Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (23 page)

“Oh.” Something warns me not to say I’m sorry. “You mean he doesn’t know about Althea?”

“No.” She smiles, her eyes bright and cuckoo.

“Seems like rather a rough deal for her.”

“I grew up quite happily under the same circumstances.” Bang, I’m dead. Well, well, well. A mad image blooms in my mind: generations of solitary Parsons women selecting sires, making impregnation trips. Well, I hear the world is moving their way.

“I better look at the fish line.”

She leaves. The glow fades.
No.
Just no, no contact. Goodbye, Captain Estéban. My leg is very uncomfortable. The hell with Mrs. Parsons’s long-distance orgasm.

We don’t talk much after that, which seems to suit Ruth. The odd day drags by. Squall after squall blows over us. Ruth singes up some more fillets, but the rain drowns her smudge; it seems to pour hardest just as the sun’s about to show.

Finally she comes to sit under my sagging serape, but there’s no warmth there. I doze, aware of her getting up now and then to look around. My subconscious notes that she’s still twitchy. I tell my subconscious to knock it off.

Presently I wake up to find her penciling on the water-soaked pages of a little notepad.

“What’s that, a shopping list for alligators?”

Automatic polite laugh. “Oh, just an address. In case we—I’m being silly, Don.”

“Hey,” I sit up, wincing. “Ruth, quit fretting. I mean it. We’ll all be out of this soon. You’ll have a great story to tell.”

She doesn’t look up. “Yes . . . I guess we will.”

“Come on, we’re doing fine. There isn’t any real danger here, you know. Unless you’re allergic to fish?”

Another good-little-girl laugh, but there’s a shiver in it.

“Sometimes I think I’d like to go . . . really far away.”

To keep her talking I say the first thing in my head.

“Tell me, Ruth. I’m curious why you would settle for that kind of lonely life, there in Washington? I mean, a woman like you—”

“Should get married?” She gives a shaky sigh, pushing the notebook back in her wet pocket.

“Why not? It’s the normal source of companionship. Don’t tell me you’re trying to be some kind of professional man-hater.”

“Lesbian, you mean?” Her laugh sounds better. “With my security rating? No, I’m not.”

“Well, then. Whatever trauma you went through, these things don’t last forever. You can’t hate all men.”

The smile is back. “Oh, there wasn’t any trauma, Don, and I
don’t
hate men. That would be as silly as—as hating the weather.” She glances wryly at the blowing rain.

“I think you have a grudge. You’re even spooky of me.”

Smooth as a mouse bite she says, “I’d love to hear about your family, Don?”

Touché. I give her the edited version of how I don’t have one anymore, and she says she’s sorry, how sad. And we chat about what a good life a single person really has, and how she and her friends enjoy plays and concerts and travel, and one of them is head cashier for Ringling Brothers, how about that?

But it’s coming out jerkier and jerkier like a bad tape, with her eyes going round the horizon in the pauses and her face listening for something that isn’t my voice. What’s wrong with her? Well, what’s wrong with any furtively unconventional middle-aged woman with an empty bed? And a security clearance. An old habit of mind remarks unkindly that Mrs. Parsons represents what is known as the classic penetration target.

“—so much more opportunity now.” Her voice trails off.

“Hurrah for women’s lib, eh?”

“The lib?” Impatiently she leans forward and tugs the serape straight. “Oh, that’s doomed.”

The apocalyptic word jars my attention.

“What do you mean, doomed?”

She glances at me as if I weren’t hanging straight either and says vaguely, “Oh . . .”

“Come on, why doomed? Didn’t they get that equal rights bill?”

Long hesitation. When she speaks again her voice is different.

“Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like—like that smoke. We’ll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You’ll see.”

Now all this is delivered in a gray tone of total conviction. The last time I heard that tone, the speaker was explaining why he had to keep his file drawers full of dead pigeons.

“Oh, come on. You and your friends are the backbone of the system; if you quit, the country would come to a screeching halt before lunch.”

No answering smile.

“That’s fantasy.” Her voice is still quiet. “Women don’t work that way. We’re a—a toothless world.” She looks around as if she wanted to stop talking. “What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine.”

