Spring 2003


      The smell of frying eggs reached into his dreams and turned him right side out. Sunlight drenched the lower half of the bed in a golden glowing pool. He stretched, joints popping in protest. His jeans and shirt lay neatly over the back of an old-fashioned rocking chair.
      Washing his face and grimacing at the roughness of his day old beard, he noticed a tiny scratch low on his neck. A close look at the inner side of his elbow revealed a similar puncture. Not a dream, not his imagination. Her desire for his blood as real as her unchanging face, as real as her ability to deduct his most intimate secrets, and as real as her continual presence in his life.
      Let it go, he told himself.
      His wrist, when freed from the elastic bandage, felt stiff but not sore or tender.
      A quick search of the medicine cabinet yielded a razor and shaving cream, as he knew it would. His mother had nothing over Kathy — Kate — when it came to being prepared. He shaved and showered and, after dressing in his own clean, dry clothes, followed his nose back to the kitchen.
      Hash browns, ham and eggs, buttered toast with jam awaited him.
      "No worries about cholesterol either?" he commented between bites.
      Kate smiled. "You humans worry about the most inane things."
      The bite stuck in his throat and it took several gulps of milk to wash it down.
      The shadow of sadness staining her eyes gave mute testimony to her clear reception of the thought that had choked him.
      "You're not human?" he grabbed the question by its thorns and quit dancing around the fact.
      "Defining human as what?" she asked rhetorically. "Are we Homo sapiens ? I guess not exactly. More like Homo sapiens viraran . A subspecies, if you will allow me the freedom."
      "Viraran? I've heard the word before." The word echoed in his ears. "What's it mean?"
      "Umm, that's difficult." She dropped her chin to her chest thinking. "First, I should define arvir and arviran. Arvir means a lord or master because of the rights of blood. King by privilege of birth." She glanced at his face, and continued when he nodded his understanding. "Arviran means the people of the rights of blood. T'arvir means not lord. Something lesser but still having rights conferred by birth."
      "Okay, I follow. How about viraran? The -an ending still denotes the people. Right?" he asked, catching on.
      She nodded. "The syllables are the same. Vir and ar. By inverting them the new word means the opposite of the original word."
      "So t'arvir and virar are the same thing?" he ventured.
      "No. Not negation, invert the meaning." She blushed. "We had no rights of birth. We are the slaves of the blood of kings."
      "Wait." He needed a breather. "What language is this?" It had no relationship to Latin.
      "T'arviran because arviran, the master tongue, was forbidden to us. We were considered pets, toys. Trainable but relatively stupid."
      She wandered out to the living room and he followed with another question. "Where did t'arviran originate?"
      She murmured something like 'Pay dirt' while gently moving a brass tablet with an acrylic cube to the low coffee table.
      "Huh?" he asked. Kate put a finger to her lips and pressed her palm to the top of the cube.
      The cube glowed and a slightly static sounding music began. A flickering figure appeared about three feet above the cube, dressed only in a diaphanous veil tied around her hips. A woman, too thin but beautiful, moved to sounds that, to Michael's ears, sounded like an uneasy mix of harem music and acid rock. The dance held no artifice or deceit. Frankly sexual, it had been designed to intrigue and to seduce. He had never seen such a pornographic sequence of movements.
      He walked to a different vantage point, the image stayed accurate in three dimensions. Suddenly with a burst of static, the picture changed. A different woman sat on a window ledge, looking out. This image also appeared three-dimensional but the picture disappeared at 180 degrees. Michael realized suddenly the picture stopped where the wall holding the window would be. He sunk onto the tiled hearth, knees shaking again.
      The woman spoke casually, gesturing freely. Her hands would caress her own skin, or comb languorously through her golden brown hair, though the effect was of a cat's self-grooming rather than a sexual connotation.
      "What's she saying?" he asked.
      "I can't speak it, but the translation my grandmother gave me says she speaks of lying, how to hide knowledge from the masters, even during sending."
      "Sending?"
      '!'
      Send felt strange, like the opposite of anesthesia. The sensation resembled an extra layer of thought instead of its absence. He received a picture of a world full of people wearing earmuffs. He laughed.
      "We don't listen too well?"
      "No, and many not at all."
      He glanced up at the woman in the video. "Who is she?"
      "Our Moses, our Abraham Lincoln. She led some of us out of slavery and into the dubious ecstasies of freedom."
      "Dubious?"
      She shrugged. "There were some who wished to go back, even now the sentiment will resurface occasionally."
      "Why?"
      She touched the top of the cube and the picture vanished. "Marran said leaving slavery would give us freedom, never specifying we'd be free to fail as well as prosper. I think it had to be difficult in the beginning. They didn't know how to survive. Farming, child rearing, hunting and trade were completely foreign concepts. So many decisions foisted upon people who had never made one in their lives."
      "They made the decision to leave slavery when offered the chance."
      "No. Marran forced her arvir to decide who would stay and who would go." Kate put the tablet and cube back on the shelf. "She recognized only the danger of staying. The arvir had become addicted to us. At some point they would exterminate us, or play with our genome again."
      "Wait. Your genome?" He thought he'd misheard. "From where in God's creation did you come?"
