum even had a long screed from a Catholic priest: “Laurel Franzini: Immaculate Conception?!?“ Too bad it turned out that the priest was fake as a three-dollar bill, incarcerated in a mental home. The Catholic bishops had made Jessie take that post down.

  Only once had Laurel surfed over to the other site, the one run by the Centers for Disease Control. Of course it wasn’t linked to hers. That had been nasty: scrolling past icky pictures of the flukes that lived inside fish’s heads in California, or tobacco hornworms encrusted with wasp larvae, or a kitten bloated with worms. (Why had she never asked about Missy? She’d had that cat for twelve years. Someday soon, she would.) With uneasy fascination she read about twirling trout and sleeping sickness. Parasitic infestations could force snails to alter their behavior, change gender, commit suicide even.

  And right there alongside those hornworms was a picture of herself, in the blue tankini! It had been small consolation that the blue went great with her fair coloring. She immediately clicked over to the USA Today page to read about the upcoming Bruce Willis movie.

  Of course there were about a million and a half medical things they wanted to do to her. Jessie had been really proactive about that, supervising every procedure and keeping an eye on the eggheads to keep them from going hog-wild.

  “She’s a human being,“ Jessie had told Katie Couric on TV. “Just because she has a medical condition doesn’t mean she’s lost her rights as an American citizen!“

  But, short of dissection, there were still a million and a half things. Samples, peeing into jars, feeling and measuring her growing belly, little tubes of blood, looking into machines, sitting in machines, being attached to machines with wires, all day, every day. It was just something you had to put up with.

  “We’re trying to help you, Laurel,“ the doctors said. “We’re hoping to save your life.“

  “I feel fine,“ Laurel replied. More and more she was inclined to disbelieve them, simply from the way their voices came out of speakers on the wall instead of from their mouths. Surely all this fanatic isolation was silly? She couldn’t even touch Jessie. Her sister had to wear the same big white suit and the thick gloves and helmet as everybody.

  “I’m tired of quarantine,“ Laurel said. “When is it going to be over? My neighbors are all out. When’s my turn?“

  Jess patted her shoulder, her hand in the white glove as clumsy as an oar. “Let them just take another series of MRIs, okay, hon?“ Through the speakers on the wall her voice sounded like a distant quack.

  Laurel knew she was whining — did she use to whine? But she couldn’t help it. “Last time it was ‘see if the radium treatments took effect,’ and the time before that it was ‘after the full course of antibiotics.’“

  “What’s the rush, Laurie? You have everything you need right here.“

  Laurel tried to explain. “I’ve spent the whole summer indoors. I want to go out. I want to swim at the beach, before it’s too cold. You know I hate cold swimming.“

  Even through the speaker she could hear the change in Jessie’s voice. “Laurie. You’ve never liked swimming. Ever. The humidity makes your hair frizz out. Or the beach — you remember when you were four, the tantrum you had about the sand getting into your shoes...“

  Something weird felt like it crawled all down her spine when she saw the way the white helmets turned so that the doctors could look at each other, and the way Jessie met their gaze too.

  “Reading all those things about wasps and caterpillars makes you paranoid,“ Jessie said.

  “I am not a victim! I am an empowered person, with civil rights, just like you said, Jessie. You can’t keep me in here forever.“

  Jessie hugged her around the shoulders, but the embrace crackled like plastic wrap. “Hon, trust me — your big sis is looking out for you, okay? Did you get your coffee this morning?“

  “I don’t like coffee.“

  “Oh! Well then, you be a good girl and have your MRI.“

  They did this every single day, almost — shoved her like a pizza on a spatula into this oven thing. There was a panic button to hold while the magnets somehow took pictures of her organs and brain. She had gotten so big now it was pretty cramped inside. She had to lie perfectly still for what felt like hours, and with all this weight on her front it made the small of her back hurt. She felt like a sock puppet, a lab rat. And all because she’d stepped on an alien cyst that had fallen in through the window!

