Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille

NOTES FROM THE FIELD

So much human language is untranslatable. After I’d scanned and tagged my latest subject, she talked non-stop.

She started by saying, “I don’t do this often. It’s my rule to get to know someone before we… you know… sleep together.” And she continued as she pulled up nylons, wiggled into a short-skirted black dress and adjusted her hair. My equipment recorded it, of course, for later analysis and synthesis with the rest of the field data. She told me about her sisters and how they were married, “Except Susan, who has been living with this realtor in Seattle for two years, so she’s practically engaged,” and then went on about her job while she reapplied makeup. When she went into the bathroom, I checked the tag’s status; the monitor showed it had already attached itself to the Fallopian tube, where it would stay, transmitting data for about six months until it broke down into undetectable biological components.

Upbeat, bright, until she was ready to go, she asked me what about half of them do. “Will I see you again?” Her face seemed poised, carefully blank.

I shrugged. A useful gesture, communicating messages in a wide range.

She took a deep breath, a shuddery one, and looked away, which often means the subject is on an emotional edge. I hadn’t seen it coming. I hardly ever do. Reading human facial expressions is my hobby, not part of my mission, but I don’t feel I’m very good at it. She looked around my apartment, at the art prints in frames, at the expensive stereo equipment, at the new furniture, which reinforced my masquerade as a young business executive, and said, “Don’t mind me. It’s all blather.”

I’ve discovered humans in the bars are often lonely, a little desperate. The sex is an amelioration.

Blather: In this context, probably meaning language that covers or replaces the message the sender would prefer to communicate. Although all human languages possess words used in this way, there is no Lasarént equivalent.

The last Lasarént abduction of a human for examination and tagging occurred in 1967 near San Antonio, Texas. The three other extrasolar races quit the practice before 1964. They attracted too much attention. Memory adjustments weren’t perfect. That’s the nature of technology, imperfection. So the plan to study humanity entered its second phase, infiltration. Still, abduction stories appeared in the tabloids. For a while there was considerable bickering among the four races about who was cheating, but it became evident that human behavior is often delusional.

My first field experience coincided with our last abduction. The human lived in Tremaine, an hour’s drive from San Antonio along a twisting, graveled road. We stalled his truck, anaesthetized him and moved him to an exploratory vehicle. Some tests require a lively nervous system, however, so he was brought near consciousness. He looked at us from the table, eyes half closed. “Jesus, Mary, son of a bitch. It’s the goddamned Rapture.”

I’ve been in the field ever since, over thirty years.

Rapture: In this context, probably meaning a religious experience of being transported to heaven. Some confusion here over his use of the article “the” instead of the more commonly expected, “a.” Other terms for this include “the final reward,” and “coming home.” See “euphemism.” Beyond that, the utterance resists translation.

For three weeks I’d been collecting information and tagging specimens in singles bars in the Old Town area of Sacramento when I ran into a Trosfrilla operative. My bioenhancements and cosmetic surgeries, some of them quite radical and painful, allowed me to pass as a male human. I had the more difficult task of studying females. Lasarént field operators disguised as females, using similar techniques in tagging males, reported as many as three or four specimens a night. One evening I attracted two females to my apartment at the same time, which nearly overloaded my scanning equipment, but other nights I only collected notes. In other countries, of course, we use practices appropriate for their cultures.

A converted riverboat, the Sleepy Jean Grill and Suds, permanently docked near the Port of Sacramento, was the next bar on my schedule. A place couldn’t be visited too often, or I might have to deal with a previous contact a second time. There is no scientific need to scan the subject twice once it has been tagged, but females I’d met previously often ruined my chances for a new encounter by talking until the bar closed. I parked in the lot, and crossed a gang-plank over the water to enter.

Inside, the bar stretched the length of the narrow room and was made of weathered barn planks, heavily varnished. Neon beer signs flashed behind Venetian blinds. No cover. A local hangout. Hard to get to if you didn’t know it was there. Grill behind the bar to the side, where a cook flipped burgers and fried potatoes. Lots of cooking odors, beer and a mossy undertone from the river. Red lights. A small dance floor flanked by large speakers at one end, a pair of pool tables at the other. Tables in between. In a larger singles bar I’d have better luck attracting someone, but I had plenty of data from those venues. Now I was more interested in atypical cases.

