In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [91]
The dogs go round and round the deck on the ends of their leashes. Behind them are the top-grade dog-walkers. She pretends to be reading.
Some people write letters, in the library. For her there’s no point. Even if she sent a letter, he moves around so much he might never get it. But someone else might.
On calm days the waves do what they are hired to do. They lull. The sea air, people say—oh, it’s so good for you. Just take a deep breath. Just relax. Just let go.
Why do you tell me these sad stories? she says, months ago. They’re lying wrapped in her coat, fur side up, his request. Cold air blows through the cracked window, streetcars clang past. Just a minute, she says, there’s a button pressing into my back.
That’s the kind of stories I know. Sad ones. Anyway, taken to its logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end everyone dies. Birth, copulation, and death. No exceptions, except maybe for the copulation part of it. Some guys don’t even get that far, poor sods.
But there can be happy parts in between, she said. In between the birth and the death—can’t there? Though I guess if you believe in Heaven that could be a happy story of sorts—dying, I mean. With flights of angels singing you to your rest and so forth.
Yeah. Pie in the sky when you die. No thanks.
Still, there could be happy parts, she says. Or more of them than you ever put in. You don’t put in many.
You mean, the part where we get married and settle down in a little bungalow and have two kids? That part?
You’re being vicious.
Okay, he says. You want a happy story. I can see you won’t leave it alone until you get one. So here goes.
It was the ninety-ninth year of what was to become known as the Hundred Years’ War, or the Xenorian Wars. The Planet Xenor, located in another dimension of space, was populated by a super-intelligent but super-cruel race of beings known as the Lizard Men, which wasn’t what they called themselves. In appearance they were seven feet tall, scaly, and grey. Their eyes had vertical slits, like the eyes of cats or snakes. So tough was their hide that ordinarily they didn’t have to wear clothing, except for short pants made of carchineal, a flexible red metal unknown on Earth. These protected their vital parts, which were also scaly, and enormous I might add, but at the same time vulnerable.
Well, thank heaven something was, she says, laughing.
I thought you’d like that. Anyway, their plan was to capture a large number of Earth women and breed a super-race, half-human, half-Xenorian Lizard Man, which would be better equipped for life on the various other habitable planets of the Universe than they were—able to adjust to strange atmospheres, eat a variety of foods, resist unknown diseases, and so on—but which would also have the strength and the extraterrestrial intelligence of the Xenorians. This super-race would spread out through space and conquer it, eating the inhabitants of the different planets en route, because the Lizard Men needed room for expansion and a new source of protein.
The space fleet of the Lizard Men of Xenor had launched its first attack on Earth in the year 1967, scoring devastating hits on major cities in which millions had perished. Amid widespread panic, the Lizard Men had made parts of Eurasia and South America their slave colonies, appropriating the younger women for their hellish breeding experiments and burying the corpses of the men in enormous pits, after eating the parts of them they preferred. They liked the brains and the hearts especially, and the kidneys, grilled lightly.
But the Xenorian supply lines had been cut by rocket fire from hidden Earth installations, thus depriving the Lizard Men of the vital ingredients for their zorch-ray death guns, and Earth had rallied and struck back—not only with her own fighting forces but with clouds of gas made from the poison of the rare Iridis hortz frog once used by the Nacrods of Ulinth to tip their arrows, and to which, it had been discovered by Earth scientists, the Xenorians were particularly susceptible.