Invasion

  TERRORIST: Anyone who perpetrates an act of violence against unarmed human beings. In American usage, does not include actions by members of the American, European, or Israeli police forces or military.

  TIME: A human concept based on their inability to see all life in the present tense.

  TWENTY-SIX

  (From the OFFICIAL HISTORY OF THE ALIEN INVASION, Volume 1, pp. 256–259. From the Presidential Tapes, Dec 9, 20--. Present: the President; Senate Majority Leader Angelo Portobello (who is also a Republican candidate running in the presidential primaries).)

  PORTOBELLO: Your new legislation making Proteans legally human beings is totally unacceptable, Mr. President. It doesn’t stand a chance in either the Senate or the House.

  PRESIDENT: And what amendments do you and your followers plan to take to the floor?

  PORTOBELLO: Not just my followers—most Republicans want a law making Proteans legally human beings only to make it easier for the government to prosecute and imprison them. Your suggested legislation doesn’t do that. It makes them human beings in almost the same way as real human beings. It would let them compete as equals and thus they would dominate Wall Street, the corporate world, sports—everything. Our plan is to define Proteans as human beings with special qualifications—as non-mammal human beings whose rights are limited. We want to be able to prosecute them as humans for hacking computer systems, robbing banks, revealing government secrets, speeding more than fifteen miles an hour—but not human beings for other purposes—like competing on a level playing field in entertainment, sports, money management, stock trading, and things like that. We want a law that will define the Proteans as citizens, but as second-class citizens.

  PRESIDENT: I don’t like that.

  PORTOBELLO: From the very beginning our Constitution divided human beings into different classes—property-owning human beings, male and female human beings, and slave human beings. Our Founding Fathers put many limits on non-property holders, women and slaves, and our proposed law making the Proteans second-class citizens has a long and honorable American history.

  PRESIDENT: A history we should be ashamed of.

  PORTOBELLO: In any case, this new law will divide human beings into two new classes: traditional human beings, and non-mammal human beings. Under our legislation the Proteans will become non-mammal human beings. However, the law will make it illegal for non-mammal human beings to operate a computer or handle money without the written permission of the Director for the Maintenance of Proteans. Moreover, it will be illegal for them to bounce more than five feet high, speed at more than fifteen miles per hour, stay under water for more than five minutes, pour alcohol over themselves, and so on. They will be second-class human beings, like women and slaves used to be.

  PRESIDENT: You know I’ll veto the bill, Angelo.

  PORTOBELLO: And we have the votes to override it.

  PRESIDENT: But why have you created all these trivial crimes like bouncing more than five feet high? They make your proposed legislation almost comical. Why the hell are you insisting on keeping them in?

  PORTOBELLO: Because those trivial crimes make it easier to arrest Proteans. It will be difficult to convict a Protean of hacking computer systems or transferring funds from hacked bank accounts, but we can always find witnesses that agree that a Protean sped at more than sixteen miles per hour, or bounced more than five feet high or poured a bottle of beer over its head. For these trivial crimes we can arrest and convict them, and lock them up. This is essentially how our marijuana laws worked for almost a hundred years. Smoking or owning a small amount of pot was a federal crime, but in the long history of the law very few middle-class white people have been sent to jail under the law. But literally hundreds of thousands of black and Hispanic folks were arrested and easily sent to jail whenever a policeman or prosecutor felt like it. Nations have always created laws to permit them to jail people they’re trying to keep as second-class citizens.

  PRESIDENT: No, Angelo, I don’t like it. What will the penalty be for bouncing over five feet or pouring beer on a head?

  PORTOBELLO: Two weeks in solitary confinement.

  PRESIDENT: Solitary confinement?

  PORTOBELLO: It’s brilliant, Mr. President. The CIA discovered in working closely with a Protean captive in Egypt that Proteans need regular sunlight and regular water. When locked in a solid cell and denied light and water the Protean captive usually dies in about a week. So the Anti-Terrorist Task Force suggested we make all Protean crimes punishable by two weeks in solitary confinement. By keeping them in a light-free cell without water, we can wipe the terrorists out.