The lights caught my attention—they were nearly the hue of the spring time Lasarént sky—and the water smells reminded me of my birth den in the bank of the far Hydrash. Before the crowd arrived, I could feel the current flowing beneath the boat, rubbing the aged wood. As soon as I entered, I knew I would return. I took a table in the middle and asked the waiter for two place settings. It was one of several techniques to interest women, the empty chair. Some women can’t resist a single man, nicely dressed, aesthetically pleasing (we’d spent years perfecting attractive proportions in the lures—a fractionally small shift in eye placement, nose size or teeth arrangement can make a lure successful or a failure—my human face had been altered numerous times). She can’t resist if it’s obvious his date has not arrived.

The empty chair is a passive technique. It depends on the women coming to me, as do several other ruses such as reading a book, or taking notes. A tape recorder on the table will sometimes work, or a camera. What doesn’t work is looking unoccupied. A man who clearly just waits is shunned. Scanning the bar doesn’t work either. A man looking for a woman never finds her. There are active techniques too. Many of them. Almost all involve some pretense for conversation, not just, “Nice weather we’re having, don’t you think?” but anything that asks the woman to contribute something of her own. Even something as simple as, “Great jacket. Where’d you get it?” can be a beginning. After that, the evening scripts itself around drinks, dancing, more conversation until it’s obvious she is willing to come to my apartment. Often there needs to be an excuse to go, either to see the art prints, or to admire the view from the balcony, or to listen to music. Rarely will either of us be straight-forward: “Let’s go somewhere private for sex.” Humans are interesting in this behavior. Important matters to them aren’t discussed directly.

I’ve been among the humans for years, “sleeping together” numerous times. Never have I discussed my matters of importance. We have no middle ground.

“Sleeping together” does not involve sleeping. It is sex, often times on a bed (which is used for sleeping too!) but one female told me we’d “slept together” when we didn’t make it past the clothes closet. Fortunately the scanning equipment covers the entire area equally well.

I was part way through a salmon steak, which I’d developed a taste for, when the woman sat at my table.

“I hate to eat alone, do you mind?” she said. Blonde hair cut short. Dark eyes, hard to see the color in this light. According to human conceptions of physical beauty, I guessed that she didn’t have to eat alone often. She was almost six feet tall, my height. Slim. Plain, blue shirt worn loose. White pants. White boots tucked under the pant’s legs. Not standard dress for a singles place, but the Sleepy Jean wasn’t typical, as I said. Two motorcycle types at the bar watched her for a moment before turning back to their drinks.

“Not at all,” I said. “Have you ordered?”

She brushed hair off her forehead. “Don’t mind if I do.”

Normally, meeting a woman is not this easy. Even though the bars exist for social interactions, humans are wary at first. They don’t trust each other. It seemed clear to me, though, that this one was bound for my apartment, so I field-scanned her. A tiny unit on my wristwatch would tell me if she’d been tagged before and give me an overview of her suitability for our studies.

She was Trosfrillan, one of the other extrasolars, which explained her height. How they got a nine-foot tall, six limbed creature into this package amazed me. My modifications, painful as they were, were not as drastic.

“Damn!” she said, looking at her own watch.

We didn’t speak for a while. The Trosfrilla study humans in much the same manner as we do. They are interested in travel patterns. Mating rituals. Work/recreation ratios. Sleep/wake cycles. Biochemistry. The normal field data for any species. Past difficulties prevent us from sharing our findings, though there is now some effort to consolidate the work. Our races evolved on different planets in the same system. There had been wars in our past. We were competitors.

I looked around the bar again. The motorcycle guys hunched over their beers. A couple shot pool at a table at the bar’s far end. Beneath me, the floor moved subtly, responding to the river’s flow.

“My name’s Arlyss,” I said. My Lasarént name would damage a human throat.

“Trudy,” she said. “Have you been down long?”

“Off and on for thirty-some years. I haven’t been off-world for eleven years now.”

The waiter came by and took her order. I ate more salmon. The mimicked human gestures came almost naturally to me, often times revealing my emotions in ways I would never display when in my Lasarént body. I found myself smiling. It had been a long time since I had talked to someone without pretending. “Yourself?” I said, when the waiter left.

