FSF, January 2009 Page 7

  There's blood on the knees of her nice tan slacks—actually, on one side, a hole right through them—and blood on the palms of her hands. At least she didn't break anything. I would have smelled that.

  My man still kneels next to her, touching her arm. “We found him in a rain storm. He's a stray. Does he know you from before? Is he yours?"

  She's not ready to answer anything yet.

  I sit still so they won't look at me. I'm thinking: Look into her eyes. Maybe she'll see who you are just as I did. Except she's the one, not ready to look at him yet.

  We sit. He keeps quiet. Finally he helps her up and brings her, both of them limping now, back to the table where his mother sits. I come back, too, dragging my leash.

  The woman still hasn't said a word. They get her tea. My man wets his handkerchief and washes the blood and dirt from her palms. His mother is asking, can she get you this or that? Even the mother is saying she's so sorry.

  "Does he know you? He's never acted this way before."

  Finally, after a few sips of tea, the woman speaks. “I've never seen him before."

  "I can't imagine what got into him. He's always so well behaved. We live just down the block. I can get the car and take you home. But I should take you to the emergency room. Wait here with my mother."

  Finally, she looks up into his eyes and sees who he is.

  She doesn't live far. There's a lot of back and forthing that ends up with the woman getting bandaged up at the emergency room and then going home for fresh clothes and then everybody going out to supper ... without me.

  I “stay” and pay attention to messages from our pods.

  * * * *

  This will all be yours. The view of the Milky Way, the North Star in the north.... Does any other world have any such view? Does any other world have dragonflies? A single moon? Butter? Pine needles? Strawberries? Chickadees?.... This will be yours.

  * * * *

  Actually I'm really thinking more about my man and the woman than the pods’ messages. I'm wondering how they're getting along. I already know how beautiful this world is and with all its smells, I don't need to be reminded. It's us seeds who are down here appreciating everything. The pods just talk about it. It's we who really know.

  I wonder how many others of us seeds are in the middle of the same adventures I am, changing things for our owners? It's part of our hosts’ nature to help the opposable-thumb people. It's part of our enjoyment of this world.

  * * * *

  I can tell when they're on their way home. I rush to the door, twirling and dancing, and right after the mother and the man come in I can tell my plans are already working.

  * * * *

  Now almost every morning we all four of us including me ... meet for breakfast at the sidewalk café and walk together afterward. First they walk the mother home and then the two of them walk me to the park.

  My man always walks farther than is comfortable for him. When he comes home he takes a long hot shower and then uses a heating pad on his leg. I lick his hands and arms and, when I can, his face, to show how I feel, but I'm not sorry for him. I know he wants to do it to prove to the woman, and to himself, also, that he's a whole man.

  He always tastes good.

  But my man needs help. He's not making a move. I don't know what to do. I'm wondering if I should trip her again. Would that put her in his arms? I keep them laughing, but, so far, that hasn't brought them closer to what they both want to do. Perhaps I should trip him instead of her.

  One good thing, though, they're both tall people who slumped to seem shorter and now they stand up straight.

  He does take her hand now and then but only to help her up the steeper places. He's the one that needs help for those. I suppose she knows that and yet takes his hand and leans on him anyway.

  * * * *

  They've found a secret place. Off the path. Surrounded by trees and bushes and at the top of a hill.

  One day they take the mother home and then bring a picnic so as to spend more time in their special spot. They even bring snacks for me.

  They sit side by side on a rock, put me through all my tricks and give me a tiny bite after each one. They keep laughing at me. Then I do a whole set of tricks all on my own and they laugh even more. The woman says, “I do love Pussy Cat.” I know she doesn't really mean she loves me, though she does. Then she says, “And I'm glad he tripped me."

  I'm wondering if my man can hear what she really wants to say. Or is he too busy thinking about his bad leg? I can tell it hurts him by now. Is that foot going to spoil everything? Though why not? It's spoiled his life so far.

  I lie down right on top of his bad foot.

  He looks at me and I stare back. I try to tell him things with my eyes and what voice I have: Put your arm around her. Pull her closer. If that goes well, kiss her. For Heaven's sake! And it will go well.

  He doesn't do any of it.

