Free Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) by James Tiptree Jr. Page A

Yyeire. You’ve never seen that.
    “Go home, boy. Go home to your version of Burned Barn . . .
    “The first Yyeir I saw, I dropped everything and started walking after it like a starving hound, just breathing. You’ve seen the pix of course. Like lost dreams. Man is in love and loves what vanishes . . .. It’s the scent, you can’t guess that. I followed until I ran into a slammed port. I spent half a cycles’s credits sending the creature the wine they call stars’ tears. . . . Later I found out it was a male. That made no difference at all.
    “You can’t have sex with them, y’know. No way. They breed by light or something, no one knows exactly. There’s a story about a man who got hold of a Yyeir woman and tried. They had him skinned. Stories—”
    He was starting to wander.
    “What about that girl in the bar, did you see her again?”
    He came back from somewhere.
    “Oh, yes. I saw her. She’d been making it with the two Sirians, y’know. The males do it in pairs. Said to be the total sexual thing for a woman, if she can stand the damage from those beaks. I wouldn’t know. She talked to me a couple of times after they finished with her. No use for men whatever. She drove off the P Street bridge. . . . The man, poor bastard, he was trying to keep that Sirian bitch happy single-handed. Money helps, for a while. I don’t know where he ended.”
    He glanced at his wrist watch again. I saw the pale bare place where a watch had been and told him the time.
    “Is that the message you want to give Earth? Never love an alien?”
    “Never love an alien—” He shrugged. “Yeah. No. Ah, Jesus, don’t you see? Everything going out, nothing coming back. Like the poor damned Polynesians. We’re gutting Earth, to begin with. Swapping raw resources for junk. Alien status symbols. Tape decks, Coca-Cola, Mickey Mouse watches.”
    “Well, there is concern over the balance of trade. Is that your message?”
    “The balance of trade.” He rolled it sardonically. “Did the Polynesians have a word for it, I wonder? You don’t see, do you? All right, why are you here? I mean you , personally. How many guys did you climb over—”
    He went rigid, hearing footsteps outside. The Procya’s hopeful face appeared around the corner. The red-haired man snarled at him and he backed out. I started to protest.
    “Ah, the silly reamer loves it. It’s the only pleasure we have left. . . . Can’t you see, man? That’s us . That’s the way we look to them, to the real ones.”
    “But—”
    “And now we’re getting the cheap C-drive, we’ll be all over just like the Procya. For the pleasure of serving as freight monkeys and junction crews. Oh, they appreciate our ingenious little service stations, the beautiful star folk. They don’t need them, y’know. Just an amusing convenience. D’you know what I do here with my two degrees? What I did at First Junction. Tube cleaning. A swab. Sometimes I get to replace a fitting.”
    I muttered something; the self-pity was getting heavy.
    “Bitter? Man, it’s a good job. Sometimes I get to talk to one of them.” His face twisted. “My wife works as a—oh, hell, you wouldn’t know. I’d trade—correction, I have traded—everything Earth offered me for just that chance. To see them. To speak to them. Once in a while to touch one. Once in a great while to find one low enough, perverted enough to want to touch me . . .”
    His voice trailed off and suddenly came back strong.
    “And so will you!” He glared at me. “Go home! Go home and tell them to quit it. Close the ports. Burn every god-lost alien thing before it’s too late! That’s what the Polynesians didn’t do.”
    “But surely—”
    “But surely be damned! Balance of trade—balance of life , man. I don’t know if our birth rate is going, that’s not the point. Our soul is leaking out. We’re bleeding to death!”
    He took a breath and lowered his tone.
    “What I’m trying to tell you, this is a trap.