It started before my mom was even born. In 1947, at a
place called Roswell, a flying saucer crashed near an Army base. An Army guy
pulled a reading device from the hands of a live alien, who they killed the
next day. All the other aliens died in the crash. A few years later, the first director
of the CIA, a guy named Allen Dulles, assigned Mom’s Uncle Miles to figure out
how to translate the stuff on the reader. When he told people why the aliens
were here, it got everybody shook up and they decided to keep it a secret so
people wouldn’t panic. Mom said she was about six when her Uncle Miles started
teaching her to speak alien. He told her it was the language of the Dogon
people of Mali. She didn’t find out the truth until she was ready to start
college and her uncle was dying. The truth was the aliens from Tau Ceti 4 made
the human race as a sort of biology experiment, and they thought they had
better put an end to us before we got into outer space with our nasty attitude.
They said they had a cosmic responsibility, but they didn’t want to just blowup
the Earth because they felt sorry for the other species, so they released a
virus that made everyone sterile.
Mom went to work for the CIA as a linguist. Nobody but her
knew that the aliens were going to come back to try again, and nobody but her
knew that she could talk to them. Back then NASA was worried about asteroids
wiping us out like the dinosaurs, so they watched for things that were headed
for Earth. When they spotted three big round things coming toward us, Mom went
to see her boss and told him they were spaceships. She said he wanted to have
her locked up, but she convinced him to let her see the director. At that time
the director was a lady named Georgia Turnbull. When I came along she became my
Godmother, but I call her Aunt Georgia.
So Aunt Georgia put Mom in charge of the Department of Alien
Affairs, which was a top-secret division of the CIA, or the Company as we
insiders call it. When Mom took over there were three other people in the
department, Uncle Paul, Aunt Jan and Uncle Eddy. They’re not really my aunt and
uncles. Mom was an only child, which may explain a few things about her. Anyway,
when Uncle Eddy found out Mom could speak their language he got the big idea to
get her in contact with them. They got engineering to draw the plans for a cell
phone site and Mom recorded a message daring them to build it, then she gave
them her phone number.
Mom got pretty close to one alien, but she wasn’t able to
talk him out of releasing the virus. I guess she got close because he’s my dad.
Yeah, I know that’s really weird, but if you grow up knowing something like
that, you pretty much take it for granted. Mom didn’t sit down to have the ‘part
of you isn’t human’ talk with me until I was six. It started because I
complained about her meatloaf. She’d been thinking about making it all day and
I was dreading having to choke it down with tons of milk.
“Terrie, how did you know I was thinking of making
meatloaf?” she asked me.
“You’ve been thinking about it all day.”
“I didn’t say anything, did I?”
“No, you were just thinking.”
“And you knew what I was thinking?”
“I always know what you’re thinking.”
“Do you know what other people are thinking?”
“Sure. Don’t you?”
“No, sweetheart, I don’t know what you’re thinking. What am
I thinking now?”
“You’re thinking I’ve got ESP.” I answered right away but I
didn’t know what it meant.
“Oh, my God. How long have you been able to do this?”
“Always, Mom. What’s the matter?”
“Well, dear, this is something nobody else can do. Do you
know what I’m thinking when we’re not together?”
“No, we have to be close. Think how confused I’d be if I
knew what everybody was thinking at the same time.”
“I suppose. Do you know why you’re special?”
I recall her looking uncomfortable, but later she told me
the idea of having to tell me this had her scared shitless. She always did have
a colorful vocabulary.
She said, “You realize that your father doesn’t look much
like anyone else?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know why?”
“’Cause he’s an alien.”
“That’s right and that’s why your beautiful eyes are the way
they are. So this—uh, gift—is something else that you got from your father’s
side of the family.”
Now I know she must have been thinking, “What else did she get from him?”
Dad’s name was Deshler—well, it still is unless he’s been
vaporized by a comet or something—so my last name is Deshler even though Mom’s
name is Player. I didn’t think it strange at the time that other people were
named Deshler, especially in Germany, but later Mom said that he told her it
was an artifact left in our society from earlier contact with his species. What
is strange is to think that he’s heading home in suspended animation, and I’ll
be dead before he gets there.
Naturally Mom didn’t describe how I came to be conceived,
but I was able to find out about it by spying inside her head. Aliens are
hermaphrodites, which is pretty creepy to think about, and Mom couldn’t have
gone through with it if she hadn’t been drugged. Uncle Eddy says she was date
raped. One of her arguments when trying to convince them not to make everybody
sterile was that she wanted to be a grandmother. To Dad’s thinking, getting her
pregnant was the closest he could come to fulfilling her wish, so he made her
fertile again and consummated the deal.
Part of the plan to wipe out humanity was to release a second
dose of the virus after the aliens were gone with some aerosols that were set
to go off automatically. Dad and his pals hid them, but after the Russians shot
down two of the flying saucers, he had a change of heart and his parting gift
to Mom was his personal reading device with the locations of the aerosol
canisters stored on it. Aunt Georgia sent Mom and her team out to find them,
and later SpaceX blasted them into the sun.
