There were indeed people out there, nude, frozen, suffocated people in various poses of death. Their corpses showed that none of them had made it more than a dozen yards from the ship’s discharge port. I picked out Ruth’s frosted face. She had managed to make it out far enough to be in my range of vision and to lift a hand to whoever next took her station. Her fingers had twisted into a claw, but I recognized the gesture. It was a salute, such as one comrade might give another.
I wondered numbly how long I would be staring at her before it was my turn to be discharged.
“Well? Come on, tell us something!”
I didn’t look back at them. I knew I would not be able to keep the truth from my face.
After a few quiet moments, which I’m sure they chalked up to being overwhelmed, I began speaking. I recalled all the things Ruth had told us of, and I added in the things my mind had conjured up over the days.
There were a few playful children in my version from the local farming colony. And there were flowers. Flowers with swollen red petals and bright yellow balls of pollen in the center.
Teeth at Bedtime
Inside its soft red mouth the thing had teeth of real enamel.
I didn’t like the look of those teeth. They looked hard and sharp. They gleamed white as though freshly brushed.
“What do you think of it, Will?” Mara asked me. She was looking lovely. It was the day after my birthday and we were alone together in my apartment. Mara herself made a wonderful birthday present. She leaned forward on the couch, her face glowing with expectant happiness. Her whole face smiled, making me feel warm inside. I noticed that a few blonde strands of her hair had caught in her eyelashes and been stained black by her mascara. Even that looked good.
“Well?” she pressed impatiently. “What do you think?”
What can you do when your girlfriend spends a lot of money on something weird? I took the only logical course open to me… I lied.
“It’s…uh. I like it, Mara.” I said, giving her the gladdest smile I could muster. At least I didn’t need to fake being surprised.
My birthday present sat on my bed stand. The thing was a black plastic box with a lot of touch-sensitive buttons and chrome knobs. It was a clock and a radio and self-answering telephone, and it had a slot on top to connect a player.
The only unusual thing about the device was that it had a mouth. No eyes or nose or ears-just the cheeks, the jaws and the mouth. It had a human, wet, female mouth with full red lips and a bright red tongue. Because it was grinning (it had come out of the box that way) I could see its fine set of hard, white teeth.
I thought of the locked strongbox in my closet and I blinked several times, very quickly.
What sickened me most about the mouth was that I recognized it. I knew those exposed teeth and the curve of that jaw. I knew the dark flat spec of a mole that it had on its right cheek, just above the spot where the lips met. I had kissed that mouth before. It was my girlfriend’s mouth. It was Mara’s mouth.
My mind turned back to the locked metal box that I kept up on the top shelf in my closet, next to the shoe boxes filled with receipts and hardcopies of old tax return forms. I eyed my birthday present and realized that it would never fit in my strongbox. No way.
I fervently hoped that she wouldn’t want me to plug it in before she left. I didn’t know if I had the guts to do it. Mara was looking at me funny. I could tell she was beginning to suspect the truth, that her gift had horrified me. I brightened up reflexively.
“Hey, Hon, this is going to be really great-” I picked the box up, handling it gingerly, the way you would a run-over terrier.
“I’ll just put it in my room.” I pushed my lips into a smile and walked into my bedroom. Mara followed me, making me groan inwardly. I set the obscenity on the bed stand, turning it to face the bed. Then Mara reached past me and plugged it in. I flinched and blinked, as if a foul odor had found my nostrils.
“Power failure detected,” the mouth spoke in a perfect imitation of Mara reading aloud from a dictionary.
“Linking to home system… Link complete.”
It was a high-tech horror. I hated it.
“Isn’t that great, Will?” Mara asked, flashing me with eyes that spoke of smooth thighs and soft kisses. Mara had me on a sex-leash, she charmed me with every movement of her body. I knew it, and hated it, but felt helpless. She was the most attractive girl that I had ever dated. During the last few weeks we had become a steady thing. It was no longer a question of who we were going to see each night, it was just a question of what the two of us would do together. A man could lose his senses over a girl like Mara. To make sure that I never did, I kept my pictures of her in my strongbox, along with pictures of the others I had dated in the past. Just to be sure. I had never told Mara about it, of course, as she wouldn’t have understood.
“It sure is, babe.” Maybe I could sleep on the couch tonight, away from the thing.
“Don’t forget the reunion tomorrow, Will,” Mara reminded me. Nagged me.
My face went hard, like stone, the way it does when I find dog crap stuck to my shoe or when a waitress takes too long with another customer. Fortunately, her back was turned.
“Why don’t you write down the time and the address, so you won’t forget?” Mara suggested. Her voice was soft and innocent, but there was the hard edge of control there, I could hear it. Mara had a beautiful woman’s natural expertise at manipulation. I watched as my traitorous hand picked up a pencil and wrote down the words that she dictated to me. I felt like a secretary. When I had finished, I turned to face her with a pasted-on smile.
Awaiting further instructions. Yes sir. Screw you, sir.
“Now you aren’t going to forget this like you always do, are you Will?” Mara teased me. The yellow number two pencil in my fist snapped. It did it all by itself. It just broke, I swear it. Fortunately, Mara had begun fingering the monstrosity she had given me and didn’t notice the broken pencil or the surprised look on my face. I slipped the snapped pencil into the back pocket of my jeans.
“Let’s play net-music on it for a minute,” she prompted, sitting on the bed and looking at me expectantly. She put her hands into her lap and neatly meshed her fingers. Each nail was carefully painted with a light orange polish. Naturally, we would have to try out the gift she had given me. The only gift she had given me. An expensive gift. Naturally. I felt out of control around Mara, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t understand women. One did not snub your honey’s birthday gift, no matter what one thought of it. Especially, yes especially when that gift was really an image of said girlfriend. You might as well complain about a holo-portrait of her that she had had digitized.
Sure, if you spent half your paycheck on the wrong type of perfume for her you might well find yourself in the exchange line at the mall, with nothing but a frown and a roll of the eyes for a thank-you. But things didn’t work that way when Mara bought a repulsive electronic image of herself and gave it to me. Not for me, they didn’t. Most women were bitches, and Mara was no exception. That’s why I kept the pictures, safe and cool, in my closet with the others. Encased in green metal with a silvery lock of stainless steel.
Approaching the object of my distaste, I knelt before it and lightly ran my finger down the tuning sensor. A liquid amber glow followed my fingerpad as the digital tuning indicator swept across the scale of stations. I watched the mouth buzz its lips together, the white noise of static emanating from it. Each time I passed over a station, the lips twitched and loosed a brief snatch of music or a few words of an announcer. I paused to hear a brief snippet of a newscast concerning the Mexican police-action, which had bogged down only 65 miles north of Mexico City’s outlying slums. A Texas senator begged the congress for justice and two more armor divisions, amid shouts of outrage from the more liberal-minded committee members. I listened for a moment without interest, nothing had changed for weeks and my birth date had already been passed by for the year by the New Plan draft board. I slid my finger more quickly, rippling through the signals, finally leaving it on the hits-only station.
I thumbed the volume control and the room filled with digital-stereo sound. A popular tune called Forget the Alamo from the latest album of the Tazers erupted out of the device. The instrumentals and backup vocals came from the secondary speakers in the thing’s base while Mara’s lovely simulacrum mouth sung the lead.
