"Amazing, isn't it, Dorothea. Can you guess how they did it?"

I turn to Jory, a plea in my eyes: Don't ruin it. Please don't ruin it.

"Don't worry," he says. "I've talked it over with the boy and everything is fine. He grew up with the truth and is proud of it. As he should be." He turns to the boy, winks, and smiles. "Isn't that so, August? You know a lot more about it than your dad does, right?"

The boy nods, grinning back. The grin is beautiful.

Jory is grinning too, saying, "Take a guess, Dorothea. It's nothing us human beings couldn't have done ourselves."

I look at the boy. The world is spinning. Everything I have ever known or accepted is about to become a lie.

"I don't know, Jory," I whisper.

No one says a thing, and suddenly Jory shouts: "Cloning! Simple cloning! Nothing fancier than that. Are you surprised?"

There is nothing I can say.

"On our second night together," Jory is saying, "she put it so well. 'It's the least we can do,' she told me. 'A living symbol,' she said, 'of our refusal to accept passion's ephemeral insubstance.' "

"He's all me, Dorothea!" Jory exclaims, laughing, glowing.

I look at the boy again.

"I'm going to leave you two alone," Jory says cheerfully, "let you get to know each other better. Our copter is in dire need of a cleaning!"

The father smiles paternally. The father smiles bountifully.

I want to believe him. I so want to believe that this is, at last, the truth.

When I look into his brown eyes, I see a real boy. When I take his hand in mine, I feel one. He is human. He is Jory, and no one else. I am able, yes, to believe that no mother's chromosomes are in him; I am able to believe what Jory claims.

We start by talking about his trip through the starlocks. My voice shakes for a time, but that is all right. He, too, with his strange, halting English, is unsure of himself. We must help each other overcome the fears. We cooperate; we allow the other to help.

As we say good-night, he whispers to me, "I love you, Mother, I do," and kisses me. It catches me off guard; I laugh nervously, wondering if his father told him to say it, or if it is just the boy's own sensitivity.

He looks hurt, and I know now I shouldn't have laughed.

"I'm sorry, August." I say it as brightly as I can, taking his warm hand. "I wasn't laughing at you; I'd never do that. Sometimes people laugh when something surprises them, especially when it's something nice."

I squeeze his hand. He squeezes back, and I am filled with emotions I haven't felt in a long long time.

Jory is with me in bed tonight, the first time in a long time.

"August was in the starlocks?" I say, afraid to ruin the magic, but haunted by a thought.

Jory gets up on one elbow and looks at me sleepily. "Yes, he was. Why?"

"He told me he loved me, and I was wondering-"

His face lights up with a grin. "Hey, that's wonderful!"

"He's been through the starlocks," I begin again. "Would he lie to me, Jory? Would he even know he was lying to me?"

The cheerfulness dies. He stares at me for the longest time.

"August never lies," he says finally.

I have been awake in the darkness for hours, thinking to myself, thinking about men and boys, fathers and sons, about a man-a liar-who swears to his wife that their son is not a liar. It is a joke of sorts, a riddle. It cannot be solved.

The strange thing is, I wouldn't mind it if August did lie to me that way.

I could come to love his lies so easily.

Jory is gone again. From the house. From my life. Back to the woods, the beach, the Winkinblinkins and Starmen, the endless worlds spinning within him.

I don't mind.

I have August. I have the child who in only five days has changed my life completely. We've picnicked on the peninsula where the remaining seals sun themselves like lazy tourists. We've tramped the tidepool reefs to identify mollusca and to make the Kirlian photographs of their fairylike "souls." We've chartered an oceanographie trawler from Mendocino, and spent the day oohing and ahing over the dredgings. We've even found time to attend a fair in Westchester, that ugly, charming little town whose streets are lined with the slick red manzanita boles washed down by the Gualala at its meanest.

Wherever we go, I feel alive, I feel proud, I feel loved. The way people look at us can only be envy. And why not? It should be clear to anyone that August, handsome and devoted son that he is, does enjoy being with me.

It happened five hours ago. I am still shaking. I should move from this chair, but I am afraid to, afraid that if I do I will lose my mind.

August came to us a week ago.

Today he asked to use the special room.

To use it.

I stared at him, unable to speak, and he asked me again.

As I took him to it, I did my best not to look at him, afraid of what I might see.

At the gasketed doorway, he looked back at me tenderly and said, "I'm sorry, Mother, but I must shut the door. I think you know why."

Yes. I do.

It is not just because of the gases.

