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AMANDA AND THE ALIEN

Some stories seem almost to write themselves. This was one of them. I wish they were all that easy, or that the results were always that pleasing.

“Amanda” was a product of the rainy winter of 1981–1982, when I was having a particularly fertile run of short-story writing. (Here I need to pause for a digression on California weather and my writing habits. California is one of five places in the world that have the so-called “Mediterranean” climate—the others are Chile, Western Australia, the western part of South Africa, and the Mediterranean region itself—in which the winters are mild and rainy and the summers are dry. Where I live, in the San Francisco region, the heaviest rains fall between November and March. Then they taper off, and from mid-April to early November there’s normally no rain at all. Rain in summertime here has been known to happen occasionally, but so rarely that it’s a front-page news item. My working pattern followed the weather: in the days when I was writing novels—it’s been a while since I last wrote one—I tended to write them during the period of maximum rainfall, tapering off to short stories as the season’s rains began to diminish in the spring, and doing as little work as my conscience would allow during the dry season. By fall, just as the rains were getting ready to return, I would warm up the machinery with a short story or two and then embark on the new season’s novel. But 1981 was an unusual year: instead of a novel, my book for the year was Majipoor Chronicles, which is actually a collection of short stories disguised as a novel, and I wrote it in the spring and summer instead of winter. When autumn came, I was out of sequence with my regular writing rhythm, and I decided to keep on doing short stories and get things straightened out later on.)

And so “Amanda.” It wasn’t the story I had intended to do then. I had promised one to Ellen Datlow, the new fiction editor of Omni, and what I had in mind was a sequel to one from the year before called “Dancers in the Time-Flux”—using the same protagonist, the 17th-century Dutch circumnavigator Olivier van Noort, who has been transported to the far future and this time encounters a Parisian woman from the year 1980 who was, like himself, a creature of antiquity, but nevertheless something out of his own future. My long-range plan was to assemble another story cycle along the lines of Majipoor Chronicles, set in the Son of Man world that I had invented for a 1969 novel. But something went wrong and the story died on me after about eight pages. I don’t know why. Unfinished stories are as rare around here as heavy rainfall in July. So far as I can recall, that’s the only story I’ve left unfinished in the past sixty years.

“The thing seems terribly slow and ponderous and wrong,” I told Ellen in a letter of February 20, 1982, “and after a few days of work I called a halt to find out what the trouble was. The trouble was, apparently, that I wanted to do a different sort of story for you, something bouncier and zippier and more contemporary. And before I really knew what was happening, the enclosed lighthearted chiller came galloping out of the typewriter.” Ellen bought it by return mail, and Terry Carr chose it for the 1983 volume of his annual Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology series.

Instead of setting my story in the remote future world of “Dancers in the Time-Flux,” I had put it right here, in the San Francisco Bay Area of just a few years hence. And, though I wrote it in cool rainy February, I picked warm sunny September as the time in which it took place. Perhaps that was why I wrote it with such ease. It had been pouring outside for days, but in my mind our long golden summer had already come. And, with it, the utterly unscrupulous Amanda, an all too familiar California life-form who comes face to face with a very scary alien and holds her own with it.

Ellen Datlow published it in the May, 1983 issue of Omni. Some years later the talented young director Jon Kroll made a very funny television movie out of it, and careful observers will note that in it I made my film debut in a role (non-speaking) that had me on camera for approximately seventeen seconds.

AMANDA SPOTTED THE ALIEN LATE Friday afternoon outside the Video Center on South Main. It was trying to look cool and laid-back, but it simply came across as bewildered and uneasy. The alien was disguised as a seventeen-year-old girl, maybe a Chicana, with olive-toned skin and hair so black it seemed almost blue, but Amanda, who was seventeen herself, knew a phony when she saw one. She studied the alien for some moments from the other side of the street to make absolutely certain. Then she walked across.

“You’re doing it wrong,” Amanda said. “Anybody with half a brain could tell what you really are.”

“Bug off,” the alien said.

“No. Listen to me. You want to stay out of the detention center or don’t you?”

