by E. C. Tubb
He crumpled it up. Then something made him smooth it out and read that single word again. With a sigh he put the card in his breast pocket, next to his heart, and tried to force her from his thoughts for the rest of the evening.
“Something to drink, master?”
It was a squat emerald-colored alien with flesh like gelatin and dozens of waving green tentacles, each holding a half-filled champagne glass. Cris couldn’t see where its voice came from. One tentacle uncoiled toward him, and Cris took the offered glass with a nod and a muttered, “Thanks.”
Sipping, he put on his charm and began to mingle with the patrons. It was expected. With megamoney everywhere, some alien, most human, there was no telling where his next sale or commission would come from.
An old lady with blue-and-gold striped hair and too many tatoos for Cris’s taste, hanging on the twin right arms of an Auctoran hominid in a pale gray tunic, cornered him by his holostatue of starships crashing into the sun. “You’re a genius,” she cooed, “the last artist left who actually feels the human condition.” The Auctoran just nodded, the coiled ropes of reddish-brown flesh on the sides of its head swaying.
“Thank you,” Cris murmured as she nattered on and on and on. “You’re too kind.” His gaze kept straying back to the door, to where he’d last seen Marica, and he felt a strange, empty sort of longing inside.
* * * *
To Cris’s surprise, when his opening ended two hours later and he wandered slightly drunk, slightly melancholy out onto the rooftop parking lot for a breath of fresh air, the glitterfolk were waiting. They had a huge new aircar taking up half a dozen spaces, and the raucous, somehow crowlike noise of the party inside settled heavily on him. The aircar itself rippled under holos, looking first like some ancient Greek temple, then a seagoing luxury yacht, then back again in a looped cycle.
The door swung open and Jade Moon, one of the few of Marica’s friends Cris remembered (more for her green-dyed face than anything else), took his arm and pulled him in.
“I feel alienated,” she announced proudly.
“Good for you,” Cris said. He pushed deeper into the chandeliered main room. Holoed geometric designs flickered everywhere, blinding, revealing, blinding. Icons of dead performers projected themselves atop men and women by turn. He wandered through the Marilyns, the Elvises, the Ted Turners, the Nathan Blakes. He didn’t see Marica anywhere, so he moved into the next room. Here dancers swayed, beckoning, undulating to the pulsing beat of glaze-rock. Colored lights blinded, then revealed, as a haze of drugmists drifted through the air. He breathed too deeply; his vision began to swim and dizziness threatened to topple his sense of balance. He found no sign of Marica here, either, so he pushed through the electric soundguard into the driver’s compartment, sparks of static electricity ghosting over the folds of his clothes.
Alone, Marica stood next to the driver’s seat, looking out across the city’s lights. She turned when he cleared his throat, and he saw she’d been crying.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. There was a lump in his throat. He could feel his heart beating faster.
“We’re so alone in the world.” She stepped close and leaned her head against his shoulder.
He hesitated a second, then pulled her tight, hugging her like she’d never left, never annulled their marriage, never abandoned him. God, it felt good. For a second the months were reeling back and she was his again and they were in love, just the two of them together against the world.
Then, remembering the pain of loss as she grew bored and drifted away, he forced himself back, holding her at arm’s length. His hands were shaking ever so faintly, and nothing he could do could control them.
“No, Marica,” he whispered. “Not again. Not this time.”
She sagged. Trembling, he let her collapse at his feet. Softly she began to sob.
Cris bit his lip, torn a million ways inside. He didn’t know what to do. Alienation. It was just another glitterfad, ultimately meaningless. And, he reminded himself, sure to pass. But for now she needs me. For now…
He couldn’t help himself. He knelt and hugged her, and once more his heart surged inside him and he experienced that strange joy, that strange fulfillment, he only found at her side.
“Drive us?” she asked.
“What happened to Kyan?”
“Brainblotted.” She pulled back a little. “We locked him in the closet till he recovers. Nobody else wanted to drive, so we waited for you. You’ll do it, won’t you?”
“Do you want to go home?”
