Alien Archives. Robert Silverberg
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glow bobbed for a moment, up, down. Then it was gone.
Demeris, shading his eyes, looked upward for a time, but there was nothing to see. He felt a sharp little momentary pang, thinking of the possibilities. But what could he have done? She had wanted something from him that he wasn’t able to give. If he had been somebody else, things might have been different. But he was who he was. He could go only so far toward becoming someone else, and then he had to pull back and return to being who he really was, and that was all there was to it.
He moved onward, toward the edge of the city.
No one gave him any trouble at all on his way out, and the return trip through the western fringe of the Occupied Zone was just as smooth. Everything was quiet, all was peaceful, clear on to the border.
The border crossing itself was equally uncomplicated. The fizzing lights and the weird hallucinatory effects of the barrier were visible, but they had no impact from this side. Demeris passed through them as though they were so much smoke, and kept on walking. In hardly any time he was across the border and back in Free Country again.
AMANDA AND THE ALIEN
Some stories seem almost to write themselves. This was one of them. I wish they were all that easy, or that the results were always that pleasing.
“Amanda” was a product of the rainy winter of 1981–1982, when I was having a particularly fertile run of short-story writing. (Here I need to pause for a digression on California weather and my writing habits. California is one of five places in the world that have the so-called “Mediterranean” climate—the others are Chile, Western Australia, the western part of South Africa, and the Mediterranean region itself—in which the winters are mild and rainy and the summers are dry. Where I live, in the San Francisco region, the heaviest rains fall between November and March. Then they taper off, and from mid-April to early November there’s normally no rain at all. Rain in summertime here has been known to happen occasionally, but so rarely that it’s a front-page news item. My working pattern followed the weather: in the days when I was writing novels—it’s been a while since I last wrote one—I tended to write them during the period of maximum rainfall, tapering off to short stories as the season’s rains began to diminish in the spring, and doing as little work as my conscience would allow during the dry season. By fall, just as the rains were getting ready to return, I would warm up the machinery with a short story or two and then embark on the new season’s novel. But 1981 was an unusual year: instead of a novel, my book for the year was Majipoor Chronicles, which is actually a collection of short stories disguised as a novel, and I wrote it in the spring and summer instead of winter. When autumn came, I was out of sequence with my regular writing rhythm, and I decided to keep on doing short stories and get things straightened out later on.)
And so “Amanda.” It wasn’t the story I had intended to do then. I had promised one to Ellen Datlow, the new fiction editor of Omni, and what I had in mind was a sequel to one from the year before called “Dancers in the Time-Flux”—using the same protagonist, the 17th-century Dutch circumnavigator Olivier van Noort, who has been transported to the far future and this time encounters a Parisian woman from the year 1980 who was, like himself, a creature of antiquity, but nevertheless something out of his own future. My long-range plan was to assemble another story cycle along the lines of Majipoor Chronicles, set in the Son of Man world that I had invented for a 1969 novel. But something went wrong and the story died on me after about eight pages. I don’t know why. Unfinished stories are as rare around here as heavy rainfall in July. So far as I can recall, that’s the only story I’ve left unfinished in the past sixty years.
“The thing seems terribly slow and ponderous and wrong,” I told Ellen in a letter of February 20, 1982, “and after a few days of work I called a halt to find out what the trouble was. The trouble was, apparently, that I wanted to do a different sort of story for you, something bouncier and zippier and more contemporary. And before I really knew what was happening, the enclosed lighthearted chiller came galloping out of the typewriter.” Ellen bought it by return mail, and Terry Carr chose it for the 1983 volume of his annual Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology series.
Instead of setting my story in the remote future world of “Dancers in the Time-Flux,” I had put it right here, in the San Francisco Bay Area of just a few years hence. And, though I wrote it in cool rainy February, I picked warm sunny September as the time in which it took place. Perhaps that was why I wrote it with such ease. It had been pouring outside for days, but in my mind our long golden summer had already come. And, with it, the utterly unscrupulous Amanda, an all too familiar California life-form who comes face to face with a very scary alien and holds her own with it.
Ellen Datlow published it in the May, 1983 issue of Omni. Some years later the talented young director Jon Kroll made a very funny television movie out of it, and careful observers will note that in it I made my film debut in a role (non-speaking) that had me on camera for approximately seventeen seconds.
AMANDA SPOTTED THE ALIEN LATE Friday afternoon outside the Video Center on South Main. It was trying to look cool and laid-back, but it simply came across as bewildered and uneasy. The alien was disguised as a seventeen-year-old girl, maybe a Chicana, with olive-toned skin and hair so black it seemed almost blue, but Amanda, who was seventeen herself, knew a phony when she saw one. She studied the alien for some moments from the other side of the street to make absolutely certain. Then she walked across.
“You’re doing it wrong,” Amanda said. “Anybody with half a brain could tell what you really are.”
“Bug off,” the alien said.
“No. Listen to me. You want to stay out of the detention center or don’t you?”
The alien stared coldly at Amanda and said, “I don’t know what the crap you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do. No sense trying to bluff me. Look, I want to help you,” Amanda said. “I think you’re getting a raw deal. You know what that means, a raw deal? Hey, look, come home with me and I’ll teach you a few things about passing for human. I’ve got the whole friggin’ weekend now with nothing else to do anyway.”
A flicker of interest came into the other girl’s dark chilly eyes. But it went quickly away and she said, “You some kind of lunatic?”
“Suit yourself, O thing from beyond the stars. Let them lock you up again. Let them stick electrodes up your ass. I tried to help. That’s all I can do, is try,” Amanda said, shrugging. She began to saunter away. She didn’t look back. Three steps, four, five, hands in pockets, slowly heading for her car. Had she been wrong, she wondered? No. No. She could be wrong about some things, like Charley Taylor’s interest in spending the weekend with her, maybe. But not this. That crinkly-haired chick was the missing alien for sure. The whole county was buzzing about it—deadly nonhuman life-form has escaped from the detention center out by Tracy, might be anywhere, Walnut Creek, Livermore, even San Francisco, dangerous monster, capable of mimicking human forms, will engulf and digest you and disguise itself in your shape, and there it was, Amanda knew, standing outside the Video Center. Amanda kept walking.
“Wait,” the alien said finally
Amanda took another easy step or two. Then she looked back over her shoulder.
“Yeah?”
“How can you tell?”
Amanda grinned. “Easy. You’ve got a rain slicker on and it’s only September. Rainy season doesn’t start around here for another month or two. Your pants are the old spandex kind. People like you don’t wear that stuff anymore. Your face paint is San Jose colors, but you’ve got the cheek chevrons put on in the Berkeley pattern. That’s just the first three things I noticed. I could find plenty more. Nothing about you fits together with anything else. It’s like