The alien stared coldly at Amanda and said, “I don’t know what the crap you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do. No sense trying to bluff me. Look, I want to help you,” Amanda said. “I think you’re getting a raw deal. You know what that means, a raw deal? Hey, look, come home with me and I’ll teach you a few things about passing for human. I’ve got the whole friggin’ weekend now with nothing else to do anyway.”

A flicker of interest came into the other girl’s dark chilly eyes. But it went quickly away and she said, “You some kind of lunatic?”

“Suit yourself, O thing from beyond the stars. Let them lock you up again. Let them stick electrodes up your ass. I tried to help. That’s all I can do, is try,” Amanda said, shrugging. She began to saunter away. She didn’t look back. Three steps, four, five, hands in pockets, slowly heading for her car. Had she been wrong, she wondered? No. No. She could be wrong about some things, like Charley Taylor’s interest in spending the weekend with her, maybe. But not this. That crinkly-haired chick was the missing alien for sure. The whole county was buzzing about it—deadly nonhuman life-form has escaped from the detention center out by Tracy, might be anywhere, Walnut Creek, Livermore, even San Francisco, dangerous monster, capable of mimicking human forms, will engulf and digest you and disguise itself in your shape, and there it was, Amanda knew, standing outside the Video Center. Amanda kept walking.

“Wait,” the alien said finally

Amanda took another easy step or two. Then she looked back over her shoulder.

“Yeah?”

“How can you tell?”

Amanda grinned. “Easy. You’ve got a rain slicker on and it’s only September. Rainy season doesn’t start around here for another month or two. Your pants are the old spandex kind. People like you don’t wear that stuff anymore. Your face paint is San Jose colors, but you’ve got the cheek chevrons put on in the Berkeley pattern. That’s just the first three things I noticed. I could find plenty more. Nothing about you fits together with anything else. It’s like you did a survey to see how you ought to appear, and tried a little of everything. The closer I study you, the more I see. Look, you’re wearing your headphones and the battery light is on, but there’s no cassette in the slot. What are you listening to, the music of the spheres? That model doesn’t have any FM tuner, you know. You see? You may think you’re perfectly camouflaged, but you aren’t.”

“I could destroy you,” the alien said.

“What? Oh, sure. Sure you could. Engulf me right here on the street, all over in thirty seconds, little trail of slime by the door and a new Amanda walks away. But what then? What good’s that going to do you? You still won’t know which end is up. So there’s no logic in destroying me, unless you’re a total dummy. I’m on your side. I’m not going to turn you in.”

“Why should I trust you?”

“Because I’ve been talking to you for five minutes and I haven’t yelled for the cops yet. Don’t you know that half of California is out searching for you? Hey, can you read? Come over here a minute. Here.” Amanda tugged the alien toward the newspaper vending box at the curb. The headline on the afternoon Examiner was:

BAY AREA ALIEN TERROR

MARINES TO JOIN NINE-COUNTY HUNT MAYOR, GOVERNOR CAUTION AGAINST PANIC

“You understand that?” Amanda asked. “That’s you they’re talking about. They’re out there with flame guns, tranquilizer darts, web snares, and God knows what else. There’s been real hysteria for a day and a half. And you standing around here with the wrong chevrons on! Christ. Christ! What’s your plan, anyway? Where are you trying to go?”

“Home,” the alien said. “But first I have to rendezvous at the pickup point.”

“Where’s that?”

“You think I’m stupid?”

“Shit,” Amanda said. “If I meant to turn you in, I’d have done it five minutes ago. But okay. I don’t give a damn where your rendezvous point is. I tell you, though, you wouldn’t make it as far as San Francisco rigged up the way you are. It’s a miracle you’ve avoided getting caught until now.”

“And you’ll help me?”

“I’ve been trying to. Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here. I’ll take you home and fix you up a little. My car’s in the lot on the corner.”

“Okay.”

“Whew!” Amanda shook her head slowly. “Christ, some people are awfully hard to help.”