It is because of what I might see when he attends to his body, to his needs, and forgets me.

He shut the door gently, and as he did he asked me to set the food and air controls for him. He could not do this himself, he said. (Yes. I remember now. He did not hold the cameras at the tidepools. He did not remove anything from the dredgings of the trawler. He did not pay for anything with his own hand. He did not open doors. He did not prepare food. He ate little, and I never saw it enter his mouth. He was simply a vision-present and loving.) He has been in there with his proper mix of gases and his nutritive membrane for five hours. The last thing he said to me was: "Don't worry, Mother. I used a room just like this in quarantine for sixteen months. It really wasn't so bad."

How to accept it all? How to accept it without screaming? That August is no clone, that he is not human, that he is not what I see.

That he is but a projection, the gift of illusion, a lie.

That something else entirely lives and thinks there behind the loving face.

As the truth sinks in, I begin to see what the books and tapes dared not explain, what governments must take pains not to reveal, what in my own unwillingness to expose our lives to public scrutiny I kept five experts from telling me.

I begin to understand what the word telemanifestor means-the word heard only once, a single tape, a passing reference buried among information I assumed was much more important. I thought I knew what "tele" meant, in all its forms.

Will I be able to live with this? When I touch his arm and feel the pulse just under the skin, what do I really touch? When he kisses me and says, "I love you, Mother, I do," what is it that really presses itself against my lips? Bony plate, accordion of fat-how can I not see them?

The scream that first rose in my throat has faded. The August-thing will soon be leaving his special room; I must try to pretend that everything is all right. It will see through the pretense, of course, but I must try anyway. As a gesture. It is intelligent, after all. It has feelings. It is a guest in my house. And I, a representative of humanity, must act accordingly. That is all I can do.

It is clear now. It is clear how the Climagos convinced the jaws and talons and eversible stomachs of their world not merely to ignore them, but to help them build a civilization on its way to the stars: The Climagos are liars too. They have survived for two hundred million years because of the terrible beauty of their lives.

I awoke this morning to an empty, familiar bed.

It was earlier than usual. A sound had awakened me, I knew.

I listened and soon heard it again.

In the next room, on a small foam mattress, I found it. It stopped its crying as soon as I appeared, and like a fool I spent the first half hour inspecting it.

The "evidence" was there of course. Even neonatal physiognomy couldn't mute that nose. The eyes would darken, yes, but the complexion would remain the same-only slightly lighter than its father's.

I changed his Dryper and took him to the garden. Soon, he was cooing and chuckling and pulling up the flowers I'd planted only yesterday. He liked the big red zinnias most, of course, bright suns that they are, and in the end the only thing able to distract him was the sight of a cypress silhouetted against a pale morning sky. (I remember how Willi loved such things, staring for hours at a high-contrast print or a striped toy animal.) We had played for over two hours when suddenly I remembered my appointment. August and I were going to Gualala for crabs! I'd been promising it to him for days.

What to do? (What would August want me to do?) It came to me then like a breeze, a waking dream, in a voice that was indeed Augusts. It was so simple.

I rose. I took the baby to the little mattress, kissed it, and left the room without looking back. It did not cry.

Ten minutes later, just as I finished the replanting of the flowers, August appeared. So simple.

He was very striking in his navy-blue one-piece, hailing me from the top of the cedar stairs like a sea captain from centuries ago. I felt frumpy and told him so, but he insisted I looked beautiful, even in my earth-stained shorts.

We had a wonderful time. "Helluva season!" the erudite crabseller crowed, and we took the crabs home for a delicious salad under amplified stars.

The baby is in bed with me tonight. I know what it is, but it doesn't matter.

August is with me, too, though I cannot see him.

And Jory is wherever he wishes to be.

It has been another day of magic. Jory and I went to a mixer in Fort Bragg this evening, for the first time in years. He was all wit, wisdom, and charisma, free with his engaging tales of Climago and the exciting chases of interplanetary Business.

When we got back to the house, he stopped me and put his hands on my shoulders. I could feel their weight. "I've been insensitive as hell, Dorothea," he said. "I know that. This time, no pheromas!" He laughed, and I couldn't help but smile. "And no damned sling field or son y lumiere either!" Face in a mocking leer, he added, "Unless, of course, you'd like to try some Everslip oil, just to keep things from being too easy."

"No, no, not the oil!" I cried in mock horror. Then, softly, I said, "I've always wanted it easy, always."