The day I bitched about her meatloaf was the first time she
showed me the reader. “I want to show you something,” she said, and took a
small metal square thing out of her purse. “This is the reading device your
father gave me when he left.”
I held it and instantly heard it reading to me in my head—in
Dad’s language, of course. “Cool,” I said, “it knows our secret language.”
“That’s right, dear. Only you and me, your uncles, Eddy and
Paul and Aunt Jan can read it. You can read it now too, but you have to let me
pick the stories for you.”
I was reading something that was the alien equivalent of Dr.
Seuss. “Why,” I asked innocently.
“Because many of the stories are too complicated for your
age”
It didn’t take me long to learn that ‘too complicated’ was a
euphemism for ‘too filthy.’ Dad had a thing for porn.
“So what do you want for dinner instead of my dry old
meatloaf?’
“Tacos.”
She rolled her eyes. She always rolled her eyes. “Okay, I
guess I’ll go make tacos.”
While she was browning the ground beef my half-sister,
Sherrie, arrived with my niece and nephew, Bobbi and Cary. Being a little more
than a year younger than I am, Cary was still quite the brat. He snatched the
reader from me and we got into a shouting match. Our pediatric angst drew a
predictable response from Mom and Sherrie who made peace and returned the
reader to me. I had finished Dr. Seuss and moved on to a short essay on alien
aphrodisiacs, then a lengthy treatise on anti-particle propulsion.
We finished our tacos and had ice cream. Sherrie stayed long
enough to help put dishes in the dishwasher. She had gathered her brood and was
saying goodbye when Aunt Georgia, who was still Mom’s boss, arrived. Even then
I was in awe at how Aunt Georgia looked. Mom naturally seemed old to me and I
knew Aunt Georgia was about twenty years older, but aside from her silver hair,
you’d think she and Mom were the same age. Where Mom looked sweet and kindly,
Aunt Georgia looked like a movie star. I ran to hug her and get fawned over and
to show off Dad’s reading device. Of course she knew all about it from her days
as director of the CIA. Now she ran Turnbull Academy where she secretly
dispensed doses of the anti-virus that restores fertility.
“So, what have you been reading?” she asked.
When I told her she took it better than Mom.
After Mom took the reader from me and fixed Aunt Georgia a
Martini, she broke the news about me being able to read minds. She looked
skeptical and asked me to tell her what she was thinking.
“You’re wondering when Mom is going to get her head screwed
on straight about Turnbull Academy.”
“I’ll be darned. It’s true.”
Mom said, “Now we have to watch what we think, and for the
record, I may never get my head screwed on straight.”
Mom and Aunt Georgia were always arguing about the
anti-virus. Aunt Georgia had control of it and only gave it to the graduates of
her extremely conservative university. Mom wanted to give it to the government
and let them decide what to do. I sided with Aunt Georgia.
Aunt Georgia said, “Carrie, we are reshaping the human race.
Culling the herd. Improving mankind.”
“But the birth rate is way too slow.”
“It will pick up. The kids are busy building careers.”
“They should be building families.” Mom got herself some
more wine and offered me a Coke. I accepted.
Aunt Georgia continued. “The U.S. population is decreasing
by three million a year and world population by fifty-six million. That in
itself is solving a lot of problems. Anyway, the reason I came here tonight is
to tell you that I’m opening academies in Europe and I want you to train the
boards of admissions.”
“Where in Europe?” Mom asked.
“England, France, Spain, Switzerland and Italy.”
“What about Germany?”
“Carrie, don’t you think the Germans have caused enough
trouble?”
She rolled her eyes again. “What about Terrie?”
“Well, take her of course. It’ll be a great experience and
school doesn’t start for two months. That should be plenty of time.”
I thought it was a great idea. Mom said, “I suppose. Four
more academies will be a boost for the population recovery.”
Then Aunt Georgia turned to me. “Okay, smarty, what am I
thinking now?”
“That you’re going to start Turnbull Industries.”
Mom said, “Now what?”
Aunt Georgia gave her a dirty look. “Turnbull Industries
will employ our engineering grads in the development of alien technology.”
I thought that was another great idea and was looking
forward to getting ray guns and anti-gravity shoes for Christmas. I hadn’t had
any time to study alien stuff except anti-particles and aphrodisiacs but I
wanted to be part of the conversation so I said, “You mean like anti-particle
propulsion?”
“That’s right, sweetheart. What can you tell me about it?”
“First you need two plasma fields to keep the anti-particles
from the particles, but you have to go into space to collect anti-particles and
we’re stuck on Earth.”
“Not quite stuck. SpaceX’s Falcon can reach geosynchronous
orbit.”
“That should be far enough,” I said as if I knew.
Mom said, “What have I created?” She was always a little
melodramatic.