“Only five. I’d been doing Seleneological surveys when this opportunity came up. It was a change.” She shifted in her seat. “I’m uncomfortable in this form.”

I nodded. Gravity was wrong. Not all that different, only 1.2 heavier, but it was wrong. A different molten core beneath me. A different wash of magnetic influences. The stars at night, wrong.

She didn’t wait for her meal. “I have to go. Quotas.”

I felt a unfamiliar urge within me as she rose. A few more people had entered the bar, taking other tables, all humans who could never know who I was. Their faces moved strangely, in their human way: too many horizontal lines, when they closed their mouths or eyes, the eyebrows, the hair line, all oddly horizontal. It frightened me to recognize their feelings in their faces—that I couldn’t really remember what a Lasarént face looked like. I wanted her to stay. She wasn’t Lasarént, but we shared a sun. “Why did you come here?” I said. The bar was small. Even when it was full, it would be as unlikely a place for her work as it was for mine.

She pushed her chair under the table. I noticed her fingers. Their sculpting was perfect, nails exactly human-like. The Trosfrilla have six fingers on their manipulating hands. She lost part of herself for this transition too. “The river reminded me of home.” She floated her hand away and indicated the whole bar. “The light—did you notice?—it’s like Trosfrilla.”

“I saw,” I said, but she was already striding away. The bikers watched her again.

Clearly I made her uneasy. If she wanted to scan and tag a human, she would be as successful here as she would be anywhere else. It wasn’t the quota that drove her away. It was me. I wondered about Trosfrillan morality. Did she consider her work embarrassing? Was this a perversion in her eyes?

Bestiality: Sexual relations with an animal. Humans consider this to be of the lowest sort of behavior. The background for this revulsion is untranslatable. Is there a Trosfrillan equivalent?

As it turned out, I made a contact that night, a woman playing pool by herself. I put quarters on the rail, shot eight-ball with her until closing.

Pool is an elegant game, maybe one of the best of the human recreations. I get lost in the velocities and angles, the cue in my hand, the felt’s smooth plain, the ball’s muted click. We played evenly. She set up for a shot then stood back each time, as if she were shooting it twice. Called her bumpers. A rhythmic pattern she never varied. She clicked her tongue appreciatively when I made a good shot. After a while, I got the impression she didn’t care about the score. She watched the rolling ball like I did, as a physics demonstration. Something beyond personality. Humans startle me sometimes with their depth, and I wished I could talk to her about myself. Last call for drinks surprised me.

We left together, and she said, “Where’s your car?” I’d scanned her earlier. Twenty-seven years old. She showed evidence of having borne children. Impossible to tell more until she was at the apartment, where the equipment was better.

She didn’t talk as we drove away, but she looked out the window. Her unsmiling reflection flickered in the streetlights. Her breathing was even, hands still in her lap. “You have protection?” she said when we pulled into the parking lot.

I nodded. Of course it was designed not to interfere with my measurements or the placing of the tag. Human diseases didn’t threaten me, and I sterilized myself between encounters to not spread contagions. I’m the definition of “safe sex.”

Later that night I drove her back to the Sleepy Jean. After she shut the car door, she leaned in the window. “My name’s Margaret.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m Arlyss. I forgot to ask.”

“I thought you should know.”

I stayed in the parking lot, listening to the river. It started to rain. Big drops slapped against the windshield and splattered on the upholstery. A stream of muddy water crossed the parking lot to empty into the river between the anchored boat and the shore. The lights had been turned off, but the beer signs still glowed, glinting redly in the rain pools. I hadn’t thought of Lasarént for years, not like this.

I once read a bumper sticker on a truck parked outside a Chicago dance club: “Save time: go ugly early.” No translation available.

The next night, at Shatterday’s, a huge singles lounge in north Sacramento, I saw Trudy again. She was on the crowded dance floor, as far as I could tell, by herself. Now that I knew she was Trosfrillan, I could see it in her movements. Their backs have twinned vertebrae. Even in her near perfect human form, she danced distinctly. People gave her room. More than a few watched her, men and women.

