Wandering Stars

by Jack Dann (ed)

  “What are you so happy about? Thinking of your grandchildren with the twelve toes?”

  She doesn’t flinch. An iron woman.

  When I close my eyes, which is rarely, I see our daughter when she was fourteen years old, with skin just beginning to go pimply and no expression yet on her face. I see her walking up to Sadie and asking her what she should do with her life now she’s filling out, and my darling Sadie, my life’s mate, telling her why not marry a freak; you got to be a beauty to find a man here, but on Mars you shouldn’t know from so many fish. “I knew I could count on you, Mama,” she says, and goes ahead and marries a plant with legs.

  Things go on like this—impossible—for months. I lose twenty pounds, my nerves, three teeth and I’m on the verge of losing Sadie, when one day the mailchute goes ding-dong and it’s a letter from my late daughter. I take it by the tips of two fingers and bring it in to where my wife is punching ingredients for the gravy I won’t eat tonight.

  “It’s a communication from one of your relatives.”

  “Oh-oh-oh.” My wife makes a grab for it, meanwhile punching CREAM-TOMATO-SAUCE-BEEF DRIPPINGS. No wonder I have no appetite.

  “I’ll give it to you on one condition only,” I tell her, holding it out of her trembling reach. “Take it into the bedroom and read it to yourself. Don’t even move your lips for once; I don’t want to know. If she’s God forbid dead, I’ll send him a sympathy card.”

  Sadie has a variety of expressions but the one thing they have in common is they all wish me misfortune in my present and future life.

  While she’s reading the letter I find suddenly I have nothing to do. The magazines I read already. Breakfast I ate (like a bird). I’m all dressed to go out if I felt like, but there’s nothing outside I don’t have inside. Frankly, I don’t feel like myself—I’m nervous. I say a lot of things I don’t really intend and now maybe this letter comes to tell me I’ve got to pay for my meanness. Maybe she got sick up there; God knows what they eat, the kind of water they drink, the creatures they run around with. Not wanting to think about it too much, I go over to my chair and turn it on to brisk massage. It doesn’t take long till I’m dreaming (fitfully).

  I’m someplace surrounded by sand, sitting in a baby’s crib and bouncing a diapered kangaroo on my knee. It gurgles up at me and calls me grandpa and I don’t know what I should do. I don’t want to hurt its feelings, but if I’m a grandpa to a kangaroo, I want no part of it; I only want it should go away. I pull out a dime from my pocket and put it into its pouch. The pouch is full of tiny insects which bite my fingers. I wake up in a sweat.

  “Sadie! Are you reading, or rearranging the sentences? Bring it in here and I’ll see what she wants. If it’s a divorce, I know a lawyer.”

  Sadie comes into the room with her I-told-you-so waddle and gives me a small wet kiss on the cheek—a gold star for acting like a mensch. So I start to read it, in a loud monotone so she shouldn’t get the impression I give a damn:

  “Dear Daddy, I’m sorry for not writing sooner. I suppose I wanted to give you a chance to simmer down first.” (Ingrate! Does the sun simmer down?) “I know it would have been inconvenient for you to come to the wedding, but Mor and I hoped you would maybe send us a letter just to let us know you’re okay and still love me, in spite of everything.”

  Right at this point I feel a hot sigh followed by a short but wrenching moan.

  “Sadie, get away from my neck. I’m warning you....”

  Her eyes are going flick-a-fleck over my shoulder, from the piece of paper I’m holding to my face, back to the page, flick-a-fleck, flick-a-fleck.

  “All right, already,” she shoo-shoos me. “I read it, I know what’s in it. Now it’s your turn to see what kind of a lousy father you turned out to be.” And she waddles back into the bedroom, shutting the door extra careful, like she’s handling a piece of snow-white velvet.

  When I’m certain she’s gone, I sit myself down on the slab of woven dental floss my wife calls a couch and press a button on the arm that reads SEMI-CL.: FELDMAN TO FRIML. The music starts to slither out from the speaker under my left armpit. The right speaker is dead and buried and the long narrow one at the base years ago got drowned from the dog, who to this day hasn’t learned to control himself when he hears “Desert Song.”

