Alien Contact (32 page)

“Friend,” whispered the Angel, startling me. He’d never spoken aloud to me, not directly.

Don’t talk, I said, bending over him, trying to figure out some way I could touch him, just for comfort. There wasn’t anything else I could do now.

“I have to,” he said, still whispering. “It’s almost all gone. Did you get it?”

Mostly, I said. Not all.

“I meant for you to have it.”

I know.

“I don’t know that it will really do you any good.” His breath kind of bubbled in his throat. I could see something wet and shiny on his mouth but it wasn’t silver fireworks. “But it’s yours. You can do as you like with it. Live on it the way I did. Get what you need when you need it. But you can live as a human, too. Eat. Work. However, whatever.”

I’m not human, I said. I’m not any more human than you, even if I do belong here.

“Yes you are, little friend. I haven’t made you any less human,” he said, and coughed some. “I’m not sorry I wouldn’t mate. I couldn’t mate with my own. It was too, I don’t know, too little of me, too much of them, something. I couldn’t bond, it would have been nothing but emptiness. The Great Sin, to be unable to give, because the universe knows only less or more and I insisted that it would be good or bad. So they sent me here. But in the end, you know, they got their way, little friend.” I felt his hand on me for a moment before it fell away. “I did it after all. Even if it wasn’t with my own.”

The bubbling in his throat stopped. I sat next to him for a while in the dark. Finally I felt it, the Angel stuff. It was kind of fluttery-churny, like too much coffee on an empty stomach. I closed my eyes and lay down on the grass, shivering. Maybe some of it was shock but I don’t think so. The silver fireworks started, in my head this time, and with them came a lot of pictures I couldn’t understand. Stuff about the Angel and where he’d come from and the way they mated. It was a lot like how we’d been together, the Angel and me. They looked a lot like us but there were a lot of differences, too, things I couldn’t make out. I couldn’t make out how they’d sent him here, either—by light, in, like, little bundles or something. It didn’t make any sense to me but I guessed an Angel could be light. Silver fireworks.

I must have passed out or something because when I opened my eyes, it felt like I’d been lying there a long time. It was still dark, though. I sat up and reached for the Angel, thinking I ought to hide his body.

He was gone. There was just a sort of wet sandy stuff where he’d been.

I looked at the car and her. All that was still there. Somebody was going to see it soon. I didn’t want to be around for that.

Everything still hurt but I managed to get to the other road and start walking back toward the city. It was like I could feel it now, the way the Angel must have, as though it were vibrating like a drum or ringing like a bell with all kinds of stuff, people laughing and crying and loving and hating and being afraid and everything else that happens to people. The stuff that the Angel took in, energy, that I could take in now if I wanted.

And I knew that taking it in that way, it would be bigger than anything all those people had, bigger than anything I could have had if things hadn’t gone wrong with me all those years ago.

I wasn’t so sure I wanted it. Like the Angel, refusing to mate back where he’d come from. He wouldn’t, there, and I couldn’t, here. Except now I could do something else.

I wasn’t so sure I wanted it. But I didn’t think I’d be able to stop it, either, any more than I could stop my heart from beating. Maybe it wasn’t really such a good thing or a right thing. But it was like the Angel said: the universe doesn’t know good or bad, only less or more.

Yeah. I heard
that
.

I thought about the waitress with no face. I could find them all now, all the ones from the other places, other worlds that sent them away for some kind of alien crimes nobody would have understood. I could find them all. They threw away their outcasts, I’d tell them, but here, we kept ours. And here’s how. Here’s how you live in a universe that only knows less or more.

I kept walking toward the city.

rs. Jerry Debree, the heroine of Grong Crossing, liked to look pretty. It was important to Jerry in his business contacts, of course, and also it made her feel more confident and kind of happy to know that her cellophane was recent and her eyelashes really well glued on and that the highlighter blush was bringing out her cheekbones like the nice girl at the counter had said. But it was beginning to be hard to feel fresh and look pretty as this desert kept getting hotter and hotter and redder and redder until it looked, really, almost like what she had always thought the Bad Place would look like, only not so many people. In fact none.

“Could we have passed it, do you think?” she ventured at last, and received without surprise the exasperation she had safety-valved from him: “How the fuck could we have
passed
it when we haven’t
passed
one fucking
thing
except those fucking
bushes
for ninety miles?
Christ
you’re dumb.”

Jerry’s language was a pity. And sometimes it made it so hard to talk to him. She had had the least little tiny sort of feeling, woman’s intuition maybe, that the men that had told him how to get to Grong Crossing were teasing him, having a little joke. He had been talking so loud in the hotel bar about how disappointed he had been with the Corroboree after flying all the way out from Adelaide to see it. He kept comparing it to the Indian dance they had seen at Taos. Actually he had been very bored and restless at Taos and they had had to leave in the middle so he could have a drink and she never had got to see the people with the masks come, but now he talked about how they really knew how to put on a native show in the U.S.A. He said a few scruffy abos jumping around weren’t going to give tourists from the real world anything to write home about. The Aussies ought to visit Disney World and find out how to do the real thing, he said.

