Being Alien (21 page)

She opened her eyes when we landed and moaned as she pulled herself out of the tube. We walked to her car. She was stiff, bruised. “Should I drive?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, and we went back to the plastic-walled hotel. Gwyngs were dismantling sections of it, quietly, with lasers, loading the pieces on trucks.

Black Amber ordered new clothes and a sleeping group before she went into the sleeping room. I heard water running and a hair drier. When she came out, she sat down on the floor beside me, her head hair still damp, and asked, “Do you know more about me now than you want?”

“I thought once first contact was over, then…”

“First contact is the beginning of ‘then.’ We have artificial food. More can live (more badly).”

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“We go back to Karst/bird terrors/bird idiocy.”

Black Amber didn’t say much more as Cadmium and I rode with her to the Gwyng planet gate facility. The Gwyngs who bolted her car down in the transport pod didn’t speak to us either, although her transition still got priority, fast handling through the gates. A bear crew, no Gwyngs among them, unbolted the car when we arrived at Karst. Black Amber sighed and drove out on Karst. I asked, “Can I see Marianne now?”

“Not yet. Wait until she isn’t embarrassed by her Karst language ability.” We didn’t go into town. Amber drove on instead up the coast to her beach house through her herds of pouch beasts with older Gwyng children playing beside them.

“The children aren’t yours.”

“Nymphs are currency (Barcons don’t understand).” She drove up to her woven plank house on stilts. A small blue electric car the size of a golf cart, but completely enclosed, was parked under the house.

We went in. Rhyodolite, her oldest pouch kin, sat in her great room, looking tragic, wrinkles sagging, oily eyes, nostril slits faintly rippling. I remembered, though, that he could be a tease. Cadmium’s blond-streaked body fur rippled. Rhyodolite, tiny, still scarred from his third and last shape-shift mission two years ago, asked, “Gwyng-Home Gwyngs disapprove of you? My first contacts disapproved of me/of Federation. Hurt feeling with xenophobia. Lost trade shares/vast fear for no profit.”

She opened her arms and bent forward slightly; they rushed awkwardly to her and cuddled against her sides, all three Gwyngs swaying together.

“But I agree with Gwyng Home (in policy issues),” Black Amber said. “They don’t understand/xenocentric.”

“But now Red Clay has new woman for us to tease,” Rhyodolite said, his lips, pursed so tight they dragged all his wrinkles forward. “Red Clay, relieve pain of scornful aliens. Here, bad xenophobe species name in Karst for slow minds.” He handed me a piece of paper: SHARWAN, FIRST CONTACT FAILURE, NON-CONTRACTING SPECIES. POSSIBLE DANGER. SEE THE INSTITUTE OF CONTROL FILE 5897-A.

6
Some Kind Of Alien Wedding

The phone buzzed the next morning while the creatures at Black Amber’s house were all sleeping, tangled up together.

At least, the Gwyngs were sleeping. Rhyodolite woke up and answered in Karst Two, then handed it to me. “The master bird, ready to send thousands to their deaths in hysterical first contacts, calls you.”

“Come on, Rhyodolite, he’ll hear you.” I took the phone and adjusted it to fit human ears, then switched off the hold function. “Red Clay here.”

Black Amber’s eyes slowly opened. Karriaagzh said, “I sent a car for you, Tom.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said. He made a throat-clearing noise, deep noise with those hollow bones vibrating behind it and hung up. Black Amber slid away from Cadmium and found her plastic plate that fitted over skull computers. She stuck a fine wire into it, said, “Put back standard functions,” and laid it behind my ear.

I dressed in my officer/officiator’s uniform, wishing I’d washed it after we left the strange Gwyng house on the cliffs. But I hadn’t, so it’d stink of Gwyng arguments. Karriaagzh had no sense of smell, but his Barcons would know.

The car driven by a Barcon, not a bear as was more usual, came up to Black Amber’s ten minutes after Karriaagzh hung up. I slid on my black shoes. Cadmium bent down to close the straps. “Don’t make Karriaagzh wait,” Black Amber said. “He wants immediate contact with the entire universe."