And it was. We made love-miracle of miracles!-in our very own unadorned hoverbed, the opaque ceiling above us wonderfully boring, the unsynched music quaint, the steady lamplight charming, and no stencils to frustrate us.

The new Jory sleeps beside me, and I lie awake, happy. I can hear the sounds, yes. The footsteps, the chairs slithering, the sighs. I hear them in the den, in the distant kitchen-but they do not bother me. A faint voice within me whispers, "That is the real Jory; those are his sounds." But I answer: "It is only a stranger, a stranger in our house. He does not bother us, we do not bother him. He is really no more than a memory, a dim figure from a fading past, a man who once said to you, 'My son is coming to live with us,' when he didn't mean that at all, when he meant instead, 'It is my lover who is coming. ...' "

In the morning, the tiny holes on my chest and arms will ooze for the briefest time. I will touch them lovingly. They are a small price to pay.

In a house like this one, but in a universe far far away, a stranger once said as he wept, "In the end, Dorothea, in the end all of our windows are mirrors, and we see only ourselves."

Or did he say, "In the end, Dorothea, all that matters to mankind is mankind, world without end, amen"?

Or perhaps he said nothing at all.

Perhaps I was the one who said it.

Or perhaps neither of us said a thing, and no lie was ever spoken.

Every writer knows that fiction tells its marvelous truths by lying, but every writer also knows that language can be used for darker lies too. "When the Fathers Go" is about the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell others. It also offers up Woman as the victim of the Lies that men in our culture build out of the cultural myths that bind them. In this sense, the story is a "feminist" story. In another, we're all Women-all victims of the Lie-and the story isn't "feminist" at all.

BRUCE MCALLISTER.

DANCING CHICKENS.

EDWARD BRYANT.

Edward Bryant began writing professionally in 1968 and has published more than a dozen books, including Among the Dead, Cinnabar, Phoenix Without Ashes (with Harlan Ellison), Wyoming Sun, Particle Theory, Fetish (a novella chapbook), and The Baku: Tales of the Nuclear Age. He first focused on science fiction and won two Nebula awards for short stories in 1978 and 1979. While he still occasionally dabbles in science fiction (such as his 1994 story "The Fire That Scours"), he gradually strayed into horror. Most of his work is now in the horror genre, as with his series of sharply etched stories about Angie Black, a contemporary witch, the zombie story "A Sad Last Love at the Diner of the Damned," and other marvelous tales.

Most of his horror fiction will be reprinted in an upcoming retrospective.

WHAT DO ALIENS WANT?.

Their burnished black ships, humming with the ominous power of a clenched fist, ghost across our cities. At first we turned our faces to the skies in the chill of every moving shadow. Now we seem to feel the disinterest bred of familiarity. It's not a sense of ease, though. The collective apprehension is still there-even if diminished. For many of us, I believe, the feeling is much like awaiting a dentist's drill.

Do aliens have expectations?

If human beings know, no one's telling. Our leaders dissemble, the news media speculate, but facts and truths alike submerge in murky communications. Extraterrestrial secrets, if they do have answers, remain quietly and tastefully enigmatic. Most of us have read about the government's beamed messages, all apparently ignored.

Do humans care?

I'm not really sure anymore. The ships have been up there for months-a year or more. People do become blase, even about those mysterious craft and their unseen pilots. When the waiting became unendurable, most humans simply seemed to tune out the ships and thought about other things again: mortgages, spiraling inflation, Mideast turmoil, and getting laid. Yet the underlying tension remained.

Some of us in the civilian sector have retained our curiosity. Right here in the neighborhood, David told us he sat in the aloneness of the early morning hours and pumped out Morse to the silhouettes as they cruised out of the dark above the mountains and slid into the dim east. If there were replies, David couldn't interpret them. "You'd think at least they'd want to go out for a drink," David had said.

Riley used the mirror in his compact to send up heliograph signals. In great excitement he claimed to have detected a reply, messages in kind. We suggested he saw, if anything, reflections from the undersides of the dark hulls. None of that diminished his ecstasy. He believed he was noticed. I felt for him.

Hawk-both job description and name-didn't hold much with guesses. "In good time," he said, "they'll tell us what they want; tell us, then buy it, take it, use it. They'll give us the word." Hawk had plucked me, runaway and desperate young man, literally out of the gutter along the Boulevard. Since before the time of the ships, he had cared for me. He had taken me home, cleaned, fed, and warmed me. He used me, sometimes well. Sometimes he only used me.

Whether Hawk loved me was debatable.