“Sounds like a guerrilla operation.” I’m not really joking, here in the ’gator den. In fact, I’m wondering if I spent too much thought on mahogany logs.

“Guerrillas have something to hope for.” Suddenly she switches on a jolly smile. “Think of us as opossums, Don. Did you know there are opossums living all over? Even in New York City.”

I smile back with my neck prickling. I thought I was the paranoid one.

“Men and women aren’t different species, Ruth. Women do everything men do.”

“Do they?” Our eyes meet, but she seems to be seeing ghosts between us in the rain. She mutters something that could be “My Lai” and looks away. “All the endless wars . . .” Her voice is a whisper. “All the huge authoritarian organizations for doing unreal things. Men live to struggle against each other; we’re just part of the battlefield. It’ll never change unless you change the whole world. I dream sometimes of—of going away—” She checks and abruptly changes voice. “Forgive me, Don, it’s so stupid saying all this.”

“Men hate wars too, Ruth,” I say as gently as I can.

“I know.” She shrugs and climbs to her feet. “But that’s your problem, isn’t it?”

End of communication. Mrs. Ruth Parsons isn’t even living in the same world with me.

I watch her move around restlessly, head turning toward the ruins. Alienation like that can add up to dead pigeons, which would be GSA’s problem. It could also lead to believing some joker who’s promising to change the whole world. Which could just probably be my problem if one of them was over in that camp last night, where she keeps looking.
Guerrillas have something to hope for . . . ?

Nonsense. I try another position and see that the sky seems to be clearing as the sun sets. The wind is quieting down at last too. Insane to think this little woman is acting out some fantasy in this swamp. But that equipment last night was no fantasy; if those lads have some connection with her, I’ll be in the way. You couldn’t find a handier spot to dispose of the body. . . . Maybe some Guévarista is a fine type of man?

Absurd. Sure . . . The only thing more absurd would be to come through the wars and get myself terminated by a mad librarian’s boyfriend on a fishing trip.

A fish flops in the stream below us. Ruth spins around so fast she hits the serape. “I better start the fire,” she says, her eyes still on the plain and her head cocked, listening.

All right, let’s test.

“Expecting company?”

It rocks her. She freezes, and her eyes come swiveling around to me like a film take captioned FRIGHT. I can see her decide to smile.

“Oh, one never can tell!” She laughs weirdly, the eyes not changed. “I’ll get the—the kindling.” She fairly scuttles into the brush.

Nobody, paranoid or not, could call
that
a normal reaction.

Ruth Parsons is either psycho or she’s expecting something to happen—and it has nothing to do with me: I scared her pissless.

Well, she could be nuts. And I could be wrong, but there are some mistakes you only make once.

Reluctantly I unzip my body belt, telling myself that if I think what I think, my only course is to take something for my leg and get as far as possible from Mrs. Ruth Parsons before whoever she’s waiting for arrives.

In my belt also is a .32-caliber asset Ruth doesn’t know about—and it’s going to stay there. My longevity program leaves the shoot-outs to TV and stresses being somewhere else when the roof falls in. I can spend a perfectly safe and also perfectly horrible night out in one of those mangrove flats. . . . Am I insane?

At this moment Ruth stands up and stares blatantly inland with her hand shading her eyes. Then she tucks something into her pocket, buttons up, and tightens her belt.

That does it.

I dry-swallow two 100-mg tabs, which should get me ambulatory and still leave me wits to hide. Give it a few minutes. I make sure my compass and some hooks are in my own pocket and sit waiting while Ruth fusses with her smudge fire, sneaking looks away when she thinks I’m not watching.

The flat world around us is turning into an unearthly amber and violet light show as the first numbness sweeps into my leg. Ruth has crawled under the bromels for more dry stuff; I can see her foot. Okay. I reach for my staff.

Suddenly the foot jerks, and Ruth yells—or rather, her throat makes that
Uh-uh-hhh
that means pure horror. The foot disappears in a rattle of bromel stalks.

I lunge upright on the crutch and look over the bank at a frozen scene.

Ruth is crouching sideways on the ledge, clutching her stomach. They are about a yard below, floating on the river in a skiff. While I was making up my stupid mind, her friends have glided right under my ass. There are three of them.