I held my beer tightly, waiting for it to warm to a drinkable temperature. Even though I had been in the bar for an hour, I’d made no attempt to hook up with anyone. I contemplated the music, which is not artistic to my ear, but I find it beautiful that they have music. It tells me perhaps we will get along when this race breaks free from its planet, when we reveal ourselves to them. There has to be something worthwhile in a species that devotes so much time to music, and invented pool. And they dance, of course, which speaks well for them, even when it’s clear that much of the dance I see is variations on mating rituals. All posturing and invitations.

Trudy’s dance had none of that in it. Pure movement for the love of movement. The Trosfrilla have hierarchies of dance, achievement levels that take years to master, as do the Lasarént. In the mythology of encounters between our two races, there is a story of a war settled by a long dance. They danced the peace in, goes the tale.

“Do you want to dance?” said the woman. Short, a bit plump by human standards. I checked my watch. Young. Twenty-one. Untagged. Her friends sat at a table a few yards from mine, hiding their giggles. I don’t believe they thought she would have the courage to ask me. She danced well, for a human. At least she moved energetically. The song ended, and we waited for the next. She kept her hand on mine to keep from losing me in the crowd. We danced again. I made frequent eye contact. Responded to her changes in posture. Human dance: postures and invitation. I read her. She read me. Others jostled us. The music pounded in its numbingly unchanging beat. As always, I felt disconnected. I didn’t know her. She would never know me. No point of synchronicity in our lives. I could imagine her in my apartment in an hour or two, trying to close the distance. For me, what happened in the apartment was clinical.

What a fruitless pursuit on her part, even if I was human. I’d seen the same kind of face before. Sad, under the laughter. What would be the best she could hope for? That I wouldn’t leave her at the end of the evening? That I wouldn’t be in another bar on another night dancing with someone else? And then what would she have? Humans don’t meet in the mind as do the Lasarént. She would never press her back into the muddy wall of a den on the banks of the Hydrash, side by side with the family line. She’d never know ecstasy as the fleshy tendrils grew between us, from back to back, burrowed in, transferred genes and nutrients and emotion. She would never touch minds with her den mates in orgiastic communion all winter long.

I almost walked away from her. But a hand pressed against my thigh, and a voice whispered in my ear, “How do you handle the loneliness?” I turned. It was Trudy, already dancing away into the crowd.

What loneliness? I thought. I am a scientist on a mission. My work is my companion. We danced more. I bought the plump woman drinks.

At the apartment, she clung to me after I’d tagged her. “I was afraid I was too ugly for you,” she said.

I told her truthfully, “You are as beautiful as any woman I’ve seen.”

“You wouldn’t kid a kidder?” she said, and tears wet my chest when she pressed her face there.

“You wouldn’t kid a kidder”: To lie to someone who lies. This is one of many funny/sad utterances humans use, like “He has a face only a mother could love,” and “She’s built for comfort, not for speed.” Emotionally untranslatable.

The next night I sat in Bullsnappers until closing. Twice women asked me to dance. I declined. Sitting back, I watched the bar’s rhythm. Men and women in groups, leaning over tables, lined up at the bar, standing besides one another at the edge of the dance floor, mostly not talking, but together. Loud music. Too loud for conversation, but sometimes someone would touch another’s arm, and they’d push their heads together. She’d shout something. He would nod.

People got up, danced, sat down. Patterns emerged of touch and laugh and movement. Strobes flashed in the ceiling, and I watched the dance floor. Legs rearranging. Pelvic rotations. The sinuous flow of a skirt’s edge around a twirling woman. Bass beat, down deep, bouncing in my chest. No pause between songs, and the pattern started again. Hands on backs, shifting. Thighs pressed against thighs under tables. A kiss on a cheek. A bathroom door opened, and harsh light silhouetted the figure coming out.

It was all too loud, chaotic, and… alien. I couldn’t integrate here. Hadn’t integrated for so long I wasn’t sure I could. Nothing felt right. I left cash on the table and pushed my way to the exit. Faces blurred. Strange faces loud with horizontal lines and teeth and darting eyes, watching each other, watching me, and knowing nothing.

Outside, I breathed raggedly. Barely made it to my car. At the apartment, hands shaking, I ran a diagnostic. Maybe one of the implants was breaking down. Maybe, after all this time, my Lasarént immune system was rejecting the grafts, or it could be an acquired allergy. I had too many symptoms, but the equipment reported nothing wrong. Everything normal. For the first time in my field experience, I sedated myself and remained unconscious for several days.

