The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

  Her palace had settled right across the main runways and that was a bother because it was there permanently. “Only built for coming down,” she said. “It won’t be going on up anymore.” She tilted her hand right and left to show the way the palace had landed, drifting back and forth as though of no weight at all. “When down,” she said, “is down.” Our bulldozers couldn’t budge it. From then on, 747s had to land all the way up in Boston or down at Dulles.

  We had seen the huge hips first and took them for some sort of big, blank alien face, but then she turned around, stood up with the aid of her props. Her first words after landing were the ones she always used. “Good, good. I like it. I like it a lot.”

  What was there to like about the vistas of Kennedy Airport? “If she says good, good, to that, she’ll say good to anything,” we said, and she did say good to anything and everything. She could see the sunset lighting up the haze over the New Jersey gas-cracking plants and liked what she saw and even what she smelled. She could examine a thin-shelled egg that would never hatch and say she loved it even so. She had small, close-set eyes—big compared to ours, but small for her bulk—and she seemed nearsighted, always squinting down at us, or any creature or thing. It seemed as if, to her, the smaller the better: bugs and bees and seeds and tiny sprouts… studying, puzzling over. If looking was any indication, she loved the tiniest things the most of all.

  It really was a palace that had come down—or looked to be more palace than spaceship with its turrets and towers, and it occurred to us that, even though they knew a lot about us, they didn’t know enough. It also occurred to us that she, herself, had been made purely to impress us—that she might be as artificial as her palace/ship seemed, but they had got the head too small, the stomach and hips too big, and the overall size way off.

  She had gifts for us. When she first mentioned them, we thought of scientific or medical advancements, new metals, the secrets of her spaceship, but it turned out her gifts were picture frames, all sizes. One of the first things she did was to stand a large one up in front of her and look at us through it, saying, “Good.”

  Though she was large, there was a mildness about her so that no one was afraid. She was like Gulliver, though smaller, and she let herself be tested and sampled: urine, blood, even large chunks of skin. So many of us wanted these that she ended up quite scarred and pale. (The skin was merely skin. The blood merely blood.) She let us listen to her great, slow breathing and her great, slow heartbeat. We (all the rest of us) saw the whole process on TV; heard the breathing and the heartbeats amplified. Some of us still couldn’t believe she was real. I doubted, too, but I was won over the evening I heard her heartbeat on the news. I listened as though to the waterfall of life—the seashore of life on a calm day; and when they focused the camera, closer and closer, on her close-set eyes, they loomed like sunrises and seemed to look right through me and yet love me anyway. Her breasts, in yellow silk (or what looked like silk), also rose up in the same way as her eyes, as if over the mountains. What can one say about those breasts! They, like her eyes, could see right through me. I knew everybody else was thinking the exact same thoughts—for in, then certainly all of us.

  As for love, I had done a lot of research. I had a postgraduate degree in it. I knew enough about it to doubt that she knew anything about it except the word itself, but, because love seemed to be her main topic of conversation and because of my credential, I was given the assignment of asking her to marry me in order to get to know her more intimately—find out who she was behind all this “Good, good,” what she really came here for, and what she meant when she said she “loved”—if she meant anything at all by it.

  There was certainly danger in the assignment. I’d learned in my studies not only that it’s the quiet ones who are the most passionate, but also that the quiet ones can be the most violent. I knew that, because of her size alone, there could be danger in her passion as well as in her anger. Perhaps, of the two, her passion would be the most dangerous.

  “Ask her to marry you right away,” they told me. “That way you’ll get close to her before she finds out it’s not our custom to get married so quickly (if at all these days).”

  When I first saw her “in the flesh” (good word to describe her, “flesh”) I wondered, allover again, if she were real, if there might not be a dozen puppeteers inside making her move, except they probably wouldn’t have been that awkward. They would have practiced until they could work smoothly together. And there were too many mistakes. The warts, for instance, and she wasn’t at all as good-looking as she’d seemed on TV. The lights had been so bright they hadn’t brought out the real color of her skin. It was grayish, tending to purple around her eyes and under her chin. There were large, whitish warts here and there that they’d covered with makeup. What I noticed most, though, after the first shock of seeing her so large and so gray, were the circles under her eyes and how she kept blinking. If one could judge from how we look when exhausted, then she, too, was exhausted.

  I think when she said yes to my asking her to marry me, she hardly knew what she was doing. She was simply saying yes to everything anyone requested of her—another sample of her skin, some strands of ropy blond hair, or if she’d marry me.

  I wondered why the others didn’t see her exhaustion or didn’t pay any attention to it, and I thought I knew how to get on her good side quickly. “We’ll have a honeymoon,” I said. “Do you know what that is? We’ll go away by ourselves and you’ll get some sleep.”

  I explained my strategy to my bosses; they approved and made it possible for us to go off alone even though that wasn’t easy.

  (Do you, Leonard, take Harriet—that’s who she insisted she was—to be your lawful, etc. “Oh, I do, I do, I do. I really do, and forever.” She was always saying too much.)

