“We will go there,” she agreed raptly.
In the morning they drove through the still-dark suburbs, but the lighted area was closer than it had been, and Brom judged that power would be restored to his area by the end of the day. That meant, ironically, that his association with Aliena was probably about to end. He hated that, despite the advantage that the restoration of power would bring them all.
Aliena was resplendent in shorts and halter, in vibrant health. She had kept up her exercise routine, showing rare discipline, and it showed. He was getting physically fitter than he had been, too, because of running with her. His exercise had been intermittent; now it was regular.
“You asked once about mating in my kind,” she said as the wind from her open window tousled her hair. “I said it was different from yours. We do not use the looks and words and strokes. Instead we sing.”
“You sing,” he repeated.
“I understand enough of your way now so that I know I can do it. I have been learning love, and now I think I love you, and am ready. But there is one thing I need, for this: to sing.”
“You mean the way we sing ‘Aliena’?”
“Not exactly, but it will do. When we reach the sea, I will sing. If you want to mate with me, you can sing that.”
“Oh, Aliena, I admit it: I have fallen in love with you and I want to have sex with you. But is it right?”
“It is right when I want it, when I am ready, and now I am. I am ready to sing.”
She continued to surprise him. “Can you tell me more about this mating song?”
“It is like this.” Then she sang a single note, like a resonant bell. It stirred him powerfully. There was just something about it.
“And if I sing ‘Aliena,’ I can join you?”
“Oh, yes.” Then she paused, the way she sometimes did. “But when we return, and the power returns, and Martha and Sam return, and you learn the rest of me, it may be over. That will be my sorrow.”
“What is it about you that you fear will turn me off?”
“I may not tell you. But I can warn you again: I am not a pretty girl. That is just my host. I wish I could be, for you, but I can’t change what I am. I can only love you, today, and hope you will love me.”
Her original form might have been ugly. But her mind was marvelous. “I have difficulty imagining anything that would turn me off you. You’re not a murderer or a changed male?”
She laughed, as she could do now. “I am neither! I am an innocent female. A virgin.” She had picked up that term from their reading.
He did not press her further. Whatever it was, he would learn all too soon. Meanwhile, they had this time together, and he wanted to make the most of it.
They came to the sea. The shore was there, and the sandy beach, but no people; the cleanup following the storm must be keeping them busy. They had it to themselves, on a sunny warm day.
“Oh!” she cried as she saw the expanse of it. She scrambled out of her clothes as he parked the car, and ran toward the water.
“Aliena!” he called. “Your swim suit!” but she was beyond caring as she ran naked to the surf. “You don’t know how to swim yet!”
“I will learn!” she called back.
What could he do? He couldn’t let her go alone, lest she get in over her head, literally. He scrambled out of his own clothing and ran after her, naked. There was no one else to see.
She splashed into the water, then threw herself down in it. She lay in the shallows, facing the sky. “Mate me! Mate me!” she cried.
She was ready at last, and he was more than ready. It was time for love.
Then, as he approached, she sang. It was the single note, vibrating again like a bell, marvelously pure and resonant; it was hard to imagine that it issued from a human throat.
She had told him to sing if he wanted to mate. He took a deep breath and sang. “Ali ali ena! Ali ali ena! Ali ali ali ali ali ali ena!”
She followed with another note, sustained and pure and compelling. It reached inside him, stirring his gut with its remarkable urgency. It hauled him to her, lying as she was half masked by the waves, water washing past her provocative thighs and breasts, her dark wet hair spreading in the surf, the loveliest creature he could imagine.
Still she sang the note, and he sang too, having no choice. Overwhelmed by the passion of the moment he flung himself down on her, and in a moment he was clasping her, inside her, unable to kiss her because they were both still singing. And there in the shallow water, compelled by the song, they surged into a joint climax. It was the wildest, most intense fulfillment he had ever had.
“Oh Aliena, I love you!” he gasped as the song finally expired.
“I love you, Brom!” Then, as an afterthought. “We have mated.”
“We have mated,” he agreed.
Then they kissed long and passionately as the waves continued to wash across them both.
He did give her some swimming instruction, and she caught on rapidly. Her joyous love of the water helped; she had absolutely no fear of it. Yet how was it that she had such joy of water, yet never before swum?
In due course they left the sea, and walked hand in hand to the outdoor shower, then back to the car, where they dressed. They had, it seemed, come here not really to swim but to sing and mate. It was enough.
“If you still love me when you know,” she said as she drove them back, “I will marry you and bear your children.” It had not occurred to her to wait for him to ask her to marry him; their love was enough.
There it was again, her chronic doubt. If he still loved her? “I will love that. There is no one else I want to be with, the rest of my life.” And that, it seemed was their engagement to marry. It was not an ordinary proposal and acceptance, but nothing about their relationship was ordinary.
“When we mated, the body pulsed and delivered intense physical pleasure, apart from the emotional joy of mating,” she said. “I enjoyed it, but do not understand it.”