  Then it's she who dares to lean her shoulder against his.

  I move from his foot to hers. I look up at her. Then at him. Then at her. I don't know how they do it, but they get the idea. They laugh at me and then look at each other and then kiss. Really kiss and I leap up and kiss them, too. They laugh again and kiss all the more.

  And right then the signal comes. So high pitched it even seems high to my host. The pods have already left the transport.

  * * * *

  Move suddenly. If you're quick it won't matter how small you are. Those of you in the alleyways, find the first of the thumb people you see. Their thumbs are useless against your teeth.

  This very moment, as you attack, we're creeping out of our shells. Without your impregnation we'll lie unfertilized ... shriveling.

  * * * *

  I sense others of us not far from me. We're busy at our jobs, guarding thumb people's property, letting ourselves be dressed up in silly costumes, retrieving ducks, leading blind thumb people, running after sticks, getting petted.... We're enjoying it as much as our hosts do. We don't make any moves against our owners.

  * * * *

  This was not the perfect infestation after all. No wonder no other aliens tried it ... or perhaps they did and didn't succeed. Probably they ended up as we have, dwindling away and drying into nothing. What a pity. This is such a nice place.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Seafarer's Blood by Albert E. Cowdrey

  This story marks the third consecutive issue in which Mr. Cowdrey has had a story ... but he professes to having no rivalry with Robert Reed for being our most prolific contributor.

  He does, however, admit to being a student of history, which helps explain this story's juxtaposition of old times and new.

  The first time they met, the Viking—ice-blue eyes, tangled red beard, arms like hairy cables—strode out of a wintry dusk and right through Eric Mumford, shattering the globe of silence that enclosed him.

  For an instant Eric felt penetrating cold, inhaled a smell like an elephant house, heard the ka-thump of a single heartbeat and the crunch of a heavy footfall in a pile of dirty snow. Then the Viking was gone, his broad leather-clad back vanishing down a battlemented wall, across a wooden footbridge, and through a narrow doorway into a massive stone tower.

  But that's impossible, Eric thought. Not seeing a Viking—he'd been doing things like that since he was seven. But in all his visions he'd never heard a sound or sniffed an odor. He felt like a moviegoer of the Twenties, accustomed to the gesticulating phantoms of the silent screen, suddenly awakening to the fact of sound. But even that moviegoer wouldn't have inhaled Theda Bara's scent or felt Valentino's hot breath.

  In the small, musty den of the row house Eric shared with Chris, he lay still for a while, puzzling over his experience. Then his alarm clock beeped, and he heard Chris in the kitchen down the hall, rattling plates—making breakfast for herself, but of course not for him.

  The world that is sometimes called real engulfed him. Same old wife, he thought wearily. Same old life. Yawning,
grunting, scratching his scalp and backside, Eric disentangled himself from his unwashed sheets and stumbled out of bed to confront another lousy day.

  * * * *

  At Pocatelli's Pasta Garden on Fell's Point the lunchtime crowd turned the place to bedlam. Yet even when he was hustling trays, reciting the specials, appeasing obnoxious customers, getting yelled at by the chef and yelling back, Eric's mind kept going over last night's experience. What exactly had happened, and above all, why?

  That evening he brushed his teeth in the little blue-painted downstairs bath he shared with a lively community of small roaches and went to bed as usual on the futon in the den. In the bedroom over his head, Chris was phoning one of her girlfriends, telling her loudly what a rat he was and how unlike Lord Vyvyan Gyles in a romance novel she was reading called The Mistress of Hardcastle. And, thought Eric, probably showering her sheets with cookie crumbs and drops of spilled gin, her usual bedmates ever since he ceased to be.

  Then his eyes closed, and without any sense of transition he was back on the castle wall.

  Alas, the Viking wasn't. Eric hovered inside his usual bubble, hearing and feeling nothing. His immaterial state allowed some crisp snowflakes to pass through him, drifting and spinning. Thirty feet or so away, bearded men-at-arms wearing clumsy wool mittens and ratty-looking cloaks shivered and rubbed their hands over a smoky fire in a black iron bucket. In the fields beyond the castle, dun-colored peasants gleaned the last stalks from the dun-colored earth.