  An L1011 had to be gutted so we could travel, and an area cleared for a mile-long airstrip, with another clearing beside a lonely lake so an army tent could be put up and stocked with food and drinking water. And it all had to be done secretly so we really would be able to be alone and she really would be able to get some rest. And I must compliment them. They did find us a beautiful, wild, and lonely place in the mountains.

  I was so patient and kind I hardly knew myself I’d never been that way with any of my girlfriends, but of course this time I was being paid for it. Also this was important research, and for the welfare of humanity in general. I could make good use of the skills I’d learned in my studies on the four main kinds of love and their subcategories. I could give all of myself in the service of my science and not feel I was giving more than my share. I expected to give more than my share whether or not I got back what was due me from my partner. But engulfed! There was not only the figurative but also the real possibility of that. I was determined, though, to keep the upper hand, and I was determined, as I’d never been before with my girlfriends, determined that she should love me, and more, and in a different way from this love, love, love she was always talking about. She didn’t even know me and already she’d told me that she loved me “like the ocean and the mountain, and you are my mountain.” (I felt more like her mouse.)

  I told her to forget love and that she should lie down on the air mattresses they’d lined up for her. I said, “Relax and I’ll rub your back. Good old American back rub.” I called it American though of course it wasn’t, but I wanted to get her on our side. Nobody knew yet what her capabilities were or if there would be other gifts that might be more useful than picture frames. If there were, we wanted them to be for us. “American lake, American honeymoon, American moon in the big American sky,” I said.

  She lay down and I pulled her big, loose blouse up and thought to myself, I have to do it in spite of the warts and the little hairy patches. I just have to shut my eyes and do it, but she was snoring monstrous snores almost as soon as I began kneading the back of her neck.

  She slept a great, three-day sleep, looking like some big beached thing, flattened with gravity,
out of her element for sure. I wondered why in the world she said she liked it here—had even called it home—when it was obviously uncomfortable for her. I thought she was probably well trained to do her job, but then so was I, so we were even.

  I was lying on the dock when she finally woke and came crawling out of the tent—again, hind end first—not bothering with her crutches or trying to stand up. I suppose not wanting, quite so soon after waking, to face gravity. She crawled over to the shore, carefully skirting a patch of iris.

  “Don’t drink,” I yelled, and just in time. “God knows what’s in the water, not even counting Giardia.” But I told her swimming was probably OK so she went on in, rolled onto her back, floating high and waved her arms over her head as though in some ritual of greeting the day. She had with her, hanging from her shoulder, a picture frame like the ones she’d used for gifts.

  “I thought all you people lived under bright lights,” she said. “I thought you were always asking questions and staying up all night giving little pricks and cuts. Now I see a different side. You do good things for me. I have slept a great, good sleep of love because of you. What’s next on a honeymoon?”

  The honeymoon part, I hoped, could wait. Now I would begin a different study. “What’s all this talk of love about, anyway? What is love to you?”

  “Oh, you know love,” she said. “It has more meanings than can be spoken of, and there’s always danger in it.” (I knew that well enough.) “It’s a big risk, but, best of all, it’s full of surprises.” Then she held up the picture frame and looked through it at the far shore. “Look how everything is so green and new,” she said.

  It didn’t look that way to me, but I didn’t say so. Dead maple trees dotted the forest (I had been sorry to see the maple syrup come to an end even though we have flavors that can imitate it fairly well), the tops of almost all the spruce were brown and many of them, too, were dead, but I had to admit it was still beautiful anyway. The water looked clear. Some hardy birds still sang. A woodpecker still pecked. Bees were rare, but other things buzzed about.

  “I feel as if I fell down from the sky right onto this sweet new place here where everything likes me. Look, even the flies like me.”

  “Dragonflies,” I said, “and thank goodness.”

  “I think how love is, is how to dance. It’s hard, but you do it anyway. You practice and learn the positions for it. Bring me my crutches, lover dear, if you wouldn’t mind, so I can dance love for you. Then you’ll see all about it. It has to be shown and not talked of”

  I went and got them, the two crutches and three props. “Dance of death” was what was in my mind, but I was here to take risks and, as she’d said, love is a risk. Even true love with my own kind is a risk. I knew that from my experiments.

  She had a lot of trouble getting up. I went to help her, but she waved me away. “Everybody has to love all by themselves,” she said. “That’s one of the risks of it. Just like with death, you’re all alone with your love. Now watch me through the frame.”

  Those frames were nothing but normal picture frames. We’d tested them carefully, but I picked it up, anyway, and looked at her through it. It was just as I knew it would be, exactly the same except with a frame around it. She’d given out thousands of those frames, and I’d thought then, as I thought now, we’ll kill ourselves off for sure if we sit around looking at everything through frames. That will be how they’ll take us over. Though I guess it’s no worse than TV Maybe better for us than TV Perhaps the frames are to wake us up-take us away from TV That would be doing us a favor. But I didn’t believe they’d really want to do us any favors. I thought maybe, instead, they wanted us to leave well enough—or, rather, not so well enough—alone. That would kill us all off. These laissez-faire frames were so we’d see that everything looked about as good as it could and we’d leave it that way. Maybe that was their strategy.

