Being Alien (9 page)

The Barcons stopped. “Nigger dealers,” someone in the bar muttered, face lost in the crowd. I saw the smaller Barcon’s jaw seem to break between the chin and ear, and both their noses pulled in.
Why doesn’t someone see?

“We must talk, outside.” The Barcon male shook his hands as though flipping off sweat.

“I’m meeting a friend here.”

A beefy guy stepped through the crowd, pool cue in one hand with a razor scar running across his knuckles.

“We know Alex,” he said. “Leave him alone.”

“We have to discuss business with him, a Barcon voice said behind me. A second pair of Barcons stood near the doors. Another white guy in a blue nylon jacket stepped through the crowd, oil on his jacket, hand in his pants pocket—
brass
knucks, heh, boy, or a gun?

“Leave us alone,” I said to everyone. The two other Barcons came up behind me. I didn’t want to choose sides.

Then Carstairs swung the doors back and stopped, arms blocking the entrance. He stared with twisted delight at the whole scene, glasses askew on his nose. He saw me and shoved his glasses back, index finger against the greasy bridge then giggled helplessly as the door on that side flapped against him.

The Barcons froze, the smallest female at the end of the bar quivering, jaw bones jerking.
Is everyone too drunk to see how alien they are?

I expected the cops any minute—saw the headlines as though they were hanging in neon in the bar smoke
ALIEN SPIES CAPTURED IN BAR BRAWL
.

Carstairs got out of the doorway and said, too loudly, “Tom, what
is
going on?”

“I don’t know.”

“No?” He pulled a barstool up and grabbed my hand.

“If I…” He had a small trocar ready to plunge into me.

“He’s taking tissue samples,” I said.

The Barcons behind me grabbed the troccar, broke it against the bar. The crunch sound brought a white boy around to face us. The female Barcon at the end of the bar whimpered.

Then Marianne came in. “Tom?”

“Help me get all these people out. Alex needs to talk to the four black guys, but not here.”

She loosened her shoulders as if cocking them, then did the same for her hips, and said, “Very definitely not here.”

I couldn’t believe it when she walked up to the guy with the cue stick and took it out of his hands. “Trust me,” she said to him, jutting her hip out against the man’s thigh, “they won’t hurt Alex.”

The female Barcon began making funny noises,
huwh, huwh,
deep in her throat. Her mate pushed his knuckles down on her spine.

“Who are
you?"
The guy with his hand hidden in his pocket asked Marianne.

She ignored him. “We ought to try down the street. Better bar for our discussion.”

“Why?” Alex said.

She said very loudly, “I met you with John Amber, didn’t I? Was he pimping the black girl or were they lovers?”

Alex paled along his skull where the bone crest had been. “I’ll come,” Carstairs said, still amused “I like black bars, too.”

“Holler if you need us,” the man who had the cue stick said. He looked at Reeann as if thinking
How did this little bitch get my cue stick away?

She put it back in his hands and walked toward me, hissed in my ear, “Racists,” her hand on my shoulder.

“Carstairs wanted to take tissue samples,” I said to Reeann as we walked to the cars, adrenaline still zinging at my fingertips, my gut cramped. “I should have let him.”

She patted my cheek almost like a cat, violence padded behind the fingertips. Or sex? Then she said, “Was John Amber a DNA recombinant experiment?”

“Carstairs was a weapons designer. Alex is crazy.” I told the others, “I’ll ride with her.”

“I took the bus,” she said.

“In the car with us, then,” the female Barcon who’d been scared in the bar said. “We want to thank you.”

“I know it’s tough on blacks in parts of Oakland.” The Barcon put her hands on either side of her nose, trying to hide the wiggle, nearly hysterical for a Barcon.

Reeann looked carefully at them as she got in the car, then looked at me, at Alex getting in his car with the other pair of Barcons, and tucked her chin down, her tongue making little wet sounds inside her mouth as though she wanted to be talking.

She knows now, just like Carstairs. She almost put her hand on my leg, but the hand rocked in the air.

“Miss, are you Tom’s friend?” the male Barcon asked almost casually.

“We just met,” she said, eyes focused on the door handles, then twitching up to the locks.

“Which bar?” I said.

“Go back down Telegraph. It’s on the left.”

“Noisy, but I know why you chose it,” the male said, sounding non-human. Marianne looked away from the locks and door handles and stared at him, breath hissing in against her teeth as she raised her head.

“Why did Alex want to avoid you?” she asked.

“He has problems,” the female said. “And we’re his therapists, right, Tom. He fears something, yet courts the disclosure of what he fears.”

“Right,” I said, pushing my shoulders back against the seat and arching my spine. The adrenaline had stiffened my muscles, and I wasn’t sure what was coming next.

“Crazy?” Reeann asked, touching the door lock button.

“Tempts public ridicule and jail,” the male Barcon said. “Tom, you must tell Alex about jail.”

Reeann stiffened as though
now
she disapproved.

Wounded recombinant experiments okay, jailbirds no. I felt like I was reliving my first day out of prison, and realized what she thought mattered to me. “Marianne, it was over drugs, in Virginia.” I hated my voice when I said that, a draggy whine, con voice deep in hustled cigarettes.

“Can I…” she began to say, then stopped. “I always wondered where John Amber and Rhoda came from, but I didn’t want to get them in trouble. I have no real loyalty to things as they are.”

The Barcons shifted in the front seat, looked at each other. “Tom does
come
from Virginia,” the male said, looking back at us through the rearview mirror, utterly alien, inspecting a potential human breeding pair. He stopped talking when the female touched one of his odd jaw angles with her fingertips.

“Virginia was wasting him, his talent,” the female said. “He…” she broke off to speak in Barcon to the male.

