The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood [134]
The creature encased in ice begins to glow, softly at first, then more strongly. Water runs silently onto the floor of the tent. Now the ice is gone. He sits up, then stands. Without a sound he approaches the sleeping girl. The dark-green hair on his head stirs, coil by coil, then lengthens, tentacle – it now appears – by tentacle. One tentacle twines itself around the girl’s throat, another around her ample charms, a third tightens itself across her mouth. She awakens as if from a nightmare, but it is no nightmare: the space being’s face is close to hers, his cold tentacles hold her in an implacable grip; he is gazing at her with unprecedented longing and desire, with sheer naked need. No mortal man has ever looked at her with such intensity. She struggles briefly, then surrenders to his embrace.
Not that she has much of a choice.
The green mouth opens, revealing fangs. They approach her neck. He loves her so much he’ll assimilate her – make her part of himself, forever. He and she will become one. She understands this wordlessly, because among other things this gent has the gift of telepathic communication. Yes, she sighs.
He rolls himself another cigarette. Will he let B be eaten and drunk in this fashion? Or will the sled dogs heed her plight, break loose from their tethers, tear in through the canvas, rip this guy to pieces, tentacle by tentacle? Will one of the others – he favours Y, the cool English scientist – come to her rescue? Will a fight ensue? That might be good. Fool! I could have taught you everything! the alien will beam at Y telepathically, just before he dies. His blood will be a non-human colour. Orange would be good.
Or perhaps the green fellow will exchange intravenous fluids with B, and she will become like him – a perfected, greenish version of herself. Then there will be two of them, and they will crush the others to jelly, decapitate the dogs, and set out to conquer the world. The rich, tyrannical cities must be destroyed, the virtuous poor set free. We are the Flail of the Lord, the pair of them will announce. They will now be in possession of the Death Ray, put together from the spaceman’s knowledge and some wrenches and hinges looted from a nearby hardware store, so who will argue?
Or else the alien is not drinking B’s blood at all – he’s injecting himself into her! His own body will shrivel up like a grape, his dry, wrinkled skin will turn to mist, and in the morning not a trace of him will be left. The three men will come upon B, rubbing her eyes sleepily. I don’t know what happened, she will say, and since she never does, they will believe this. Maybe we’ve all been hallucinating, they will say. It’s the North, the Northern Lights – they addle men’s brains. They thick men’s blood with cold. They will not catch the ultra-intelligent alien green gleam in B’s eyes, which were green to begin with anyway. The dogs will know, however. They will smell the change. They will growl with their ears back, they will howl plaintively, they will no longer be her friends. What’s got into those dogs?
It could go so many ways.
The struggle, the fight, the rescue. The death of the alien. Clothes will be torn off in the process. They always are.
Why does he crank out this junk? Because he needs to – otherwise he’d be stony flat broke, and to seek other employment at this juncture would bring him further out in the open than would be at all prudent. Also because he can. He has a facility for it. Not everyone does: many have tried, many failed. He had bigger ambitions once, more serious ones. To write a man’s life the way it really is. To go in at the ground level, the level of starvation pay and bread and dripping and slag-faced penny-ante whores and boots in the face and puke in the gutter. To expose the workings of the system, the machinery, the way it keeps you alive just so long as you’ve got some kick left in you, how it uses you up, turns you into a cog or a souse, crushes your face into the muck one way or another.
The average working man wouldn’t read that kind of thing, though – the working