*
He opened the front door to the sound of rain rattling through maple leaves. College days, the street outside his dorm, and his first girl. Only this wasn’t a girl, the thing that called itself Natalie.
Michael stood a minute on the porch. The wrong porch. Inside had been the familiar rooms of his boyhood home (mushroom skin notwithstanding), long gone to fire and sorrow. This porch belonged to his dorm at the University of Washington. After a while he stepped down to the sidewalk and the Natalie-thing smiled.
“Would you like to take a walk with me?” it asked.
“Not really.”
*
He held the umbrella over both of them. Rain pattered on the taut fabric. The Natalie-thing slipped its arm under his. It was wearing a sweater and a wool skirt and black shoes that clocked on the sidewalk. Its hair was very dark red and its cheeks were rosy with the cold. When it glanced up at him it presented eyes as black and lusterless as a shark’s. Still wrong. And anyway, nothing like Natalie or his college girl.
“Want to see a movie?” it asked.
“All right.”
*
They held hands in the dark. He felt comfortable. The theater smelled of hot popcorn and the damp wool of the Natalie-thing’s skirt. He used to escape to the movies, where he could turn his mind off and be lost in the Deep Enhancement Cinema. Movies provided an imperfect respite from the memories ceaselessly rising out of the ashy ruin of his home.
The screen dimmed and brightened and incomprehensible sounds, like crowd noises muffled in cotton, issued from unseen speakers that seemed to communicate directly into his head. They—the ones like this Natalie beside him—hadn’t fully comprehended the idea of a movie.
It squeezed his hand.
“This is good,” it said.
“Pretty good,” he replied.
The theater was empty except for them. Empty of human forms, anyway. Irregular shadows cropped up randomly, like shapes in a night jungle. Then one of the shapes two rows in front of Michael turned around and leaned over the back of the seat, and Michael saw it was a woman, a real woman, dressed as he was, in a flight suit. She was wearing a breathing mask.
The woman began to speak but he couldn’t understand her. He leaned forward.
“What, what did you say?”
The thing beside him tightened its grip, so tight the fingers of his hand ached in its grasp, the small bones grinding in their sleeves of flesh. He tried to stand but it held him down and squeezed harder and harder until his entire awareness was occupied by the pain.
Several of the jungle shapes interposed themselves between Michael and the woman who had spoken to him. The air became clogged, humid, stifling. Rain began to fall inside the theater. He struggled to pull free. The numbing pain traveled up his arm. The theater seat held him, shifted around him. Knobby protuberances poked and dug into him, like sitting in a tangle of roots. He couldn’t breathe.
Then it stopped.
He sat in a movie theater with a young, mahogany-haired woman, who held his hand sweetly in the dark. She leaned over and whispered, “You fell asleep!” Her warm breath touched his ear.
“I did?” He sat up, groggy.
“Yes, darling.”
He blinked at the screen, where dim pulses of light moved in meaningless patterns. That was so wrong.
*
The one that liked to make love pulled him to his feet in the hotel room and kissed him roughly. He tried to push it away but it was too strong. After a while it held him at arm’s length and said something he couldn’t understand. The jungle effluvium infiltrated his brain, and he saw a woman he used to know, or a rudimentary version of her. The eyes were still wrong—plugs of dull amber. Michael staggered back, caught his heel on the carpet, and fell. His lips were bruised, sticky and sweet with sap.
It stalked over and stood above him.
“Mike, we have to get out of here.”
This new voice didn’t belong to the thing straddling his legs.
Michael craned his head around. A women stood in a flight suit similar to his own. She was there and then she wasn’t there, as the scenery shifted around him, from his old bedroom on Earth to the hotel room on Mars.
“Natalie—?” he said.
The one that liked to make love lowered itself on top of him. Michael tried to roll away but couldn’t. It mounted him and he screamed.
*
That time in New San Francisco, in the mock Victorian hotel room, in the bed of clean linen sheets, the following morning, when Natalie woke early and started to get out of bed, he had reached out and touched her naked hip and said, “Stay.” A costly word.
*
He was alone again, half asleep in and out of dream. Then something was shaking him.
“Mike, come on. There isn’t time. They’ll be back.”
He struggled against this new assault. Something wrestling with him, pinning him down on the bed with its knobby knees. Then a mask fitted over his mouth and nose, and a clean wind blew into his lungs, filling him, clearing his head. He opened his eyes, closed them, opened them wide.
“Hello, Nat,” he said, his voice muffled through the breathing mask.
She flipped the little mahogany curl of hair out of her eye.
“Hello yourself, you idiot,” Natalie said.
“How’d you get here?” he asked, meaning how did she get into his hotel room. But even as he asked the question the last vestiges of the illusion blew away in the fresh revivifying oxygen.
A pink puzzle piece sky shone above the jungle canopy.
Twisted trees crowded them, shaggy with moss, hung with thick vines braided like chains.
“I dropped in, just like you,” Natalie said.
Michael looked around. “I have a feeling we’re not on Mars, Dorothy.”
“Who’s Dorothy?”