  This time I’m lucky; it’s a piece by Feldman that comes on. I continue to read, calmed by the music.

  “I might as well get to the point, Papa, because for all I know you’re so mad you tore up this letter without even reading it. The point is that Mor and I are going to have a baby. Please, please don’t throw this into the disintegrator. It’s due in July, which gives you over three months to plan the trip up here. We have a lovely house, with a guest room that you and Mama can stay in for as long as you want.”

  I have to stop here to interject a couple of questions, since my daughter never had a head for logic and it’s my strong point.

  First of all, if she were in front of me in person right now I would ask right off what means “Mor and I are going to have a baby.” Which? Or both? The second thing is, when she refers to it as “it” is she being literal or just uncertain? And just one more thing and then I’m through for good: Just how lovely can a guest room be that has all the air piped in and you can’t even see the sky or take a walk on the grass because there is no grass, only simulated this and substituted that?

  All the above notwithstanding, I continue to read:

  “By the way, Papa, there’s something I’m not sure you understand. Mor, you may or may not know, is as human as you and me, in all the important ways—and frankly a bit more intelligent.”

  I put down the letter for a minute just to give the goosebumps a chance to fly out of my stomach ulcers before I go on with her love and best and kisses and hopes for seeing us soon, Lorinda.

  I don’t know how she manages it, but the second I’m finished, Sadie is out of the bedroom and breathing hard.

  “Well, do I start packing or do I start packing? And when I start packing, do I pack for us or do I pack for me?”

  “Never. I should die three thousand deaths, each one with a worse prognosis.”

  It’s a shame a company like Interplanetary Aviation can’t afford, with the fares they charge, to give you a comfortable seat. Don’t ask how I ever got there in the first place. Ask my wife—she’s the one with the mouth. First of all, they only allow you three pounds of luggage, which if you’re only bringing clothes is plenty, but we had a few gifts with us. We were only planning to stay a few days and to sublet the house was Sadie’s idea, not mine.

  The whole trip was supposed to take a month, each way. This is one reason Sadie thought it was impractical to stay for the weekend and then go h ome, which was the condition on which I’d agreed to go.

  But now that we’re on our way, I decide I might as well relax. I close my eyes and try to think of what the first meeting will be like.

  “How.” I put up my right hand in a gesture of friendship and trust. I reach into my pocket and offer him beads.

  But even in my mind he looks at me blank, his naked pink antennas waving in the breeze like a worm’s underwear. Then I realize there isn’t any breeze where we’re going. So they stop waving and wilt.

  I look around in my mind. We’re alone, the two of us, in the middle of a vast plain, me in my business suit and him in his green skin. The scene looks familiar, like something I had experienced, or read about.... “We’ll meet at Philippi,” I think, and stab him with my sword.

  Only then am I able to catch a few winks.

  The month goes by. When I begin to think I’ll never remember how to use a fork, the loudspeaker is turned on and I hear this very smooth, modulated voice, the tranquilized tones of a psychiatrist sucking glycerine, telling us it’s just about over, and we should expect a slight jolt upon landing.

  That slight jolt starts my life going by so fast I’m missing all the good parts. But finally the ship is still and all you can hear are
the wheezes and sighs of the engines—the sounds remind me of Sadie when she’s winding down from a good argument. I look around. Everybody is very white. Sadie’s five fingers are around my upper arm like a tourniquet.

  “We’re here,” I tell her. “Do I get a hacksaw or can you manage it yourself?”

  “Oh, my goodness.” She loosens her grip. She really looks a mess—completely pale, not blinking, not even nagging.

  I take her by the arm and steer her into customs. All the time I feel that she’s a big piece of unwilling luggage I’m smuggling in. There’s no cooperation at all in her feet and her eyes are going every which way.

  “Sadie, shape up!”

  “If you had a little more curiosity about the world you’d be a better person,” she says tolerantly.

