Increasingly Chan was tired now, and wanted only to lie in bed or on the sofa, and read or watch television.  While Chan slept or dozed I was thrust more into the company of Rupa.  Worried that the growing life inside Chan might be making more demands on her human physiology than she could bear, I asked Rupa if she was at all concerned by Chan’s exhaustion.  Rupa was typically perfunctory.  ‘No, it’s normal that she should want to rest as much as she does.’

I realised that I was not sure whether Rupa knew I was Badezoid.  Chan must have told Rupa, I reasoned, in order to make her understand why the authorities could not be involved in this birth.

‘Chan has told you about me, hasn’t she?’

That slow, quizzical look, the very model of noncommittal.

‘That I’m not from this planet.  That I’m an alien.’

‘She told me that’s what you believe, yes.’

‘She believes it too.’

‘Does she?’

‘Yes, of course she does.’  A look at me, a beat, a look away.  Rupa knew that withholding words was far more powerful than giving voice to them.

‘We’ve talked about it many, many times.  I’ll admit that at first she wasn’t convinced, but she knows so much now, about my past life, since my memory’s returned.  And why would she swear you to secrecy if she didn’t think that the baby inside her has a highly unusual gene pool?’

‘Why indeed.’

I could have begun in on the long descriptions of Badezon that I had given to Chan, but I knew it would be a waste of time.  Rupa didn’t think I was an extra-terrestrial any more than she was.  She, however, did not seem especially human either.

Yet I often found myself drifting into the room in which she was sitting.  I watched her read, and waited for the glimmer of gentle amusement which momentarily curled up her lips at their ends.  I interrupted her to ask questions about the birth; was there anything I could do to be more than simply a support?

‘If we need to ring for an ambulance… that will be your job.’

It was when one day I interrupted her reading for a fourth time, ambling backwards and forwards across the floor before the armchair in which she was sat, that she said, ‘why don’t you go out for a walk?’  There was as much amusement as impatience in her tone.

‘Why don’t you come with?’

We dropped down the hillside and threaded our way through the dunes and onto the beach, and into the last light of the setting sun.  It was a still evening; the clouds were was hazed with golds rather than pinks.  Before we left Rupa said to bring some newspaper.  I carried it under my arm as we walked, never quite side by side, saying nothing.

It was low tide.  She walked to edge of the water, obeying the drag of the moon, the backwards drag of particles by each successive wave.  She stopped, and I turned towards the dunes and the houses to reckon.  ‘It was about there, where you’re standing, that she found me.  The day I fell to earth.’  I thought then that I saw just a little crack in Rupa’s sphinxy façade.

We walked further along, skirted the rocks of the headland and found ourselves in a bay that it would be tricky to escape when the tide turned and came back in; there was a way up the cliff, but in the dark, without a torch – without wings – it would be tricky.  Under the lee of the cliff she stretched out a hand for the newspaper and told me to go and search for driftwood.  By the time I came back she had found several pieces herself, had somehow splintered and arranged them pyramidally around the paper.  From her pocket she produced a lighter and set the paper aflame.  We sat down and she tended the fire periodically, adding bigger and bigger pieces of wood.  We sat watching the flames, from time to time passing the small bottle of water she had also brought.

‘Who are you?’  It could have been either one of us who said it, but it was me to her.

She smiled a defensive smile.  ‘I am Rupa.  That’s really all you need to know.’

And I could not tell her my true name back, for it was the one thing that memory had not returned to me.  Instead, on an impulse, I put my hands into the black nest of her hair and looked into her face.  I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to shake her out of her ever-present serenity, or kiss her, or both.  But I could make out no disconcerted ruffle, no invitation.  Just a searching look back, an apparently non-judgmental appraisal.  Perhaps kissing her might do it.  I became aware of the feel of her hair in my hands, its thickness surprisingly soft; hints of its natural oils shuffled the sea smells aside for a moment.  Reluctantly, gently, I withdrew my hands.

Then she put a hand to my face, brushed hair away from it.  ‘I think we both would like to.  But we both should not.’  It was the most demonstrative thing I ever heard her say.

