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?”