Part 9 (1/2)

”Oh, Tommy,” she looked back over her shoulder, ”Tommy, they were hurting me. I didn't have a choice. Are you okay? Where is Erin? Heather?”

He reached out his upperhand, almost touched her, pulled back. She smelled devastation.

”Mommy, you did this, didn't you? Why did you come here? They are so angry with you. You have to go.”

She scrubbed at her eyes, reached out to her son. She touched his back, stroked the silky skin. He shuddered and moved away. ”You have to go,” he repeated.

”But the dreams, I felt them. I felt you in the dreams.”

”You, humans, you aren't allowed there. You have your place and this is our place.”

”I need to help you-”

Erin and Heather appeared, coming out of the same hole. Erin charged at Jo-ann. ”Auntie Jo-ann, you did a bad thing. You hurt someone, there's blood!”

She looked toward the Froggie nest. Sitting on the edge, one of the aliens cradled the stump of its midarm. Blood, brown and thick, oozed out of the stump evenly, not pulsing as from a human injury. Shocked, she watched. She tried to speak, but couldn't get words past the lump in her throat.

The bleeding slowed. She blinked, and the bleeding had stopped completely. A final drip, and the flesh at the end of the Froggie's arm collapsed inward. Amazed, she realized that the Froggie would live-its gate circulatory system had acted as a natural tourniquet.

But now the children approached, focused on her, backs bristling with anger.

”I'm sorry. I didn't mean to. I never wanted to hurt anyone. But you have to tell them, there are bad people, the Hugonauts-”

Heather interrupted. ”What's so bad about them?”

”They want to destroy the planet. They want to dig holes, really big holes that kill the forest and the animals, to get at the rocks underneath. They would dig and dig until there was nothing left. Not your nice nesting holes, much bigger. They've messed up other planets before, and now they want to take your home away.”

”But you're the one who messed things up. You took us away from our real home, didn'tyou?” said Erin.

Jo-ann felt Erin's accusation driving at her, but she had to concentrate on explaining the important issue to them. ”Yes. I did. But you have to understand, I need to talk to them. All these years, I've been trying to prove that they communicate. So we can keep the planet safe.

And it's the dreams, you children found the answer, they talk in dreams. I felt it, too! I felt I was in their dreams. . . .”

Tommy whipped his tail around, as though he would slap her, but just brushed the tip across her forearm. ”No! I told you already. You can't feel them-it's not allowed. They're very angry with you.”

”But, Tommy, I knew you were there, I could smell, such strange smells, but with you mixed in, and some chemical, like tar. What were they saying, do you know?”

”Mommy, no. You're not my mommy. You stole us. They say, Go.”

”Go,” said Heather.

”Go,” said Erin.

”But you have to help. ...”

She searched for the words to explain why she needed them. Why she needed the Froggies to listen to her, to welcome her. She had been so sure, those years ago, sure that the Froggies would answer her, and she would show everyone their intelligence, show that Jo-ann had seen the truth everyone else had missed. And now she had it, their communication dancing through her mind. (Go, Tommy had said. He had told her to leave. Go, echoed in her ears.) These amazing creatures would hare their dreams with her. The children would have to understand.

They had to see how she needed them to translate- Her thoughts came to a grinding halt. Words left her. She paused, lingered over that last word, see. She looked. The children sat before her, one two three, and they were not human children. She spoke, they spoke back, she thought they were talking with each other. But, even though the children used the same words she used, they did not see what she saw. They did not see the Hugonauts strip-mining their planet. They did not see the people in the courtroom laughing at them, at her for declaring their intelligence. They did not see. She had no idea what they perceived, inside their heads. After the briefest glimpse, she knew that she would never know what they imagined, or what they needed.

They had chosen, and they had not chosen her.

She couldn't help it; she started crying. ”I just wanted to find a way to talk to them. I thought you kids would talk to me.”

She reached out to Tommy. He stepped back.

”You are wrong. You don't belong here. They've explained it to me. This is our place, not yours. We don't come into your world. You stay out of ours.”

”Tommy, I love you.”

”You go now.”

Dave was waiting at the gate. As Jo-ann stepped out of the trees, he reached out a hand. He waved in question toward the trees behind her. She shook her head.

”Did you find them?”

”Yes.”Dave folded his s.h.i.+rts, stacking them in a careful pile. Jo-ann crammed her data cells into the mem-erase, one after the other.

Jo-ann felt him watching her. ”These aren't the important ones. Just baseline material.”

”I didn't say anything.”

While he tucked gla.s.sware in with the s.h.i.+rts, she moved around the house, restless, picking things up and putting them down again, collecting data cells for the ruthless scrubbing of the mem-erase. Feeding her latest collection into the machine, she reached with her other hand for the data cell propped on the table by the sofa, the one with their favorite pictures of Tommy, of the three of them making up the game of hop-and-catch. As she picked it up, it was pulled back.

Startled, she turned her head.

”Not that one,” Dave said. ”I want to keep it.”

”No need for it, might as well reuse the data cell. They're not cheap.”

Dave didn't let go. After a moment, Jo-ann let her hand drop. She looked out the window at the garden. She felt Tommy stroke her hair. She watched again as Dave carefully snipped the encroaching vines off his azalea bushes.

She thought, Vines wrap around your heart-when you try to pull them out, you only tear yourself.

Writer collaborations are strange things-when they work, they're marvelous meldings of two (or more) fertile minds into something not quite like each of them separately. We have two such collaborations in this book, and this first one has proved fertile, indeed.

Barry Malzberg, besides being a N. Y. Giants football fan, has been a wonderfully iconoclastic writer from the original New Wave to now. His stories are instantly recognizable as Malzbergian- intense, almost frantic in narration, cerebral and emotive at the same time. Kathe Koja first made a name for herself in the dark fantasy field.

They've written some wonderful stories together. ”What We Did That Summer” is one of them, and was one of the first stories I bought for this volume.

What We Did That Summer.

KATHE KOJA AND BARRY N. MALZBERG.

Boy, I sure miss those aliens, he said. What? She had to put down her beer for that one but there was nothing stronger than amus.e.m.e.nt now; she was not surprised; it was not possible any longer to surprise her. Say that again, she said, leaning into the metal ladderback of the kitchen chair, the one with the crooked leg that when it moved sc.r.a.ped that red linoleum with the textbook sound of discontent. Say it again and then explain it.

Nothing to explain, he said, I just miss them. We called them aliens, those girls, it was our word for them, they would have done anything. Anything, you wouldn't believe, he said, nodding and nodding in that way he had. Not for money, you know, they didn't want money or presents, whatever. It was like a contest they were having between themselves. Almost like we weren't there at all, he said, and sighed, scratched himself in memory as she watched without contempt, watched all this from some secret part of herself that was not a failed madam, not a woman whom he had once paid, regularly though never well, to f.u.c.k; not a woman whose home now permitted no yielding surface whatsoever, nothing soft or warm or pleasant to the touch,no plush sofas and certainly no beds; she herself slept on a cot like a board and ate macaroni and cheese and potpies that she bought at the supermarket when they were on sale. Tell me, she said. Tell me about those aliens, why not. Let me get another beer first, though.