Something hulking, hunched and redolent of mold and jungle rot came shambling toward them.
“Nat, look out!”
She turned swiftly, yanking a blaster from her utility belt. Reality stuttered. As if in a fading memory he saw the tree-thing knock the weapon from Natalie’s hand. At the same moment, superimposed, he saw her fire. A bright red flash of plasma energy seared into the thing. It lurched back, yowling, punky smoke flowing from the fresh wound.
Nat grabbed Michael’s hand and pulled him up. He felt dizzy and weak, still drugged.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“Rescuing your ass.” She gave him a little push. “That way to the ship.”
“No,” he said, pointing, “it’s that way.”
“My ship is this way. Your ship sank.”
He scrambled drunkenly ahead of her, stumbling over roots, getting hung up in vines. Though the illusions were displaced he could still hear the Siren wail in his mind and had to fight an impulse to rip the mask from his face. There was movement all around them. More of the things shambled out of the shadows. Natalie blasted away with her weapon, clearing a path.
They broke into the open. The ship gleamed in weak sunlight.
“Get in! I’ll hold them off.”
Michael clambered up the ladder to the cockpit. At the top of the ladder he turned and saw Natalie about to be overwhelmed.
“Nat, come on!”
She dropped her depleted blaster, swung onto the ladder—but it was too late. They had her.
*
Michael slumped in his theater seat, withdrawn from the Deep Enhancement movie experience he had created. Warm rain fell out of the darkness. The One Who Liked Rain sat beside him with a bowl of soggy popcorn.
It turned to him.
“That was so good, Mike.”
Its lips glistened with butter. Its eyes were dull amber wads. A breathing mask with a torn strap dangled from its fingers.
Michael groaned.
Like an insect buzz in his ear: Michael wake up, for God’s sake.
Michael closed his eyes.
*
On
Mars Natalie had said, “I think I’m falling in love with you,” and his defenses had rattled down like iron gates.
“Mike?”
“Not a good idea. In the first place we’ll both soon be Outbound. It might be years before we see each other again. In the second place, my modifications inhibit my ability to achieve human intimacy. I’m a lost cause, Nat.”
Natalie shook her head. “You don’t have to drag out your excuses. I know you. I’m just saying how I feel, not asking for anything. And by the way, your mods have nothing to do with intimacy. I’ve known plenty of Womb Hole pilots and I don’t buy the myth that you’re all emotional cripples.”
Michael smiled. He hadn’t been thinking about the mods he’d volunteered to undergo, the ones necessary for Ship State, the ones that at least allowed him a semblance of intimacy, even if it was with a machine consciousness. He had meant the more visceral mods of his psyche, where blackened timbers had risen like pickets in Hell to form the first rudimentary fence around his heart.
“You don’t really know me,” he said.
“Not at this rate, I don’t.”
Then the biological crisis on Meropa IV occurred. Vital vaccines needed. Michael’s Ship Tender came up with Kobory Fever, and Natalie, loose on Mars, got the duty. Like some kind of Fate. Michael experienced a burst of pure joy—which he quickly stomped on.
*
“I don’t see why I had to die,” Natalie said. Was she the real Natalie?
He was back in the hotel, lying flat on the bed. Natalie, having fitted another breathing mask to his face, sat in a chair near the window. Except it appeared she wasn’t sitting in a chair at all, but on a tangle of thick roots growing out of the floor. He had just told her about the movie.
“You were saving me,” he said.
“I’m saving you now,” she said. “Or trying to. You’ve got to get off your ass and participate.”
Michael felt heavy.
“And in this version I don’t die,” Natalie said.
*
She led him out of the hotel room, which quickly became something other than a hotel room. As his head cleared the vine-tangle wallpaper popped out in three dimensions, the floor became soft, spongy. The light shifted to heavily screened pink/green. Flying insects buzzed his sweaty face. A locus of pain began rhythmically stabbing behind his right eye.
“The atmosphere is drugged with hallucinogenic vapors from the plants,” Natalie said. “They want you here, but they don’t want you to know where ‘here’ is.”
“Who wants me?”
“They. The jungle. The sentient life on this planet. It’s gynoecious, by the way, and it’s been sweeping open space, seeking first contact. They detected you and Mona and evidently became entranced by the possibilities of companion male energy. Frankly, they have a point.”
“Where the hell do you get all that?”
“I asked. Or Mona did, actually. She’s been frantically investigating language possibilities since you disappeared. They communicate telepathically.”
Natalie led him through a sort of tunnel made from over-arching branches. They had to duck their heads.
“Wait.” He grabbed her arm. She turned, a curl of dark red hair flipping over her eye. “Did you bring a weapon?”
“Of course,” she said.
“Well, where is it?”
“They sort of disarmed me.”
“I see.”
“Don’t worry. We’re getting out of here. As long as you’re not breathing the air they can’t mess you up too much. I think they’ll let us leave. I have a theory. Now let’s keep moving. It isn’t far to the ship.”
They emerged from the tunnel. The ship was there, but they were cut off from it by a wall of the tree-things, the crooked things with hungry, amber eyes. They encircled the ship, knobby limbs entwined to form a barrier.
