Redshift

"Oh, Tommy," she looked back over her shoulder, "Tommy, they were hurting me. I didn"t have a choice. Are you okay? Where is Erin? Heather?"

He reached out his upperhand, almost touched her, pulled back. She smelled devastation.

"Mommy, you did this, didn"t you? Why did you come here? They are so angry with you. You have to go."

She scrubbed at her eyes, reached out to her son. She touched his back, stroked the silky skin. He shuddered and moved away. "You have to go," he repeated.

"But the dreams, I felt them. I felt you in the dreams."

"You, humans, you aren"t allowed there. You have your place and this is our place."

"I need to help you-"

Erin and Heather appeared, coming out of the same hole. Erin charged at Jo-ann. "Auntie Jo-ann, you did a bad thing. You hurt someone, there"s blood!"

She looked toward the Froggie nest. Sitting on the edge, one of the aliens cradled the stump of its midarm. Blood, brown and thick, oozed out of the stump evenly, not pulsing as from a human injury. Shocked, she watched. She tried to speak, but couldn"t get words past the lump in her throat.

The bleeding slowed. She blinked, and the bleeding had stopped completely. A final drip, and the flesh at the end of the Froggie"s arm collapsed inward. Amazed, she realized that the Froggie would live-its gate circulatory system had acted as a natural tourniquet.

But now the children approached, focused on her, backs bristling with anger.

"I"m sorry. I didn"t mean to. I never wanted to hurt anyone. But you have to tell them, there are bad people, the Hugonauts-"

Heather interrupted. "What"s so bad about them?"

"They want to destroy the planet. They want to dig holes, really big holes that kill the forest and the animals, to get at the rocks underneath. They would dig and dig until there was nothing left. Not your nice nesting holes, much bigger. They"ve messed up other planets before, and now they want to take your home away."

"But you"re the one who messed things up. You took us away from our real home, didn"tyou?" said Erin.

Jo-ann felt Erin"s accusation driving at her, but she had to concentrate on explaining the important issue to them. "Yes. I did. But you have to understand, I need to talk to them. All these years, I"ve been trying to prove that they communicate. So we can keep the planet safe.

And it"s the dreams, you children found the answer, they talk in dreams. I felt it, too! I felt I was in their dreams. . . ."

Tommy whipped his tail around, as though he would slap her, but just brushed the tip across her forearm. "No! I told you already. You can"t feel them-it"s not allowed. They"re very angry with you."

"But, Tommy, I knew you were there, I could smell, such strange smells, but with you mixed in, and some chemical, like tar. What were they saying, do you know?"

"Mommy, no. You"re not my mommy. You stole us. They say, Go."

"Go," said Heather.

"Go," said Erin.

"But you have to help. ..."

She searched for the words to explain why she needed them. Why she needed the Froggies to listen to her, to welcome her. She had been so sure, those years ago, sure that the Froggies would answer her, and she would show everyone their intelligence, show that Jo-ann had seen the truth everyone else had missed. And now she had it, their communication dancing through her mind. (Go, Tommy had said. He had told her to leave. Go, echoed in her ears.) These amazing creatures would hare their dreams with her. The children would have to understand.

They had to see how she needed them to translate- Her thoughts came to a grinding halt. Words left her. She paused, lingered over that last word, see. She looked. The children sat before her, one two three, and they were not human children. She spoke, they spoke back, she thought they were talking with each other. But, even though the children used the same words she used, they did not see what she saw. They did not see the Hugonauts strip-mining their planet. They did not see the people in the courtroom laughing at them, at her for declaring their intelligence. They did not see. She had no idea what they perceived, inside their heads. After the briefest glimpse, she knew that she would never know what they imagined, or what they needed.

They had chosen, and they had not chosen her.

She couldn"t help it; she started crying. "I just wanted to find a way to talk to them. I thought you kids would talk to me."

She reached out to Tommy. He stepped back.

"You are wrong. You don"t belong here. They"ve explained it to me. This is our place, not yours. We don"t come into your world. You stay out of ours."

"Tommy, I love you."

"You go now."

Dave was waiting at the gate. As Jo-ann stepped out of the trees, he reached out a hand. He waved in question toward the trees behind her. She shook her head.

"Did you find them?"

"Yes."Dave folded his shirts, stacking them in a careful pile. Jo-ann crammed her data cells into the mem-erase, one after the other.