  She began her big, dumb dance, stumbling and wobbling. No danger in it to me that I could see, unless she fell on me. Holding up the frame made me awkward—as awkward as she was, so I kept well away. At the end of the dance she tried to twirl around faster and faster and did fall—into the iris patch. “The best of love,” she said, lying there panting, shaking allover, “was in that last part.” Then she saw she’d ruined the iris and looked as if she might cry, but held herself back. “Death is everywhere,” she said, “as usual, and right in the middle of love.”

  She crawled into the tent and brought out another picture frame and then she sat near the edge of the dock. (I was glad to see she had better sense than to walk out on it.) “Now we sit,” she said. “I’ll rest up and we can watch this world together.” At that moment I couldn’t feel any menace in her even though I thought certainly they will win over us. All they have to do is wait.

  In the water minnows no longer clustered under the dock, though a few lay, belly up, along the shore. Crayfish no longer shunted from rock to rock. But turtles were still there, sunning themselves on the dead tree trunks that had fallen in near the banks. And we could watch the mating beetles, and the mating frogs, and the luminescent dragonflies, mating as they flew.

  “What’s next on the honeymoon?” she said again, after several minutes of watching through the frame. Then she said what had been on my mind… what I’d been worrying about all this time. “Sex,” she said. “When is that?”

  “What about real love?” I said. “I mean really real love?” Of course I was stalling.

  “Oh, I can prove that. Come close.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Wait a minute!” Then I thought back to my training and turned it back to her. (Always ask a question if you don’t know what to do next.) “What do you think should happen now?” I asked. “And how do they do things where you come from? After all,” I said, “I don’t want to be selfish. We should do things your way sometimes.”

  She looked pleased, but then she said again to come closer. ‘’I’ll show you,” she said, and she reached out with that big picture frame—I stepped back, but not fast enough. She hooked me around the neck with it and pulled me to her. I was right up against her big, naked stomach, breasts hovering over my head—resting on it, actually, one big boob actually resting on the top of my head. I couldn’t breathe. Nothing was covering my nose or mouth, but I felt as though I were suffocating. Right in front of me was one of her biggest moles and it had five or six thick, black hairs growing from it. A part of me felt sympathy for her for having a mole like that, but another part of me was terrified—especially terrified because I began to have an erection. I told myself it was from fear, except here were these big boobs drooping over me, soft against my forehead, the puckered areola, a huge nipple, erect, hovering, wobbling back and forth in front of my mouth.

  “No!” I shouted. I couldn’t help myself I put my hands—lost them actually-in her soft belly and pushed with all the weight and strength I had, and she, her balance never good, went down backward. As she fell, the frame came up over my head and I was free. I ran. Up the mountain. I thought that would be safest. I could hear her struggling to get up behind me and I knew I could get a good head start. I didn’t look back until I was out of breath and had to stop.

  She was coming faster than I expected. No props or crutches, but then it was a steep climb and she didn’t need them as she would have on flat ground. I went on, angling more to the side, but I knew that wouldn’t help much. She could always lean into the mountain even going sideways and support herself In going up, I had just made it easier for her.

  I headed for a pile of boulders. I was getting tired and hoped there’d be a place to hide. I found what I was looking for, a crack between two huge stones that I could wriggle into but she couldn’t and where I could go farther in than her arm could reach. I waited there, listening to the loosened rocks clattering down, to the scrape and rustle of bushes, to her great breathing and to her breathless calling. “My love,” she called. “My only one. My dearest heart. Honey bunch. My heart will break.” Where had she
learned all these cliches? Certainly we don’t use them anymore. And how could a people invent a great civilization and communicate—God knows from where or how far-travel through space, arrive in a “palace” that couldn’t be moved or even blasted out of the way, and then keep talking like this all the time? And I mean all the time.

  But already she had come up and was leaning against my rocks. “It’s love that helps to find the lover,” she said, breathing hard and looking in at me. “Love needs no sense of direction, nor of smell, nor to see the tracks. Love finds its ways.” (She had probably heard me. I was, as she was, breathing hard.)

  I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Cut the crap,” I said, but she went on.

  “Dear heart,” she said, as though out of some Victorian novel. “Dear, dear, dear, dear heart.”

  “Look,” I said. “You can’t keep loving everything that comes in sight. And I’m sick and tired,” I said, “of hearing about it.” Then I said all sorts of things you’re not supposed to say if you want any kind of lasting relationship with a person. I said she was sappy. I said no one—not a single person on this planet—could put up with her for a minute, least of all myself “Love!” I said, “I don’t even like you. Nobody here does.”

  She sat down then, and I could see her better from between my stones. She was looking at the ground, scratching into it with one big, fat finger, and, again, I had a feeling of sympathy for her, but then she said, “There’s a sweet little bug here.”

  “Crush it,” I said, and she did.

  “What about all these other ones?”

  “Same,”I said, “and keep doing it.” She did and then looked for more little things to crush. I felt a wicked sense of satisfaction. “OK,” I said, “now no more picture frames. Promise.”

  “All right,” she said. ‘’And stop doing everything I say to do. I can’t stand that anymore.”