  PRESIDENT: Good God. Is that your plan? You want to wipe out all the Proteans!?

  PORTOBELLO: Well perhaps not all. But they have the potential to wipe us out, so most of my party want to strike first, and our proposed legislation will do that.

  PRESIDENT: This is madness. We should be trying to get the Proteans to be on our side, work to use their supreme computer powers to help us, rather than robbing us blind. I will veto your law and convince enough Democrats to block your trying to override it. No death sentences for bouncing over five feet high.

  PORTOBELLO: You’ll lose, Mr. President.

  PRESIDENT: Then we’ll all lose.

  ITEM IN THE NEWS

  (Being the op-ed piece in The New York Times written by the Protean terrorist Louie, published December 10th, 20--)

  There is nothing you have to do.

  There is nowhere you have to go.

  There is no one you have to be.

  Roll on.

  The sun rises in the morning whether you want it to or not.

  The sun sets in the evening no matter how you feel about it.

  Sometimes it rains. Your opinion on the matter is not relevant.

  Sometimes someone dies. Every second someone dies. Your grief or rage do not produce a resurrection.

  Your car fails to start. Engines do not respond to obscenities.

  You have discovered your soulmate. The universe yawns.

  Your leader does something particularly thoughtless and stupid. Your snarls do not change his mind.

  After hours or years of effort you win the big race or big promotion. Within a few days everyone but you seems to have forgotten.

  You met someone important to you and know that you made a terrific impression. Too bad. Now you will have to live up to that impression for the rest of your life.

  You met someone important to you and know that you made a horrible impression. Good. You can try something different next time.

  You feel that no one pays any attention to you. You are lucky. If only other humans would stop paying attention, you could let go and at any moment be whoever you feel like being. But when you notice someone paying attention then you have to narrow your act to perform for that someone. The role you might really have wanted to play gets stuffed in the costume trunk.

  A straight line is the best way to travel between two points, and the worst way for humans to travel through life.

  All you do is build mole hills that you imagine are mountains. The first strong wind will blow away all that you thought was eternal.

  Nothing lasts. Thank your Buddha, nothing lasts. All life is cursed and blessed by this simple truth: nothing lasts. The paradox you humans struggle to close your eyes to is that if anything were eternal it would be unimportant. Only change is interesting. All life is change. The being you are at the beginning of this sentence has changed forever before you reach the period that ends it.

  And we thank God it is so. Nothing lasts.

  But humans fight change and thus fight life. Most human misery lies in the effort to preserve something—someone’s love, wealth, a new sofa, a child’s charm, a talent that is fading. Let them go, let them go. Every effort to preserve something blocks the arrival of something new that might enrich you.

  Humans dream of a perfect life, and miss the perfection of life.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

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p; (From Billy Morton’s MY FRIEND LOUIE, pp. 198–204)

  “How’d you get involved with Molière and the FFs?” I says to Karen after we’d settled down in the cockpit, Karen sitting opposite me on the port cockpit settee. I’d set our course for Key Largo, speed down to twenty knots: didn’t want Louie and Molière to get out of breath trying to get back to us. Lucas was below playing with a small rat.

  “Simple,” she says. “I was swimming about fifty feet off shore and Molière comes along and says, ‘Want a ride?’ And I said ‘yes’.”

  “Weren’t you a bit afraid?”

  “Of Molière?” she says. “I’d seen that TV show where Louie talked and performed. That made me like FFs. When Molière first offered me a lift I thought he might even be Louie. I hadn’t gotten to know both and be able to distinguish them as I can now.”

  “That’s strange, isn’t it? I mean if you took photos of them side by side I couldn’t in a million years tell which was which, but when you’re with them you know immediately.”

