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Her breaths came from far away, through blackness so thick and uniform it reminded Samantha of snow-covered windows. She knew they were her breaths but she didn’t believe it. She was floating, swimming through the emptiness. She felt Bak and Ras but only dimly, as though they were running toward her but being pulled back at the same time. She floated like this for a minute, an hour, a day, a week... She didn’t know. Time did not feel the same here.
Then a light pinpricked through the dark, a hole of light so small it was smaller than a thumbprint. But Samantha knew that the best thing to do, the only thing, was to swim toward it. She kicked her legs and moved her arms toward that tiny speck of light. It was deep winter in the real world, and this was the first stark sunlight she had seen in months. As she got closer, she could even feel the light kissing her skin.
She put her hands in the hole of light, and heard the breathing quicken in the distance. With an effort, she steadied it, and then she pulled the hole of light wider and wider until it was big enough to enter. When that was done, she fell through, straight into the outstretched arms of Bak.
***
“TELL ME OF YOU BOTH,” she said.
She was lying in sand: sand warmer than a hot water bottle; sand that cushioned her and heated her skin. Waves lapped at her ankles, and the sun shone down so beautifully she felt as though she might weep. Bak cradled her head in his lap and Ras trailed his fingers up and down her legs. They were all naked, she noted for the millionth time, feeling a rush of lust. Their human guises were gone, their skin as blue as the clear sky.
“I need to know everything about you,” she said. “I need to know you.”
They had been here for two weeks. Samantha knew it wasn’t really two weeks. But she had experienced two weeks. They had made love under the sun and ate mango and watermelon and coconut and wild pig. For a simulation, a dream, a whatever it was, the pleasures were astounding. But in all that time she had not learnt much about Bak and Ras. She knew about their planet, sure, and their history, and their heritage. They came from a long line of upper-middle class landowners. They had attended an equivalent of college. Bak worked with computer-like things and Ras was a hunter; he had caught the wild pigs, though he said he hunted huge dragon-like beasts back home.
“Tell me how the two of you met,” she said.
She knew that on their planet two men joined early in life as bref, which meant brothers for a woman, according to Ras. When they met, they agreed that together they would pursue their Queen. It just so happens that instead of a nice blue-skinned girl, they had scented Samantha across the stars. She even knew that they had met when Ras was ten (Earth) years old and Bak was fifteen. Now Bak was thirty-two and Ras was twenty-seven.
“What you are really asking,” Bak said, “is how and why we chose you. You want to know why the two of us want you so badly.”
“Yes,” Samantha said.
“My family have never been rich,” Bak said. “But we have always had money. My mother wanted me to mate almost as soon as I found Ras. She said we should find a girl straight away, regardless of Ras’ age.”
“She was a feisty woman,” Ras said fondly.
“But it never seemed right,” Bak went on. “We had contact with women, but it always felt forced, like something was missing. So we grew up and thought for a long time that we would be alone for our lives. I had come to terms with it. It is shameful because it is a high honor in our culture to have children.”
And an even higher one to have half-human children. This had been the biggest revelation during their time here; other members of their species had been here before, all throughout Earth’s history, to whisk women off to their planet. It was not common, but it was not unknown of for men of their species to send the Black Box across the stars to the woman they desired once they had scented her. Scenting, apparently, was a heightened chemical reaction that worked on a different plane of existence, a sort of second-sight sense of smell. Samantha didn’t fully understand it. Neither, apparently, did Ras or Bak. They took it for granted as a wolf must take his sense of smell for granted.
“But about two of your years ago, we scented you, Samantha. That is when we started watching you on one of our Earth-links. And we saw that there was something missing from your life. You were not unhappy, but you were not happy, either. You were like a dead person.”
She wished she could argue with that, but she couldn’t. For had she not herself, many times, compared her life to that of a non-person? Maybe her parents’ death had taken something vital from her, something that only now, in this dream-place, was starting to return.
“I met with Ras and I asked him, do you too scent her?”
“Yes, I told him,” Ras said. “I scented you more strongly than the viliptas flowers that ringed my dwelling. Your smell was all over me.” His hand trailed toward her vagina, toying with her clit. She giggled and batted his hand away. “I became addicted to watching you, to be honest. You are special, Samantha. In a way I find hard to put into words. There is an essence to you that the entirety of your species lacks.”
Samantha had never, ever thought she was special; she had always thought of herself as normal, mundane.
Special, she thought. And then again, trying to cement it in her mind: Special.
***
THE LANDSCAPE WAS UNLIKE anything Samantha had ever seen. When you rose from the beach and looked out to the horizon, a jungle of fierce reds and yellows and greens met your vision. The sky was always blue and clear, except at night when it became a black sheet littered with diamonds. There were never clouds and it never rained, but there was a lake that never went dry and the water was pure and fresh.
They spent their days relaxing or telling stories from their childhood. Samantha told them of the time her parents had taken her to fayre and a man in a clown suit had helped her find her parents after she’d wandered off. She told Ras and Bak that after that she had always liked clowns, even though before she had been terrified of them. Bak and Ras were confused when she told them that lots of humans were scared of clowns. What, they asked, was there to be scared of?
Samantha found herself falling for these men. She knew it was by far the strangest thing she had ever done: enter a dream realm and fall in love with aliens. But she didn’t care anymore. The thought of returning to her snowy, damp life in a gray city surrounded by grayness filled her with dread. How could she return to such a life after experiencing this?
And then Bak came to her one day after they’d been there for two and a half months and said: “It is time we returned. If we stay here for much longer, there is a danger we will lose ourselves here.”
Samantha didn’t see that as wholly a bad thing. So what if they lost themselves in a realm of beauty and pleasure? But then Bak told her that they would eventually starve to death in the real world. It would take a long, long time, but eventually it would happen and all this would end anyway. And Samantha didn’t like the idea of Jessica returning and finding her unconscious with two men. What would she think?
“Fine,” Samantha whispered, sifting sunbaked sand through her fingers. “How do we get back?”
“We Converge,” Bak said.
They sat in a circle in the sand, hand in hand, looking out upon the glittering sea. The heat was luxurious on her skin, and all she wanted to do was sleep and later maybe make love. But instead she was being compelled toward the snow-filled wasteland that was her normal life.
Bak squeezed her hand and Ras smiled at her. “Let’s return,” Bak said.
Their hands tingled against hers with electric pulses and then Samantha was swaying forward, collapsing into the sand. Then a deep black hole opened in the sand and swallowed her.
All she knew for a time was darkness.