Alien Sex полностью

WHEN HE TOLD ME he had fathered a child Out There, I felt sure he was lying. I thought of the five years I’d been awake, the five years since his return, the five years I’d been pleading with him for a child, and I thought of all his lies. (They all come back lying.)

I was sure he was lying.

It was night in the skyroom. We were naked and wet from another warm programmed rain, and were again pawing at each other in good-natured frustration, laughing because the paper-thin energy field between us wouldn’t let us touch.

The frustration was important.

Soon one of us would tell the room’s computer to activate a stencil, a brand-new pattern for our hands to explore blindly, seeking the holes through which we might reach each other.

The frustration was so important.

Before long—if everything went right—we would be moving against the field like animals, two starved bodies no longer willing to accept the constraints so good-naturedly.

It was all a karezza, a game I suspected Jory liked, though I could never be sure. The only things I was sure of were the hallucinogens and the pheromas. These I knew he liked. Only these.

He might pull away suddenly from the stencil, stare at me, and walk off into the night.

And if he stayed, if he indeed stayed long enough for it to happen, it would be an event as unrelated to me as any dim nova in a distant galaxy. I would see it in his eyes: he would be somewhere else. His moment would belong to him and him alone—Out There.

I blame the hallucinogens as much as the rest. I am jealous of the Moonlight, the Starmen, Schwarzchild’s Love, and Winkinblinkins. They are his real lovers.

When he spoke, I assumed it was to the room’s computer. But his voice went on—the amplified stars twinkling madly through the electronic glass, the moonlight falling on our naked shoulders like a cold blue robe. He was talking to me.

“I’m sorry, Dorothea,” he was saying. “I am, as a long-lost poet once put it, a man adrift from his duties, a man awash in his world. I should have told you long before now, but did not. Why? Because it’s horrible as well as beautiful.”

He paused, so emotional, so crucified by remorse, and then: “When I was Out There, Dorothea, when I had the starlocks at my back and the universe at my feet, when I’d abandoned my home world as surely as if I’d died, I took an alien lover, Dorothea, and she bore me a son. I can’t believe it myself, but it is true, and the time has come.”

He was histrionic. He was heroic. He was playing to some great audience I couldn’t see.

And he was lying.

They say the ones who go Out There—the diplos, greeters, and runners—come back liars because of what they’ve seen, because of the starlock sleep, because of what they dream as they make their painful slow way through the concentric rings of sequential tokamaks, super-pinches, marriages of light-cones, and miracles of winkholes. It is a sleep (the rumors say) filled with visions of eternal parallel universes, of all possible alternative worlds—where Hitler did and didn’t, where Christ was and wasn’t, where the Nile never flowed, where Jory never left, or if he did, I never went to sleep for him.

They are changed by it. They come back seeing what isn’t, but what might have been, what isn’t but is—somewhere. And because they come back liars to a world fifteen years older, there will always be jobs for any man or woman willing to be a diplo or greeter or runner. They are the lambs. They are sacrificed in our names.