Rhyodolite said, “Tell him the Shangwan refused/not my fault (possible?/doubt/nervous of being blamed).”

Sharwan, he meant. Rhyodolite had no ear for what to him were nonsense sounds.

The Barcon opened the rear door from the driver’s seat and said, “Your people are doing well. Now at Rector’s People Chalk 137 and Agate 120. Jereks, very solid couple.”

I said, “I haven’t met them.” Jereks—the weasels, who worked so much for the spy Institute of Analytics and Tactics. Aliens with eyelids shiny and black as their eyes so you could hardly tell when they blinked. Carbon-jet, the Jerek spy who bit me in the leg when he was arrested by the people we’d just admitted to the Federation—he didn’t have the nerve to bite anyone more directly responsible. “Can’t they go to a Rector’s People I know better, a species…?” I couldn’t tell him I didn’t like Jereks. I had to like most sapient species—why couldn’t I have one species that I didn’t like, didn’t have to get along with? Why not a little xenophobia after sympathizing with so strange a creature as Black Amber?

“No, you need to be tamed to Jereks.”

“What about Gwyng Rector’s People?”

“You have a Gwyng sponsor.” Rigid, inflexible, remote—typical Barcon, not S’um, who’d calmed Sam Turner by playing harpsichord duets with him.

“What does Karriaagzh want to talk to me about?”

“About Yauntra, about Gwyng Home.”

I leaned back against the seat cushions and stared at the rolling coastal hills, the glints of ocean beyond them. We crossed the northernmost river that fed into Karst Bay and were suddenly in the city near the water landing docks. The Barcon drove through the slums as if they didn’t matter. I thought I saw Yangchenla’s oldest uncle, selling buttered and salted tea from a pushcart.

Then we turned inland and I saw the Academy walls and towers, and felt an odd rush of relief, at a somatic level.

“You do stink of Gwyng,” the Barcon said as he let me out in front of the Rector’s office.

I walked inside and .took an elevator to Karriaagzh’s floor. Almost no one was in the building—I remembered that it was spring mating season here—behind Earth’s seasons. I went through the huge Karriaagzh-sized doors into the outer office.

“Come in,” Karriaagzh called. I did; he sat behind his boomerang-shaped desk. On the desk, beside his terminal, a teapot suddenly steamed, went to full boil, then simmered down. As I looked at it, he said, “From Yauntra.” He dropped in some loose herbal tea, turned the pot off, and brought out a University of California Berkeley cup for me and his spouted bird cup. “From Alex.”

“Thank him for me,” I said.

“He likes humans very much.”

“He got us in trouble with the FBI.”

Karriaagzh stared at me. One hand scribbled on his keypad. Then he looked at his computer screen. “Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he said in English before translating that to Karst equivalent terms. “Ah, Alex. He has interesting ideas. If only people could gradually become accustomed to the idea of the intelligent other.”

“I don’t think humans can half believe intelligent other sapients share the universe with them. Should Alex go up to the FBI and say, ‘Maybe I’m an extraterrestrial’?”

“Let’s not talk about this right now,” he said. Karriaagzh slid his transparent inner eyelids vertically over his yellow eyes, dimming them. I watched the muscles around his eyes bunch, relax, bunch up again, until he saw me watching and raised his crest. He wrote on his pad again, and the terminal display changed. “The Barcons said you have traces of thumb gland odor on your body. Gwyng were angry around you.”

‘‘‘Not enough to wipe the juice on me.”

“But enough to leak slightly.” Feathers around his beak twitched, and his inner eyelids relaxed. “Black Amber—can she be separated from Gwyng Home policy?”

“She can’t do enough for them.” Karriaagzh’s beak gaped slightly, and I regretted saying that much. “Gwyng Home seems like a poor planet. “

“Overpopulated,” Karriaagzh said. “They would starve if not for gas-giant industries, which the Federation made possible.”

“She thinks we need to work more with present Federation members, not send out additional observation teams. Gwyng Home thinks she’s been morally corrupted by alien contact, but they don’t disagree with her politics.”

“Observation teams don’t speed up on-planet technological development.” Karriaagzh shielded his eyes again with the transparent lids. “We didn’t have an observation station at one system, and the species spread into another planetary system. Rhyodolite was on the team that tried to contact them. Not effective. Not convincing.”