“That was the orgasm,” he explained. “It is, as you found, intense physical pleasure, the body’s way of encouraging mating when folk might not otherwise be interested. It is actually independent of conception. With men especially, this pleasure becomes an end in itself; they seek sex for the sake of sex, not to reproduce. Procreation becomes recreation, as it is said.”
“Now I know I have the feeling of lust aligned. The other feelings will fall into place more readily now, as did the tickle.” She smiled. “But I would like to feel that orgasm again, even though I no longer need to, to learn the way of it.”
“We can do it again, as often as you wish. In fact I will always want it, whenever you are willing to accommodate me.”
“I will always be willing.”
“But the pleasures of flirtation and interest do not have to lead to immediate sex,” he said. “Just as I like to see your lovely body, I like to interact with you suggestively without expecting to have sex at the moment. To sing without mating, merely reaffirming our camaraderie, our love.”
“I can do that, now that I understand.” Then she sang her note, and he joined in with “Aliena.”
Farther along they heard a siren. “Pull over to the side,” he told her. “Slow down, stop if necessary. That sound means there is an emergency vehicle that needs to have the right of way. It is one of the rules of the road.”
“Rules of the road,” she repeated, slowing as she drew to the side. In moments the ambulance passed rapidly, going the other way.
“Now resume,” he said. “We have been good citizens.”
“I am learning so much from you,” she said appreciatively.
The lights were on in the city and in the suburbs as they arrived. Their block was bright. And sure enough, there was a car parked before Aliena’s house. Her people had returned.
“Please, kiss me, this one time,” she said as she brought the car to a halt.
Brom didn’t argue. He put his face to hers and kissed her on the mouth. This
time there seemed to be a kind of desperation in her response. She really was afraid of what was coming. So was he, possibly for different reason.
There were a man and a woman by the house: Sam and Martha. They turned as the car stopped, and forged toward them. Martha was at this moment one grim woman, and Sam looked like death supercharged. Brom could tell just by looking at the man that he was more than capable of murder.
Aliena got out on her side of the car and faced them. Brom did the same on his side. “Alice! Where have you been?” Martha demanded.
“I took her to the beach,” Brom replied for her.
“We swam naked,” Aliena added helpfully as Brom winced.
“That will be enough of that,” Sam said.
“Did he hurt you?” Martha asked.
“He mated me.”
Both people froze in place. Then Sam spoke. “Get out of here, man, and don’t look back. You have no idea what you’re messing into.”
“No!” Aliena said. “Brom stays.”
“Dear, Sam will handle it,” Martha said. “The man won’t bother you again. Come inside. We must check you for damage.” Sam endorsed her words by slamming a massive fist into his palm. This was obviously serious mischief.
“I damaged not am! You are whom with associate to self tell who may?” Alien demanded angrily, garbling her words as she did when disturbed. There was an imperative tone Brom had not heard from her before. As if she were a princess, and these her servants.
They stared at her, evidently taken aback. They had probably never seen her so angry before, and neither had Brom.
“If I may translate,” Brom said, emboldened by Aliena’s distress, “she is telling you to fuck off, asshole.”
“Endorsement!” Aliena agreed. “Copulate distantly, colon terminus!”
Martha glanced at Sam. “It seems he is in the picture. You had better brief him.”
“I’d better,” Sam agreed grimly.
Aliena faced Sam, her whole body shaking. “Talk only will you. Touch not. Him tell all.” She glared, and Sam actually paled as if rebuked by a superior. She was definitely a princess.
“Understood,” Sam said.
Now Aliena turned to Brom, her hauteur melting into concern. “Go with him, beloved. Listen to what he says. When, if, if you return, I will welcome you.”
If? There it was again: her doubt that he would still want her, once he learned more about her. It was past time to find out what this was all about.
“Beloved?” Martha repeated questioningly.
“We can talk in my house,” Brom told Sam, as Martha possessively guided Aliena to her house. “I can tell you’d as soon kill me as look at me, and are more than capable of it, but I can tell you this at the outset: I love her, and she loves me.”
“You don’t know her, and she is incapable of love as we know it,” Sam said.
“I know her well enough to know that now she can love, and does. Ask her; she’ll tell you.”
“We shall see.”
They entered the house and sat down at the table. “So what’s the big secret?” Brom asked.
“Alice Nye is not a person as we know it. She’s an alien creature.”
“You are speaking of the woman I love. What are you trying to do, goad me into trying something foolish so you can off me and call it self defense?”
Sam, surprisingly, smiled. “I admit the temptation. But this is business, not pleasure. Tell me what you know of Alice.”
“Not so fast, Sam. What has passed between Aliena and me is our business. I will not betray her confidence.”
Sam looked as if he were considering how best to handle a child who was misbehaving in public. “Perhaps you have questions.”
“Why are you here? Did you intimidate the president, then the secret service banished you to the sticks?”
“I trained in my replacement and moved on to more important work.”
What got Brom was not only the implied confirmation that this man was a highly trained secret service agent of the kind that protected top political figures. It was that he was not joking. Brom’s profession enabled him to read the subtle signs.
