short story: benita cruickshank
HeShe
Las Vegas one day in the future >
As Jon was walking down the airport aisle a shoal of older citizens approached on pedibikes. The shoal consisted of males and females, and males and males, and females and females, hand in hand. They parted round him as they chatted on the phones attached to their ears and he turned briefly and stared after them as they sped into the distance.
HeShe had done that for them, made it possible: they were flying off on a sky-boat for a holiday on Disneymoon. They were saying the water was cleaner there. He didn’t think so himself. It was recycled urine. Never mind, they believed what they believed and they were happy.
In fact, recently, he believed they’d cleaned up the earth pretty well – even before the arrival of their new Messiah, HeShe or, as some said, SheHe. The Asia-Arab Alliance, the AAA, had seen financial potential in ecology and the marine biologists and the physicists had worked out how to provide free energy, so now few people worked much.
Apart from himself, of course, he worked hard. The interpretation business had been booming, both on line and personally, as everyone in the world had to understand everyone else. Earth language was an evolved form of English which everyone needed to use. He’d been a pioneer in the area.
He’d done well - but he was tired.
This was to be a much needed rest in Las Vegas. After the latest Tech Expo in which he had still played a major part, as had his beautiful fiancée.
He recognised her slim, tall outline as she ran towards him through the crowds and he swept her up into his arms. She turned in his embrace and put a hand about his waist, walking back towards the fantasy hotel where they were to stay. Neither of them could wait. This reunion had had to be postponed several times.
They’d had to wait until now to get together after all the furore over HeShe’s death. Thank God the religious fervour had died down a bit.
The world’s New Messiah had died – or disappeared - a while back.
Jon sighed. Despite everything, he really missed HeShe.
HeShe had arrived in 2050 and quickly learned to speak Earth language from him – he had been one of HeShe’s teachers. In fact he had introduced HeShe to technology and the creature had absorbed all the codes programmed into computers and satellites in the same way as HeShe had absorbed everything else.
The image of HeShe patiently transforming part of his/her amorphous shape so as to extend the outline of fingers on a briefly extended arm and a head and face with eyes in order to ‘see’ and handle their technology would stay in his mind forever.
He was sure those eyes had looked sideways at him with a wink before disappearing back into the series of flashing lights by which the creature normally indicated its moods and that it was thinking.
While HeShe seemed to greatly prefer being among animals to humans – which had helped the fashion in ecological preservation, his/her major virtue had been in the ability to cure: no-one quite knew the wave-length he/she used, but that’s how he/she operated. This had led largely to the belief that this was the new Messiah. Unfortunately – or fortunately – possibly HeShe intended it – he/she also rendered humans infertile when she/he cured them. There had been a bit of a fuss over that. HeShe was not universally popular.
‘So only perfectly healthy people reproduce’, Jon’s fiancée had once observed wryly.
‘Do you think HeShe is a hermaphrodite?’ he asked her.
She laughed. ‘I’m a marine biologist, not a doctor.’
‘Where do you think he/she came from?’
‘Not a watery planet, that’s for sure. You couldn’t turn into a thought machine like that. He/she is practically weightless despite his/her size. He/she floats.’
‘How does he/she generate power? He/she doesn’t eat.’
‘Absorption through the exterior ‘skin’ of sunshine, particularly, and air and water and pollen.’
‘Pollen?’
‘Yes, haven’t you noticed how he/she moves around the world? Think about the seasons and where he/she goes. The motivation has to be some form of nourishment. HeShe really gets around.’
‘Yes, but I thought that was to learn world languages.’
She laughed as she brushed her long silver hair. She always reminded him of a mermaid. ‘HeShe doesn’t need to learn languages. The motive is clearly energy and climate.’
‘Oh, OK.’
‘You know him/her pretty well. You’ve spent hours together.’
‘Sure, but I’m teaching him/her,’ he pointed out.
‘Do you like HeShe?’
‘Oh, yes. It’s lovely to be around something as ephemeral and beautiful and spiritual as he/she is.’
‘More than me?’
No-one agreed what He/She looked like. Jelly fish, shifting lights? Those lights within the form would dance with pleasure at the sound of music, fade into the palest blue in relaxation, form complex patterns of thought. The creature could send ‘messages’ via radio or tv and the phone or just through thought transference.
HeShe became invisible, apart from the pulsing lights. In photography – there was just a faint outline.
There was also some controversy as to whether there was more than one. How could you know? Were there lots of them? It could be that if one learned all the others learned too?
Puzzled as humans were, it was clear their visitor also had questions to ask.
HeShe seemed most puzzled by the concept of good and evil. HeShe cured illness because HeShe could, it seemed to Jon…… he thought HeShe had a concept of wholeness or ‘the original plan’, as he called it in his own mind. He had the distinct feeling that HeShe had the idea humans were not ‘whole’ and that they needed to be joined permanently together in a unit of some sort.
His fiancée had laughed. ‘In a permanent state of orgasm?’ she’d suggested.
‘It’s possible that’s how HeShe is constructed,’ he answered.
‘A sort of permanent Yin and Yang?’
‘You should have got to know HeShe better. Then you could have made a study,’ he told her.
She shivered. ‘No. HeShe always gave me a funny feeling – as if I was in the wrong somehow.’
‘You felt guilty around him/her? Why?’
‘Guilty. Uneasy. I’m not sure. It’s as if there’s something I had to give up in order to heal.’
‘That sounds religious. Don’t!’ He shuddered. ‘The history of our warring religions has just been healed. Everything is calm at last. Everyone thinks the Messiah has come. Don’t rock the boat on that one!’
They arrived at their hotel room still deep in conversation and lay on the bed together, ‘Oh, I like the new calm world,’ she said, running her mink gloved hands over his perfect body, ‘but don’t you think it feels strange?’
‘We have to get used to the state of not killing each other. No news on the television satellites about war or crime, no burglary, no rape, or diet worries…’ he nodded at the picture of a waterfall tumbling on the TV screen.
‘No news,’ she murmured as she bent to run her mink glove down his legs. ‘Dull, isn’t it?’
He laughed and stretched with a sense of total well being, then ran his own mink covered fingers down her spine as she straightened up in front of him.
He felt a leap of vitality as the picture radiated in his mind of the harmoniously pulsing lights of HeShe - as their bodies joined.
about the writer: benita cruickshank
After five years in marketing, a couple more as a restaurant owner, I started travelling. This turned into thirty years as an international teacher trainer, discovering such wonders as Easter Island, Xi’an, Komodo dragons and Galapagos marine life. A published non-fiction co-author, I am now London-based, writing satisfying crime about a lady sleuth. You can read more here: https://www.benitacruickshank.com/
[Also she is one of my personal heroes. sv]
