Alien Sex: 19 Tales by the Masters of Science Fiction and Dark Fantasy

DANCING CHICKENS ^{EDWARD BRYANT}

WHAT DO ALIENS WANT?

Their burnished black ships, humming with the ominous power of a clenched fist, ghost across our cities. At first we turned our faces to the skies in the chill of every moving shadow. Now we seem to feel the disinterest bred of familiarity. It’s not a sense of ease, though. The collective apprehension is still there—even if diminished. For many of us, I believe, the feeling is much like awaiting a dentist’s drill.

Do aliens have expectations?

If human beings know, no one’s telling. Our leaders dissemble, the news media speculate, but facts and truths alike submerge in murky communications. Extraterrestrial secrets, if they do have answers, remain quietly and tastefully enigmatic. Most of us have read about the government’s beamed messages, all apparently ignored.

Do humans care?

I’m not really sure anymore. The ships have been up there for months—a year or more. People do become blasé, even about those mysterious craft and their unseen pilots. When the waiting became unendurable, most humans simply seemed to tune out the ships and thought about other things again: mortgages, spiraling inflation, Mideast turmoil, and getting laid. Yet the underlying tension remained.

Some of us in the civilian sector have retained our curiosity. Right here in the neighborhood, David told us he sat in the aloneness of the early morning hours and pumped out Morse to the silhouettes as they cruised out of the dark above the mountains and slid into the dim east. If there were replies, David couldn’t interpret them. “You’d think at least they’d want to go out for a drink,” David had said.

Riley used the mirror in his compact to send up heliograph signals. In great excitement he claimed to have detected a reply, messages in kind. We suggested he saw, if anything, reflections from the undersides of the dark hulls. None of that diminished his ecstasy. He believed he was noticed. I felt for him.

Hawk—both job description and name—didn’t hold much with guesses. “In good time,” he said, “they’ll tell us what they want; tell us, then buy it, take it, use it. They’ll give us the word.” Hawk had plucked me, runaway and desperate young man, literally out of the gutter along the Boulevard. Since before the time of the ships, he had cared for me. He had taken me home, cleaned, fed, and warmed me. He used me, sometimes well. Sometimes he only used me.

Whether Hawk loved me was debatable.

Watching the ships gave me no answer.

I attempted to communicate every day. It was a little like what my case worker told me about what dentists did to kids’ mouths before anyone had invented braces. When he was a boy with protruding teeth, my case worker was instructed to push fingers gently against those front teeth every time he thought of his mouth and how people were making fun. “Hey, Trigger! Where’s Roy?” Years of gentle, insistent touches did what braces do now.

I tried to do something like that with the alien ships. Every time I fantasized smooth, alien features when I shivered in the chilly wake of an alien shadow, I gathered my mental energies, concentrated, shot an inquiring thought after the diminishing leviathan.

Ship, come to me… I wanted it to carry me away, to take charge, to save me from any sense of responsibility about my own actions in my own life. I knew better, but that didn’t stop the temptation.

Once, only once, I thought I felt a reply, the slightest tickling just at the border of my mind. At the time it was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, more a textural thing: slick surfaces, cool, moist, one whole enclosing another. (A fist fills the glove. One hand, damp, warm: the wrist—twists.)

I tried to describe the sensation to some of the people on the street. I’m not sure who disbelieved me. I know Hawk believed. He stared at me with his dark raptor eyes and touched my arm. I danced skittishly away.

“You fit, Ricky,” he said. “You really do.”

“Not like that,” I answer. The conversation has taken place in many variations, in many bedrooms and on many streets, and still does. “No longer. No more.”

Hawk nods, almost sadly, I think. “Still going to leave?”

“I’ll dance again,” I say. “I’m young.” Dancing was the only thing the therapists ever gave me that I loved.

“You’re that,” he agrees. “But you’re out of shape.” His voice is sad again. “At least for dancing.”

