Being Alien (6 page)

“Fine, she and Wy’um had a son.”

“Behind every liberated Gwyng male is a truly ambitious pouch sister.”

“That’s cynical.”

“But true. The males
are
useless. I had to deal with the crisis over Mica. After Black Amber was wounded, Rhyodolite coma’ed out, the stupid bastard. Cadmium, I guess he wasn’t any more hysterical than usual.”

“Yeah. What do you know about the people Black Amber wants me to meet?”

“Nice girl. I’m glad I’ve been altered to speak perfect Midwestern English or she might have tried to analyze where I come from.”

“Are you from the Ahram home planet or are you Karst-born?”

“Karst-born.”

“Are all the Karst-born weird for their kind?”

“No weirder than you are for yours, Tom,” Alex said. We could see the car from the hill and began talking of other things, like manzanitas, black sage, oaks, and how most one-celled organisms had global ranges, lived in both fresh and salt water.

“So disappointing to get water from the Pacific and see the same damn diatoms that I’d seen in spring water,” Alex said. “Even saw a Euplotes patella, looks almost like…”

I said, “Physical constraints on possibilities?”

“Or maybe all life is expressions of one mind?”
Karriaagzh’s line.
Alex said, “Relax, I was lonely today. Just lonely,” as we got in the car.

When he let me out of the car at my place, I said, “Let me know next time you go drinking with Carstairs.”

“Okay, maybe.”

I didn’t see Alex again for days. The next day, I worried all morning, studying the computer printouts on the UCal Japanese studies library holdings. Most of them were in Japanese—I wondered about getting a translation program, but didn’t know if Earthlings had developed such things yet.

By ten
A.M.
, when I hadn’t been arrested due to being seen with an alien, I went to the Co-op and bought beans, pork backbones, and a loaf of bread. Then I called the computer store and asked if they had anything that could translate Japanese into English.

“Are we talking technical data? Are you willing to screen out invisible idiots?” the clerk asked.

“Technical data.”

“Well, it’s going to take a sixth generation machine if you’re asking it to translate voice.”

“I’ve got a KayPro XV. Bought it there day before yesterday. No voice, just text, printed texts.”

“We can sell you just the program.”

I decided to read what I could in English before machine translating Japanese to English, get a general picture.

The next day, I stared at my glitter ceiling, then went out to buy a radio at the Co-op hardware store. While I was there, I got a few tools to make a garden: spading fork, mattock, shovel, and gloves to protect my fake prints. It wasn’t that I’d be here long enough to eat anything; I just wanted something familiar to do.

I put the radio on a listener-sponsored station. In Floyd, we got three listener-sponsored stations, each one running the same PBS stuff. I’d listened enough to know who Bach was. But this radio station was playing fusion music—illegitimate daughter of heavy metal and calypso-oid music—and announcing programs that would debate second-generation space defense programs.

I opened the door so I could hear the radio while I worked in the garden—then started clearing away some old boards in the little yard.

Newts under those logs? In a city? Newts and deer—Berkeley began to seem like they’d just last week laid the city over wilderness and the animals hadn’t had time to leave. I threw the newts over the back fence and started grubbing out the ivy.

A huge snail the size of a tennis ball wiggled its eye stalks at me.
Shi-it.
I’d never seen snails that big. I threw it over the fence after the newts and tried to lift a forkful of dirt.

I bounced on that fork seven times before the black clay broke free. Another snail watched from where it was chomping down an oak.
Okay, we’ll go back and ask the gardening freak what works with black clay.

But instead of heading back to the Co-op, I walked down Milvia, just walked, checking out where I was now. A half-grown peacock ran across the road and behind one of the apartment buildings.

Something clicked. I stopped comparing the hills to the Blue Ridge as though they were both built the same way. Brown summer grass here, fine. The temperature rose to about ninety for a minute while I was walking, then dropped to forty-five when the sun…when the earth I stood on rolled behind the terminator, behind its own shadow.

Instead of expecting arrest as an alien spy, I began to worry about muggers, turned back home, walking on Shattuck, which I figured would be safer. There, I spotted the store where Alex had bought my Earth-style clothes.

Still no sign of Alex the next day. I checked out a Lafcadio Hearn book at the insistence of an Asian library clerk and two books on Japanese industrial development.

“Industrial development in Japan was very sudden,” she told me. “About the time of your Civil War. We had been insular before then.”

“Was it better being insular?”

“Read this.” She handed me some copied sheets.

She was Japanese. I wanted to talk to her more, but I saw her face twist away from me and the eyes dart back toward me—a human sexual interest behavior that I’d studied
from
books and life on Karst, so I thanked her and left. No more Oriental women.

You’re a prissy little human,
Alex said from my memory. Alex was playing with a weapons designer who did dimensional physics on the side.
Maybe he’s sneaking gate design information to Carstairs?
Suddenly I didn’t want to even be in my apartment. I went to the Co-op bookstore and bought a Bay Area guidebook, called up the BART schedule on the computer, then went to San Francisco.

Something odd about this train.
I couldn’t quite put my finger on what, dangling from a strap surrounded by a human mob, then realized I’d never been on a train filled with just one species. Humans all of us. I stared at bearded and shaved men’s faces, then at women’s lips, all painted various shades of red and pink, cheeks chemically flushed, too.
Wow, we are a weird species.

Five people in yellow robes got on the train at the first San Francisco stop and began chanting, “Hari Krishna Krishna Rama, Rama Rama.”

Yangchenla’s people, shit.
The robes looked so much like the Karst Tibetans’ robes that I couldn’t watch, but instead stared at black hulks whizzing by the window until the train burst out into bright fog and multi-colored houses.

