Women and Other Monsters (11 page)

***

It was a small enough box that it fit inside the center of his tentacle.  Klatu ran his tendrils along its ornate golden surface and opened the lid, taking out the tiny data card.  The card contained his people’s most sacred, ancient texts; the teachings of the earliest prophets who foresaw their journey into the stars, up to the personal accounts of those who witnessed the miracles of the Beneficent Redeemer.     

His mother had given him the box many years ago, and he held it to his chest when he sometimes became desperate enough to pray for The Sight.  Other than that it mostly sat on a shelf in his sleeping quarters. 

The blue-green planet of the humanoids rotated miles below him, and he was so lost in thought that he did not hear L’aida slithering across the room.  Her antennas brushed the horns dotting his neck.  She pressed close to him and stroked the back of his head with her tendrils.  “How are you feeling?”

“I do not know.” 

“Do you think it was real?”

He nodded slowly.  “But then, of course I would say that.  I’m just the fool who carries on like he’ll someday possess The Sight.” 

She looked down at the planet with him.  “Why don’t you start by telling me exactly what you saw?”

He told her in detail about the female and the small creature, who he now knew to be her daughter.  They were playing, running through a field that led to the woods where he had found them.  Klatu told her about the male now laying dead on their examination table; that he was their husband and father, and that he had told them he would be along soon.  There was more that Klatu could not bring himself to say.  When he made contact with the male’s mind, a debilitating sense of horror and grief latched onto him.  He saw the birth of that child when it was just a tiny drooling thing that the mother caressed and fitted to her breast.  He saw that same child lying dead in the grass and it was as if everything good had gone out of existence.  And it was his doing. 

Klatu lifted the box of sacred teachings to his forehead and began to weep. 

***

They selected a less densely populated terrain.  Klatu landed on the dry desert sand, feeling an intense heat that threatened to cook him alive inside the suit.  He sprinted across the landscape and his suit took on the appearance of rock formations and small shrubs. 

The intercom crackled, “Straight ahead, just over the dune.  Do you see it?”

Klatu stopped running and peered over the sandy hill, seeing a small hut with a cluster of males assembled outside.  “Abort the mission, Klatu,” L’aida said.  “There are too many of them.”

“No,” he said.  “I can do this.”

“I said abort.”

He slid down the dune and went past them into the hut where a dozen females crowded around a small bed.  He lifted his head to peer over them at the female specimen lying there, not moving.  Her eyes were open and both of her hands were draped protectively over her round stomach. 

Klatu tried to translate the women’s words but his machine was overloaded with too many voices speaking at the same time.  He closed his eyes and relaxed, deciding not to reach out for anything this time, but allowing them to reach into him. 

He received the thoughts of the eldest woman first.  She knew the pregnant female on the bed was dying and had attempted to extract the child in a desperate attempt to save it.  She failed.  Klatu backed away, sinking into the furthest corner.  The front door opened and the males came in from outside.  Each of them carried their own memories, hopes, and pain that battered him.

All of their thoughts buzzed through his mind like static until one voice broke through the others and struck him with so much force that he sank to the floor.  It was the mother of the deceased female, and her grief was enough to make Klatu throw his tentacles over his head and beg L’aida to do something.  “I will bring them all on board if I have to.” 

L’aida’s voice was soft, “Both the mother and child are past the point of sustainability.  They are gone.  It is no wonder considering the brutality of their medical practices.”

“All is not lost.  Give me time to think.”

He hid in a cave for an entire day as they conducted their death rituals.  He filmed them lowering the corpse into the ground and then covering her with piles of dirt and stone.  L’aida chattered into his earpiece as she viewed the feed, shocked at the primitiveness of the act.  He waited until long after the last lights of the settlement went dark, then exhumed the corpse and raced with it over his shoulder toward the portal.     

L’aida slit the female’s belly and removed the innards in one clump, setting them aside.  She reached into the stomach with her tentacles and pulled the deceased infant out. 

Klatu looked away when she divided that small, grey-tinged creature into sections and compiled several smears from it, taking them to her analysis chamber.

When he went to check on her progress, she was staring at a spinning hologram of intertwining cords.  “What is that?” he said. 

“It is the building blocks of their make-up.  These chemical sequences contain instructions for everything about these creatures.  From how tall to grow, to the color of their eyes.”  She pointed at the lowest tangle of cords, “This is group information, written into the data-stream from the species’ very origin.  If you trace it far enough back it becomes simian.  If you follow it to the top it defines them as individuals.  Do you realize what this means?”

Klatu stared at the holograms.  “We can manipulate the sequences.  We could grow a specimen in whatever way we desire.”

“The military implications alone,” she whispered.  “We could create an entire species of foot soldiers to be used with impunity.  It is enough to get us out of this forsaken assignment, and with your evidence of The Sight, we will have the luxury of picking our next assignment.”  She took a deep breath and said, “Ship, prepare a channel to the Consortium!”  The ship raised an enormous antenna above the roof in preparation to transmit, and L’aida said, “Give the command, my love.  You deserve it.  Step into history.”  Her face beamed with pride and she intertwined her tentacles with his.  

She was beaming with pride and had intertwined her tentacles in his.  He stroked her face gently and said, “No.”

***

The double-helix rotated on the display and Klatu looked it over, deciding it was imperfect.  He rewrote a sequence on one of the strands, deleted it, and rewrote it again.  He pushed away from the table in disgust and stood up from the chair, seeing that L’aida was watching him.  They had not spoken in several days.  “Do you need something?” he said. 