“I can get back,” I say helplessly, spreading my hands. “Soon.” I try to ignore the fact that, as young as I am, I’ve abandoned my best years.

“I wish you could do it.” The tone is as gentle as Hawk’s voice ever gets. “It’s the sticks, kiddo,” he says. “You’re a runaway on the skids, just off the street, in the sticks.”

I don’t like being reminded. He makes me remember every foster home, every set of possible parents who threw me back in the pool.

Hawk nods toward the stairs. “Come up.”

I look at the darkness beyond the landing. I look at the faceted rings on the knuckles of Hawk’s right hand. I stare at the floor. “No.” I feel the circle tighten.

“Rick…” His voice shines dark and faceted.

“No.” But I follow Hawk up the steps and into freezing alien shadows.

I’m planning my escape. I keep telling myself that. But that’s all I do. Plan. If I left, I’d have to go someplace. There’s nowhere I’ve ever realistically wanted to go.

Come, ships…

At one time I thought about hitching to Montana. I’d seen Comes a Horseman on late-night TV. Then I made the mistake of turning to Hawk and mentioning my plan. He raised his head from the pillow and said, “Ricky, you want to be a dancer again and go to Montana? You’re maybe going to dance for the Great Falls Repertory Ballet?” I pretended to ignore the mockery. Someday I would leave. Just as soon as I made up my mind.

I gave up the Montana idea. But I still plan my escape. I’ve saved a few hundred dollars in tips waiting on tables at Richard’s Coffee Shop. I have a dog-eared copy of Ecotopia and a Texaco road map of Oregon. I think Portland’s probably a whole lot larger and more cosmopolitan than Great Falls. Certainly more cultural. Oregon seems familiar to me. I read a tattered paperback of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest in that fragmented past when I bounced from home to home, always waiting for them to tell my case worker I wasn’t quite what they wanted.

If I really wanted to go, I’d leave. Right? Hawk jokes about it because he simply doesn’t believe me. He doesn’t know me. He never did find the passage to my mind.

Tonight I’m at a party at David and Lee’s apartment. There are plenty of times when I wish I had the kind of relationship with someone, loving and supportive, that the two of them share.

David and Lee’s apartment is on the fourteenth floor of a high-rise, rearing improbably out of a restored Victorian neighborhood. The balcony faces east and I can see all the way across the city, almost to the plains. There are maybe thirty people in the apartment, smoking, talking, drinking. Lee had laid out some lines he got at work on the big heart-shaped mirror on the coffee table, but those vanished early on. While some of the party guests watch, David is at his ham set, flashing out dah-dit, dah-dit, dah-dah-dit messages to the aliens.

Riley, resplendent in ermine and pearls, rushes up to my elbow. “Oh, Ricky, you’ve got to see!” I turn, look past him. People are thronging around the bar. The laughter rises and crashes uproariously. “Ricky, come on.” He takes my arm and propels me into the apartment.

I crane my neck to see what’s going on. For once unladylike, Riley climbs onto a chair. Somebody I don’t know, shiny in full leathers, is standing behind the mahogany bar. For a second I think he’s wearing a white glove, but only for a second.

It’s a chicken. The man has stuffed his fist into a plucked, pale chicken right out of a cello-wrapped package from a Safeway meat department. He wears it like a naked hand puppet. I find it hard to believe.

The man holds the chicken close to his face and talks to it like a ventriloquist crooning to his dummy. “That’s a good boy, you like the party? Want to entertain the nice folks with a little dance?” I realize the headless chicken has a small black bolo tie with a dime-sized silver concho tied around its neck. Tasteful, basic black. The drumsticks are wearing doll shoes. The sheen of chicken juice on the rubbery, stippled skin starts to make me queasy.

It ought to be funny—but it’s not.

The man addresses us, the audience. “And now,” he says, “the award-winning performance by a featherless biped.” He nods toward David, who has come away from his radio set to watch. “Maestro, if you please.” The expensive stereo cackles and we hear a tinkling piano version of “Tea for Two.” The man with the chicken half crouches behind the bar top so that most of his arm is hidden. The chicken stands onstage. And starts to dance.

