Whether Jory’s lies are universes he indeed perceives, or simply the handiwork of a pathology, I do not know. I do know that there are times when I enter his lies with him and times when I do not. There are even times when I love his lies, though it embarrasses me to say so. When we lie together on the little stretch of sand below our house and make a simpler love—the roll of the waves mercifully drowning out the sucking of the great factory pipes so nearby—I want those lies, ask for them in my own way, and he gives them to me:
“Dorothea, my love, I have known women, insatiable women, women from a satyr’s wildest dreams. I have known them in every port of the Empire—from Dandanek II to Miladen-Poy, from Gloster’s Alley to Blackie’s Hole, from the great silicon-methane bays of Torsion to the antigravity Steppes of Heart—and none of them can compare with the softest touch of your skin, with the simplest caress of your breath.”
There are no ports like these. Not yet. No swashbuckling spacelanes, no pirates of the Hypervoid, no Empire. No romantic Frontier for the sowing of the human seed throughout galaxies so vast and wondrous that their glory must catch in your throat. It is, after all, a simpler, more mundane universe we inhabit.
But when he speaks to me like this, my world is suddenly grand, the ports as real as San Francisco, the women as lusty as legends, and I, a Helen of New Troy, with a strange and beautiful apple in my hand.
I could have answered him with “What was she like, Jory?” I could have entered that lie, too, and said, “Did you ever see your son, Jory?”
But this one hurt. It hurt too much.
“What do you mean, the time has come?” I asked, sighing.
He was turning away, toward the darkness of the hills behind our house.
“He is coming to live with us,” he said.
I closed my eyes. “Your son?”
“Of course, Dorothea.”
I hate him for it.
He knows how it hurts. He knows why.
We have encountered three races Out There. The first two—the nearest us in light-years—are indeed humanoid, offering (for some, at least) clear proof of the “seeding” theory of mankind’s presence in this solar system. The third race, the mysterious Climagos, is so alien that instead of animosity and avarice we find in it a disturbing generosity—gifts like the energy fields, crystalline sleep, and the starlocks. In return, it has asked nothing but goodwill. We do not understand this. We do not understand it at all.
We have (we have decided) nothing to learn, nothing to gain, from the two humanoid species, the little Debolites and stolid Oteans. We ignore them, and are jealous of the attention the Climagos pay them. We are, it would seem, afraid of what these two humanoid species might eventually do with the Climagos’ gifts. After all, we know well what it means to be “human.”
“You haven’t asked, but I will tell you anyway,” he says.
He has followed me down to the tidepools, where I am trying to count the species of neogastropods and landlocked sculpins, to compare them against those listed in a wood-pulp book printed fifty years ago.
He seems sober, matter-of-fact. This means nothing.
Oblivious to the chugging of the factory behind him, he looks wistfully out to sea and says:
“She was Otean, of course. Her thighs like tree trunks, her body a muscular fist. The sable-smooth hair that covered her glinted like gold in the sunset of their star. She was a child by their standards, but twice as old as I, and her wide dark eyes were as full of dreams as mine. That is how it happened: we both were dreamers. I’d been away too long.”
It is a moving tale, in its own way convincing. Otus is indeed a heavy world, the atmosphere thick, the surface touched by less light than Earth. In turn, Otean eyes are more photosensitive, their bodies stockier, their lungs accustomed to richer oxygen. And although they are much more like us than the little Debolites are, they hate Terra; they cannot stand to be here even for a day, even in lightweight breathing gear. (Some say it is photophobia; others believe it is a peculiarity of the inner ear; still others, a vascularization vertigo.)
“I was drunk on the oxygen mix of that world,” Jory is saying now, “and never did smell the lipid alienness of her. My poor blind passion never stumbled the whole long night.”
I remember something else that gives credence: the marks—the dozens of tiny toothlike marks on his chest, on the inside of his arms. They’ve been there since I can remember, though I’ve never asked about them, assuming, as I did, that they’d been left by the medical instruments that prepared him for his journey.
Abruptly, somberly, Jory says, “No, I never saw the boy. I left Otus long before he was born.”
It is almost convincing. But not quite.
1. Humans and Oteans are able to copulate, but fertilization is impossible; the Otean secretions are toxic. And were a sperm cell to survive, it would not penetrate the ovum; and were it to penetrate, the chromosomes would fail to align themselves on the spindle.
2. Jory was never on Otus.