San Francisco looked like a magic Roanoke that had been kept up and painted colors (my brain did some wish landscaping, but Roanoke
was
built when San Francisco was being re-built). Suddenly the houses disappeared as the train went into a tunnel. On the other side of the tunnel were metal and ferroconcrete apartment buildings.

At Seal Rock, I saw the Pacific Ocean, big and chilly with real seals in it. One stared back at me from the rock—that creature to creature stare you only get from really intelligent animals or fellow sapients.

Would the stars tonight be the same as the stars I saw
in Floyd,
I wondered.

I didn’t feel like checking and headed back to the BART station. The train back wasn’t entirely mono-specific. I caught a glimpse of one Barcon getting on. A car behind me. I was relieved to see them.
They must be tracking me
through my skull computer.

I walked home from the university station, catching one more glimpse of the Barcons. When I got home, the phone was ringing. I almost didn’t answer it, but thought that it might be Alex.

“Tom, did Alex drop by today?” It was the male Barcon.

“No. I saw you guys behind me, on the train.”

“We didn’t have time to say hello.” He hung up.

I fixed a late lunch, but I couldn’t feel the time in Berkeley. After lunch, I was bored, the boredom edged with tension. I couldn’t do anything about Alex—I didn’t feel like helping the Yauntries today. Fuck the research. I pulled out the address Black Amber had given me.

Amber had traced the address from the journal she’d kept when she knew English, when she hunted in human shape for Mica, saying as she traced, “Humans, untrustworthy, except for this woman and you, Red Clay.”

But Karriaagzh said if only a few were different, then humans didn’t have to be xeno-flips,
I remembered as I found the street address on my Berkeley map.

The woman lived on Cedar, between Milvia and Martin Luther King, not far from my apartment, in a house. Who’d be home during the day? I’d leave a note. Black Amber’s friend was the older sister, Marianne, the younger was Molly. The Schweigman sisters—but not from hill German folks like some of my kin. I wrote
I’m a friend
of John Amber’s and would like to talk to you. Tom Gresham, 1607 Milvia, 555-6641.

As I walked out of my apartment and crossed Cedar, my sweat mingled with the chilly fog. My fingers rolled the paper back and forth, back and forth. By the time I got to the Schweigman door, the note looked like a crumpled joint.

Voices inside the house paralyzed me.
Knock, knock. Who’s there? Alien. Alien? I been alien for your love, Marianne.

Hush, head, and let the hand up to knock.
Finally obedient, my knuckles tapped the door, then I saw the door bell and pushed the button.

A young, redheaded woman, about twenty-three, came to the door in a long skirt, braless under a Bach t-shirt.

“Hi?” she said, like it was a question, her toes twisting in the carpet as if they were cramped.

“Are you Marianne?” I didn’t think so—Marianne was older than me, by about two years.

“No, I’m Molly. I’m busy.”

I looked closer at the skirt and said, “Handspun? You’re a weaver, John Amber told me.”

“That one? Mum…m.”

“John wanted me to give Marianne a message. I was going to leave a note if no one was home.”

“Don’t ever do that in Berkeley. You’d get us robbed. Where are you from, to do such a thing?”

“From the country,” I said. “Virginia.”

She looked at me like
what an idiot.
A black man, almost asleep, padded downstairs and snuggled up behind her, arms reaching around her waist. He asked, “Who’s this?”

“Sam, he’s looking for Marianne.” She leaned back against the black guy. The black guy was her lover. I felt weird, then ashamed of my racist streak.

“We’ll give her your address,” Sam said in most proper and chilly English.

“Please do,” I said. They stared through me hard enough to have spotted my computerized plastic skull bone. “I wanted to thank her. For helping John Amber.”

“Yeah, John Amber,” Sam said.

I didn’t go home then. Virginia or Federal law might be waiting on the comer of Milvia and Cedar to recall me to jail.

At sunset, on the corner of Shattuck and University, I stuck out my thumb and hitched, to the sunset. Carstairs wasn’t there. After the night came, electric glitter under us, I rode back down with the guys who’d driven me up. They discussed sunsets in Mexico, Japan over Mt. Fuji. I almost told them about the sky around Karst.

Back at my apartment, the phone rang as I put the key in the round hole.
Maybe someone’s watching?

“Have you seen Alex?” The female Barcon sounded worried.

“Nope. I went by the Schweigman house.”

“Wait on that.”

“I left word. Marianne wasn’t home.”

“Put her off until we find Alex. “

I told them, “He’s been hanging out with a Lawrence Lab researcher named Jerry Carstairs. Drinking at an Irish pub. Have you seen Alex’s car anywhere?”

“Parked at his apartment.”

“Well, do you want me to check with Carstairs?”

“Do.” The Barcon hung up. I got out the phone book and looked up the number for Lawrence Laboratory, called and asked, “Do you know when I can reach Jerry Carstairs?”

“Doesn’t work here anymore.”

“What about his home number?”

“Call personnel, ten to four, work hours. Sorry, okay.”

“Okay.” I didn’t know what to think. Whatever, I’d have to wait until morning. I turned on the radio and tuned in the weird listener-supported station, but that was playing some squealing code.

I froze in cold sweat, then the announcer broke in, “We’re going to blackbox twenty-four hours a day next month, so subscribe now for a descrambler at present subscription prices.”

Code but not for me.
I collapsed giggling on the ratty couch, part of my brain rather coldly watching.

Nobody came by or called the next morning, so I began reading
The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720-1830,
by Donald Keene. The Federation, I thought, was fairer than the Dutch traders at Nagasaki.