Kinkaid smiled at that. He had heard it before, from the Catholic girls he used to date back in Short Hills, New Jersey. He knew how to handle the situation.
“I really do love you,” he said. For the moment, at least, it was true.
“I have—certain feelings toward you, too,” she admitted. “But you can’t imagine what is involved when you love an Andar woman.”
“Tell me about it,” Kinkaid said, slipping an arm around her waist and drawing her to him.
“I cannot,” she said. “It is our sacred mystery. We are not allowed to reveal it to men. Perhaps you should leave me now, while there’s still time.”
Kinkaid knew it was good advice: there was something spooky about her and the way she had appeared on the island. He really ought to leave. But he couldn’t. As far as women were concerned he was a danger junkie, and this lady represented an all-time high in female challenges. He was no painter or writer. His amateur archaeology would never gain him any recognition. The one thing he could leave behind was his record of sexual conquests. Let them carve it on his tombstone: Kinkaid had the best, and he took it where he found it.
He kissed her, a kiss that went on and on, a kiss that continued as they dissolved to the ground in a montage of floating clothing and the bright flash of flesh. The ecstasy he experienced as they came together went right off the scale of his ability to express it. So intense was the feeling that he barely noticed the six sharp punctures, three on either side, neatly spaced between his ribs.
It was only later, lying back, spent and contented, that he looked at the six small, clean puncture wounds in his skin. He sat up and looked at Alia. She was naked, impossibly lovely, her dark red hair a shimmering cloud around her heart-shaped face. She did have one unusual feature which he had not noticed in the passion of love-making. There were six small erectile structures, three on each side of her rib cage, each armed with a slender hollow fang. He thought of certain female insects on the Earth who bite off the heads of their mates during the act of love. He still didn’t really believe she was an extraterrestrial. But he didn’t disbelieve it quite as strongly as before. He thought of different species of insect on the Earth which resemble other species—grasshoppers that look like dry twigs, beetles that imitate wasps. Is that it? Was she about to take off her body?
He said, “It was terrific, baby, even if it is going to cost me my life.”
She stared at him. “What are you saying?” she cried. “Do you actually think I would kill you? Impossible! I am an Andar female, you are my mate for life, and life for us lasts a very long time.”
“Then what did you do to me?” Kinkaid asked.
“I’ve simply injected the children into you,” Alia said. “They’re going to be so lovely, darling. I hope they have your coloring.”
Kinkaid couldn’t quite grasp it at first. “Are you sure you haven’t poisoned me?” he asked. “I feel very strange.”
“That’s just the hibernation serum. I injected it along with the babies. You’ll sleep now, my sweet, here in this nice dry cave, and our children will grow safely between your ribs. In a year I’ll come back and take them out of you and put them into their cocoons and take them home to Andar. That’s the next stage of their development.”
“And what about me?” Kinkaid asked, fighting the desire to sleep that had come powerfully over him.
“You’ll be fine,” Alia said. “Hibernation is perfectly safe, and I’ll be back in plenty of time for the birth. Then you’ll need to rest for awhile. Perhaps a week. I’ll be here to take care of you. And then we can make love again.”
“And then?”
“Then it’ll be hibernation time again, my sweet, until the next year.”
Kinkaid wanted to tell her that this wasn’t how he’d planned to spend his life—an hour of love, a year of sleep, then giving birth and starting all over again. He wanted to tell her that, all things considered, he’d prefer that she bite his head off. But he couldn’t talk, could barely stay awake. And Alia was getting ready to leave.
“You’re really cute,” he managed to tell her. “But I wish you’d stayed on Andar and married your hometown sweetheart.”
“I would have, darling,” she said, “but something went wrong back home. The men must have been spying on our sacred mysteries. Suddenly we couldn’t find them anymore. That’s what we call the Great Disappearance. They went away, all of them, completely off the planet.”
“It figures they’d catch on sooner or later,” Kinkaid said.
“It was very wrong of them,” Alia said. “I know that childbearing makes great demands on men, but it can’t be helped, the race must go on. And we Andar women can be relied upon to keep it going, no matter what lengths we must go to. I did give you a sporting chance to get away. Goodbye, my darling, until next year.”
Message from Hell
My dead brother-in-law Howard came to me in a dream and said, “Hi, Tom, long time no see; I’ve missed you, buddy, how you been?”
I trusted him no more dead than when he was alive. He had always been against Tracy and me. The first time we met, when Tracy brought me to her home and introduced me as the young man she had met in the writing program at NYU, her parents weren’t exactly ecstatic about me, but Howard’s reaction had been somewhat colder than frigid. He made it clear that he didn’t want a down-at-heels writer marrying his one, his only, his beloved kid sister, Tracy.
But to Hell with that, right? Tracy and I got married and took a little apartment in Coconut Grove. I can’t prove it, but I know it was Howard who tipped the cops that I was a big dope dealer masquerading as a bohemian. They came in with guns drawn and that wild who-do-I-shoot-first look in their eyes, expecting to find a laboratory in my closet or under my bed, where I turned paste into top grade cocaine. Ironic that they should expect this of me—a man who had flunked elementary science in college and whose idea of a chemical reaction was dropping an Alka-Seltzer into a glass of water.
They didn’t find a thing, and the half ounce of mediocre weed under my socks finally was ruled inadmissible evidence. But it put a strain on our relationship all the same.
Lots of people marry without the approval of their family. Tracy and I did. We figured Howard would cool off after a while.
That year I sold my fifth short story and got my first novel contract, despite Howard spreading it around that I was a no-talent plagiarist and that Tracy wrote all my stuff for me.
Steady waves of hatred emanated from his stucco house in Coral Gables, permeating our little jungle apartment in the Grove. Things weren’t going so well for Tracy and me. I won’t say it was his fault, but he sure didn’t help.
She had a nervous breakdown, left me, went to Houston, lived with a girlfriend for a while, divorced me, and married somebody else. This was during the time I was finishing my second novel. I’m pretty sure Howard paid off somebody at the Miami Herald to give my book the worst review in the history of southern Florida.
So, in light of all this, perhaps you can understand why I didn’t exactly mourn when, two years later, a rusted-out ‘73 Buick coupe driven by a drunk skindiving instructor from Marathon Shores screeched over the curb on Oceanside Boulevard like a bumper-toothed monster seeking its prey, and sieved Howard through the iron mesh fence at the foot of South Beach.
It was unworthy of me to feel so good about his getting killed, but I did. I couldn’t have planned it better myself. I liked it so much I wished I’d thought of it first. I must also confess that attending Howard’s funeral was the best day I had all year. I’m not proud of this, but there it is. I was miserable and I was glad he was dead and I wondered where he came off now stepping into my dream like this.