“He said there were problems.”

“If we’d contacted the Sharwan just before they developed gate technology, they might have been friendlier.” He slid his nictitating membranes back. “We need to expand contacts, now, before the Sharwan form their own Federation.”

I went to Marianne at the Jerek Rector’s People’s place, in the north by the polar sea. Big polar sea, so the place wasn’t freezing all the time, just in the winter. It was early summer now and just froze on occasional nights.

But Chalk and Agate’s house looked just-like Tesseract’s—sprawling, lots of porches and wings—only they’d backed the main wing up against a mountain. My little plane landed on a runway near the swimming pool placed on the same side of the house as Tesseract’s.

I climbed out of the plane and looked into two Jerek faces. Their noses were up; so I wasn’t getting threat-face, but they were otherwise unreadable. Chalk was the male—he had slightly lighter fur than Agate.

I asked them, “How are they?”

Chalk said, “Marianne is well beyond the rudiments.”

“Warren?”

Chalk looked at Agate, then answered again, “He heard about other humans. We’re arranging a meeting. If he joins them, he’ll still have a city pass.”

“With the Tibetans?”

“Yes. The Barcons checked his sperm and found it unaffected by his brain malformations, so he has a duplication breeding permit. Is this too upsetting?”

“I want Warren to be happy.” I didn’t want to break his balls by switching from younger brother to boss, either.

All my twentieth-century human colleagues came out now as if signaled. They wore grey tunics down below the knees except for Marianne, who wore white with a green stripe across the shoulders at clavicle level—pre-Linguistics. Then Warren shuffled out, in jeans and a plaid wool shirt, his feet in felt slippers.

“The clothes are boring,” Molly said.

“They’re a disguise,” I told her. “Do you have other learners here?” I asked Chalk.

“We don’t do this generally,” Agate said, lowering her nose slightly. No, they were Rector’s People, not near-poor language-trainers.

“But you’ve all learned Karst One?”

Warren said, “Thought I’d really gone crazy. Language worse than a bad drug.”

“I enjoyed it,” I said. Marianne and Molly looked at each other.

“They cut off my music,” Sam said, “English and my music. But it came back. Weird language, this one.”

“So many meanings,” Marianne said, looking at me as though I was strange to her now.

“Meanings driving me…” Warren began.

“Don’t say it, Warren,” Sam said. “Remember the Barcons.”

Warren shuddered, and I wondered what happened in the hospital. “We’re refugees…stinks,” he said.

“Can we move back to the apartment?” I asked.

“When Sam learns his subjunctives better,” Chalk said. “Come in. The house is Rector’s People, like Tesseract’s, but we have Jerek quarters below.”

We were housed in the restriction wing. Sam raised one eyebrow—that frustrating gesture I couldn’t master—as we passed armored doors now pulled back in their pockets. I said, “Do you have other people here now?”

“Travertine and our daughter, Uteece, Academy name Lisanmarl. We have another child, a son, but he’s studying now, multi-Institute.”

Sam said, “Lisanmarl’s teaching me sarai drums.”

I felt odd, as though the four new humans had aged while I hadn’t, and vaguely threatened. They were getting along with Jereks, Had they explained all the social connotations of
Virginia high school dropout ex-con
to Chalk and Agate, I wondered to myself.

Marianne hugged me, disconcerting me by the very attempt to reassure me. I kissed her and rubbed my cheek against hers, then saw Warren staring at us, his eyelids swollen, bottom lip curled down. He saw me looking, and his scalp flushed.
Oh, Warren, so sorry there’s no woman for you after all that hospital jail.
Probably he should go to the Tibetans, I thought. If he ate takeout Cambodian in Richmond, maybe he’d like buttered tea.

The Jereks put me in a room with Marianne, but gave us two beds and something like a velvet-padded Henry Moore sculpture: holes, tunnels, curves, and protuberances. Warren followed us to the door.

When I touched the velvet-padded thing, Warren said, “For sexual stunts.” I flushed. Marianne pretended not to hear. He said, “I’ll leave you now.”