  “By means we don’t know about, they somehow radiate their individual personalities.”

  I stood up and went forward to make sure we weren’t approaching an iceberg. Nope.

  “How’d you end up becoming a lowly crew member on this boat?”

  “I’m not a lowly crew member,” she says, smiling. “I’m first mate.”

  “Whatever,” says I. “Did Molière ask you?”

  “Yeah, he did. He said he liked me and hoped I’d join your cruise.”

  “Think he was hitting on you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How about you? You attracted to hairy beach balls?”

  She laughed.

  “No. But I’m attracted to Molière. I like him a lot.”

  “Well, lots of luck,” says I. “Molière and Louie are so much smarter than we are, they probably look at us the way we look at… turtles, say. We might find a turtle cute, but we don’t usually plan a long-term relationship.”

  Karen laughed again.

  “And do you figure Molière is more on the male side or the female side?” I ask.

  “Doesn’t make any difference. He’s simply a creature I like. His sex doesn’t matter.”

  Next thing we knew Louie had surged up onto the stern coaming and bounced into the cockpit, his four bags of cash splashing down in a mess onto the cockpit floor. A few seconds later, Molière was there too. He hopped down into the cockpit and gently placed his four bags in a neat row. Lucas and the small rat, hearing the commotion, came up out of the main cabin.

  We were a family again.

  * * *

  Later that night, Louie and I sat in the cockpit and talked. Karen and Lucas had gone to bed, and Molière was down below in the main cabin looking at an app that told him about every pebble between where we were and Key Largo. Louie-Twoie was keeping watch from the counter forward of the wheel. For some reason he’d shaped himself as letter U, his two “arms” raised. Lack of stability made him wobble a bit.

  “Things are getting a little hairier than I figured when I agreed to help you, Louie,” I says. “I didn’t know I’d signed up for breaking prisoners free from the Feds and a lot of flying bullets.”

  “We never meant to involve you this way, Billy. Of course, we also never intended for me to get captured.”

  “I might enjoy it if I weren’t married, but this seems to be involving Lita and the boys in a way that worries me.”

  “We’ll try to get you out of it, Billy. In fact Molière, Gibberish, and I have been talking about what happened in the last few days and decided to draw back from our more aggressive ploys against governments and corporations. Things have gotten too hot for our taste too.”

  “Getting chopped up and shot not that much fun, huh?” says I.

  “It isn’t. I’ve lost about fifteen percent of my capacity and Molière and Gibberish have lost about the same. Baloney got hit three times and has lost closer to twenty-five percent. He’s had to cut back on a quarter of his ‘baloneys’.”

  “Does getting carved up and shot hurt?”

  “There’s no pain involved in quite the human sense, but we all feel… down I guess you’d say. It affects our spirits.”

  “So you’re going to withdraw a bit from your game against the dictators,” says I.

  “We’re going to change the focus,” says Louie. “Our aggressive actions against banks, corporations, and your security agencies don’t communicate to humans that we’re into play. We want to try to make human beings stop taking everything so seriously—including the injustice of the economic system they’re stuck with—and get into doing things for the hell of it.”

  “Lots of luck.”

  “You’re right, of course. We’ll be trying to change a culture that has dominated your human life for centuries. Everyone believes that having a serious purpose is the key to being a good human. We FFs believe that being able to play is the key to being a good human. We probably won’t make a dent in your culture, but it’s the game we now want to concentrate on.”

  “Not a single dent,” says I. “Humans can’t be changed.”

  “We’ll see.”

  I was pooped, so I said goodnight to Louie and LT and went into the main cabin and then down to my berth, which was forward at the forepeak. Molière had deserted his app and, as I was passing the master cabin, I heard Karen emit a low scream. I turned back to the cabin door.

  “You okay?” I says.

  There was only silence. So I knocked on the door and pushed it open.