***

AS SHE DROVE OUT OF the center of town, Amanda glanced occasionally at the alien sitting tensely to her right. Basically the disguise was very convincing, Amanda thought. Maybe all the small details were wrong, the outer stuff, the anthropological stuff, but the alien looked human, it sounded human, it even smelled human. Possibly it could fool ninety-nine people out of a hundred, or maybe more than that. But Amanda had always had a good eye for detail. And the particular moment she had spotted the alien on South Main she had been unusually alert, sensitive, all raw nerves, every antenna up. Of course, it wasn’t aliens she was hunting for, but just a diversion, a little excitement, something to fill the great gaping emptiness that Charley Taylor had left in her weekend.

Amanda had been planning the weekend with Charley all month. Her parents were going to go off to Lake Tahoe for three days, her kid sister had wangled permission to accompany them, and Amanda was going to have the house to herself, just her and Macavity the cat. And Charley. He was going to move in on Friday afternoon and they’d cook dinner together and get blasted on her stash of choice powder and watch five or six of her parents’ X-rated cassettes, and Saturday they’d drive over to the city and cruise some of the kinky districts and go to that bathhouse on Folsom where everybody got naked and climbed into the giant Jacuzzi, and then on Sunday—Well, none of that was going to happen. Charley had called on Thursday to cancel. “Something big came up,” he said, and Amanda had a pretty good idea what that was, which was his hot little cousin from New Orleans who sometimes came flying out here on no notice at all; but the inconsiderate bastard seemed to be entirely unaware of how much Amanda had been looking forward to this weekend, how much it meant to her, how painful it was to be dumped like this. She had run through the planned events of the weekend in her mind so many times that she almost felt as though she had experienced them: it was that real to her. But overnight it had become unreal. Three whole days on her own, the house to herself, and so early in the semester that there was no homework to think about, and Charley had stood her up! What was she supposed to do now, call desperately around town to scrounge up some old lover as a playmate? Or pick up some stranger downtown? Amanda hated to fool around with strangers. She was half tempted to go over to the city and just let things happen, but they were all weirdos and creeps over there, anyway, and she knew what she could expect. What a waste, not having Charley! She could kill him for robbing her of the weekend.

Now there was the alien, though. A dozen of these star people had come to Earth last year, not in a flying saucer as everybody had expected, but in little capsules that floated like milkweed seeds, and they had landed in a wide arc between San Diego and Salt Lake City. Their natural form, so far as anyone could tell for sure, was something like a huge jellyfish with a row of staring purple eyes down one wavy margin, but their usual tactic was to borrow any local body they found, digesting it and turning themselves into an accurate imitation of it. One of them had made the mistake of turning itself into a brown mountain bear and another into a bobcat—maybe they thought that those were the dominant life-forms on Earth—but the others had taken on human bodies, at the cost of at least ten lives. Then they went looking to make contact with government leaders, and naturally they were rounded up very swiftly and interned, some in mental hospitals and some in county jails, but eventually—as soon as the truth of what they really were sank in—they were all put in a special detention camp in Northern California. Of course, a tremendous fuss was made over them, endless stuff in the papers and on the tube, speculation by this heavy thinker and that about the significance of their mission, the nature of their biochemistry, a little wild talk about the possibility that more of their kind might be waiting undetected out there and plotting to do God knows what, and all sorts of that stuff, and then came a government clamp on the entire subject, no official announcements except that “discussions” with the visitors were continuing; and after a while the whole thing degenerated into dumb alien jokes (“Why did the alien cross the road?”) and Halloween invader masks, and then it moved into the background of everyone’s attention and was forgotten. And remained forgotten until the announcement that one of the creatures had slipped out of the camp somehow and was loose within a hundred-mile zone around San Francisco. Preoccupied as she was with her anguish over Charley’s heartlessness, even Amanda had managed to pick up that news item. And now the alien was in her very car. So there’d be some weekend amusement for her after all. Amanda was entirely unafraid of the alleged deadliness of the star being: whatever else the alien might be, it was surely no dope, not if it had been picked to come halfway across the galaxy on a mission like this, and Amanda knew that the alien could see that harming her was not going to be in its own best interests. The alien had need of her, and the alien realized that. And Amanda, in some way that she was only just beginning to work out, had need of the alien.