Jo-ann felt him watching her. "These aren"t the important ones. Just baseline material."

"I didn"t say anything."

While he tucked gla.s.sware in with the shirts, she moved around the house, restless, picking things up and putting them down again, collecting data cells for the ruthless scrubbing of the mem-erase. Feeding her latest collection into the machine, she reached with her other hand for the data cell propped on the table by the sofa, the one with their favorite pictures of Tommy, of the three of them making up the game of hop-and-catch. As she picked it up, it was pulled back.

Startled, she turned her head.

"Not that one," Dave said. "I want to keep it."

"No need for it, might as well reuse the data cell. They"re not cheap."

Dave didn"t let go. After a moment, Jo-ann let her hand drop. She looked out the window at the garden. She felt Tommy stroke her hair. She watched again as Dave carefully snipped the encroaching vines off his azalea bushes.

She thought, Vines wrap around your heart-when you try to pull them out, you only tear yourself.

Writer collaborations are strange things-when they work, they"re marvelous meldings of two (or more) fertile minds into something not quite like each of them separately. We have two such collaborations in this book, and this first one has proved fertile, indeed.

Barry Malzberg, besides being a N. Y. Giants football fan, has been a wonderfully iconoclastic writer from the original New Wave to now. His stories are instantly recognizable as Malzbergian- intense, almost frantic in narration, cerebral and emotive at the same time. Kathe Koja first made a name for herself in the dark fantasy field.

They"ve written some wonderful stories together. "What We Did That Summer" is one of them, and was one of the first stories I bought for this volume.

What We Did That Summer.

KATHE KOJA AND BARRY N. MALZBERG.

Boy, I sure miss those aliens, he said. What? She had to put down her beer for that one but there was nothing stronger than amus.e.m.e.nt now; she was not surprised; it was not possible any longer to surprise her. Say that again, she said, leaning into the metal ladderback of the kitchen chair, the one with the crooked leg that when it moved sc.r.a.ped that red linoleum with the textbook sound of discontent. Say it again and then explain it.

Nothing to explain, he said, I just miss them. We called them aliens, those girls, it was our word for them, they would have done anything. Anything, you wouldn"t believe, he said, nodding and nodding in that way he had. Not for money, you know, they didn"t want money or presents, whatever. It was like a contest they were having between themselves. Almost like we weren"t there at all, he said, and sighed, scratched himself in memory as she watched without contempt, watched all this from some secret part of herself that was not a failed madam, not a woman whom he had once paid, regularly though never well, to f.u.c.k; not a woman whose home now permitted no yielding surface whatsoever, nothing soft or warm or pleasant to the touch,no plush sofas and certainly no beds; she herself slept on a cot like a board and ate macaroni and cheese and potpies that she bought at the supermarket when they were on sale. Tell me, she said. Tell me about those aliens, why not. Let me get another beer first, though.

Get one for me, too, he said, and scratched again; there was an annoying dry patch between his legs, just behind the dangle of his s.c.r.o.t.u.m, not an easy place to scratch in public but at her place, well. Well well well. It had never mattered what he did here, not in the old days, the brisk wild days in which she had absorbed without delight the greater part of his pay, or that strange hallucinatory period in which he had decided he was into S&M and she had proved so thoroughly and with such elan that he was not; not during his divorce from Deborah and the unraveling that followed, and the rewinding of the skein which followed that; she was in some ways the best friend he had ever had, and it was for that reason he suspected without knowing or caring to admit that he had begun to tell her this story, this night, in this comfortless kitchen with its piles of old yellow pages and its warped unclosable window presenting its endless, disheartening view of the faraway river and all points east.

All right, she said, setting down both cans of beer; they did not use gla.s.ses; gla.s.ses were both effete and a bother with beer like this. Go on, tell me. So they f.u.c.ked your heads off, you and your gang, those dumb boys you ran with, and they never took your dollar bills or the flowers you picked yourselves. Queen Anne"s lace, am I right, from the side of the road? past the beer cans in the ditches? Or the candy you bought from the drugstore, three Hershey bars for them to split? What charity, she said, laughing although not directly at him or even the boy he had been. What princes, she said, what royalty you must have been.

If you"re going to make fun, he said, subtly ashamed at the sound of his own petulance but unwilling to correct it, I won"t tell the story.

Oh yes you will, she said, not laughing now but smiling. Of course you will. Go on ahead and tell it, I won"t laugh. Much.

