Human to Human (2 page)

“They are beautiful,” Marianne said.

I didn’t remember the Sharwani as lovely, but I’d met them only once before in near-combat conditions, an interrupted First Contact with another species. Nasty little Sharwani had bombed a two-million-population city to bluff another new species away from the Federation.

These captives looked like what ferrets crossed with angels would aspire to be: blond hair, cheekbones like pyramids hidden under skin that went from bare to fur as dense as moleskin, fur on the points of the cheekbones and along the jaw. Dense eyelashes matted with gum now gave them a hurt look. I pulled the sheet off the male; he wore a brown Federation-style tunic and pants. To conceal species differences, our tunics covered our middle leg joints, and the pants were baggy. The male Sharwan also wore a shock bracelet and a second ID bracelet on his left arm.

Marianne said, “The female’s right wrist is broken.” She made a move to pull the sheet off the female, but the baby lashed out at her.

One of the Shiny Blacks from the Institute of Control said, “If you’d go out for a few hours, we’ll finish the installation.”

The other one said, “Your black opaque-skinned con-specific plays music at Wanderers in the Green Light Building, three parks inland.”

It took me a second to realize they meant Sam Turner, the black man who’d been married to Marianne’s sister, Molly. I wondered if the Shiny Blacks made up a name for us, too, like the window-skinned ones. Marianne said, “Yangchenla will probably be there.”

Funny thing, even though I loved Marianne better, I didn’t really like seeing Yangchenla happy with another man. “
She can be a real bitch, too
,” I said in English, “
but I miss human music
.”

Human music was what Sam Turner played. Turner’s training came both from Oakland black clubs and equal opportunity laws bearing down on Juilliard. When he was really hot, all of what we humans could be came through on his harpsichord, his digital piano, or his woman’s Tibetan drums. Black man, married to an Asian woman born on Karst, Sam denied all limits other than the purely human.

He was lucky. Humans these past two years were a fad, considered representatives of a culture on the cusp between the primitive and the techno-bore future where all the machines on all the planets evolved into one chain of forms.

Sam said, privately, that humans had passed the cusp, around the time of Mozart, and had begun teching down toward functional forms ever since. He didn’t date the music he played for the cusp-culture lovers, though.

Marianne said, “I miss Sam.”

The Shiny Blacks watched us decide to go hear Sam and his group. “Get your rainclothes,” the female with her tiny breasts just under her clavicles said. “We’ll stay until you get back.”

So we left the Shiny Black couple with the unconscious Sharwani and went out in raincoats and clear plastic hats through the wet parks behind the buildings. One park over, odd lights bounced through the raindrops onto plants that looked like red glass or brown dead things, evolved under suns harsher than ours.

By the time we got to the Wanderers’ Club building, I felt ambivalent about seeing other humans, especially ex-lovers with ex-brothers-in-law.

The Green Light Building front was made of white tile with chrome inlays under a writhing mass of green neon tubes, with enough red lights to intensify the green for those species who saw that low in the light spectrum. I put my hand in front on a dark tube and felt heat—visible as infrared to some species. Marianne said, “I’ve seen buildings like this before.”

“They just opened a few weeks ago,” I said.

“In San Francisco,” Marianne said.

Green light tubes covered the first two stories of the building, twisting, writhing, yet not so brilliant as to be obnoxious to the people living on the street. Green Light Building housed clubs instead of people; the lobby was jammed and full of sweat and gland odors of over fifty species. The graphics for Wanderers lit up over the elevator, and we filed in with other species evolved from tropical brachiators. A different club light lit over the second elevator and a mob of crepuscular-types got on that one, large eyes reflecting the lights. Then our elevator doors closed, and we began going up, a couple standing in the corner muttering about us being the same species as the musician. Turner Musician—they’d translated his name into the closest Karst One equivalent.

Marianne touched me on the side and smiled when I looked at her. She said, “He’s still family, really.”

The elevator doors opened, and I saw Yangchenla in a red shiny sheath dress talking to an Ahram, who ground inch-long molars and rubbed his skull crest as he looked at her. He was almost completely bald-headed, not just along the crest ridge. Yangchenla slid a data card into a hand computer and began writing on the scribe pad. I figured she was hustling a better deal for the gig. Sam came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist, then noticed us and slid his hands up under her breasts and smiled, showing teeth.

Another Ahram said to us, “Chip?”

I shuffled through my cards, handed him the credit chip, and said, “Both on this.”

Yangchenla seemed to have cut her deal by the time I looked back. The Ahram's crest was quite red, and even his scalp seemed flushed a little. Yangchenla scribed a bit more on her computer; he smiled a little, and the red left his crest skin. Sam unwound his arms from her body and went up to the music stand. Two Tibetans were waiting in the dark there.

Marianne said, “Big crowd.” We threaded through the bodies and sat down, the only humans in the audience. “How expensive was it?”

“All right for them,” I said, suspecting Yangchenla got Sam a percentage of the gate. “Half a day’s minimum wage for each of us.” I couldn’t really say what that would be in dollars, maybe twenty-five each, as minimum buys more here than minimum would have bought on Earth.

Marianne said, “It’s okay if mood changers are included.” The one Karst word she used included all legal chemical mood changers: drinks, drugs, electric apparatuses, vibrators, the works.

I said, “Dinner should be.”

Sam sat down at his harpsichord and played Bach. The stage under him began to glow, throwing shadows and lights on his face that made him look almost ghoulish. The Bach piece jerked out of the harpsichord, electrically nervous, each note cut separate, more space between the notes than Bach usually got on Earth.

Marianne breathed in deeply when Sam segued into jazz made from broken bits of the Bach. The Tibetans beat drum beats like little bombs. My mouth went dry. Complex aggressive music. Human music.

