Abruptly, she stopped. She looked up at me, her tears streaking down her cheeks in dirty rivulets. Her mascara had become a dark map around her eyes. "Oh, God, Jim. I'm so sorry. What am I doing to you? I'm using you-" She rolled away from me and bolted for the bathroom.
"I like being used-" I offered, but it was a halfhearted attempt. I didn't know if she'd heard me or not.
I sat up on the bed and tried to think. My head was full of noise. This was stupid. I got up and went to the bathroom door. "Lizard?" I said. I knocked politely. "Please?"
She came out almost immediately. She had splashed a little water on her face and was still wiping it off. She looked a little more composed now. As if she'd made a decision. "We should stop," she said.
"I-I-" I felt as if she'd shoved a hand grenade down my throat and pulled the pin.
"No," she stopped me. She put a finger across my lips and said, "It's not because I don't love you. It's because I do. I love you so much, it hurts. I love you so much, I'm hurting you every day. And that's wrong. I don't want to hurt the people I love. Not anymore. Please, Jim, not anymore."
I grabbed her arms and held her still. "Stop it," I said. "Stop it, right now."
She tried to shake free. She tried to pull away. She tried to turn her face away from me.
I used the voice. "Stop it, Lizard."
It worked. The voice always works. It's the voice of God. When you speak in the voice, you're not simply imitating God-you'r being God. It's one of the things you learn in the training. When people hear the voice of God, they listen. She shut up and listened.
"I love you," I said. "You know that. That goes without question. You love me too. I know that. There's nothing you can say or do that will ever convince me otherwise." I took a breath. "But if the fact that we love each other isn't a reason or an excus or a justification for staying together, then neither can it be reason or an excuse or a justification for staying apart. It's totally irrelevant to the issue. You said so."
I stared into her eyes. She was listening intently. I could onl assume that she wanted to hear what I had to say. "Yes, we have arguments. Really good ones. Yes, I hurt you sometimes. Yes, you hurt me sometimes. But I love you in spite of it, or because of it; it doesn't matter. The important thing is that you're never going to stop hurting the people you love, it's always going to be a part of life. And you're going to be hurt in exchange. But the alternative to being hurt is to become a zombie, without feelings, without relationships, and without anyone ever to hold you close in the middle of the night when everything else gets too hard to bear. I'm not willing to be a zombie-and neither are you. Because the next step is to be one of those glassy-eyed naked men and wome walking in herds through the streets of San Francisco.
"Listen to me, Lizard. I know about Robert and Stevie. I doesn't hurt me to see you cry because you miss them. It make me proud of you for remembering what was special about the world before. I'm not jealous. How could I be? Do you know how much I love you? If I had the power to put the world back the wa it was before the Chtorrans came, I'd give you that gift right now. I'd do it in a minute, even if it meant I'd never see you again. But I can't and you can't and no one can, and we're stuck with things just the way they are. And we're going to hurt a lot, each and every one of us. But even if there weren't any Chtorrans, we'd all stil be hurting a lot; only we'd be doing it in different ways; because that's the condition of being human. At least, that's the way I've always experienced it. Well, I'm willing to accept that as the price of admission. And having done that, at least I'm going to choose the hurts that feel good. Do you hear me? I'm not willing to lose you for a stupid reason. If you want to give me up, you're going to have to come up with something a whole lot better than the bullshit you just offered."
Amazingly she listened to the whole speech in silence. Some people listen to the first sentence only and then wait politely while they mentally prepare their reply. Lizard didn't do that. She listened to every word I said. And when I was finished, she didn't argue. She didn't say anything. She just lowered her eyes, and then her head, and leaned silently into me. She rested her head against my chest.
I didn't move. I waited. I wanted to see if she would put her arms around me. She didn't. I felt so damned frustrated. All I wanted was just one little signal that it was all right to touch her again; but she wasn't going to give it to me. I wondered if she was through giving, if the whole thing had become so irrevocably damaged that it could never be repaired.
I made a decision. I had to know. Slowly, gently, I reached my arms up around her. I didn't pull her toward me, I didn't even hug her. I just put my hands on her shoulders in a comforting way and waited in wretched silence. She felt so warm and she smelled so good, and I ached so desperately to know what she was thinking or feeling. Did she still hate me?
She sniffled quietly and brought one hand up between us to wipe her nose. She looked at me bleary-eyed and shook her head sadly. "I can't ever win an argument with you, you know that?"
"Huh?"
"Oh, I can teach you. I can give you information you never had before, Jim-but I can't ever convince you of anything. You have always been so headstrong in your pursuit of what's right that all that anybody around you can do is cooperate or get out of your way." She leaned against me again, resting her head against mine, and put her hands on my shoulders. She sighed and finally let her body relax against mine. "It's so hard to be your friend. Harder to be your lover. But it's harder to let go altogether. I can't do it. I don't have the strength to let go anymore. I'm so tired." She glanced up at me. "You're going to have to be strong for both of us. I'm just going to hang on until you decide to give me up."
"I'll never give you up, you know that."
"I know." She looked so sad as she said it that I almost changed my mind.
I tilted her chin up so she was looking me straight in the eye. Her sea-green eyes were wet and shining. "Lizard-will you marry me?"
From this perspective, it is now clear that the most advantageous method of colonization is to start at the very bottom of the food chain, replacing the Terran processes of decay with Chtorran processes of decay-thus capturing the basic building blocks of the Terran food chain and transforming them into a source of energy for the Chtorran ecology.
The Chtorran ecology can now begin to assemble itself layer by layer without any overt or direct attacks on any Terran life form. The ecology of the host planet becomes progressively weaker while the colonizing ecology becomes progressively stronger.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 36
Chocolate and Babies
"It only takes one person to make a marriage work-it takes two to really fuck it up."
-SOLOMON SHORT
For the longest time, she didn't answer. Her silence lasted several centuries—during the whole of which time I agonized that I had taken advantage of her vulnerability, that I had said a terribly wrong thing, that I had finally, irrevocably, made myself the kind of fool that even she couldn't forgive-because no matter what she said in reply, yes or no, nothing between us could ever be the same again.
At last, Lizard sniffed, wiped her nose, wiped her eyes, smiled a little, looked up at me, shook her head, and said, "You don't have to do that. I won't lock you out again."