  While we’re waiting to be processed by a creature in a suit like ours who surprises me by talking English, I sneak a quick look around.

  It’s funny. If I didn’t know where we are I’d think we’re in the backyard. The ground stretches out pure green, and it’s only from the leaflet they give you in the ship to keep your mind off the panic that I know it’s 100 percent Acrispan we’re looking at, not grass. The air we’re getting smells good, too, like fresh-cut flowers, but not too sweet.

  By the time I’ve had a good look and a breathe, what’s-its-name is handing us back our passports with a button that says to keep Mars beautiful don’t litter.

  I won’t tell you about the troubles we had getting to the house, or the misunderstanding about the tip, because to be honest I wasn’t paying attention. But we do manage to make it to the right door, and considering that the visit was a surprise, I didn’t really expect they would meet us at the airport. My daughter must have been peeking, though, because she’s in front of us even before we have a chance to knock.

  “Mother!” she says, looking very round in the stomach. She hugs and kisses Sadie, who starts bawling. Five minutes later, when they’re out of the clinch, Lorinda turns to me, a little nervous.

  You can say a lot of things about me, but basically I’m a warm person, and we’re about to be guests in this house, even if she is a stranger to me. I shake her hand.

  “Is he home, or is he out in the back yard, growing new leaves?”

  Her face (or what I can see of it through the climate adapter) crumbles a little at the chin line, but she straightens it out and puts her hand on my shoulder.

  “Mor had to go out, Daddy—something important came up—but he should be back in an hour or so. Come on, let’s go inside.”

  Actually there’s nothing too crazy about the house, or even interesting. It has walls, a floor and a roof, I’m glad to see, even a few relaxer chairs, and after the trip we just had, I sit down and relax. I notice my daughter is having a little trouble looking me straight in the face, which is only as it should be, and it isn’t long before she and Sadie are discussing pregnancy, gravitational exercise, labor, hospitals, formulas and sleep-taught toilet training. When I’m starting to feel that I’m getting over-educated, I decide to go into the kitchen and make myself a bite to eat. I could have asked them for a little something but I don’t want to interfere with their first conversation. Sadie has all engines going and is interrupting four times a sentence, which is exactly the kind of game they always had back home—my daughter’s goal is to say one complete thought out loud. If Sadie doesn’t spring back with a non sequitur, Lorinda wins that round. A full-fledged knockout with Sadie still champion is when my daughter can’t get a sentence in for a week. Sometimes I can understand why she went to Mars.

  Anyway, while they’re at the height of their simultaneous monologues, I go quietly off to the kitchen to see what I can dig up. (Ripe parts of Mor, wrapped in plastic? Does he really regenerate, I wonder. Does Lorinda fully understand how he works, or one day will she make an asparagus omelet out of one of his appendages, only to learn that’s the part that doesn’t grow back? “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she says. “Can you ever forgive me?”)

  The refrigerator, though obsolete on Earth, is well stocked—fruits of a sort, steaks, it seems, small chicken-type things that might be stunted pigeons. There’s a bowl of a brownish, creamy mess—I can’t even bring myself to smell it. Who’s hungry, anyway, I think. The rumbling in my stomach is the symptom of a father’s love turning sour.

  I wander into the bedroom. There’s a large portrait of Mor hanging on the wall—or maybe his ancestor. Is it true that, instead of hearts, Martians have a large avocado pit? There’s a rumor on Earth that when Martians get old they start to turn brown at the edges, like lettuce.

  There’s an object on the floor and I bend down and pick it up. A piece of material—at home I would have thought it was a man’s handkerchief. Maybe it is a handkerchief. Maybe they have colds like us. They catch a germ, the sap rises to combat the infection, and they have to blow their stamens. I open up a drawer to put the piece of material in (I like to be neat), but when I close it, something gets stuck. Another thing I can’t recognize. It’s small, round and either concave or convex, depending on how you look at it. It’s made of something black and shiny. A cloth bowl? What would a vegetable be doing with a cloth bowl? Some questions are too deep for me, but what I don’t know I eventually find out—and not by asking, either.