They are tall and white. I try to see them as men in some kind of white jumpsuits. The one nearest the bank is stretching out a long white arm toward Ruth. She jerks and scuttles farther away.

The arm stretches after her. It stretches and stretches. It stretches two yards and stays hanging in the air. Small black things are wiggling from its tip.

I look where their faces should be and see black hollow dishes with vertical stripes. The stripes move slowly. . . .

There is no more possibility of their being human—or anything else I’ve ever seen. What has Ruth conjured up?

The scene is totally silent. I blink, blink—this cannot be real. The two in the far end of the skiff are writhing those arms around an apparatus on a tripod. A weapon? Suddenly I hear the same blurry voice I heard in the night.

“Guh-give,” it groans. “G-give . . .”

Dear god, it’s real, whatever it is. I’m terrified. My mind is trying not to form a word.

And Ruth—Jesus, of course—Ruth is terrified too; she’s edging along the bank away from them, gaping at the monsters in the skiff, who are obviously nobody’s friends. She’s hugging something to her body. Why doesn’t she get over the bank and circle back behind me?

“G-g-give.” That wheeze is coming from the tripod. “Peeeeze give.” The skiff is moving upstream below Ruth, following her. The arm undulates out at her again, its black digits looping. Ruth scrambles to the top of the bank.

“Ruth!” My voice cracks. “Ruth, get over here behind me!”

She doesn’t look at me, only keeps sidling farther away. My terror detonates into anger.

“Come back here!” With my free hand I’m working the .32 out of my belt. The sun has gone down.

She doesn’t turn but straightens up warily, still hugging the thing. I see her mouth working. Is she actually trying to
talk
to hem?

“Please . . .” She swallows. “Please speak to me. I need your help.”

“RUTH!!”

At this moment the nearest white monster whips into a great S-curve and sails right onto the bank at her, eight feet of snowy rippling horror.

And I shoot Ruth.

I don’t know that for a minute—I’ve yanked the gun up so fast that my staff slips and dumps me as I fire. I stagger up, hearing Ruth scream, “No! No! No!”

The creature is back down by his boat, and Ruth is still farther away, clutching herself. Blood is running down her elbow.

“Stop it, Don! They aren’t attacking you!”

“For god’s sake! Don’t be a fool, I can’t help you if you won’t get away from them!”

No reply. Nobody moves. No sound except the drone of a jet passing far above. In the darkening stream below me the three white figures shift uneasily; I get the impression of radar dishes focusing. The word spells itself in my head:
Aliens.

Extraterrestrials.

What do I do, call the President? Capture them singlehanded with my peashooter? . . . I’m alone in the arse end of nowhere with one leg and my brain cuddled in meperidine hydrochloride.

“Prrr-eese,” their machine blurs again. “Wa-wat hep . . .”

“Our plane fell down,” Ruth says in a very distinct, eerie voice. She points up at the jet, out toward the bay. “My—my child is there. Please take us
there
in your boat.”

Dear god. While she’s gesturing, I get a look at the thing she’s hugging in her wounded arm. It’s metallic, like a big glimmering distributor head. What—?

Wait a minute. This morning: when she was gone so long, she could have found that thing. Something they left behind. Or dropped. And she hid it, not telling me. That’s why she kept going under that bromel clump—she was peeking at it. Waiting. And the owners came back and caught her. They want it. She’s trying to bargain, by god.

“—Water,” Ruth is pointing again. “Take us. Me. And him.”

The black faces turn toward me, blind and horrible. Later on I may be grateful for that “us.” Not now.

“Throw your gun away, Don. They’ll take us back.” Her voice is weak.

“Like hell I will. You—who are you? What are you doing here?”

“Oh, god, does it matter? He’s frightened,” she cries to them. “Can you understand?”

She’s as alien as they, there in the twilight. The beings in the skiff are twittering among themselves. Their box starts to moan.

“Ss-stu-dens,” I make out. “S-stu-ding . . . not—huh-arming

. . . w-we . . . buh . . .” It fades into garble and then says, “G-give . . . we . . . g-go. . . .”

Peace-loving cultural-exchange students—on the interstellar level now. Oh, no.