She shook her head, gesturing vaguely west, toward the spaceport. “Please?”
He bent to kiss her, but she pushed him away, laughing. “Just friends.”
“I need to paint you.”
“You already did.”
“I need to do it again. For me, not the gallery this time. So I can remember you.”
“Just friends,” she repeated.
“I’ll kill myself!” he swore. “I can’t live without you! Marica, please!”
“No, Cris. I’m sorry…it’s over.”
It felt like nails being driven into his coffin. Angrily he thought, It’s like we never had anything between us. He ignored the dark impulses within, the little voice that said, Hit her, make her pay, she’s killing you inside.
Instead, he slid into the driver’s seat and buckled the harness across his chest. Digital readouts appeared on his retinas: a haze of numbers and view options. Everything checked; they were ready to go.
“Alienation,” Marica was whispering as she gazed out the viewport and hugged herself. She said it over and over again like a mantra: “Alienation, alienation, alienation.”
* * * *
She steered him not to the spaceport, but to the warehouse district. This late, it lay empty, a ghost-town of towering old brick buildings. They roared down deserted streets seemingly at random. Then Marica flicked on the aircar’s underbelly lights. Pavement leapt to life: scurrying rats, bits of trash, dust and dirt and decades’ accumulated grime.
Cris began powering down, assuming she wanted to land, but Marica shook her head. “Keep going,” she said.
Then it hit him. “You’re looking for aliens,” he said.
She smiled, eyes scanning the street ahead. Sometimes, Cris knew, illegals stowed away on freighters and made their way to Earth. The police made periodic sweeps through the spaceport and its outlying sectors, rounding them up, but invariably a small number slipped past.
“There!” she said, pointing. Cris caught a glimpse of something like a small, hairless bear ducking into an alley.
“Land,” Marica said. “That’s the one I want.”
Cris felt confused, out of step. “Why?” he had to ask.
“It’s coming to the party.”
“You don’t even know if it’s intelligent!”
“Does it matter?”
Yes, Cris wanted to say, but he didn’t. That might upset her, and upsetting her might screw up their chances of getting together again. She didn’t seem to have taken a new lover yet. He could still hope, still plan, still dream of her.
Toggling the automatic landing sequence, he stood and offered Marica his elbow. She took it. Arm in arm, they passed through the soundguard, through the danceroom to the main doors.
“Alienation,” she said loudly, with great affected sighs, “can make you happy!”
Abruptly she screamed. Cris jumped, caught by surprise, and when the glitterfolk began to applaud and gather around and pat her on the back, he cursed them. But it was Marica who drew his eye, and he couldn’t push her from his thoughts no matter how he tried.
* * * *
The aircar grounded with a jangle of chandeliers and a renewed popping of champagne corks. The music started again, now weirdly atonal, full of drums and primitive rhythms. Dancers began to gyrate. Cris glanced at Marica and found her sheathed in a Betty Boop hologram.
The doors opened with a hiss, and a sour, vaguely chemical smell poured i
n. Cris moved to the doorway and found himself gazing out at the wall of a bleak gray warehouse. Streaks of light blazed across the sky as starships came and went from the spaceport a few kilometers away. The night seemed singularly uninviting.
Marica gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Excited?” she asked.
“I don’t like it,” he said. “Let’s get back to your house, Marica. This isn’t fun.”
She laughed and gestured grandly. “We’re for alienation. That’s the theme tonight. Alienation. Alienation. So we need an alien. Right?”
Cris nodded gloomily. “I guess.” It was going to be that sort of night, he could tell, full of odd meanings, full of odd portents. Perhaps—”
“Tam, David,” Marica called, and a couple of glitterfolk with quicksilver hair gave up the dance to join her. Faithful hounds, Cris thought. Marica passed out lightsticks and tanglenets from a box labelled MEDICAL SUPPLIES, and gave all three quick pecks on the cheek, “For luck.”
Cris tromped out with Tam and David on his heels. Buildings loomed as far in each direction as he could see. There were no visible windows or doors, of course; those lay atop roofs.
