Alien Contact (27 page)

Something any killer needs
….

The Antalouan gesture the boy had used meant “obligation to blood,” though it lacked the slow unsheathing of the
demoor
. The boy had chosen well.

“Thank you,” the boy was saying, and the alien knew he had rehearsed both the touch and the words. It had filled the boy with great fear, the thought of it, but he had rehearsed until fear no longer ruled him.

As the boy stepped back, shaking now and unable to stop it, he said, “Do you have a family-cluster still?”

“I do not,” the alien answered, not surprised by the question. The boy no longer surprised him. “It was a decision…made without regrets. Many Antalou have made it. My work…prevents it. You understand….”

The boy nodded, a gesture which meant that he did.

And then the boy said it:

“What is it like to kill?”

It was, the alien knew, the question the boy had most wanted to ask. There was excitement in the voice, but still no fear.

When the alien answered, it was to say simply:

“It is both…more and less…than what one…imagines it will be.”

The boy named Kim Tuckey-Yatsen stood in the doorway of the small room where he slept and schooled, and listened as the man spoke to his mother and father. The man never looked at his mother’s swollen belly. He said simply, “You have been granted an exception, Family Tuckey-Yatsen. You have permission to proceed with the delivery of the unborn female. You will be receiving confirmation of a Four-Member Family Waiver within three workweeks. All questions should be referred to BuPopCon, Seventh District, at the netnumber on this card.”

When the man was gone, his mother cried in happiness and his father held her. When the boy stepped up to them, they embraced him, too. There were three of them now, hugging, and soon there would be four. That was what mattered. His parents were good people. They had taken a chance for him, and he loved them. That mattered, too, he knew.

That night he dreamed of her again. Her name would be Kiara. In the dream she looked a little like Siddo’s sister two floors down, but also like his mother. Daughters should look like their mothers, shouldn’t they? In his dream the four of them were hugging and there were more rooms, and the rooms were bigger.

When the boy was seventeen and his sister five, sharing a single room as well as siblings can, the trunk arrived from Romah, one of the war-scarred worlds of the Pleiades. Pressurized and dented, the small alloy container bore the customs stamps of four spacelocks, had been opened at least seven times in its passage, and smelled. It had been disinfected, the USPUS carrier who delivered it explained. It had been kept in quarantine for a year and had nearly not gotten through, given the circumstances.

The boy did not know what the carrier meant.

The trunk held many things, the woman explained. The small polished skull of a carnivore not from Earth. A piece of space metal fused like the blossom of a flower. Two rings of polished stone which tingled to the touch. An ancient device which the boy would later discover was a third-generation airless communicator used by the Gar-Betties. A coil made of animal hair and pitch, which he would learn was a rare musical instrument from Hoggun VI. And many smaller things, among them the postcard of the Pacific Fountain the boy had given the alien.

Only later did the family receive official word of the 300,000 inters deposited in the boy’s name in the neutral banking station of HiVerks; of the cache of specialized weapons few would understand that had been placed in perpetual care on Titan, also in his name; and of the offworld travel voucher purchased for the boy to use when he was old enough to use it.

Though it read like no will ever written on Earth, it was indeed a will, one that the Antalou called a “bequeathing cantation.” That it had been recorded in a spacelock lobby shortly before the alien’s violent death on a world called Glory did not diminish its legal authority.

Although the boy tried to explain it to them, his parents did not understand; and before long it did not matter. The money bought them five rooms in the northeast sector of the city, a better job for his mother, better care for his father’s autoimmunities, more technical education for the boy, and all the food and clothes they needed; and for the time being (though only that) these things mattered more to him than Saturn’s great moon and the marvelous weapons waiting patiently for him there.

ike a miniature Jupiter gone insane, the paint-blob hangs in the middle of the room—a Jupiter whose tides and weather and powerful gravity snapped on the strain of the secret of its monstrous microscopic inhabitants so its regular bands are broken up into gaily swirling asymmetrical patterns of mingling paint with color almost computer-exaggerated—like the glorious unholy mother of all cat’s eye marbles, it glares at me.

