“It’s a lovely land,” Mary agreed. “But it can be a dirty one as well. You’ve taken in all the sights, then?”
“I’ve been everywhere—to Tara, and the Cliffs of Moher, and Newgrange, and the Ring of Kerry. I’ve even kissed the Blarney Stone.” The alien lowered her voice and made a complicated gesture that I’m guessing was the equivalent of a giggle. “I was hoping to see one of the little people. But maybe it’s just as well I didn’t. It might have carried me off to a fairy mound and then after a night of feasting and music I’d emerge to find that centuries had gone by and everybody I knew was dead.”
I stiffened, knowing that Mary found this kind of thing offensive. But she only smiled and said, “It’s not the wee folk you have to worry about. It’s the boys.”
“The boys?”
“Aye. Ireland is a hotbed of nativist resistance, you know. During the day, it’s safe enough. But the night belongs to the boys.” She touched her lips to indicate that she wouldn’t speak the organization’s name out loud. “They’ll target a lone Outsider to be killed as an example to others. The landlord gives them the key to her room. They have ropes and guns and filthy big knives. Then it’s a short jaunt out to the bogs, and what happens there… Well, they’re simple, brutal men. It’s all over by dawn and there are never any witnesses. Nobody sees a thing.”
The alien’s arms thrashed. “The tourist officials didn’t say anything about this!”
“Well, they wouldn’t, would they?”
“What do you mean?” the alien asked.
Mary said nothing. She only stood there, staring insolently, waiting for the alien to catch on to what she was saying.
After a time, the alien folded all four of her arms protectively against her thorax. When she did, Mary spoke at last. “Sometimes they’ll give you a warning. A friendly local will come up to you and suggest that the climate is less healthy than you thought, and you might want to leave before nightfall.”
Very carefully, the alien said, “Is that what’s happening here?”
“No, of course not.” Mary’s face was hard and unreadable. “Only, I hear Australia’s lovely this time of year.”
Abruptly, she whirled about and strode away so rapidly that I had to run to catch up to her. When we were well out of earshot of the alien, I grabbed her arm and angrily said, “What the fuck did you do
“I really don’t think it’s any of your business.”
“Let’s just pretend that it is. Why?”
“To spread fear among the Outsiders,” she said, quiet and fierce. “To remind them that Earth is sacred ground to us and always will be. To let them know that while they may temporarily hold the whip, this isn’t their planet and never will be.”
Then, out of nowhere, she laughed. “Did you see the expression on that skinny blue bitch’s face? She practically turned green!”
“Who are you, Mary O’Reilly?” I asked her that night, when we were lying naked and sweaty among the tangled sheets. I’d spent the day thinking, and realized how little she’d told me about herself. I knew her body far better than I did her mind. “What are your likes and dislikes? What do you hope and what do you fear? What made you a musician, and what do you want to be when you grow up?” I was trying to keep it light, seriously though I meant it all.
“I always had the music, and thank God for that. Music was my salvation.”
“How so?”
“My parents died in the last days of the war. I was only an infant, so I was put into an orphanage. The orphanages were funded with American and Outsider money, part of the campaign to win the hearts and minds of the conquered peoples. We were raised to be denationalized citizens of the universe. Not a word of Irish touched our ears, nor any hint of our history or culture. It was all Greece and Rome and the Aldebaran Unity. Thank Christ for our music! They couldn’t keep that out, though they tried hard to convince us it was all harmless deedle-deedle jigs and reels. But we knew it was subversive. We knew it carried truth. Our minds escaped long before our bodies could.”
Her face was like stone. “I’m what I am. An Irishwoman. A musician. A patriot. Cooze for an American playboy.”
I kept my smile, though I felt as if she’d slapped me. “That’s unfair.”
It’s an evil thing to have a naked woman look at you the way Mary did me. “Is it? Are you not abandoning your planet in two days? Maybe you’re thinking of taking me along. Tell me, exactly how does that work?”
I reached for the whiskey bottle on the table by the bed. We’d drunk it almost empty, but there was still a little left. “If we’re not close, then how is that my fault? You’ve known from the start that I’m mad about you. But you won’t even—oh, fuck it!” I drained the bottle. “Just what the hell do you want from me? Tell me! I don’t think you can.”
Mary grabbed me angrily by the arms and I dropped the bottle and broke her hold and seized her by the wrists. She bit my shoulder so hard it bled and when I tried to push her away, topped me over on my back and clambered up on top of me.
We did not so much resolve our argument as fuck it into oblivion.
It took me forever to fall asleep that night. Not Mary. She simply decided to sleep and sleep came at her bidding. I, however, sat up for hours staring at her face in the moonlight. It was all hard planes and determination. A strong face but not one given to compromise. I’d definitely fallen in love with the wrong woman. Worse, I was leaving for distant worlds the day after tomorrow. All my life had been shaped toward that end. I had no Plan B.
In the little time I had left, I could never sort out my feelings for Mary, much less hers for me. I loved her, of course, that went without saying. But I hated her bullying ways, her hectoring manner of speech, her arrogant assurance that I would do whatever she wanted me to do. Much as I desired her, I wanted nothing more than to never see her again. I had all the wealth and wonders of the universe ahead of me. My future was guaranteed.
And, God help me, if she’d only asked me to stay, I would have thrown it all away for her in an instant.
In the morning, we took a hyperrapid to Galway and toured its vitrified ruins. “Resistance was stiffest in the West,” Mary said. “One by one all the nations of the Earth sued for peace, and even in Dublin there was talk of accommodation. Yet we fought on. So the Outsiders hung a warship in geostationary orbit and turned their strange weapons on us. This beautiful port city was turned to glass. The ships were blown against the shore and broke on the cobbles. The cathedral collapsed under its own weight. Nobody has lived here since.”
The rain spattered to a stop and there was a brief respite from the squalls which in that part of the country come off the Atlantic in waves. The sun dazzled from a hundred crystalline planes. The sudden silence was like a heavy hand laid unexpectedly upon my shoulder. “At least they didn’t kill anyone,” I said weakly. I was of a generation that saw the occupation of the Outsiders as being, ultimately, a good thing. We were healthier, richer, happier, than our parents had been. Nobody worried about environmental degradation or running out of resources anymore. There was no denying we were physically better off for their intervention.
“It was a false mercy that spared the citizens of Galway from immediate death and sent them out into the countryside with no more than the clothes on their backs. How were they supposed to survive? They were doctors and lawyers and accountants. Some of them reverted to brigandry and violence, to be sure. But most simply kept walking until they lay down by the side of the road and died. I can show you as many thousand hours of recordings of the Great Starvation as you can bring yourself to stomach. There was no food to be had, but thanks to the trinkets the Outsiders had used to collapse the economy, everybody had cameras feeding right off their optic nerves, saving all the golden memories of watching their children die.”
Mary was being unfair—the economic troubles hadn’t been the Outsiders’ doing. I knew because I’d taken economics in college. History, too, so I also knew that the war had, in part, been forced upon them. But though I