Standing a moment, getting his bearings, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the dimness. It wasn’t truly dark this close to the city; the sky glowed the yellow-brown of an old bruise, creating a perpetual grim twilight.
He faced the alley. Get it over with. He gestured Tam left and David right.
“Circle around”, he said. “I’ll go straight in. We’ll see if we can catch it.”
They padded away.
The beat of drums from the aircar felt like a headache coming on.
Chris sighed, rubbed his eyes, and turned up his lightstick until it cast a brilliant blue-white glow. He clipped it to his belt. Hefting his tanglenet, he started forward.
The alley stank. He could smell the heaps of rotted fruits and vegetables before he saw them. Beyond lay empty plastic packing crates, bits of smashed machinery, and all manner of other garbage which warehouses and spaceport alike had dumped here. His swinging lightstick created huge, darting shadows.
A giant rat chittered at him from atop a crumbling heap of bricks. It had to be a meter long, he thought, and that wasn’t counting its tail—some weird freak or mutation. Shivering, he flashed his light in its eyes. It scurried away.
Ahead, a board creaked. He raised his light.
“Tam?” he called. “David? You there?”
No answer. Heart pounding, he eased forward. The stench grew worse with every step. A carpet of rotting pulp squelched underfoot.
Then he came to a naked corpse lying face-down behind the smashed remnants of a huge shipping crate. A pool of dark blood had congealed around the man’s body, and little clawed footprints had tracked blood across the man’s back. The air reeked with an overpowering sour-sweetness.
Shivering involuntarily, Cris rolled the man over with the toe of his shoe. Blood had settled in the left side of the man’s face, making it blotchy and discolored. Three rows of evenly-spaced cuts…claw marks?…gouged the chest. Most of the stomach was gone, the soft inner organs torn out and, Cris thought, eaten. Rats certainly hadn’t done that, not even giant rats.
He let the body fall and tried to keep his own stomach from heaving. This wasn’t just another alien, it was a mankiller. He began to back up.
Something rattled. He whirled and found a creature like a huge, ugly gray frog perched atop a staved-in plastic crate. It had a mouth and three holes for nostrils, but no eyes. How had it gotten behind him?
Thin, almost skeletal arms flexed. Bits of some red, stringy material hung from its maw, and dried blood, human blood Cris was certain, splotched its hairless chest and arms. It had no genitals.
He tensed, hand on the tanglenet’s trigger. Run! something inside him cried, but he kept still as a marble sculpture. If he turned his back on this thing, he knew it would attack.
The alien shifted, the crate creaking. Cris searched its face for eyes—how did it see?—and found nothing remotely human in the empty gray ridges above its mouth.
The tufts of hair atop its head began to writhe. A feral almost-growl rolled from deep in its chest. Bolder now, it hopped to the ground, rose on two legs, and took a step toward him. Claws like ebon knives slid from its fingertips.
Cris flung the tanglenet as it sprang, and the world became a frantic blur of movement as the tanglenet spread out, seeking movement. Its probes caught the alien full-on, wrapping it mummylike in webbed strands, and the more the creature struggled, the tighter it grew. Seconds later the creature lay trussed too tightly to move.
Cris caught his breath. Cautiously he moved forward, squatted, and looked the thing in the face. The tufts on its head hid four pencil-thin eyestalks, he discovered. It was watching him.
“Do you speak English?” he asked.
Its body began to melt. He could think of no other way to describe it. One second its flesh was firm, and the next it was liquid, flowing against gravity, rippling, changing.
Suddenly Cris found himself looking at the huge rat he’d seen earlier. He leaped back with a cry of alarm.
The creature’s transformation had taken less than a minute. Now its powerful hind legs heaved against the tanglenet, stretching it. Teeth bit at durasteel webbing; claws sawed at individual strands. But the net held, drawing even tighter.
And abruptly the rat lost its form. Its fur melted; its bones shifted. And then a naked man lay in the tanglenet: he was perhaps thirty-five, a touch of gray at his temples, eyes dark, skin sallow.