I try not to see her.

There’s no gravity here, but that floating blob has a pull just the same. I orbit in freefall, make ’em let me paint in the center of these cans where the spinning doesn’t suck you to the floor—and like the irresistible pull of Jupiter, so big, so bad, so goddam awesome that you feel yourself fall into those convulsive, frenzied clouds, like you’re being sucked
up,
not pulled down (Jupiter is too big, too gigantic for you to ever be on top of it)—and
it
still pulls me.

And she pulls me.

I take the stick like an Aztec priest wielding a flint knife, or that cop swinging his baton on that cool, starless night years ago in L.A.—crushing the buckle from my gas mask into my skull, leaving a cute little scar on my scalp that I shaved my head for months to show off.

It exploded—like an amphetamine-choked blob. Amorphous little monsters sailed through the air, some colliding with me and sticking to my naked flesh. One sought my eyes in order to blind me. Lucky I have goggles like Tlaloc, the Rain, Water, and Thunder God…and a breathing mask—that’s all the covering I need! I wipe away the paint, my vision is smeared with color.

The entire little canvas-lined room is exploding with color. Beautiful.

Like her.

Still, the paint has this sickening tendency to settle into little jiggling globes that just sit there like mini-Jupiters, mocking me. I refuse to allow entropy to happen in my presence, so, like a samurai Jackson Pollock, I scream through my mask and thrash the disgusting little buggers into tinier flying sky-serpents that merrily decorate me, and the canvas on the walls.

And the canvas is raw, unprimed and the paint is mixed with a base that gives it the consistency of water. Splatter marks don’t just sit there looking pretty—no, they grow fur as the canvas absorbs it, thirstily. My work is always wild and woolly.

Soon the colorful swordplay is over and I am victorious. All (except for a few little stubborn, but insignificant BB’s) the paint is slapped down to the canvas. I shed my goggles for a while and the furious splatters change into visions.

André Masson, eat your heart out!

Bizarre hieroglyphs materialize in the Jovian storm clouds:
Demonic cartoon characters exhaling balloons full of obscenity—hordes of baby godzilloids crawling through vacuum and eating rocks—endless three-D labyrinths of orbital castles complete with living gargoyles and tapestries you can walk into—large, luxuriant cars encrusted with jewels and tail-fins that race the crowded, tangled spaghetti of freeways with off-ramps all over the galaxy—the vegetal love poetry that an intelligent network of vines sings to the jungle it intricately embraces—the ecstatic rush of falling into an ocean of warm mud that tastes delicious and makes you feel so good—pornographic geometries that can only be imagined on a scale more than intergalactic—the Byzantine plots of surrealistic soap operas that take place outside of spacetime, in Omeyocan, the highest heaven—the ballet of subatomic particles smaller than any yet discovered!

Letting the stick fly, I attack the canvas with paint-covered fingers—desperately trying to record the visions before they fade, but never finishing before they do, so I have to fill many gaps with memory and imagination.

Then I see her face again.

That beautiful, perfect Zulu face, with impossibly intense eyes—beauty that puts the cold, marble-white classicism of dead and buried ancient Greece to shame, causing arrogant statues to crack and crumble to dust—making you see how right the barbarians were in knocking their heads off. A presence that is soft, yet extremely powerful, like the fearful sound of the soft, swishing skirt that reveals that an umkhovu—like a bad memory of apartheid—is roaming the midnight streets of Soweto, making its way past the sleepy suburbs, to the shiny new university to the Center of Parapsychology…

I find myself drawing that magnificent face. The face of Willa Shembe, a pampered little (she was taller than me, but still, somehow,
little
) psychic from Zululand, from whom I’ll never be free. The sorcery that caused her “death” has contaminated me, enslaved me. I will see, draw, and paint her forever.

I should have known the first time I saw her—who knows how long after my surprisingly non-fatal encounter with the Sirens…

Whatever made Calvino send her to me? I guess a little inspiration flickers under that pale, bald head, behind those thick, old-fashioned glasses and fat, gray eyebrows on occasion.