“This woman is more important?”
“Far more. She represents the news event of the millennium. Her welfare is paramount.”
Again, the man was not joking. That was profoundly unsettling. What foreign princess would be that important?
“Then why the hell did you desert her for a week? If I had not helped her she would have been in serious trouble.”
“That is correct, and we shall reimburse you for your trouble. This project is beyond top secret, to the extent that there is no official recognition of it. I am trusting you to maintain that confidence because it is clear that Alice trusts you. Martha, myself, and the others are technically assigned to other departments, TDY to an unnamed assignment. When the storm crisis came we were recalled for emergency relief, and were unable to protest without revealing the true nature of our work. The power outage prevented us from getting through to our superior. It was a royal snafu.”
“Situation normal: all fucked up,” Brom said. “That is the kind of idiom I have been explaining to Aliena.”
“It was of course not supposed to happen,” Sam said. “Heads are rolling already. It will not happen again. We are immeasurably relieved to find Alice in good health.” He angled his head slightly. “You call her Aliena?”
“It’s a private personal thing. She’s alien, that is, from a far country, so I call her that with no affront to her intended.”
“You did help her. We can see that she has not suffered from our involuntary neglect. We acknowledge that, and are duly appreciative. That did not give you license to rape her.”
Was the man baiting him? Brom suppressed his temper. “We had sex. It was mutually consensual. We are in love.”
Sam digested that as he might foul tasting medicine. “I have been candid with you. Now please be candid with me. Exactly what do you know of Aliena?”
This did seem legitimate. It was time to answer. “She comes from far away, maybe a warm Pacific island with fine sandy beaches. She does have a thing about sea water. English is not her native language, she’s unfamiliar with Western culture, has been raised in an extraordinarily protective society, kept ignorant of all but the most basic personal hygiene. Of sex, indeed of normal human emotions. She is from a tribe perhaps unknown to the outside world. They even have a legend of coming from a distant planet where things are different. She is a genius of an order beyond anything we have seen before. Her island must have some natural resource of incredible value, maybe even the secret of enhancing an ordinary brain to genius level, that the government wants to exploit. So she is being trained as an envoy, an interface between her folk and ours.”
“She is far more than that,” Sam said. “Did she mention her brain?”
“Her brain, in what must have been a historic first, was transplanted into the body of a woman who lost her own brain to a rare auto-immune malfunction, maybe like your snafu. She has been laboring to align the connections, which did not fit perfectly at first. She is getting there. She is a very smart, determined woman.”
Sam nodded. “This is a good assessment, as far as it goes.”
“She seems to feel that I will no longer love her if I know more about her. Why is that?”
“Because, as I said, she is not human. She is an alien creature. That legend is true; her species exists on a planet a hundred light years from ours. They are underwater creatures somewhat resembling starfish. They are incapable of living on land in our atmosphere with our biology. Her brain has had to adapt from a sea environment to a land environment. It is a considerable challenge, but she is, as you surmised, a genius. She is learning it all and coping quite well, considering. But she is not the pretty girl you see. Not inside.”
His words rang true. Numerous perplexing hints wore falling into place. Aliena was literally alien, a creature from the sea of another plan
et. It was amazing, but it made sense.
“That’s what she said,” Brom said after a moment. “That she was not a pretty girl. I thought she meant she was ugly or old or ill in her original body.”
“Not so. I understand she was an esthetic starfish. She gave up her body in order to perform this surpassingly important role of liaison between our two technological species.” Sam gave him a straight look. “Now how do you feel about her?”
“I still love her,” Brom said without hesitation. “Her human body is lovely, but so is her alien mind, her personality. She has qualities of character I deeply respect. This is the way I came to know her, and I would not have her change.” He took a breath. “I will marry her if I can. I realize that first alien contact may have no place for an ordinary Joe like me, but if she wants me, I am hers.”
Sam merely sat there with no visible reaction.
“Look,” Brom said after a moment. “I see now why you may not want me in the picture. I’m just the next door neighbor who got involved when she needed it. I don’t want you for an enemy. Please, give me your candid opinion, off the record. Should I continue to associate with Aliena?”
“Off the record,” Sam agreed. “I thought they were going about her training all wrong, and were in danger of messing up the greatest breakthrough this world has ever seen. Hell, she’s a living creature, not a loaf of bread! A genius, but not a machine. She has needs beyond information. But I’m just a foot soldier, here to protect her body; I don’t make policy. But via sheer blind luck you entered the picture, and you have evoked more in her in a few days than we with all our information and technology did in a month. You are exactly what she needs: a man who loves her as a person, not a headline, regardless of her origin.” He smiled. “Welcome to the Project, friend.” He offered his hand.
Bemused, Brom took it. This was much better than he had feared.
“We will of course compensate your for your work. Shall we say a thousand dollars?”
“I haven’t spent that much on her, and it wasn’t work. Let it go.”
“You have learned too much about the project. We need to put you on the payroll, officially secure your loyalty.”