  Suddenly she knew she couldn’t stand it any more. She used to be okay with small closed spaces, but not now. How much longer were they going to push her around? Weeks and weeks of this crap — she had to get out. Out! She hit the panic button, and bells began to clang. The
y whipped her stretcher out of the chamber, twittering with questions, and she was able to sit up. She snatched up a pair of scissors from the instrument cart, and stabbed the points into the nearest thick white sleeve.

  “Aaah! Laurie! No!“

  “Jeez, help her!“

  “Holy shit!“

  Astonished, Laurel found that she was hacking and stabbing at Jessie. Well, of course it was the fault of all this thick white protective gear, that made even your own sister look like a monster. The other doctors grabbed her arm, forcing her back, but their shouts and cries were distant and unimportant, out of synch with the dim movements of their lips. It sounded like Jessie was crying, having hysterics muffled inside her helmet, but they were all talking at once and the speaker crackled and spat with the overload. They pushed her back into a chair and left her by the MRI machine, clustering around Jessie, shepherding her out through the whooshing door so that they could take off the encumbering suits and help her.

  Laurel sat sulkily in the chair, her head bowed and her hands clasped over her huge lopsided belly. They were in such a fuss, they’d forgotten that the suits transmitted to the wall speaker. She could hear everything even though they were outside.

  “You’re all right, Jessica. Look, the suit wasn’t breached.“

  “Thank God they were just bandage scissors!“

  “She just cut the first layer, you see? You’re all right. You haven’t been exposed.“

  All the doctors sounded alike, but Laurel could recognize Jess’s convulsive weeping. “Oh Jesus! What was she doing? Oh God, Laurie was attacking me! Laurie!“

  “Ms. Franzini, try to calm down, please. We’ve told you, you’ve seen, how the invader is growing in Laurel’s system.“

  A vulgar blatting noise, as Jessie blew her nose. “You have to save her. Please! You said you’d save her.“

  “Ms. Franzini, we can’t. We cannot get the alien out without killing her. You remember what happened to the cat. The life form has insinuated itself into her circulatory system, the lymph nodes —“

  Another, more authoritative voice. “Ms. Franzini, it’s worse even than that. Yes, here’s another tissue. Get her a glass of water, somebody... These are today’s brain scans, Ms. Franzini. You see that blue strand, between the hemispheres and up into the corpus callosum? It’s possible that... How can I put this? That she’s not your sister any more.“

  “Oh Jesus! Laurie would never have hurt me, never. Not Laurie!“

  “Ms. Franzini — Jessica — do you understand? There are many shades between gray and black, but there comes a point when the color is definitely black. We’ve disagreed about when that point is crossed. It was good and right of you to fight for your sister. But I hope this convinces you now, to drop your court case. You cannot think only of Laurel now. You have to consider the rest of the human race. We are being invaded. Laurie is more than your sister now. She is Normandy, Jessica. Iwo Jima. A beach-head.“

  At the mention of names she didn’t recognize Laurel quit listening. Gray, indeed! She rolled her eyes and sighed. Of all the silly hysterical panics. None of these people had any common sense. It wasn’t an invader. It was a baby, sweet as summer, heavy as a fruit. And ready to pop any day now, ripe and ready to melt. She stroked the awkward angular dome of her front. If only she could get down to that beach and float, weightless, then she’d feel better. Warm salt water — all her troubles would dissolve!

  She looked over at the instrument cart. One of those spatula things might help pry the flashing away from her window. She picked up the sturdiest one, and tucked it into her blouse above the big asymmetrical bulge.

  oOo

  Brenda W. Clough...

  ...is a meek, mild-mannered reporter at a major metropolitan publication. She has published seven novels, many short stories, nonfiction, and innumerable book reviews that revolve around death, misery, and grief. She has traveled around the world under the aegis of the US government, and now lives in a cottage at the edge of a forest, surrounded by animals.

  Her latest novel, Revise the World, is available at Book View Café . A version of it was a finalist for both the Hugo and Nebula awards.

  Slick

  Sylvia Kelso

  When I first saw it, I thought something had died.

  And in my waterhole. At least, my favorite waterhole, the best one on the place, and the place has been ours since granddad’s time.

  Then I thought, pollution. Those Neanderthal pig-shooters have been down here again, lighting fires and dropping beer cans at their backsides and slopping the waterhole full of oil.