Reeann listened hard to them, then pulled away from me, body arched away from me, rigid. “So what happens now?"

The male wiggled his nose. “Maybe you can become friends with us?”

“I’m not going to be kidnapped.”

“No, not kidnapped,” the males said. “We need to talk to Alex, and with you.”

We parked behind another bar, in Berkeley on Telegraph, not in Oakland. Carstairs, alone in his car, pulled in behind us, got out and watched, his eyes trembling in their sockets as a Barcon got out, then Alex, both huge males, easily 220 pounds and over six and a half feet, then the last Barcon, only slightly smaller, got out and stretched. At first, I thought Alex was in cuffs, but he was just rubbing his wrists, holding them together, Then Alex looked at Carstairs as though he hadn’t meant to involve his human friend in this, whatever
this
would be.

The Barcons looked around the parking lot, then began discussing the situation in Barcon. “All right, you humans know,” the male Barcon who hadn’t ridden with Reeann and me said. “But it’s worthless knowledge.”

Carstairs looked at Alex as if Alex was his connection for maximum head candy. Alex shrugged slightly, then we went in, by black and white couples and singles, to an empty back room. We all sat down in a booth.

“You used drugs,” the littlest female, the one who’d been scared in the bar, told Carstairs. “And you resigned your job. Why?"

Carstairs hunched over a beer in a frost-rimmed mug.

“You are…” He didn’t sound straight, and he didn’t finish.

“Alex,” her mate said, “why?”

Alex sighed and reached for a pecan in a bowl set on our table, cracked it with his teeth, smiled at Carstairs as he tongued the meat separate from the shells, spit the shells out onto his fingertips. Finally, he answered, “I think the bird is right.”
Meaning Karriaagzh.
“We should expand contacts, give these people gate systems.”

“No,” the littlest female said, “the wait magnifies your terror of jail, so you’d like them to know now. You may have to be rotated out before the contact.”

“Why?” Carstairs asked.

“Because of you,” the chief male said.

“I resigned. I suspected.”

“Alex told you?”

“No. I got a sweat sample. It wasn’t conclusive.”

Alex looked up at Carstairs and picked up another nut. 

“Tell Alex about jail, Tom,” the smallest female Barcon said. She looked just like a big black man slumped over a beer and stirring it with a swizzle stick. Alex flinched.

I said, “Federal prisons wouldn’t be quite like the state prison camp I was in.”

“But they give such time to spies,” the female Barcon said to Alex. “Very cruel to disguised outsiders, no?”

Reeann said, “Let Tom and me leave. I’m not part of this.”

“I’ll take you all God dammit down,” Alex said.

Reeann began laughing.
Is she hysterical,
I wondered. Carstairs giggled for two seconds, then said, “You befriended me because of my weapons work, Alex?”

Alex said, “No.” Veins in his eyes seemed to be enlarging. Then I saw a tear roll out of his eye, larger than a human tear. Maybe his skin had a different surface tension? “Someday, you’ll find a way into space, and the Federation will turn me over to the FBI as a peace gesture. The more I’m with you, the less I want you to see me as an alien.”

“Oh, Alex,” Carstairs said.

Alex said, “Jerry, my wife was with me here for two years. She died, a trivial accident, on Karst. I’m alone here except for humans. These are no company.” He swung a hand at the Barcons.

The other female Barcon, silent up until now, said softly, “He wouldn’t re-mate.”

Carstairs looked
 
nervous—
hey, what are the implications, Carstairs baby. 
Then he asked, “You aren’t going to hurt me?”

“No,” the chief male said, "as long as you don’t betray him ahead of time."

Carstairs began to smile then he frowned and asked “Time dilation?”

Meaning, did you get here by flying at near light speeds?

“Time doesn’t play a part in it,” Alex said.

“I knew the accents were odd,” Reeann said. “You’re not recombinant DNA experiments. You’re not humans.”

“I went camping with you, for two days,” Carstairs said softly to Alex.

“Prisons here could hold us all, I think,” the chief male Barcon said, leaning on his elbows, his hands shredding napkins on the table.

Alex lurched up and said, “I have to go to the bathroom.” One of the Barcon males followed him. I told Reeann, “I’d go back to prison, if the State of Virginia found out. I broke parole.”

She shook her head slightly, real fast, as though a bee’d buzzed her. “You, then,
are
human?”

“Yeah.” I felt ashamed,

“And you’ve been in jail, for drugs, and aliens took you away and did what with you?” Her voice got edgy; she heard her own hysteria rising and grimaced.

“They trained me to make contacts with other sapients,” I said. “I’m good at that
.” But I fuck up with
my own species.
I remembered Yangchenla’s harangues on how I never questioned what was done to me.

She said, reaching for my hand, “Is it difficult, being back?”

“Yes, but the Federation wants me to be as good with my own kind as I am with others.”

The Barcons were watching Reeann and me intently Carstairs seemed bored, writing something on his napkin. When Alex and the second Barcon male came back, Carstairs shoved the napkin at Alex who said, “I don’t know.”

“Or can’t tell me,” Carstairs replied.

The Barcon chief picked up the napkin, looked at it, and said, “You’re thinking along the right lines, but I suspect you have been all along, or Alex wouldn’t have been so interested in you. Perhaps we can tell you when you’re right. So better to keep showing us your theories, stay away from the FBI. Does that help?”

“How close? Could we make contact with you next year if I tried this?” Carstairs took the napkin back, scribbled on it, and shoved it back at the Barcon.

“Not that way either, but…”

Carstairs carefully folded his napkin and put it in his wallet.

Alex stared at a waitress until she swung by the table. “Four pitchers of beer,” he ordered. She brought them promptly and he swallowed two mugs-f in about three breaths, deliberately trying for a drunk. Then he leaned back from the table and shuddered.