Obscurely terrified, yet too fascinated to run, Cris took a step back. That face—he knew it. It belonged to the dead man behind him.
He turned to run, but the creature called, “Wait…” Cris hesitated. “You can talk?”
“So easy…” The thing’s voice was cool, fluid, somehow beautiful.
Cris shivered. “What are you?”
It gave a series of clicks. “Your language has no word.” Then, slowly, almost reluctantly it seemed to Cris, it added, “I…in one of your machines was caught, packed among…sugarreeds. Two days ago…I have freed myself.”
“You murdered a man!”
“Your language was needed. No harm was meant. Let me go. The word…please?”
“You tried to kill me!”
“No, only talk. Let us…bargain, yes? Our thought-streams, so different…I…master the humanness. Help me…I help you. Bargain?”
Cris snorted. “You can’t possibly help me,” he said, thinking of Marica.
“Try?” it urged.
“I want—” He broke off. “I want—” Finally, voice rising in desperation, he said, “I want my wife again. I need to paint her picture for the rest of my life. I need her, and nothing you can do can help me.”
“If you need form, I—will provide. Bring—I must see.”
“You can take her form?” he asked, hardly daring to believe.
“Change…so easy…yes.”
“Then—I agree.” Cris stood, feeling light-headed. It seemed impossible…he couldn’t let himself hope, not yet. Marica had shattered his dreams too often. For all he knew, the alien might turn on him when he let it loose, murder him as it had murdered the other man. But for the chance to paint Marica again…for that he would risk everything.
He deactivated the tanglenet and held his breath. The alien stood, touching its human arms and legs, probing its ears and nose and mouth wonderingly.
“So different…” it said. “Flat…”
Cris did his best to explain about Marica, about the glitterfolk, about their party and their alienation kick. The alien said, “Yes,” several times as if it understood.
When Cris finished, the alien resumed its natural form. They needed that, he knew, to get close to Marica. The alien needed to see her, to study her.
“Ready?” he asked.
It made a clicking noise in its chest, under its skin, and followed him when he moved cautiously toward the mouth of t
he alley. Cris could barely contain the euphoria that threatened to overwhelm him.
When they reached the aircar, Tam and David were waiting. They hadn’t followed orders. Turning, they scrambled inside, calling, “We got the alien!”
And Marica, beaming, appeared in the hatch to welcome Cris like a homecoming hero. Holos played over her body, and she flickered between Elvis and Marilyn Monroe.
“Ugly,” she said, appraising the alien. “But he’ll do.”
“You can always give him a bath,” Cris said.
She giggled. “Let’s go to my place! More champagne!”
Jade Moon brought a tray of glasses, and everyone took one, even the alien, though it didn’t seem to know what to do with it.
Marica pulled Cris into the pilot’s compartment. The alien followed like a trained dog. While Cris strapped in, Marica sealed them off from the rest of the aircar, turned on the lights, and gave the alien her full attention.
“He’ll do,” she said. “Oh yes, he’ll do fine. Is he friendly?”
“Yes,” Cris said, immersed in the computer read-outs. He powered up the repellers, checked everything, and lifted smoothly. The computer reported light traffic on the course he programmed, so he switched to autopilot.
When he disengaged from the computer, he found Marica lying on the floor with the alien hunched over her, its arm buried to the elbow in her mouth. Marica had a weird, glazed look on her face. Lumps like kittens crawling through a garden hose were travelling from her body inside the alien’s arm.
“No!” Cris screamed.
His stomach churned; his heart pounded like a hammer. Frantic, he tore the pilot’s harness away and launched himself at the creature. Everything seemed to be moving at different speeds, the alien in slow motion, himself slower still, and yet his mind raced ahead like a runaway train. He called himself all the vile things in the world, a stupid, dreaming fuckup too stupid to know right from wrong, love from a hole in the ground.
The alien batted him away him with its free hand. Cris felt like he’d slammed into a durasteel wall. Rebounding, he struck his head on the pilot’s seat, and everything went dark.
* * * *