All right then, he said, and scratched again, but thus invited was somehow at a loss for a true beginning: he drank some of the beer, set down the can. Well, he said. You remember John Regard? John Regard, she said. I remember he was an a.s.shole, yes. Well, think what you want, but he was a good friend to me, he used to let me borrow his car, that black-and-yellow Barracuda. Remember that?

No, she said; they both knew she was lying. If there"s going to be a lot about John Regard in this story, I don"t think I want to hear it after all.

Oh, just shut up, he said, and listen. Anyway, it was John who found them, out in the field that night; it was behind where the factories used to be, all those tool-and-die places. We were drinking beer, but we weren"t drunk, stopping the narrative there, pointing with the hand holding the can; neither of them if they noticed remarked on this irony. We were not drunk and I want you to remember that.

I will, she said.

Anyway, John said he heard voices or saw a flashlight or something, and we headed over there, and we found these girls and they were naked. Three of them, bare-a.s.s naked.

She sc.r.a.ped the chair leg a little, leaning with all her weight. What were they doing? she said.

Nothing, I don"t know. Even from this distance, time and age, and geography she saw his wistfulness, the depth and slow pa.s.sion of his wonder. They were just sitting there, he said,talking. And John said- I know what John said. Meat on the hoof, that"s what John- Will you quit? he said, with a sudden sad ferocity that silenced them both; they sat in the silence as in the middle of a large and formal room and finally he said, Just let me tell it, all right? Just let me tell the f.u.c.king thing and get it over with, and then you can say whatever the h.e.l.l you want. All right? Is that all right with you, milady?

Yes, she said. Yes, it"s fine. Go on.

Well. Not sullen but disturbed, as if he had lost his place in chronology itself and would take his own time finding it. Well, anyway, he said. They were sitting there naked and John said (daring her with a look to mock) Do you ladies need some help? And they didn"t say anything at first but finally they did, one of them, she seemed like the oldest or the smartest or something, and she said, in this way that was like an accent but not really an accent, you know what I mean? Like the person is from somewhere but you can"t place where. And she said We"re having a bet. That"s what she said. We"re having a bet and we can"t decide who"s right.

And John said (leaning back a little as if back in the field, taking his time, measuring his place) Well what"s the bet? Now you have to remember we were both kids, then, you know, we were sixteen or so, and we both had pretty good rods on, looking at these naked girls there in the dirt and the weeds and so on. They weren"t really beautiful girls, they were kind of a little fat or out of shape-what"s the word? misshapen? Is that a word?-but they were definitely girls and they were naked girls and that was good enough for us. So John said What"s your bet, and they said We are trying to bet which one of us can have the most boys.

It was very still in the kitchen; she did not say anything though he thought she would, until the silence told him that she was not going to comment on this and so Well, he said. That was all we needed to hear and, well, John said you can start with me, ladies, and so there we were.

Us and those three girls.

She still did not say anything until she saw that he would not continue without some kind of comment or response from her, something to keep the story moving like rollers under a ponderous piano, or someone"s obese and terrible aunt. Well, she said. There you were, like you say. I can guess what happened next. Then what?

Well that was the thing, he said. After we were done and getting dressed I asked them their names, you know, and they wouldn"t tell us, not like they were shy or something but as if they weren"t sure what we wanted. And so they wouldn"t say anything and finally I left.

You? she said. What happened to John?

He was, he had to go p.i.s.s or something. I don"t remember, crossly. Anyway that was it for that night but the next night we went out there, you know, again (in that field with its weeds and chunked metal, sc.r.a.p and dirt and the oily smell of the tool-and-die shops, its moonlessness and its absence of mystery) and there they were. Only this time only one of them was naked and the other two were wearing these dresses, weird dresses, you know, like old ladies or something would wear. And the smart one said She doesn"t want to make a baby, about the naked one, you know? She doesn"t want to make a baby so do something different this time.

Well, she said, and could not help smiling; and he smiled, too, and they both laughed a little, a laugh not wholly comfortable but without true embarra.s.sment, and she said Get me another beer, will you? and he did. So anyway, he said. We did it all different ways with that girl, and the other two sat in their old-lady dresses and watched us like they were kids in school andnever said a word or made any sound at all. Just sat there in the dirt and watched us do their sister, you know, until we were tired.

How long did that take? she said.

A lot longer than it does now, he said, and she smiled, and he did, too. So they talked to each other in little voices and John said How about tomorrow? and they said no, not tomorrow but that they would see us soon. And then we left.

