Alien Archives. Robert Silverberg

following. Demeris expected to see Spooks go riding by next, but there was no sign of that. He wondered what they were like. “Like ghosts,” Bud had said. “Long shining ghosts, but solid.” That didn’t help much.

      When they camped that night, Demeris entered the tent with her without hesitation, and waited only a moment or two after lying down to reach for her. Her reaction was noncommittal for the first instant. But then he heard a sort of purring sound and she turned to him, open and ready. There had been nothing remotely like affection between them all afternoon, but now she generated sudden passion out of nothing at all, pulling it up like water from an artesian well; and he rode with her swiftly and expertly toward sweaty, noisy climaxes. He rested a while and went back to her a second time, but she said simply, “No. Let’s sleep now,” and turned her back to him. A very strange woman, he thought. He lay awake for a time, listening to the rhythm of her breathing just to see if she was asleep, thinking he might nuzzle up to her anyway if she was still conscious and seemed at all receptive. He couldn’t tell. She was motionless, limp: for all he knew, dead. Her breathing-sounds were virtually imperceptible. After a time Demeris rolled away. He dreamed of a bright sky streaked with crimson fire, and dragons flying in formations out of the south.

      ***

      NOW THEY WERE NEARING SPOOK City. Instead of following along a dusty unpaved trail they had moved onto an actual road, perhaps some old United States of America highway that the aliens had jazzed up by giving it an internal glow, a cool throbbing green luminance rising in eddying waves from a point deep underground. Other travelers joined them here, some riding wagons drawn by alien beasts of burden, a few floating along on silent flatbed vehicles that had no apparent means of propulsion. The travelers all seemed to be human.

      “How do Spooks get around?” Demeris asked.

      “Any way they like,” said Jill.

      A corroded highway sign that looked five thousand years old announced that they had reached a town called Dimmitt. There wasn’t any town there, only a sort of checkpoint of light like a benign version of the border barrier: a cheerful shimmering sheen, a dazzling moire pattern dancing in the air. One by one the wagons and flatbeds and carts passed through it and disappeared. “It’s the hunt perimeter,” Jill explained, while they were waiting their turn to go through. “Like a big pen around Spook City, miles in diameter, to keep the animals in. They won’t cross the line. It scares them.”

      He felt no effect at all as they crossed it. On the other side she told him that she had some formalities to take care of, and walked off toward a battered shed a hundred feet from the road. Demeris waited for her beside the elephant-camel.

      A grizzled-looking weather-beaten man of about fifty came limping up and grinned at him.

      “Jack Lawson,” he announced. He put out his hand. “On my way back from my daughter’s wedding, Oklahoma City.”

      “Nick Demeris.”

      “Interesting traveling companion you got, Nick. What’s it like, traveling with one of those? I’ve always wondered about that.”

      “One of what?” Demeris said.

      Lawson winked. “Come on, friend. You know what I mean.”

      “I don’t think I do.”

      “Your pal’s a Spook, friend. Surely you aren’t going to try to make me believe she’s anything else.”

      “Friend, my ass. And she’s as human as you or me.”

      “Right.”

      “Believe me,” Demeris said flatly. “I know. I’ve checked her out at very close range.”

      Lawson’s eyebrows rose a little. “That’s what I figured. I’ve heard there are men who go in for that. Some women, too.”

      “Shit,” Demeris said, feeling himself beginning to heat up. He didn’t have the time or the inclination for a fight, and Lawson looked about twice his age anyway. As calmly as he could he said, “You’re fucking wrong, just the way that Mex kid down south who said she was a Spook was wrong. Neither of you knows shit about her.”

      “I know one when I see one.”

      “And I know an asshole when I see one,” said Demeris.

      “Easy, friend. Easy. I see I’m mistaken, that you simply don’t understand what’s going on. Okay. A thousand pardons, friend. Ten thousand.” Lawson gave him an oily, smarmy smile, a courtly bow, and started to move away.

      “Wait,” Demeris said. “You really think she’s a Spook?”

      “Bet your ass I do.”

      “Prove it, then.”

      “Don’t have any proof. Just intuition.”

      “Intuition’s not worth much where I come from.”

      “Sometimes you can just tell. There’s something about her. I don’t know. I couldn’t put it into words.”

      “My father used to say that if you can’t put something into words, that’s on account of you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

      Lawson laughed. It was that same patronizing I-know-better-than-you laugh that the kid in the village had given him. Anger welled up again in Demeris and it was all he could do to keep from swinging on the older man.

      But just then Jill returned. She looked human as hell as she came walking up, swinging her hips. Lawson tipped his hat to her with exaggerated courtesy and went sauntering back to his wagon.

      “Ready?” Demeris asked her.

      “All set.” She glanced at him. “You okay, Nick?”

      “Sure.”

      “What was that fellow saying to you?”

      “Telling me about his daughter’s wedding in Oklahoma.”

      He clambered up on the elephant-camel, taking up his position on the middle hump.

      His anger over what Lawson had said gradually subsided. They all knew so much, these Occupied Zone people. Or thought they did. Always trying to get one up on the greenhorn from Free Country, giving you their knowledgeable looks, hitting you with their sly insinuations.

      Some rational part of him told him that if two people over here had said the same thing about Jill, it might just be true. A fair chance of it, in fact. Well, fuck it. She looked human, she smelled human, she felt human when he ran his hands over her body. That was good enough for him. Let these Spook Land people say what they liked. He intended to go on accepting her as human no matter what anyone might try to tell him. It was too late for him to believe anything else. He had had his mouth to hers; he had been inside her body; he had given himself to her in the most intimate way there was. There was no way he could let himself believe that he had been embracing something from another planet, not now. He absolutely could not permit himself to believe that now.

      And then he felt a sudden stab of wild, almost intoxicating temptation: the paradoxical hope that she was a Spook after all, that by embracing her he had done something extraordinary and outrageous. A true crossing of borders: his youth restored. He was amazed. It was a stunning moment, a glimpse of what it might be like to step outside the prisons of his soul. But it passed quickly and he was his old sober self again. She is human, he told himself stolidly. Human. Human.

      ***

      A LITTLE CLOSER IN, HE saw one of the pens where the hunt animals were being kept. It was like a sheet of lightning rising from the ground, but lightning that stayed and stayed and stayed. Behind it Demeris thought he could make out huge dark moving shapes. Nothing was clear, and after a few moments of staring at that fluid rippling wall of light he started to feel the way he had felt when he was first pushing through the border barrier.

      “What kind of things do they have in there?” he asked her.

      “Everything,” she said. “Wait and see,