LITMIR.BIZ

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with Zrek as best man. Everyone throws confetti as Elliot and Korelu walk out of the church, hand in hand, and get in Zrek’s Ferrari. The baby is snug in his car seat in the back. Zrek chauffeurs the newlyweds and their newborn up the gangplank into the spaceship and we see that the car is towing a bunch of cans and the license plate reads ‘JUST MARRIED.’ Elliott breaks the fourth wall, looks directly at the camera and says ‘I’ll be back’ in his best Arnold Schwarzenegger voice. They go up into the belly of the ship, the doors close, and they embark on their honeymoon to the Outer Rim. Roll credits.”

      “Yes, I’d say it definitely strikes a different tone from the first E.T.”

      “I’m glad you agree.”

      “And you’d want me to play Elliott? I mean maybe?”

      “Well, you look enough like Henry Thomas that an audience will be willing to suspend its disbelief. At the same time, you’ve got a look all your own, one I haven’t quite seen before in the movies. Not the boy next door so much as the boy next door to him. Am I interesting you at all?”

      “My God,” Dylan said. “I’ve never been so interested in anything in my life.”

      “Great. So once we put a wrap on 12 Monkeys, we’ll organize a proper audition. Now let me make sure I’ve got your contact info.”

      Dylan wrote down his address and phone number in a little black book, and then they proceeded to eat their s’mores. Dylan wanted to impress Gilliam in conversation but lacked the life experience. Fortunately Gilliam was loquacious, and as long as Dylan kept prodding him with earnest questions about the industry, all he really had to do was listen.

      Once again, Dylan told nobody about what had happened. Some part of him was convinced it would all come to naught, that it was far too good to be true. His pessimism was reinforced when summer came to a close without his ever hearing another peep from Gilliam. He and Chad quit their jobs and moved into the “New Res” dorms at Temple. They went to class, read Oedipus and Shakespeare, and auditioned for a play called Balm in Gilead. Chad got a part, Dylan didn’t.

      And then one morning, while Dylan was doing his math-for-artists homework at the last minute, he got a call from his mother, who had gotten a call from Terry Gilliam. To Dylan’s surprise, she knew who that was. “Call him right away,” she said.

      And Dylan did.

      And a week later he was in LA for his audition.

      And the rest is a matter of record: despite its modest budget, tight production schedule, and hasty release, E.T. II: Nocturnal Fears was a massive blockbuster, a grand slam for the critic and the casual moviegoer alike. In part the film’s success could be credited to its undeniably slick execution, but it didn’t hurt that first contact had taken place just two weeks before the release (complex hominids with single nostrils on Tarantino, 90,000 light years away); ironically, the film seemed to fulfill the public’s yearning for aliens worthy of the name far better than the headlines were doing, and both Independence Day and Star Trek: First Contact would ride on its coattails later that year.

      Whether it was for this reason or a more old-fashioned one, E.T. II also happened to be a grand slam for palpitating young women across the land who were lucky enough to find an adult to accompany them. The fan mail came pouring in, as did the scripts. The first one that Dylan accepted, at his agent’s urging, was James Cameron’s new film, a special effects extravaganza to be called Titanic, with principal photography beginning soon.

      • • •

On his way home from the American School, Dylan decided to hover through the Grind. He generally did this a couple of times a month. Owing perhaps to the legal status of prostitution on New Taiwan, the Grind had to be the least seedy red-light district in the Milky Way. The prostitutes, what the natives called azalfuds, were lined up along a narrow, kilometer-long esplanade, females on the north side, flexing their biceps and abs; males on the south, tossing their tawny hair and caressing their breasts. Dylan was slightly troubled by how attracted he felt to the males; they were as feminine as any geisha, but he could not look past the bulges in their bikini bottoms. He knew from the biology textbooks at school that the New Taiwanese penis looked more or less like a human one but with a slightly bifurcated head. For a certain subsection of humanity, of course, these reverse secondary characteristics were a dream come true. Transgender women had always commanded a modest corner of the sex trade on Earth, and here they were normative. By contrast, it was (what American exopats referred to as) “he-males” and “she-girls” who catered to alternative native lifestyles, and, as it happened, heteronormative Terran ones.10 These trans azalfuds, everyone knew, peddled their wares on a block toward the end of the esplanade that had come to resemble an R & R camp for Terran exopats reminiscent of the fleshpots of Saigon circa 1972. Though it had been quietly beckoning for the better part of two decades, Dylan had never once been there. He hovered through for the spectacle and the thought experiments, and that was all. Mike the exobiology teacher would tell him sometimes about his sexual adventures over there: how the she-girls were like the hottest Earthling girls you’d ever seen; how the New Taiwanese vagina was totally compatible with the Earthling penis,11 and “tight as shit;” how they’d do anything you could possibly imagine and dirt cheap to boot. Dylan had gotten really close a couple of times to investigating all of that himself. The thought of sleeping with an alien did strike him as irresistibly exotic for a time. Since first looking up from Earth, human stargazers had projected their hopes and fears onto the heavens, either demonizing extraterrestrials or making angels of them. Caught up in the early excitement of the Great Up-and-Out, Dylan had been as guilty of the latter as anyone—so much so that he’d wondered if he wasn’t making a terrible mistake in sealing himself to Erin just before their departure—but after a couple of years of living and working among the host culture, he’d finally understood, intellectually and viscerally, that life on other planets was just life. Aliens weren’t so alien. Hominids everywhere worked and played, exulted and suffered, loved their families and buried their dead. The universe was largely conscious, it turned out, but that meant what it meant and nothing else besides. We all still had to die.

      10_____________

      The IEF (International Exodus Federation) was very sensitive to the desires of indigenous populations when settling new worlds. Once they’d established an outpost and their linguist AIs had deciphered the native tongue, which generally took about six weeks (Chomsky’s universal grammar is more universal than even he supposed), they briefed indigenous officials on the particulars of human civilization. As a gesture of goodwill, they practiced full disclosure, and given how notoriously bound up with crime the flesh trade was on Earth, the New Taiwanese could hardly be blamed for not wanting to import any sex workers. In fact, early on, all they had wanted were teachers.

      11_____________

      The status of intermarriage was still a hot issue in the courts. That said, dozens of Terran-exopat males were now cohabiting with New Taiwanese she-girls, and some had even reared some adorable mongrel offspring. The reverse, i.e. exopat females procreating with New Taiwanese he-males, was comparatively rare, though not unheard of.

      Moreover, Dylan was married, and if he believed in anything, it was the sanctity of marriage. He would no sooner sleep with an alien—or anyone else—than he’d have Erin do so. He had watched her make out with another girl at a party once, on a dare. They’d gone at it way too long, and it had made Dylan feel deeply confused, both aroused and jealous at once. After the party, he had asked her not to do that ever again please, and as far as he knew she hadn’t.

Dylan, for his part, had cheated on Erin just once. They hadn’t been married yet, and it probably wouldn’t have happened at all were it not for the immense peer pressure, and the sense of dreamlike impunity that comes with partying inside the moon.12

      12_____________

      To be sure, the surface of Earth’s moon is every bit as barren as the Apollo astronauts

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