I will order the appropriate compressed gas tanks from San Francisco, and I will have a marine construction firm in Fort Bragg build a self-sterilizing, airtight room. But I need to do more homework on the nutrion. Perhaps through supplements of some kind—say, a concentrated mineral/protein mixture tailored to blood profiles on Climago—we may be able to circumvent the need for volumes and volumes of blood-bearing tissue.
I’ve gone ahead and phoned three exobiologists in the Bay Area and in Houston, and have extracted all the information I can without jeopardizing our secret. We just can’t let people—scientists, doctors, and commedia folk—know what is about to happen here. Were the word to get out, our lives would be a hell of ruptured privacy. And if the child is as fragile as Jory claims it is, such a commotion might endanger its life.
But the exobs are willing to part with more information than either the transnational corporations or national governments seem to be, and I have unearthed the following: a Climago should be able to exist comfortably on a mixture of oxygenated, hydrogenated, and proteinized Na, K, Ca, Mg, Cl, and various iron- and copper-based transport pigments taken from Terran mammals and accessible through a durable membrane, natural or synthetic.
I haven’t seen Jory in days; I have, in fact, seen him only two or three times in the past few weeks. It is as though his announcement that day—his “gift” to me—was at last able to liberate him.
Which is what he has wanted for five years.
When he visited me at the hospital just after I awoke, he said he wanted a house on this desolate coast. I thought I knew why. I imagined the harshness and solitude would be his way of bringing us together again.
I was lying to myself then.
It was the gray sea, the cold crags, the solitude itself that he wanted, not a marriage of lives. It was the inhumanity of it all that he wanted, and he wanted it more than anything else.
There are times—those rare moments when we embrace without the need to consummate—when I feel in his body the rhythms, the suckings and chuggings of the factory itself, of the great pipes that pull their material from the far seabed, of the dark engines that do to it what they do.
“Why is he coming?” I ask gently, wondering if gentleness can prevent a lie.
“His mother is dead,” Jory says. “He is too human to live out the rest of his life there.”
“No, Jory,” I say. “
He looks at me sadly, cocks his head like a dog, and tries again: “Because he has a terrible congenital disorder and has very few years to live. He wants to be with his father, his cold mad feary father, before he dies.”
“Please. Why is he coming?”
The smile flashes like a knife. The cruel eyes transfix me.
“Because I’m sick and tired of your nagging, your slop pails of complaint, Dorothea. I am giving you what you want and need. It’s a better career than the aborted one, isn’t it?”
All I can think to say is, “I see.”
In a softer voice, he tells me, “Because I asked him to, Dorothea.”
“Oh,” I say. ‘And when was that?”
He looks away. “A few years ago. I’ve missed him so.”
“Jory, a lockgram come-go takes two or three years.”
“Yes, it does, but their telepathy is a very special kind. That’s their survival secret, Dorothea. I can think a message to my beloved son across the whole galaxy and he can hear me. Hemispherical space is no obstacle for a love that—”
I turn. I leave him.
I am sure of it now: Jory invited his “child” to live with us before he left Climago.
Only one explanation is possible: the Climagos are immeasurably more advanced than we are in genetic engineering. They are able, through computer modeling and analog translation, to convert human genetic message into Climago genetic code. They are able to replicate human morphological and physiological capabilities in Climagoan cellular arrangements. But they made a mistake this time. The translation failed. The resulting organism: a hybrid mess, a congenitally doomed anomaly. What Jory has described. Why they would attempt such a thing, I do not know. They are aliens, and perhaps we should not expect to understand them.
I heard voices as I came down the cedar stairs from the helipad yesterday. One was raised, almost violent, and I should have recognized it.
The other was softer, though not conciliatory.
“I can assure you,” the softer voice was saying, “that we do not look sympathetically on visas for them, let alone immigration.”
“And I can assure