“They will execute you when they uncover your treachery.”  

“Yes.  I know.”

“And me as well, if I do not report you.”

“I expected that you already had.”

 “They will destroy this entire planet if they suspect we have tampered with the humanoids.”

“As opposed to harvesting them for food or turning them into cannon fodder?”

L’aida looked down at the molecules of repeating nucleotides on the screen and said, “The sequence’s structure will collapse if you do not wind it around the helical axis.  You are doing this wrong.” 

Klatu watched her sit and begin moving strands of proteins and molecules into different positions.  “There is something I have been thinking about,” he said.  “I see a potential in these beings that would allow them to someday come to the Consortium on their own terms.  Not just wait to be scooped up and used for whatever means we see fit.  But they are lacking something.” 

He held up his golden box and opened the lid, removing the data card of religious texts.  “They need to believe that anything is possible.  I want to encode parts of this into the sequence.”

***

Night fell.  The desert plains were silent and empty except for sheep grazing in a desert meadow.  Klatu scanned the village’s perimeter but only saw small reptiles slithering over the sand.  He went to the first dwelling and let himself in.     

A female slept atop an animal skin in the first room.  She turned over onto her side and he waited until her breathing slowed to deploy the syringe from his glove.

He crept toward her, bending until his helmet was directly over her face.  Her eyes opened and she gasped just as the tip of the needle slid into her neck.  She struggled against Klatu’s invisible form until her eyes rolled back in her head and she went limp.  He undid her robes, revealing her milk white flesh as he spread her legs and aimed the device downwards. 

She moaned softly as the probes slid inside of her.  Klatu fit a vial inside the device and took a deep breath as he coded the sequence to initiate the insemination process. 

The female reached up and touched his helmet. 

Klatu froze, held by the look in her eyes.  They were dilated and glossed over from the narcotic, and she smiled when he lifted his helmet’s visor and revealed his face to her.  She ran her fingers over his face, touching the dry, smooth surface of his skin in wonder.   

***

Joachim woke at the sound of his front door closing.  He looked over at his wife and said, “If that boy was in her room, I will kill him.  I do not care if they are betrothed.”  He got up and went out to look, but saw nothing.  He opened the door and peered into the night.  “Joseph?  Are you out there?”

He shut the door and opened the curtain to his daughter’s room.  Mary was sleeping soundly.  “I suppose it was just my imagination,” he said before closing the curtain and returning to bed. 

Digestif

I grew up in a converted farmhouse on the outskirts of Horsham, Pennsylvania.  We were surrounded by open space—woods, corn fields, big sky, and a small airstrip down the street where Cessna’s and other light airplanes would fly in circles overhead for hours. 

There was a house at the end of the airstrip where Poppy and Mrs. Springer lived.  Poppy Springer was born in the late 1800’s and had fought in the First World War.  He wasn’t allowed to drive a car anymore, so he would get around on his riding lawnmower.  Over the sound of chickens and airplanes, you would hear that thing’s engine puttering down the street toward you and know that he was coming to visit. 

Poppy Springer was missing a few fingers on his right hand from his early days as a machinist.  He was an inventor and constant tinkerer, and had bought his house near the airfield because airplanes fascinated him.  He told me he’d been born before the invention of the airplane, and could spend a whole day just watching them fly around. 

When Mrs. Springer died, my parents used to send me down to read to Poppy Springer, but I hated to go.  He didn’t seem particularly pleased to have to endure the company of a ten year old and would either fall asleep or start talking about fighting in France during the Great War.  He died a few years after that, and it was the first time I ever saw my father cry. 

Sometimes, I would stand on our front porch at sunset and look out over the fields and trees.  A light breeze would roll in, carrying the scent of honeysuckles from the bushes planted along our front yard.  I would look up and imagine an enormous space ship coming toward me over the horizon, its width stretching from one end of the sky to the other.  I could imagine it so vividly that to this day I still know exactly what it would have looked like. 

At night, I would terrify myself before going to sleep by imagining monsters lurking in the woods and killers hidden in the corn stalks, ready to snatch me up the next time I ventured into either one of them alone.  It occurred to me that every scary movie I’d ever seen was happening at a place that looked exactly like where I lived.  Jason Vorhees never attacked anybody on a cul-de-sac.  Serial Killers weren’t strolling down York Road picking off people coming out of Burdick’s Candy Store. 

Those fears disappeared in the daylight, though. 

My favorite place was a wide stream that ran through the woods across the street.  It had large, moss-covered rocks all along its banks, and being in that place made me feel like one of Mallory’s Arthurian Knights.  I would trudge through that stream like Sir Percival, searching for the Grail’s hidden location.   

I stayed in those woods until my father would come out to the edge of the driveway and unleash his world-class split-finger whistle.  My father’s whistle can stop your heart at short distances, and as kids we learned to return home at its signal. 

It had been his decision to move the family so far out into the boonies.  For my old man, nothing was better than standing on the front porch drinking a beer, looking out across the open countryside.

My mother was raised in Philadelphia and hated that we lived so far from civilization.  She often complained that we should have lived in a residential development with sidewalks and other kids to play with.  A neighborhood, where I had more to do than spend all day trekking through the Bower Farm’s fields getting chased by skunks.  In my defense, I only got sprayed once.  My dog got it too, and the two of us spent an afternoon soaking in a bathtub full of tomato juice. 

 It was my mother who taught me how to read and then carted me around to used bookstores in search of hidden treasures.