  There was only a dim nightlight at the head of the bed and the light from the boat’s main hallway, but I saw Karen’s blond hair spread out on one end of the bed and her bare feet and her long legs at the other. The main part of her body was covered—by Molière.

  He was about three and a half feet long, with one end of his body over Karen’s… pelvis let’s call it—and the other over her face. His whole body was pressing into her, and it didn’t take me long to realize that he was humping her. I heard Karen moaning.

  I backed up a step, closed the door behind me, went forward to my berth in the forepeak, and with a groan lay back on the foam bed.

  First inter-universe sex in the history of mankind. Or is it intra-universe sex? Have to look it up. The way Molière was going at it, maybe it wasn’t the first. In fact, giving it some thought for three or four seconds, I concluded that any creatures that could change shape like our FFs were probably capable of mating with a few million different creatures. Jesus. Talk about polymorphous perversity: Molière and Louie could set some sort of inter-universe record. Or is it intra-universe?

  And I knew from Louie’s performance on the TV show that an FF could assume a female shape as easily as that of a male. Hell, an FF could create five or six sexy holes all around his body at the drop of a hat. Wouldn’t even have to drop the hat. And a male could take his pick. And an FF could come up with four or five breasts if he wanted, big nipples too. Breasts any size you want.

  Jesus, this is ridiculous. Get a hold of yourself, Billy.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  (From Billy Morton’s MY FRIEND LOUIE, pp. 205–211)

  “You folks have a good time last night?” I ask Karen and Molière, who were sitting side by side with Louie across from me in the boat’s cockpit. That morning we were off Taverna Key and only twenty miles from our destination in Key Largo.

  Karen laughed and I felt Molière smile.

  “I told you I liked Molière,” says Karen.

  “You hop into bed with everyone you like?”

  “Don’t be a human being,” Louie says to me.

  ’Course I then realized what a jerk I was being. Two people, well two creatures that I liked a lot had just become lovers. I should be celebrating, not acting like a stupid old… human being.

  “Sorry about that,” says I. “I’m about ninety-nine and forty-four hundredths asshole and it occasionally shows.”

  I got up to walk over to Karen.
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  “You’re a gem, Karen,” I says. “And you and Molière make a great couple.”

  Karen stood up and gave me a big hug. It was pretty nice to hold a lovely new woman in my arms and, if I weren’t trying to be noble, I’m sure my pecker would have raised his head.

  “You’re a wonderful man,” says Karen and after squeezing me hard moves her face forward and gives me a long, soft kiss right next to my mouth. My pecker forgot all about nobility.

  “I’m a jerk,” I says, “But I tend to get over my jerkiness pretty quick.”

  I turned to Molière.

  “How’d you get so lucky to pick out such a winner on your first try?”

  Molière laughed.

  “I’ve looked at tens of thousands of humans since I first landed here,” he says, “and I knew what I wanted and I found her.”

  “Don’t want to complain, Molière, but you sound like an ad for an online dating service.”

  Karen laughs, but Molière, Louie, and LT become absolutely still.

  “Trouble coming,” says Molière.

  “Take us toward shore, Billy,” says Louie.

  “Full speed,” adds Molière.

  Although not hearing anything, I rushed to the helm, took her off autopilot, and swung west at close to forty knots toward the barely visible shore of the Keys about five miles away. Over the roar of the engines and the smashing through the sea, I still couldn’t hear or see anything suspicious, but then heard Karen shout: “There they are!”

  ’Course I wanted to take a look, but I was stuck to the helm. I was vaguely aware of Louie and Molière rushing past me to go down below, and of Lucas coming up beside me.

  “Get your life preserver on,” I says to Lucas. “And bring one for me too. And Karen.” He disappeared.

  Louie and Molière emerged from below with their four bags each of cash, though they stayed under the cockpit roof.

  “If they begin to shoot at us, Billy,” says Louie, “you, Lucas, and Karen jump into the water. Put the boat on autopilot to keep going at this speed toward shore.”