So what happened then? she said. Incidentally, you"re going to knock that beer over if you keep- I see it, it"s okay. So we went back anyway (and from his face she could see he was less present in the kitchen than in that midnight field, picking his way with l.u.s.t and hope through the clutter and debris, searching for three misshapen naked girls who would perform with him acts he had never dreamed of suggesting, who would do whatever he asked for as long as he could without demanding recompense or return; it was some men"s idea of heaven, she knew) but they weren"t there. We waited around and waited around and they didn"t show and so finally we left.

And John went back the next night and- John did? What about you?

I didn"t have a car, he said shortly; they both knew what that meant and neither remarked on it, John"s well-known selfishness and duplicity, John sneaking back alone in the yellow-and-black Barracuda to have them all for himself. Anyway, he said, John went back but he didn"t find them, and so we figured maybe they were gone for good. But then one night about two weeks later they came back. It was raining, we had to do it in the car. John was in back- With two of them, she said.

Yes. With two of them. You want to tell my story or should I? (But it was mere rote irritation, only physical pain could have stopped this story now; it was like the last drive to o.r.g.a.s.m, you needed a baseball bat and room to swing it if you wanted to make it stop.) So I was up front with the other one, and it rained and rained, water like crazy down the windshield and the windows. And every once in a while I would try to get her to drink some beer, you know, but she never would, she said she didn"t want any. And we kept at it all night, it was about four o"clock when finally they said they would see us later and they got out of the car and walked away in the rain, the three of them side by side like they were in a marching band or something, they kept walking until I couldn"t see them anymore.

And then what? she said, imagining him sore and drunk and triumphant, prince in a circus of carnality and stretched imagination, after f.u.c.king and sucking and dog-style and what have you, what else is there, what else is left for a sixteen-year-old boy who has not yet perfected the angles and declensions of true desire? Even with her, as a man both matured and stunted by the pressure of his needs, there had come a limiting and it had come from him. Then what happened? she said again, but gently, to lead and not to prod.

He did not answer at first; he seemed not to have heard her. Then he sighed and drank the rest of the beer in the can, one melancholy swallow. Well, he said. I was all for finding out their names and where they lived and so on and so on, but John said they were probably foreigners and their fathers would shoot our heads off or cut off our b.a.l.l.s or something if we tried. So all we did was go back to the field, and sit there, and wait.

And did they come back? she said.

Well, he said, that"s the interesting part. One of the interesting parts, 1 guess. They did andthey didn"t. What I mean is that the next night out in the field we waited and waited until we had got past the point where the beer meant anything, you know that kind of drunk where every new one just seems to bring you down, make you less drunk and sadder? We sat there in the field drinking and talking about p.u.s.s.y and what the aliens had been like and all the time the sky seemed to be lightening up like dawn except that it wasn"t near morning and we weren"t getting anywhere at all. The nicking had seemed good at first but the longer we talked and waited the sadder it got until I had a whole new look on the situation: we were a couple of sixteen-year-old kids humping these naked girls who didn"t know any better and in a way, when you looked at it, it could have been maybe even rape. Like they were feeble-minded or something or just out from an inst.i.tution, they sure didn"t act normal. How the h.e.l.l did we know? How did we know? he said with a shudder, looking now as if the field in memory had become a bleak and dangerous place, a place of pain and not of happiness; and she looked at him not for the first time in a way that went past his old face, his sunken shoulders, his dumb, dragging features, and she thought You took his money and let him climb on top of you, and then you didn"t want to feel like a wh.o.r.e anymore, so you stopped taking his money and then sooner or later you stopped taking him and what the h.e.l.l was that, now? What did that come to? Are you happy now? Never mind him: what about you?

Well, he said, the sluice of beer problematic down his throat, he swallowed as if it were his own trapped saliva, as if it was something he needed but did not want. Well just about four in the morning or something like that, John and I were so drunk and so sick we were ready to give up and go home and then all of a sudden this guy comes out of the bushes, a tall thin guy as naked as the girls had been except for this big hat he was wearing and something around his neck like a medal or a badge, it was hard to tell in the light. But he was naked as h.e.l.l and I just want to tell you this part, you can believe it or not, but he didn"t have any c.o.c.k or b.a.l.l.s. He had nothing in that place, just smoothness, and he was about the scariest fellow we had ever seen, drunk or sober, because of that empty place there and a look in his eyes which even then we could tell. You"re the ones, aren"t you? he said to John and me, the same way the girls talked, that foreigner-talk, only from him it was mean. You"re the ones they"ve been doing it with.