She agreed with that; she loved Disney World. It was the only thing in Florida, where they had to live now that Jerry was ACEO, that she liked much. One of the Australian men at the bar had seen Disneyland and agreed that it was amazing, or maybe he meant amusing; what he said was amizing. He seemed to be a nice man. Bruce, he said his name was, and his friend’s name was Bruce too. “Common sort of name here,” he said, only he said nime, but he meant name, she was quite sure. When Jerry went on complaining about the Corroboree, the first Bruce said, “Well, mite, you might go out to Grong Crossing, if you really want to see the real thing—right, Bruce?”

At first the other Bruce didn’t seem to know what he meant, and that was when her woman’s intuition woke up. But pretty soon both Bruces were talking away about this place, Grong Crossing, way out in “the bush,” where they were certain to meet real abos really living in the desert. “Near Alice Springs,” Jerry said knowledgeably, but it wasn’t, they said; it was still farther west from here. They gave directions so precisely that it was clear they knew what they were talking about. “Few hours’ drive, that’s all,” Bruce said, “but y’see most tourists want to keep on the beaten path. This is a bit more on the inside track.”

“Bang-up shows,” said Bruce. “Nightly Corroborees.”

“Hotel any better than this dump?” Jerry asked, and they laughed. No hotel, they explained. “It’s like a safari, see—tents under the stars. Never rines,” said Bruce.

“Marvelous food, though,” Bruce said. “Fresh kangaroo chops. Kangaroo hunts daily, see. Witchetty grubs along with the drinks before dinner. Roughing it in luxury, I’d call it; right, Bruce?”

“Absolutely,” said Bruce.

“Friendly, are they, these abos?” Jerry asked.

“Oh, salt of the earth. Treat you like kings. Think white men are sort of gods, y’know,” Bruce said. Jerry nodded.

So Jerry wrote down all the directions, and here they were driving and driving in the old station wagon that was all there was to rent in the small town they’d been at for the Corroboree, and by now you only knew the road was a road because it was perfectly straight forever. Jerry had been in a good humor at first. “This’ll be something to shove up that bastard Thiel’s ass,” he said. His friend Thiel was always going to places like Tibet and having wonderful adventures and showing videos of himself with yaks. Jerry had bought a very expensive camcorder for this trip, and now he said, “Going to shoot me some abos. Show that fucking Thiel and his musk-oxes!” But as the morning went on and the road went on and the desert went on—did they call it “the bush” because there was one little thorny bush once a mile or so?—he got hotter and hotter and redder and redder, just like the desert. And she began to feel depressed and like her mascara was caking.

She was wondering if after another forty miles (four was her lucky number) she could say, “Maybe we ought to turn back?” for the first time, when he said, “There!”

There was something ahead, all right.

“There hasn’t been any sign,” she said, dubious. “They didn’t say anything about a hill, did they?”

“Hell, that’s no hill, that’s a rock—what do they call it—some big fucking red rock—”

“Ayers Rock?” She had read the Welcome to Down Under flyer in the hotel in Adelaide while Jerry was at the plastics conference. “But that’s in the middle of Australia, isn’t it?”

“So where the fuck do you think we are? In the middle of Australia! What do you think this is, fucking East Germany?” He was shouting, and he speeded up. The terribly straight road shot them straight at the hill, or rock, or whatever it was. It
wasn’t
Ayers Rock, she
knew
that, but there wasn’t any use irritating Jerry, especially when he started shouting.

It was reddish, and shaped kind of like a huge VW bug, only lumpier; and there were certainly people all around it, and at first she was very glad to see them. Their utter isolation—they hadn’t seen another car or farm or anything for two hours—had scared her. Then as they got closer she thought the people looked rather funny. Funnier than the ones at the Corroboree even. “I guess they’re natives,” she said aloud.

“What the shit did you expect, Frenchmen?” Jerry said, but he said it like a joke, and she laughed. But—“Oh! Goodness!” she said involuntarily, getting her first clear sight of one of the natives.

“Big fellows, huh,” he said. “Bushmen, they call ’em.”

That didn’t seem right, but she was still getting over the shock of seeing that tall, thin, black-and-white, weird person. It had been just standing looking at the car, only she couldn’t see its eyes. Heavy brows and thick, hairy eyebrows hid them. Black, ropy hair hung over half its face and stuck out from behind its ears.

“Are they—are they painted?” she asked weakly.

“They always paint ’emselves up like that.” His contempt for her ignorance was reassuring.

“They almost don’t look human,” she said, very softly so as not to hurt their feelings, if they spoke English, since Jerry had stopped the car and flung the doors open and was rummaging out the video camera.

“Hold this!”

She held it. Five or six of the tall black-and-white people had sort of turned their way, but they all seemed to be busy with something at the foot of the hill or rock or whatever it was. There were some things that might be tents. Nobody came to welcome them or anything, but she was actually just as glad they didn’t.