***

SHE PULLED UP OUTSIDE HER house, a compact split-level at the western end of town. “This is the place,” she said. Heat shimmers danced in the air, and the hills back of the house, parched in the long dry summer, were the color of lions. Macavity, Amanda’s old tabby, sprawled in the shade of the bottlebrush tree on the ragged front lawn. As Amanda and the alien approached, the cat sat up warily, flattened his cars, hissed. The alien immediately moved into a defensive posture, sniffing the air.

“Just a household pet,” Amanda said. “You know what that is? He isn’t dangerous. He’s always a little suspicious of strangers.”

Which was untrue. An earthquake couldn’t have brought Macavity out of his nap, and a cotillion of mice dancing minuets on his tail wouldn’t have drawn a reaction from him. Amanda calmed him with some fur-ruffling, but he wanted nothing to do with the alien, and went slinking sullenly into the underbrush. The alien watched him with care until he was out of sight.

“You have anything like cats on your planet?” Amanda asked as they went inside.

“We had small wild animals once. They were unnecessary.”

“Oh,” Amanda said. The house had a stuffy, stagnant air. She switched on air-conditioning. “Where is your planet, anyway?”

The alien ignored the question. It padded around the living room, very much like a prowling cat itself, studying the stereo, the television, the couches, the vase of dried flowers.

“Is this a typical Earthian home?”

“More or less,” said Amanda. “Typical for around here, at least. This is what we call a suburb. It’s half an hour by freeway from here to San Francisco. That’s a city. A lot of people living all close together. I’ll take you over there tonight or tomorrow for a look, if you’re interested.” She got some music going, high volume. The alien didn’t seem to mind, so she notched the volume up more. “I’m going to take a shower. You could use one, too, actually.”

“Shower? You mean rain?”

“I mean body-cleaning activities. We Earthlings like to wash a lot, to get rid of sweat and dirt and stuff. It’s considered bad form to stink. Come on, I’ll show you how to do it. You’ve got to do what I do if you want to keep from getting caught, you know.” She led the alien to the bathroom. “Take your clothes off first.”

The alien stripped. Underneath its rain slicker it wore a stained T-shirt that said “Fisherman’s Wharf” with a picture of the San Francisco skyline, and a pair of unzipped jeans. Under that it was wearing a black brassiere, unfastened and with the cups over its shoulder blades, and a pair of black shiny panty briefs with a red heart on the left buttock. The alien’s body was that of a lean, tough-looking girl with a scar running down the inside of one arm.

“Whose body is that?” Amanda asked. “Do you know?”

“She worked at the detention center. In the kitchen.”

“You know her name?”

“Flores Concepion.”

“The other way around, probably. Concepion Flores. I’ll call you Connie, unless you want to give me your real name.”

“Connie will do.”

“All right, Connie. Pay attention. You turn the water on here, and you adjust the mix of hot and cold until you like it. Then you pull this knob and get underneath the spout here and wet your body, and rub soap over it and wash the soap off. Afterward you dry yourself and put fresh clothes on. You have to clean your clothes from time to time, too, because otherwise they start to smell and it upsets people. Watch me shower, and then you do it.”

Amanda washed quickly, while plans hummed in her head. The alien wasn’t going to last long out there wearing the body of Concepion Flores. Sooner or later someone was going to notice that one of the kitchen girls was missing, and they’d get an all-points alarm out for her. Amanda wondered whether the alien had figured that out yet. The alien, Amanda thought, needs a different body in a hurry.

But not mine, she told herself. For sure, not mine.

“Your turn,” she said, shutting the water off.

The alien, fumbling a little, turned the water back on and got under the spray. Clouds of steam rose and its skin began to look boiled, but it didn’t appear troubled. No sense of pain? “Hold it,” Amanda said. “Step back.” She adjusted the water. “You’ve got it too hot. You’ll damage that body that way. Look, if you can’t tell the difference between hot and cold, just take cold showers, okay? It’s less dangerous. This is cold, on this side.” She left the alien under the shower and went to find some clean clothes. When she came back, the alien was still showering, under icy water. “Enough,” Amanda said. “Here. Put these on.”

“I had more clothes than this before.”

“A T-shirt and jeans are all you need in hot weather like this. With your kind of build you can skip the bra, and anyway I don’t think you’ll be able to fasten it the right way.”