  God, how boring the Dark Ages were. Almost as bad as Baltimore.

  He awoke in a gelid predawn. Chris was rattling dishes in the kitchen. He stumbled out of bed and went to work. He came home in the wintry twilight, watched the Ravens lose a game on TV, and returned to bed. A week passed, the days falling one by one with the sullen iteration of a dripping faucet. He and Chris had two more fights. He accused her of entertaining other men while he was at work and called her a sleazy slut; she denied the charge and called him a fool, a failure, and a faggot. He threw a lamp at her. She threw a plate at him. Neither connected.

  Every night he went back to the wall, where absolutely nothing happened either. It rained or didn't rain, snowed or didn't snow. He might as well have tuned into a ninth-century weather channel.

  Then, one otherwise forgettable Tuesday morning, Eric lurched off the futon as usual, only to discover a painful bruise on his right knee. Where'd I get that? he wondered. It hadn't been there the night before. His telephone lay on the floor, mournfully beeping. The familiar, battered furniture of the den had been randomly pushed around, and the ratty pale carpet bore damp footprints. When he stepped on one, his foot covered the print precisely.

  Shaking his head, Eric staggered loowards, only to find the shower curtain pulled loose and water still trickling in the stall. Baffled, he washed sketchily, dressed, and was heading for the front door when he encountered Chris in the foyer. As a rule, they said as little as possible to each other, especially in the morning. But today she stated—in a screechy voice that was particularly hard on his nerves—that she intended to report his vandalism to Barton U. Scheisster, the lawyer who was handling her divorce.

  Eric naturally inquired what vandalism she was referring to.

  "You knocked over that antique table in the upstairs hall, the one Aunt Mae gave me. Two legs are broken."

  "I never went upstairs last night."

  "Oh, can it. After the crash woke me up, I was lying there in the dark listening, pretty scared if you want to know the truth, and I heard you running into things. Drunk again, I suppose. Then you started talking out loud—babbling like an idiot. I ran to the bedroom door and opened it and switched on the light just in time to see that ratty old Dortmunder Beer T-shirt you sleep in disappearing down the stairs."

  "You were so soused on gin last night you probably broke that crappy little table yourself."

  "Lying jerk."

  "Boozy bitch."

  On that affectionate note, they parted.

  Eric's journey to Fell's Point, always dreary, became drearier as he admitted to himself that he'd turned into a sleepwalker. Worse, his stressed-out personality had fractured into components that knew nothing of each other's doings—which sounded like a formula for lunacy. He was no longer merely an unhappy schmuck, he was now an unhappy nutcase as well. Brooding thus, he arrived at Pocatelli's, where another workday began.

  * * * *

  That evening he pub-crawled home through the sleaze of Greenmount Avenue, pausing now and then to down a few Dortmunders and reject the advances of a couple of fat old whores.

  In the last bar on his itinerary, a dreggy hole that smelled vaguely like puke, companioned only by three other isolated men and a bartender perusing a racing form, he succumbed to meditation. Usually Eric avoided thinking about the toilet his life had fallen into. But there were times, like now, with some brews in his belly and absolutely nothing to do, when he found himself asking that most depressing of all questions, Where did I go wrong?

  Maybe, he thought, with his very first vision, back when he was a child. That was when his inner life began the long, slow task of transforming him into a man who was really alive only when asleep. It happened in a small, comfy condo in Homewood, where he and Mama had moved when he was seven. Behind them lay hard years after his Papa, a Norwegian businessman, died in a plane crash before he and Mama could marry. They'd lived on welfare until she found a job keeping patients’ records for a surgical clinic attached to Maryland General Hospital. That gave her the credit she needed to buy the condo—and yeah, it was small, but after the slum apartment on West Lombard they'd come from, it looked luxurious.

  Eric slept on a cot in the dining alcove, feeling with pride that now he very nearly had a room all his own. On the day after Christmas, 1981, he wasted a lot of time and water in the bathroom, donned Winnie the Pooh PJs, kissed Mama goodnight, and crawled into bed with one of his gifts, a stuffed Scotty named McTavish who wore a tartan ribbon around his neck. Eric's eyelids grew heavy, closed, then seemed to open again on a scene far, far away.