  I go back to the living room.

  “Did you find anything to eat?” Lorinda asks. “Or would you like me to fix—”

  “Don’t even get up,” Sadie says quickly. “I can find my way around any kitchen, I don’t care whose.”

  “I’m not hungry. It was a terrible trip. I thought I’d never wake up from it in one piece. By the way, I heard a good riddle on the ship. What’s round and black, either concave or convex, depending on how you look at it, and made out of a shiny material?”

  Lorinda blushed. “A skullcap? But that’s not funny.”

  “So who needs funny? Riddles have to be a laugh a minute all of a sudden? You think Oedipus giggled all the way home from seeing the Sphinx?”

  “Look, Daddy, I think there’s something I should tell you.”

  “I think there are all sorts of things you should tell me.”

  “No, I mean about Mor.”

  “Who do you think I mean, the grocery boy? You elope with a cucumber from outer space and you want I should be satisfied because he’s human in all the important ways? What’s important—that he sneezes and hiccups? If you tell me he snores, I should be ecstatic? Maybe he sneezes when he’s happy and hiccups when he’s making love and snores because it helps him think better. Does that make him human?”

  “Daddy, please.”

  “Okay, not another word.” Actually I’m starting to feel quite guilty. What if she has a miscarriage right on the spot? A man like me doesn’t blithely torture a pregnant woman, even if she does happen to be his daughter. “What’s so important it can’t wait till later?”

  “Nothing, I guess. Would you like some chopped liver? I just made some fresh.”

  “What?”

  “Chopped liver—you know, chopped liver.”

  Oh yes, the ugly mess in the refrigerator. “You made it, that stuff in the bowl?”

  “Sure. Daddy, there’s something I really have to tell you.”

  She never does get to tell me, though, because her husband walks in, bold as brass.

  I won’t even begin to tell you what he looks like. Let me just say he’s a good dream cooked up by Mary Shelley. I won’t go into it, but if it gives you a small idea, I’ll say that his head is shaped like an acorn on top of a stalk of broccoli. Enormous blue eyes, green skin and no hair at all except for a small blue round area on top of his head. His ears are adorable. Remember Dumbo the Elephant? Only a little smaller—I never exaggerate, even for effect. And he looks boneless, like a filet.

  My wife, God bless her, I don’t have to worry about; she’s a gem in a crisis. One look at her son-in-law and she faints dead away. If I didn’t know her better, if I wasn’t absolutely certain that her simple
mind contained no guile, I would have sworn she did it on purpose, to give everybody something to fuss about. Before we know what’s happening, we’re all in a tight, frantic conversation about what’s the best way to bring her around. But while my daughter and her husband are in the bathroom looking for some deadly chemical, Sadie opens both eyes at once and stares up at me from the floor.

  “What did I miss?”

  “You didn’t miss anything—you were only unconscious for fifteen seconds. It was a cat nap, not a coma.”

  “Say hello, Hector. Say hello to him or so help me I’ll close my eyes for good.”

  “I’m very glad to meet you, Mr. Trumbnick,” he says. I’m grateful that he’s sparing me the humiliation of making the first gesture, but I pretend I don’t see the stalk he’s holding out.

  “Smutual,” I say.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Smutual. How are you? You look better than your pictures.” He does, too. Even though his skin is green, it looks like the real thing up close. But his top lip sort of vibrates when he talks, and I can hardly bear to look at him except sideways.

  “I hear you had some business this afternoon. My daughter never did tell me what your line is, uh, Morton.”

  “Daddy, his name is Mor. Why don’t you call him Mor?”

  “Because I prefer Morton. When we know each other better I’ll call him something less formal. Don’t rush me, Lorinda; I’m still getting adjusted to the chopped liver.”

  My son-in-law chuckles and his top lip really goes crazy. “Oh, were you surprised? Imported meats aren’t a rarity here, you know. Just the other day one of my clients was telling me about an all-Earth meal he had at home.”