ON A PLANET
ALIEN



ForBillPronzini
CHAPTER I

FLICKER OF HISTORY: Lying on the bleak earth of this blasted planet, listening to the wind filter through the trees, it is possible for one moment in the clinging darkness to believe that it is not impossibly removed, that it is not at the far edge of the uni­verse but that indeed it is Earth itself and this has not been a voyage outward but a voyage in, to some other aspect of familiar terrain . . . but in the next moment, as Nina comes close against me once more that feeling slides away from me thinly like all illusion and the feeling ofalienness seeps in once again. It is not Earth, it is nothing we have ever known: we have voyaged at impossible speed to the heart of the unknown . . . and still I lie there, looking up at the impenetrable sky, shaking. My legs seem fibers filled with small tremors. She presses harder.

“Come on, Hans,” she says, “stop thinking.” Her voice is ten­tative but underneath is insistence. “There is nothing to think about.” She begins to stroke at me. “Come here.”

I close my eyes, open them, then roll, clearing that distance between us, drawing her within. There is no flight. She is right; corporeality makes its own statement: I cannot withdraw from her. Under the rules and terms of the compact she is to be satisfied and I am her coupling: therefore I must satisfy her. Therefore to satisfy her. Slowly I bring my knee up the inner surfaces of her thigh, there is a wicker of contact beneath the cloth that surrounds us, then slowly I roll to cover her all the way, draw my knees up, seeking. In the forest which surrounds us I can hear sounds which might be those of the birds and animals but then again—when this pastoral flight falls away like a garment—it is more likely to be the natives at the rim of the forest, crashing around, peering within. The idea that the natives, not discouraged by our fires, by the walls of insulation which we have placed, might actually be looking within, seeing what Nina and I are doing, fills me with a perverse excitement, a feeling of disconnection and floating to be sure and now the contact between us is no longer so tenuous but indeed wedges hard, wedges harder, and I feel myself beginning to flow within her.Ah! she groans, a scatological little moan,aha,aha! for all the coldness of her exterior she had always taken a simple and basic pleasure in the act of coupling and I turn myself over to the sensations completely, feeling them beginning to waft around me.

We couple. On the floor of the forest we couple. The old graceless motions overwhelm me and momentarily I am no longer a scientist, no longer Hans the Captain (as I refer to myself in interior monologue) but merely a being caught on the pipe of mortality, flinging myself in and out of her spasmodically. Drag­ging myself to orgasm like a man moving hand-over-hand on piping, there is, near the peak, a sudden moment of hesitation, a superimposed blankness and then once again that image returns: an image of familiarity oozing into all the crevices of conscious­ness: this planet is not irretrievably alien,NinaandIarenotlightyearsfromhomebutindeedthetwoofusarecouplingnormallyinfamiliarsurroundings . When my orgasm comes it is then on a bright thread of pain: lost, irrevocably lost, a billion years from home only to recover the old sensations which will never, never hurl us back . . . unless of course most of this is taking place in my mind and not on the terrain of what they will come to call Folsom’s Planet.