  From a grove of vine-draped trees on a jungle hillside he was gazing across a narrow green valley at a flight of wide steps climbing the slope opposite. Only the steps weren't like any he'd ever seen—they were pools of water, and in each, tiny ladies wearing trousers and wide hats were bowing and rising, bowing and rising. Eric wanted to go and find out what the ladies were up to, but all he could do was look. Sunlight vibrated on the terraced hillside and flashed in the water of the rice paddies, but he didn't feel heat. Tendrils of steam rose from the jungle, but he didn't feel dampness.

  Fascinated; frustrated; he tried to break through the bubble that confined him. Instead, he really woke up back in his bed, breathing air that was chilly and faintly resinous from a small Christmas tree standing in the condo's minute foyer. His sticky eyes met the resentful gaze of two shiny black buttons—McTavish asking silently why Eric had left him behind on his trip to another world.

  * * * *

  Another world. Sighing, grown-up Eric slid off the bar stool and headed home. Chris was nowhere to be seen, so that was okay. Sacked out on the futon, he turned on his side, drew his limbs into the fetal position, fell asleep and for the nth time woke up on the wall—where, at long last, things had changed.

  The Huns had arrived.

  Actually, they might have been any kind of eastern invaders. Eric called them Huns because they rode small shaggy horses and looked ferocious. Below the wall, warriors carrying short maces and braided lariats and heavy curved swords slouched in and out of brown felt yurts. Dark-haired women with chains of silver coins woven into their hair tended campfires or stirred cookpots. Filthy children skittered about like fleas. Goats and other hoofed mammals browsed on remnants of grass while waiting to be milked or slaughtered.

  All in silence, of course. But he didn't need sound to realize that the Viking's castle was under siege. And that an attack was imminent.

  Ragged slaves wer
e hammering together crude ladders. Hun archers were bending and stringing short recurved bows. Some began taking practice shots at the dozen or so men-at-arms watching them from the wall. A crossbowman replied with a bolt that missed its target but killed a goat. A fire still burned in the bucket, only now serfs wearing garments like gunny sacks were heating oil in a black iron cauldron hanging from a tripod.

  Abruptly the Viking strode out of the tower and across the footbridge. He wore a greasy chain-mail shirt over a leather jerkin, a heavy straight sword hanging from his iron-studded belt, and a pointed helmet pressed down on his hayrick of flaming hair. As he passed, Eric merged with him again. Instantly he regained the four senses he'd been missing, and he clung to the inside of the Viking's capacious chest. In the red darkness Eric worked himself up through slippery channels of flesh, until he could look at the world through the eyes of his host.

  Down below, a Hun warrior, maybe a clan chief to judge by the barbaric splendor of his lacquered armor, vaulted with acrobatic ease onto his shaggy little horse and shouted a guttural command. The bowmen sent a flight of barbed arrows hissing toward the wall, and a defender went down with a feathered haft sticking from his neck. He flopped and twisted like a landed fish, but nobody paid attention because the Hun warriors with a ragged cheer were raising the ladders and rushing the wall.

  Wood slammed against stone. Serfs muscled the cauldron to the battlements and dumped boiling oil a gallon or two at a time on the attackers. Screams of pain added to the racket. Horns blared and reinforcements came trotting across the bridge from the tower, some carrying hooked lances. The Viking roared orders until the inside of his head resounded like an echo chamber.

  The crisis was now. Huns were hacking and thrusting and trying to fight their way between or over the battlements. A man-at-arms took an arrow in the eye, and as he fell the Viking dropped his sword and snatched a chain mace from his hand. He whirled it around his head, making it whistle and moan as he ran with heavy jarring steps toward a broad-shouldered warrior with eyes of jet. The spiked ball of the mace smacked the top of the Hun's helmet of lacquered leather and his head collapsed like a building pancaking in an earthquake. He fell back onto the man behind him and both tumbled from the ladder. Two men-at-arms came running with a hooked lance, caught the top rung, and the ladder went over backward and crashed, Huns squirming out from under it like grubs from under a rock. The defenders cheered and beat the stone battlements with the flat of their swords, and—