“You were saying?” Michael said, straightening his back. “Anyway, have Mona fly the ship over.”
“I can’t. Mona was hinky about landing after your Drop Ship sank. Also, I think they got into her head and spooked her. I had to engage the emergency override, same as you did.”
“Wonderful.”
“At least the security repulsion field is keeping them away from the ship.”
“At least.”
Hands on her hips, Natalie appraised the situation. After a minute she touched the com button on her wrist and spoke into it.
“Mona, we need help. Send the Proxy to clear a path.”
The aft hatch swung up and the Proxy appeared. It climbed down and disappeared behind the tree-things. A moment later the circle tightened. There was a flash and pop of a blaster discharge. One of the tree things erupted in flame. It stumped out of the ring and stood apart, burning. The others closed in. A violent disturbance occurred. There were no further blasts. The Proxy’s torso arced high over the line, dull metal skin shining. It clanked once when it hit the ground. The line resumed its stillness.
“It’s a female jungle, all right,” Michael said. “Care to reveal your famous theory?”
Natalie held his hand. “We’re walking through,” she said.
“Just like that.”
“Yes. If we’re together they’ll let us. I mean really together.”
“That’s your theory?”
“Basically. Mike, trust me.”
They started walking. When they came to the Proxy’s torso, Michael held her back.
“I’ll go through alone,” he said. “If I make it to the ship I’ll lift off and pick you up in the clear.”
He tried to pull his hand free but she wouldn’t let go.
“No,” she said.
“Nat—”
“No. Don’t you see? If you go alone they’ll take you again. If I go alone they’ll rip me apart like the Proxy.”
“And if we go together?”
“If we go together they . . . will see.”
“See what?”
“That you aren’t solo, that somebody else is already claiming your male companion energy, another of your own species. Unlike Mona, whom they felt justified in severing you from. They know I’m imprinted in your psyche. You said yourself they always used my name. You just have to stop fighting us.”
Michael scratched his cheek, which was whiskered after a few days in the sentient jungle. Natalie squeezed his hand.
“Mike?”
“No.”
“We have to move.”
“It’s too risky.”
“Come on. It’s now or never.”
He felt himself collapsing inside, and then the old detachment. The cold, necessary detachment. She saw it in his eyes and let go of his hand.
“I’ll go through myself, then,” she said, and started walking forward.
He grabbed her arm.
“You just said they’d tear you apart.”
“I’m already torn apart,” she said.
“Don’t, Nat. Let’s think about this.”
“Just let me go, okay? You don’t want me. I get it.”
He held on. “There has to be another way to the ship.”
She pulled loose.
“I might get through. Wish me luck.”
“Nat—”
A cringing, huddled piece of him behind the cold wall stood up, trembling.
Natalie again started for the picket line of tree-things, walking quickly, leaving Michael standing where he was.
The tree-things reacted, reaching for her.
Michael got to her first and pulled her back into his arms. “Damn it,” he said. “Damn it, damn it, damn it.”
*
They lifted out of the jungle, accelerating until they achieved orbit. He sat tandem behind Natalie in the narrow cockpit of the Drop Ship.
“You really like to force the issue,” he said.
“Do I?”
“I’m not saying it’s a bad idea.”
“No.”
“I mean, a little push doesn’t hurt.”
&nb
sp; “Hmm.”
A few minutes later they acquired the starship and Natalie resumed manual operation and began docking maneuvers. She worked the controls very competently. Michael watched over her shoulder. But his gaze returned again and again to rest upon the nape of her neck, where a few silken hairs escaped and lay sweetly over her skin.
“The Dorothy thing,” he said, “that was another old movie reference. A child is swept away from family and friends and finds herself estranged in a hostile world.”
“How does she get back home?”
“She discovers a way to trust companions who initially frighten her.”
“I like that one.”
“It works for me.”
Natalie tucked them neatly into Mona’s docking bay.
*
For Nancy
Two
Cold. He squirmed naked on a metal table. Chill air circulated over his body. He hugged himself, bewildered and frightened. He wept. Tightly focused light beams probed his body, directed out of the darkness above. He could feel the light like icy coins slipping over his cold-puckered skin. He tried to sit up. A force restrained him. One of the coins slid up his chest, his throat, his chin, lips, cheek, and then it focused into a point and speared through his eye and into his brain and began to write there. He could not move, and it was a long time writing.
*
He sat in the Teaching Room. An image appeared before him. A yellow sphere. There was a modulated sound, and then an arrangement of straight and curving black lines formed under the sphere. The whole thing repeated. He stared in confusion. After the fourth repetition he moved his lips and made a sound like the one he kept hearing.
“Bawl,” he said. “Ball.”
Good Boy!
The yellow sphere jumped forward into three dimensions and bounced across the floor. He reached out but his hands passed through it, a phantom.
Ball.
*
Time passed. Many lessons occurred. He grew.
A mathematical formula appeared before him.
“Pythagorean Theorem,” he said.
Good boy.
*
I have something for you.
Are You There and Other Stories Page 34