  Because it looked like an oil slick. A raggedy, ten-foot wide oil slick, not quite above the water, not quite under it. Dull yellow, bobbly, undulating, sort of. Like a mat of old wattle flowers. Or the half-submerged rafts of yellow gloop you see, out near the islands, when the coral spawns.

  It’s not really a waterhole, the way most people use the word. It’s an anabranch, one of the secondary courses that the river fills when it floods. But once the flood ebbs, the water stays there, caught between the shallow places, a long, long, meandering ribbon shining through the grass and the tall piebald trunks of the blackbutt trees, smooth white above, scaly dark below. Rising over the knobbly piers of root that split the cattle-tracks, leaning out over the pitted mud, reaching down, down, into the coffee-crystal water, smooth, still, shimmery, among the flotillas of waterlily-pads.

  Nobody knows how deep it is. Deep enough to make cattle swim when they cross, deep enough never to show the bottom. Like I say, in white man’s memory, it’s never run dry.

  So when I saw the slick, I rode down for a look. The mare was twitchy, but the mare is always twitchy along the river. I don’t know if it’s the way the dead pandanus fronds rattle when she steps on them, or the smell of those cursed pigs. But the waterhole’s a good mile from the river channel, and I’ve always loved the place. So quiet, except when we come through mustering. Otherwise there’s just the crows and a magpie or two, and the silence of the river country. And that long, sea-sound draw of wind through miles of trees.

  It was a job to get near the water-rim. The mare kept jibbing and roots seemed to be everywhere. Nests of them, long, dark, criss-crossing roots stubborn as pythons, all over the lower bank, that had washed out into a regular cliff. I could see the thing over the top. Dusty yellow, floating, undulating. Like a slick of really heavy industrial oil.

  The mare put on a turn at the roots’ edge, so I didn’t actually get much of a look. Enough to think it wasn’t really oil, and wonder what on earth it might be, and with a jerk in the stomach, that maybe whatever-it-was was decayed, rotten, dead —

  And by the time I wrestled the mare back, it was gone.

  For a while that really puzzled me. But we’d come back from a different angle, and the sun was on the water, so it could all have been a trick of the light. Because now there was nothing at all. Just the waterhole, shimmering, that liquid amber sheen of undisturbed standing water. And the roots going down into it, and a waterlily, holding up one stained-glass blue flower.

  Imagination, I thought. Stupid, I thought. And went off in a hurry to block the cattle that had just come scooting down my bank, and forgot the idea that for one moment, under the clotted pollen yellow, there might have been something more.

  An arm. A face.

  oOo

  That might have been all there was to it — how many times has that been all there was to it? Except about a month later, we came back. Mustering stragglers, and I ended up with the river country. Riding through, checking for fresh tracks, listening for crows, that’ll tell you where the cattle are. Hearing the wind, and the quiet. Because the country was surprisingly empty. I hadn’t found a beast, when I stopped by the waterhole for my dinner camp.

  It was October by then, starting to build up for an early Wet. Hot. Not the burning inland heat, but wet heat, sweaty, sultry, thick as porridge, with the big, early storm clouds packed up before midday, snow-pale and
silver, hanging southward over me, making the river country seem quieter, and more hushed, and more — ominous — than it already was.

  So when we made the waterhole I was glad to let the horse wade, at a sandy place, and dip up a fairly clean quartpot-full while he drank. I had an old brown gelding that day, that the river country never worried a jot. I tied him in the shade at the top of the high bank, put a fire together, and boiled the quart for tea. And then, the way we always did if we had no cattle, stretched out by him in the shade for half an hour’s sleep.

  Not that I usually do sleep. But I did that day, because it was in my ears when I woke up.

  A horse’s snort. Not that easy clear-the-flies snort, but the nostril-crack they make when they’re alone, and surprised. Or afraid.

  I sat up fast. That should have made him jump. He never even twitched. He’d swung round beside me and his neck was straight up, head horizontal, the way horses look when they’ve absolutely panicked, and his ears were tight forward, and he was stiff all over. Staring.