      "Your God had no part in our genesis, though he may have designed our distant forefathers."
      "Huh?" A picture started to form in his head, but obligingly disappeared as he pushed it away.
      "We didn't evolve on Earth. Some early humans were kidnapped and genetically engineered into viraran. Marran won our release and we were returned a few millennia ago."
      "Alien abduction?" He started laughing and his laughter went on and on. She had taken him hook, line and sinker until the part about little green men and her Joe-Bob tales of 'sex-shue-all' experimentation. Her look of patient confusion instigated a fresh spate of hysterics.
      Finally with a look of complete disgust, she left the room. He heard the sound of her bare feet on the stairs. Subduing his laughter, he followed. Her bedroom door was locked.
      "Come on, Katie. Don't be angry. It's just too trite," he said, swallowing the fresh gale rising toward a poorly timed outburst.
      He heard the click and, when the door stayed closed, tried the knob — open. The windows were unlatched and she stood on a landing just outside.
      "Trite? What makes this history trite?"
      "All those stories of alien abductions — come on." The breeze from the wooded yard smelled of pine.
      "Your damned human legends." The ice of her eyes chilled her voice, "Tell me, Mr. I-refuse-to-be-fooled Beiler. What makes one legend more believable than another?"
      "Evidence!" he exclaimed, leaning on the window frame.
      "What hard evidence do you have of the identity of the self-proclaimed Son of God, your Christ? What evidence do you have of the accuracy of the Big Bang Theory of the universe?" she scoffed. "You simply pick the things you choose to believe. You need no evidence."
      She stepped up on the skinny railing, causing his throat to constrict with concern for her safety. "Evidence, Michael? How's this?" She leaned over backwards and performed a pretty walkover. "You know I'm at least your age." She hopped down. "How many forty-eight year olds do you know with my flexibility and balance?"
      She placed her hands on either side of him, her arms blocking his way. "You deny any evidence which disturbs you, or endangers your idea of this world's singularity." Her eyes flashed, the gold sparkling in the oblique sunshine. She nuzzled him. "Break free, Michael. Unless you like the feel of my teeth in your jugular." He jerked unsuccessfully, surprised by the strength of her grip.
      "Don't fret, I'm sure there are plenty of 134 pound women who can immobilize a 188 pound man."
      "Katie don't," he pleaded. Afraid again.
      "Don't what? I can't possibly be what I claim to be, because legends are only clever fiction. Right?" Her arms tightened around him, and the feel of her lips on his skin made him more frightened. "Wrong, Michael. Shall I send you a dream, of a raft on a lake? Oh, but telepathy isn't proven either." The send entered his imagination as her teeth slipped into his neck. As quickly as he had been snared, she set him free.
      She stepped past him into the sitting room and said in a hoarse whisper, "Most legends have basis in fact. Whether you acknowledge the truth is not relevant. I know — from where I came, and of what I am."
      He touched his neck, a tiny smear of blood. He suspected she found it difficult to turn back from a feast once the blood had touched her lips, but she had. Was the violence of this little demonstration distasteful to her alien code of ethics?
      The sound of water running located her for him. She drank from her cupped hands — handful after handful.
      "Kate?" He wanted to apologize for laughing at her.
      Her eyes met his in the mirror. "Go away. There's a television in the den off the living room and a computer. I'm going to go for a run. We'll talk after I shower." The warning rang out as clearly as if spoken. Stay away until she had regained her composure. Her anger needed an outlet. If she were pushed anymore, he would serve as well as anything else — maybe better, considering he had triggered the eruption.
      He heard her light derisive laughter behind him as he stepped out of her room. "Just for laughs, Michael. Check out the Hollow Earth Theory. That'll fry your pudding a little."
      Fry your pudding, whatever that meant. And it did, the strange contradictory evidence pointing to the lack of an earth's core being one of those things that have no place. A little puzzler certain to make one say 'huh?'
      She hadn't come looking for him by lunchtime, so he ate some leftover salad. Maybe she slept in a coffin during the day? He snorted and wandered into the living room. An opened bottle of beer sat on the coffee table, still cold. He glanced around, enjoying the scavenger hunt. The stereo system had a note hanging from it. An envelope labeled:

'Michael',
'Drink the beer. Push play. Read my note. '
K.

      One Heineken, as prescribed. The music started and he settled onto the deep sofa. He dragged one of the throws over his feet. She had chosen a Kansas CD, the one with Dust in the Wind, and Point of No Return. College music. She intended to help him remember, he realized. The music itself started no memory cascade. The Polaroid fell out of the envelope, Katie and him. He looked at it a minute while finishing the beer, trying to place the moment. No good.
      Unfolding her note, the beer began to take effect. No not the beer, whatever she put in it. Her saliva, he thought with a laugh, gave a new twist to spitting in someone's beer.

Michael,
Between the music, the beer, the photo, and this note you'll remember enough to keep you busy for a while.
Katie

At the bottom edge of the paper two words had been printed in block lettering instead of her normal barely decipherable scrawl.

THE GAUNTLET


      Heat flowed into his face. The Gauntlet. God, what a piece of chauvinistic work he and his fraternity brothers had been. He remembered — and it felt like yesterday.

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