“Do we put the face paint on now?”

“We can skip it while we’re home. It’s just stupid kid stuff anyway, all that tribal crap. If we go out we’ll do it, and we’ll give you Walnut Creek colors, I think. Concepcion wore San Jose, but we want to throw people off the track. How about some dope?”

“What?”

“Grass. Marijuana. A drug widely used by local Earthians of our age.”

“I don’t need no drug.”

“I don’t either. But I’d like some. You ought to learn how, just in case you find yourself in a social situation.” Amanda reached for her pack of Filter Golds and pulled out a joint. Expertly she tweaked its lighter tip and took a deep hit. “Here,” she said, passing it. “Hold it like I did. Put it to your mouth, breathe in, suck the smoke deep.” The alien dragged the joint and began to cough. “Not so deep, maybe,” Amanda said. “Take just a little. Hold it. Let it out. There, much better. Now give me back the joint. You’ve got to keep passing it back and forth. That part’s important. You feel anything from it?”

“No.”

“It can be subtle. Don’t worry about it. Are you hungry?”

“Not yet,” the alien said.

“I am. Come into the kitchen.” As she assembled a sandwich—peanut butter and avocado on whole wheat, with tomato and onion—she asked, “What sort of things do you eat?”

“Life.”

“Life?”

“We never eat dead things. Only things with life.”

Amanda fought back a shudder. “I see. Anything with life?”

“We prefer animal life. We can absorb plants if necessary.”

“Ah. Yes. And when are you going to be hungry again?”

“Maybe tonight,” the alien said. “Or tomorrow. The hunger comes very suddenly, when it comes.”

“There’s not much around here that you could eat live. But I’ll work on it.”

“The small furry animal?”

“No. My cat is not available for dinner. Get that idea right out of your head. Likewise me. I’m your protector and guide. It wouldn’t be sensible of you to eat me. You follow what I’m trying to tell you?”

“I said that I’m not hungry yet.”

“Well, you let me know when you start feeling the pangs. I’ll find you a meal.” Amanda began to construct a second sandwich. The alien prowled the kitchen, examining the appliances. Perhaps making mental records, Amanda thought, of sink and oven design, to copy on its home world. Amanda said, “Why did you people come here in the first place?”

“It was our mission.”

“Yes. Sure. But for what purpose? What are you after? You want to take over the world? You want to steal our scientific secrets?” The alien, making no reply, began taking spices out of the spice rack. Delicately it licked its finger, touched it to the oregano, tasted it, tried the cumin. Amanda said, “Or is it that you want to keep us from going into space? That you think we’re a dangerous species, so you’re going to quarantine us on our own planet? Come on, you can tell me. I’m not a government spy.” The alien sampled the tarragon, the basil, the sage. When it reached for the curry powder, its hand suddenly shook so violently that it knocked the open jars of oregano and tarragon over, making a mess. “Hey, are you all right?” Amanda asked.

The alien said, “I think I’m getting hungry. Are these things drugs, too?”

“Spices,” Amanda said. “We put them in our foods to make them taste better.” The alien was looking very strange, glassy-eyed, flushed, sweaty. “Are you feeling sick?”

“I feel excited. These powders—”

“They’re turning you on? Which one?”

“This, I think.” It pointed to the oregano. “It was either the first one or the second.”

“Yeah,” Amanda said. “Oregano. It can really make you fly.” She wondered whether the alien might get violent when zonked. Or whether the oregano would stimulate its appetite. She had to watch out for its appetite. There are certain risks, Amanda reflected, in doing what I’m doing. Deftly she cleaned up the spilled oregano and tarragon and put the caps on the spice jars. “You ought to be careful,” she said. “Your metabolism isn’t used to this stuff. A little can go a long way.”

“Give me some more.

“Later,” Amanda said. “You don’t want to overdo it.”

“More!”

“Calm down. I know this planet better than you, and I don’t want to see you get in trouble. Trust me: I’ll let you have more oregano when it’s the right time. Look at the way you’re shaking. And you’re sweating like crazy.” Pocketing the oregano jar, she led the alien back into the living room. “Sit down. Relax.”