We sat awhile watching the flames as it grew dark and the driftwood crumbled to white ash.  With a start we realised that the tide was well on its way in and had cut off our route back round the headland.  We would have to brave the cliff face.  Rupa filled the bottle with sea water and poured it on the remnants of the fire.  In the increasing gloom we found the steps shaped into the rock, and helped each other up them.  By the time we made it to the top, we had reached an understanding.

Rupa’s presence allowed me licence to fly more frequently, and for longer, now that it was spring, and for that I was grateful.  I did not know what to make of her.  She was an entirely different kind of human being to Chan – in looks, in speech, in what could be perceived of her thinking, everything.  She was easy to understand but difficult to know.  She seemed to lack something that Chan had – some basic but extremely sophisticated human facility to appeal – and in that sense, she was more like me than either of them realised.  You will laugh when I say that she seemed alien to me.  There was no attraction, at first, in either direction, of that I am sure.  Despite the curiosity aroused by being at such close quarters with a second human, I swiftly came to resent her presence as an intrusion on the state of balance Chan and I had struggled so hard to achieve.  It had taken me so long to adapt to the uncertainties which stemmed from being memoryless and fallen to earth, and for the two of us to stabilise the lows and highs of my sense of loss and the freedom that followed into something resembling a sustainable future.

No longer could we entwine our legs before the night-time fire; at least, no longer could I feel comfortable doing so, with Rupa sat in the adjoining armchair, sphinxing the room, unsettling me while she put Chan at ease.  And instead of listening to Chan’s music, we watched earthbound television, and I failed to see there the poetry that I heard in the earth’s music.  Chan and Rupa laughed at the inanities and frivolity, and laughed at me for not laughing.  I slammed the door as I left for my shift at Sandy’s, and when I returned Rupa was sitting where I usually sat on the sofa.  She was feeling Chan’s bump, smiling with silent, sphinxy joy at the feel of the wriggling feet.  The television no longer played in the corner.  I wondered how long they had been sitting like that.  There was nothing calculated about the way Rupa ignored my presence and continued to fondle Chan’s belly, but there was enough in it to suggest a notion to me that I had not previously considered.  I brooded on this notion as I sat in the armchair and ate some cold pasta.  In my head I sang an old Badezoid flying song to blot out the exclamation of endearments that my child’s every kick brought from the two women.  I finished my functional meal and gradually then I calmed down.  (Sandy had earlier remarked what a furious pot washer I seemed to be this evening.)  When Rupa offered me back my place on the sofa, I softened and waved her back into her seat.  Then Chan smiled at me and we were all at peace.  That is, I became part of the peaceable scene that existed before I walked in the door.  Gnawing resentment was my cross to bear, mine alone.

Because even within the privacy of our bedroom at night, things were different.  Chan wanted to make love less frequently now, and when we did, the wild abandon which had been so confidently ours was now diminished.  When I cried out in Badezoid tongue she cupped my mouth for fear of Rupa hearing, and her own moans were self-stifled.  We arrived at the same destination, but the journey there was frustrating, stop-start, a mimicking of past couplings.  It was odd, for Rupa was a woman of women; she knew their bodies and their needs and surely would not have been surprised to be woken in the night, nor minded.

Increasingly of course there was a fourth member of the household to consider, and its needs were fast becoming paramount.  But I understood that and would not mind it.  I could feel the engine of history powering up behind us, inaudible at present to all but ourselves.  As far as I knew, we were the parents of what would be the universe’s first human-badezoid child.  The more I dwelt on it, the more I could not wait to watch over this little one until its fledgling wings were strong enough to bear a grown body’s weight into the air and away beyond my sight.  I did not fear that it might turn out to be the true sphinx, a winged one, part human, part lion, part bird, unknowable even to its parents; its unique thoughts and destiny unguessable.

And so Rupa and I sat at breakfast and in the evenings as two inscrutable statues, one wearing a mysterious smile, the other a slight but unmistakeable frown.  Between us, exhibiting the supreme rosy glow that was the gift given by a unique interspecies incubation, sat the woman within whom the little sphinx grew, the woman we all needed and who needed us.