Evidently the joints have been cracked, because the dancer’s limbs swing loose. The little shoes clatter on the Formica bar. The wings flap up and down wildly. Fluid drips to the bar.

“An obscene featherless biped,” someone says accurately. But we all keep watching. The pimpled skin catches the light wetly. I don’t think this is what the Greek philosopher who defined human beings as featherless bipeds had in mind.

The tune changes, the tempo alters—faster—“If You Knew Susie”—and the dancer is in trouble. It seems to be sliding off the manipulator’s hand. The man behind the bar impatiently reaches with his free hand and screws the chicken down firmly on his fist. It makes a squelching sound like adjusting a rubber glove. Now I can smell the raw chicken. I turn suddenly and head for the balcony and the clean air that should steady my stomach.

I walk by Hawk. He lightly touches my wrist as I pass, but his eyes don’t deviate from the scene on the bar. He doesn’t have to look at me.

On the balcony I lean over the railing and retch. It’s dark now and I have no idea who or what is fourteen stories below. Crazily I hope it will all evaporate before it hits the ground, like those immensely long and beautiful South American waterfall veils that dissolve into mist and then vanish before ever hitting the jungle floor.

Travelogs again. I want to escape.

My mind skips erratically. I also have to find a new doctor. My appointment this morning arrived at the point I’ve come to dread. There always comes a time when my current doctor looks at me quizzically and says, “Son, those aren’t ordinary hemorrhoids.” I stammer and leave.

Leave.

Good-bye, Hawk.

I’m leaving.

“But what do they want?” someone is saying as I walk across the floor. Oregon is, more or less, on the other side of that door. What do they want? Alien ships are still sliding silently between us and the stars. The watchers are out on the balcony, no longer discreet now that I’ve finished my purgation.

Ship, come to me…

Inside the apartment, the dancing chicken episode is triggering debate. I am amazed to see a confrontation between David and Lee. That they would fight is enough to make me pause.

“Sick,” says Lee. “Tasteless. How could you let him spoil the party? You helped him.”

“He’s your friend,” David says.

“Colleague. He stacks boxes. That’s all.” Lee’s expression is furious. “The two of you! What sort of people think it’s amusing to stick their hand inside a dead chicken?”

David says defensively, “Everyone was watching.”

“And that makes it real!” Lee’s amazement and anger are palpable. “Jesus! We’re part of the most technologically sophisticated civilization on Earth, and yet we do this.”

Riley has come up to us, looking cool and demure. “All societies are just individuals,” he says reasonably. “You have to allow for a wide variation in”—he smiles sweetly—“individual tastes.”

“Don’t give me platitudes!” says Lee angrily. He stalks off toward the kitchen.

“Sulky, sulky,” says Riley, and shrugs.

The three of us hear a chorus of ooh’s and aah’s from behind. We turn as one toward the balcony.

“I’ve never seen one so close,” says a voice suffused with wonder. I imagine it’s like sitting helplessly in a rowboat being passed by a whale. It seems as though the shining metallic skin of the alien ship is gliding past only yards from the balcony. The ship is so huge I can’t accurately gauge the distance. The whooosh of displaced air flows through the windows. Chilly currents cocoon us.

The cold breaks the spell.

“I’m leaving,” I say to the people around me. Lee and Riley seem fixed in place by the passing ship. They don’t hear me. But then I don’t think they ever did. “Good-bye,” I say. “I’m leaving.” Nobody hears me.

So, finally, I carry out my plans, my threat, my promise to myself.

I leave, and it feels better than I’d expected.

Someone does notice my departure, and he catches up with me at the elevator.

I try to ignore Hawk. He lounges beside the door until it slides open. Then he follows me into the car. I slap the ground-floor button with my fist.

“Stay,” Hawk says.

I look at the sharpness of his eyes. “Why?”