On a Wednesday night, I returned to the Sleepy Jean. Same red lights. Same soothing murmur under the boat. No one in the bar besides the bartender, a cook and myself. I took notes idly about peanut shells on the floor, and how they cracked underfoot, about lingering odors beneath the obvious ones: perfumes, sweat, detergents, petrochemicals. The chair’s surface was cool and smooth, and I realized for the first time that it was an imitation of leather.

Around the room, numerous fakes and imitations. On the walls, old movie posters, but, on close inspection, not the originals. Baseball mitts hanging from the ceiling, just like ones I’d seen in several other bars to provide “atmosphere,” along with old road signs, car license plates, a pair of snow shoes, a boat oar, a stuffed peccary, several fishing poles: all pretending to be random, as if the bar grew to be this way instead of being designed. The beer mugs done in an old-fashioned style. The bartender dressed as a riverboat captain. Fakes. I scribbled into my notebook. So much of the integral human experience involved fakery, which was no different from what happened between them. For years I’d watched them come into bars, pretending to be at ease or happy or interested or interesting, and it all covered something else. Like their language.

I put my notebook down and shut my eyes. If I ignored the glassy clink behind the bar, shut out the alien cooking smells and odd gravity; if I concentrated on the river’s swishy passage under the boat and the dim red light through my eyelids, I could almost imagine faraway Lasarént. What season was it there? Would the rivers be running high now on their winding flow to the shallow seas? Would the hills be oozy and wet under the reddish sun? I licked my lips, tasted the river’s moisture on my tongue. Rested my head on the chair’s back to feel the moving water better.

I stayed that way for a long time.

Footsteps thudded on the floor. I felt them, and I scrinched my eyes tighter, trying not to break the feeling, but a chair scraped back, and someone joined me at my table. The problem with the vacant chair is it invites company. I thought about sending the person away. Another specimen for the database didn’t seem that important right now. What would be the use of one more tagged woman, moving through her life, tracked by invisible Lasarént field scientists? What would be the good of me committing one more act of human fakery?

It was Trudy.

“I expected to find you here,” she said.

I touched her hand. “That’s good work.”

She held it up to herself, fingers straight. “They hurt all the time, you know.”

I didn’t, but I said I did.

The bartender asked her if she wanted something, and she ordered a beer. When he turned away, she said, “Enzyme treatments make it palatable—even my digestive system was changed—but they drink it too cold.”

“Mine too. When I started, all the food was shunted to a storage stomach. I emptied it after meals, but they decided that was too cumbersome—shipping food to me twice a month—so I have earth-analog bacteria implants and a processor that converts it for me.”

“Ouch,” she said. “All that biologically?”

“Most. I’d attract a lot of attention in an Earth hospital if they X-rayed my insides, though.”

She laughed. I admired the perfection of her guise. No evidence of vestigial scales. The missing limbs. The loss of height. The loss of eye stalks. Trosfrilla biotechs must be true artists.

The door opened and a dozen men and women poured into the bar. A coed softball team, wearing black and yellow T-shirts, talking excitedly.

I didn’t want her to go again. The players settled around two tables, calling for beer and pretzels. One of them plugged money into a juke box, and the Sleepy Jean suddenly became noisy and too crowded.

“Can we go someplace quiet?” I asked.

She nodded. What thoughts were going through her Trosfrilla brain? We were no longer enemies, technically, but she could learn nothing about Earth people from me. I could learn nothing from her. Our conversation made no scientific sense. We’d gain nothing from it. She was not a human woman. I could take no readings or plant a tag. Still, I wanted to stay with her.

She followed me in her car to my apartment. I turned the equipment off before she entered. No point in letting my superiors know I’d entertained a Trofrillan operative.

I said, “Can I get you something to drink?”

Trudy moved into my apartment unlike anyone who’d entered before. She dropped the human role; her feet slid across the carpet, more like her own gait, and her hands went to her jaw line that she rubbed hard. She said, “Water is fine, if it’s warm.” The heels of her hands ground into the side of her face. “It hurts all the time, here. I’ll be glad to go home.”