The music cut its closure in the air. I almost clapped Terran style, didn’t, then wished I had. Marianne leaned her lips near my ear and said, “I’d like a tape of that to play when I’m nervous about the Sharwani.”

The house lights came up and small fuzzy creatures like serious teddy bears began bringing around small vials of liquids. One of them paused at our table and backed off to take a photo of us with Sam in the background, then went about its business.

Marianne said, “Somehow, I don’t think we could ever be an ordinary human couple.”

I was about to say,
what happens if we’re contacted,
   
but realized if Earth did make contact with the Federation, we’d still be odd, rescued by aliens from a criminal record in my case and post-doctoral boredom in Marianne’s. I said instead, “I just want to be a complete me.”

She jerked her head back and looked at me as if I’d surprised her. “Are parts missing?”

I shrugged. Sam began with a tape—Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” The audience began to seem almost afraid
of
us, then Sam and his sidemen took the Wagnerian motifs and twisted them, almost mocking these aliens for the fears that Wagner stirred. I looked over at Marianne and saw her teeth glinting behind her lips.

I realized I was angry and didn’t quite know why.” I wondered about us humans.

When we got back, the female Sharwan was pacing the room, her head hair flared like a Persian cat’s ruff, darker hair showing underneath, looking like undyed roots. She looked around when we came in. The Shiny Black who was awake said, “The male and the child seem calmer.”

Marianne asked, “Do they understand our language?”

“Some Wrengu. Karriaagzh’s team captured them on Ersh’s planet.”

I said, “I know Wrengu.” Ersh was my first contact person from the Wrengee, a creature halfway between lizard and feathered bipedal sapient, scales the size of saucers along his sides that he could raise, eyes like a kitten’s, that dark blue, but shaped wrong. “Maybe it’s only fair that I have to deal with these people since the First Contact team I was on couldn’t stop them.”

Marianne said, “We both have to deal with them.”

The Black Shiny male woke up finally and said, “Ersh wants to meet them. We’re not sure that’s a good idea.” Ersh was a reptilian sophont that I’d negotiated with from First Contact with his planet.

Marianne said, “Where’s Karl?”

“In his room. The feathered nursery mother stayed until he fell asleep.”

Marianne said in English, “
He loves to cuddle up to feathers. I’m just not fluffy enough
.”

The female Sharwan leaned her hands against the polycarb, the one in a cast looking bruised under the plastic, and pushed. She trembled and then spat at us, a projectile spitting that sounded like a rock, not liquid, against the barrier.

“We’ve left language tapes,” the Shiny Black male said. “Explain to them what the situation is.” He and his mate left us then with our captives.

The situation was that the Federation species alone out­-numbered the Sharwani more than five hundred to one. That wasn’t the ratio of the populations compared to each other, which was worse for the Sharwani. Some Sharwani wanted to set up a Sharwani-dominated planets system. Ersh told me five Sharwani helped him escape the twenty thousand other Sharwani controlling his planet. It wouldn’t have been fair to the good guys to run a genocide operation on them, even if the Federation did such things.

And the poor-ass Sharwani thought they were fighting a war.

Marianne said, “I can’t sleep yet.”

“They can’t get out.”

She and the female Sharwan locked eyes, like two pit-bull bitches.

I woke up with Karl’s fingers gripping my chest hair. Marianne was sleeping beside me, her hair spread all over her face. Karl said, “The Sharwani can’t get Mom, can they?”

“They’re caged behind armored windows.”

He looked at me as if used to lying daddies. I couldn’t remember being so sophisticated at seven, but did remember eleven-year-olds like little men before puberty scrambled their first maturity. “Karl, we’ll leave them behind the polycarbonate barrier—the armored windows—until we get back.”

“It’s like restraint rooms. One of our daddies was in a Control restraint room once.”

Which species, I wanted to ask him. “One of the people in the children’s group?”

He looked down at his nails, then up at me with Marianne’s dark eyes, his mouth straight, muscles locked against expression. “We’re not supposed to know.”

“Keep your secret then.”

He smiled and said, “Okay, it was the pug-faced male. He got in a fight with another pug-faced male. Nothing serious, only it’s gotten Sul worried.”

“Bir’s son? He’s…” I remembered him as more like a domestic animal than a sapient baby, walking on four legs, as precocial as a baby pig.

“He’s learning fast now that he’s walking like us. Dad, he says we treat him funny, but he just this year got smart enough to talk.”

“Try to forget that he was more like a pet once.”

“Okay, but he’s afraid to grow up and not be like our other daddies. Male Domicans fight a lot.”

“Tell him he’ll be happiest being what he is…. No, don’t tell him anything, just be his friend.”

Karl got out of bed as if he had been surprised to act like such a baby and wanted nobody to mention anything about sleeping with us. “I liked him better as a pet. Now he talks back.”

“Live with it,” I said, getting my uniform out. Marianne opened her eyes and smiled. I suspected she’d been listening all along. I turned to her and said, “You going to be okay? I could see if Black Amber could talk to me in the city.”

“I’ll have the nursery group here a couple of days running, so I won’t be alone with them,” Marianne said. She pulled down her nightgown as she unwound herself from the covers. Yangchenla was never such a restless sleeper. “But does Karl have to go?” Marianne’s breasts rolled under her gown as she stood up. She came up close and didn’t kiss me, just breathed on me with her arms around my neck, crossed at the forearms. I pulled her right up to my lips and heard Karl groan behind us as we kissed.

I pulled back and said,
“Sappy,
huh?”

He didn’t understand the English word, but got the tone. “You said species language limits brain development,” he said, then he worried the inside of his lower lip with his teeth. “I don’t want to be here alone with them.”

“Not even with your mother?”

“The child one can get out of the littlest door. His people bombed Ersh’s planet.”