He smiles slightly. “I haven’t finished using you.”

“At least that’s honest.”

“I’ve got no need to lie,” he says. “I know you well enough, I can say that.”

The sureness in his voice and the agreement I feel combine internally to make me feel again the sickness I felt upstairs watching the chicken dance. But now I have nothing left to purge.

The elevator brakes and I feel it all through my gut—it’s the burn you get gulping ice water. The door hisses open. Hawk follows me into the apartment lobby. “Just let me go,” I say without turning.

His words catch me as I reach for the outer door. “You know, Ricky, in my own way, I do love you.”

I wonder if he knows the cruelty of that. I stare at him, startled. He’s the first I remember saying that to me. Tears I haven’t felt since childhood slide down my cheeks. I turn away.

“Stick around, kiddo,” Hawk calls after me. “Please?”

“No.” This time I mean it. I’ve made my decision. I don’t look back at him. I stiff-arm the door open and lunge past a pair of aging queens; I am running as I hit the sidewalk. I barely see through the tears as a shadow deeper than the surrounding night envelops me. Rubbing eyes with wet knuckles, I look up to see an alien ship cross my vision and recede into the east. There are other ships in the sky now. Huge as they are, they still seem to dance and dart like enormous moths. What I see must be true, because others around me on the street are also gawking at the sky. Perhaps we all simply share the delusion.

“Rick!” Hawk’s voice sinuously seeks me from behind.

I lower my head and bull forward.

“Ricky, look out!”

I register what my eyes must have seen all the time. The bus. The driver, wide-eyed and staring upward. The rushing chrome bumpers—

I feel no pain at first. Just the brutal physical force, the crushing motion, the slamming against the pavement. I feel—broken. Parts of me are no longer whole, that I know. When I try to move, some things don’t, and those that do, don’t move in the right places.

I am lying on my back. I think one leg is twisted beneath me.

Come to me, ship…

One of the swooping, agitated, alien ships has parked poised, stationary above the block, above the street, above me. It masks both the city glow and the few stars penetrating that radiance. The angles are peculiar. Hawk’s face enters my field of vision. I expect him to look stricken, or at least concerned. He only looks—I don’t know—possessive, a boy whose doll has broken. Other faces now, all staring on with confusion, some with a sort of interest. I saw those faces at the party, those expressions.

As I stare past Hawk at the immobile alien ship, I know that I am dying here in the street. And I was on the way to Oregon…. Why is the alien ship above me? They’ll start somewhere, Hawk had said. Sometime. With someone.

Then I feel the ice. At least I can feel something. I feel that knotted—something, an agency from outside me coming within, a chilly intrusion into my core.

The ship seems closer, dwarfing everything else, monopolizing my vision. They’ll give us the word, Hawk had said. I had wanted the word. Now I feel very tight and unwilling.

From deep inside, spreading, flexing, tearing, ice impales me. The cold burns with a flame. I try to shrink away from it—and cannot. And then something moves. My foot. It spasms once, twice. My ankle jerks. My knee separates, cartilage wrenching apart, sliding back together, but wrong. My whole body quivers, each limb rebelling. Joints grind.

But I start to move. Slowly, horribly, without my orders, I rear up. Stop it, I will myself. I can’t stop it.

I wonder if the aliens define featherless bipeds too?

The faces around the mirror pain as my body struggles to its knees. No one watches the ship anymore. All eyes fix on my performance.

I am called… At last I am wanted.

Why aren’t I dead? I’m moving and I cannot help it. My body lurches to its feet, limbs pivoting at wrong, odd angles. The fist inside me tentatively twists. I struggle to fall, to rest, but I am not allowed the luxury of ending this. Death doesn’t save me. I waited too long and forfeit escape. At least I finally tried. It isn’t fair, but then it never was.

The fist in me flexes, testing again.

My eyes flicker. Hawk has come to me. He watches with impassive eyes of shining black metal.

What do aliens want?

Chickens, dancing.