I poured the water and one for myself. Through the door I could see her examining my things. She pushed aside an art print to study the thin plate of scanning equipment behind.

“What’s your range?” she called.

“About fifty feet.”

She grunted and let the print swing back into place.

“Do you have any music?” she said. “Real music?”

I had several CD’s of recordings I’d made from Lasarént. The stereo couldn’t do the full tonal range justice, but it captured the mutating harmonics and asynchronous rhythms well. We sat beside each other on the couch. Through my picture window the sun set, a red sunset, and I smiled at that. Trudy stayed motionless, her fingers curled on her thighs, her wrists bent slightly, like a Preying Mantis. I smelled nothing Trosfrillan on her, only shampoo and perfume.

Around us the human city teemed with its activities. In the building, doors slammed—I felt their distant echoes—feet pattered down the hallways. Outside, traffic pushed past, all individually guided, most cars holding only one person. Busy. Horns and engine noise beat against the glass. A siren whining. But in my apartment, the red sun bathed everything warmly, and the music currents swept by, gentle and chaotic, like the river beneath the Sleepy Jean, like the far Hydrash. My scanning equipment was off. My position was no longer clinical. I wasn’t collecting.

Trudy rubbed her face again. Underneath the mock skin (Beautifully engineered! Only a well equipped lab that knew what to look for would be able to detect its extraterrestrial origin), I guessed her reshaped skull ached along its alien lines. She grimaced, a very human gesture of pain.

“Here, let me,” I said. In the kitchen, I filled a pan with warm water and found a washcloth. She watched me soak the cloth, then press out the excess moisture.

“I don’t think we should,” she said. Her hand rested on my forearm. “Thank you for the thought, though.”

Still, she didn’t resist when I placed the cloth against her cheek, let the warmth rest there for a moment, and then pushed my thumbs gently into the muscles. Her dark eyes locked on my own. When I went back to the bowl to reheat the cloth, she sighed and shut her eyes. I straddled her on the couch so I could massage both sides of her face equally. She moved her head against the pressure, so I could tell where she wanted it. Gradually, the apartment darkened, and the red sunset behind me went from vermillion to purple to sable. My thumbs kneaded her cheek bones, pushed into the ridge of her jawbone, circled under her ears—the skin caressed the covered bones, a whole tiny landscape of knobs and valleys and smooth plains, over and over.

She said, “Do you miss winter on Lasarént?”

My back ached with memory’s loss. The den filled and dark and close. The hormonal changes engendered in the moist soil and shared air, and the timeless eruption of tendrils in my back, burrowing through the mud, finding other tendrils, growing and intertwining until we joined, all of us, in one organism; one birthing, breathing, thinking organism that waited out the winter in warmth and communion and unity. The integration.

I couldn’t say anything, but swallowed the human sob in my throat while my thumbs orbited endlessly on her face.

Her hands went to my shirt, unbuttoning. In the darkness I saw her eyes glinting, staring again at me. I massaged the skull above the ears; her hair tickled my wrists. She held my ribs and pulled me closer, her breath hot on my chest, then she reached around and put her hands on my back.

“Here?” she said, her voice mellow against the music.

“Higher,” I said, and moved down so she could reach.

The Trosfrilla know our anatomy; they know us. One can’t go to war for generations without learning of the enemy, and she knew. She knew. Her fingers traveled up and down beside my back bone, digging until she found the buried tendril-pods, chemically suppressed, but still there, sensitive to stimulation, and she rubbed them gently.

When the music ended, I fell away, exhausted.

We breathed deeply in the now silent room, city lights glittering beyond the window, the traffic slowed to its night time murmur.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Does it hurt as bad?” I touched the side of her face.

She didn’t look at me. “Not as bad. And you?”

Of course there had been incomplete satisfaction in what she’d done, not like a full nesting, but she knew the tendril-pods were there. She’d touched them and reminded them they were alive.

“That felt good,” I said. “Thanks.”

Trudy rose from the couch, and I knew she was leaving.

She got to the door before I said, “Will I see you again?”

By the dim city light, she paused, her back to me—things remained that way for many heart beats—then she shrugged.

“Why?” she said.

I tried not to weep, my alien form overwhelming me with reflexive emotion, and I suddenly understood something human.

“Don’t mind me,” I said. “It’s all blather.”