We looked at him, and there was nothing to say. I mean, what could we say? Yes, we were doing it? Doing what? While we were trying to figure that one out he made a motion and the girls were there, except this time they weren"t naked. They must have come from the bushes, too, but it was hard to tell. Maybe they dropped from the sky. You got to understand, we were so drunk by now and the whole situation was so peculiar that we couldn"t get a handle on it.

You follow me? But those girls were chittering away and poking each other like animals and then they pointed at me and John, raised their fingers and just pointed them down. We felt pretty d.a.m.ned foolish, I want you to know, and scared, too; here"s some guy without a c.o.c.k and b.a.l.l.s and three girls pointing at you, it would scare anybody. Even you, he said.

She said nothing. The beer in the can had gone flat, but she did not move, to drink it, to replace it. The refrigerator buzzed and buzzed like a large and sorry insect trapped in a greasy jar.

Maybe it wouldn"t scare you, he said. Who knows what scares you, anyway, but it sure scared us. No one said anything for a minute, and then I said, All right. All right, I said, we did it. They wanted us to, John said and you can say what you want about John, but that was a brave thing to say, in that field at that moment, to that guy. They wanted us to, he said, and theyasked for everything and if they tell you different, it"s a lie. We gave them whatever they wanted, and if you got any quarrel, take it up with them.

I don"t have a quarrel, the guy said, I only want facts. The girls were still chittering, and I could see that John was starting to shake, but I have to tell you that for me it was different. I might"ve been more scared than any of them, but whether it was the beer or not, I just didn"t give a d.a.m.n. I mean, it looked like some kind of farmer"s daughter scam, you know what I mean? Like he was going to charge us for having devir-ginated his precious daughters and who the h.e.l.l was he, anyway, and where was he when they were being f.u.c.ked? All right, I said, John"s right. We did it because they begged for it and wanted it worse than us and that"s all there is to it. You got any problems you take it up with them.

I already have, the guy said, and made a motion, and the three girls turned around and moved away from there. That"s already been achieved, the guy said. Now it comes to you.

You"ve done this and you"re going to have to pay. That"s all. This is what they call the iron law of the universe, and you are caught up in it.

A pause less silence than memory"s clench, he was so far back in that night it was as if she spoke to two people, man and boy and neither truly listening. Why are you telling me this now?

she said. You never told me any of this all these years. I lay under you for ten years and you treated me like s.h.i.t and then you left and now you tell me this story? I don"t understand you, she said. I never understood you, realizing as she said this that it was only part of the truth: the real thing was that she had never understood anything. So why do you come back to tell me this now? she said. You were sixteen, you and John, that was, what, twenty-five, thirty years ago?

What does this have to do with anything? Maybe you should just get out of here, take your a.s.s down the hollow and split.

I never liked it, she said, leaning slightly toward him, her elbows on the table as if she sighted him down the barrel of some strange and heinous gun. I have to tell you that now. You tell me about aliens? You"re an alien. You never made me feel like a woman, you never made me feel anything at all except bad. I felt like a cornhole, is that what you call it? A gloryhole?

A place to stick it into until it made come and you yelped, that was a h.e.l.l of a thing. I don"t like you much for that.

Well, he said, wincing, staring at her, dragged at least halfway back from the field. Well, now, I don"t like that either. I"m almost finished now, why don"t you let me finish? I got started so let me finish and shut your mouth. All right? She said nothing. Well, he said, in such a way that made her wonder if he had heard more than every third word she had said, well this guy says again You have to pay. That is the first and only law of the universe, of time and density.

If you do something you pay for it but you pay double and if you don"t understand what you were doing, well then it is triple. Here you are now, the guy said, you pay triple. Three times.

Then he made some kind of motion like he was shooing us off, and the next thing I knew the field was on fire. It was fire outside like the f.u.c.king had been fire inside and everything was scorched black and then he was gone. That was the end of it-girls, guy without a c.o.c.k, the whole thing. They never came back again. John was standing in the same place when the fire went out and looked about the same, but who knows, inside and outside, who can tell? He had nothing to say and I had nothing to say either. You have to pay, the guy said, that was the deal.

So we had to pay, that was all.