57.

Michel jumped over the side of the gazebo (again) and, standing under the master bedroom window, stretched his legs until his face approached the window. Then he started elongating his neck, as well.  As it happened Cy had his back to the house. Only George saw it, and of course Colin, who heard a tap on the window and walked over from the desk where he worked in his grandmother’s room.

He was frightened and jumped back, fortunately not into anything, and then as he recovered from what was obviously a prank, sighed heavily when Michel yelled “Bring more blankets!” through the glass.

His grandmother was in one of her increasingly rare emotionally lucid moments.

“What’s happening?” she asked in a creaky whisper.

“I’m being pranked by aliens,” Colin said, openly irritated.

“Have you invited them in yet?”

“They don’t like it indoors.”

“Bring him in,” she said, in something so like her normal cheerful voice that he immediately went to obey her, and then stopped.

“This is a lovely dream — or I’m being boring and dying. Is there really an alien?”

“There are two,” Colin said painfully.  True to form, she had zoned out again. For a moment he stood and argued with himself about it, and then gave the matter over to his grandfather with the extra blankets. “She wants to meet an alien.”

George tried to respond. “I can’t actually climb the —“ and the next word was smothered against Michel’s roomy shoulder, “stairs.”

“No problem.  Chunk-style to the rescue,” Michel said. Cy called out.

“You’re never going back in my house, Michel. George is welcome and you are not.  We can meet elsewhere, but not here.”

Michel said, “I won’t prank a dying woman.”

George murmured, “Put me down you enormous hatchling. You are the stupidest person. Do you want me to punch you in your hairs? Your little squeaky hairs? Until they stop sticking out and start sticking in?”

Michel, annoyed but aware that the violence George so richly deserved would be hard to hide if only one of them was invisible, did the next best thing. He dropped George on the ground, and was rewarded with no human grunt or moan, but two almighty ‘bloops’ as cauldron-sized bubbles of lava might make.

“What was that?”

“I’d say that was George’s two main diaphragms letting go, but I didn’t have my hands on him — quite the reverse now I think of it — so I couldn’t say for sure.”

“Is he in pain?” Colin asked.

“Nah, he can grow another one in minutes, but I bet he sleeps well tonight.”

“I’m supposed to drive him home,” Colin said. George had lost his human appearance again, but anything they threw on top of him to hide him from any neighbours who might be outdoors in early October slid off like satin on marble.

“Fine. If he stays like this you know you can’t get him into the car,” Michel said, trying to be matter-of-fact.

“It was like trying to move mercury,” Colin said.

“If you don’t have the stickum you can’t move Sixers,” Michel said. “Take me to your grand-mère, I promise I’ll play nice.”

“You don’t get to scare the crap out of me and Cy and then visit Muriel like it ain’t no thing. Learn manners or get lost.” Colin went back inside.

“Is he always this way?” Michel asked.

“He’s a snotty son-of-a-bitch, but he’s also useful and kind in a practical way,” his grandfather said.

“He wasn’t making any concessions to me being a Sixer,” Michel said.

“Why the hell should he, when George has made no secret of you being part of the network that dropped 50 bodies in Montreal in two years, back in the day, events which I read about with horror and dismay as they occurred,” Cy said. Waving one hand airily, “We also know you’ve abandoned violence against humans for politics or sport. George explained that you’ve done it to reduce your footprint.”

“I s’pose that’s one way of looking at it.  George said if I kept messing with humans there’d be lots hard to explain and even more difficult to deny, and that the earlier I gave it up — my killing and wounding and all that — like a good sport, while I kept doing what I like best anyway, which is thumping assholes and banging Kima, the better off I’d be.”

“You make it sound quite reasonable,” Cy said.

“Well, that’s the thing, George can make you think that something ludicrous can be tapped with a wand and made plausible. And he never by definition lies, and he changes languages to communicate depending on the not-definitely-lies he wants to tell, because every language we mutually speak offers tactical advantage in some way.  He never learned French, no matter how much I bugged him, and I’ll think him a moron and a very poor friend until he dies for dodging it. My brain gives me a weird combination of French, Greek and Italian, when I’m thinking in English space, and I know I speak fluently but I don’t want to, mostly to protest how disgusting English is.”