Human to Human (21 page)

I asked, “Have you announced that we’re out there?”

“Not yet,” Cromwell said. “We don’t want to panic the civilian population.”

I could identify with that, not trusting general humans myself.

“Alex’s friends organized a defense committee,” Friese said. “They want to know what the charges are.” Cromwell looked surprised. Somehow I knew in Berkeley Alex must have been able to find others besides Carstairs to confide in, humans who’d accept him for himself.

Friese said, “Tom doesn’t seem surprised by that.”

I said, “Alex is unorthodox for an Ahram.”

“Ahram, Ahram. He never told us what he was. Does he really look like that?”

I hesitated, then remembered I wasn’t supposed to lie, and fuck Alex anyway. “He had his skull crest surgically removed, but otherwise that’s what he looks like.”

“Skull crest?” Cromwell said.

“Their women like them, so it’s a secondary sexual characteristic that’s been bred for.”

“Do they…does it…oh?” Cromwell imagined the implications and uses of a skull crest.

I shut up. The plane taxied to a covered dock where another gray stretch limo waited under the roof, surrounded by people with military stances dressed in civilian clothes. I got out and walked toward the car. It had South Carolina plates and a Charleston sticker, but we weren’t near the ocean.

“Don’t get in that one,” Friese said. “The one behind it.”

The muddy plates made the green sedan look like a drug dealer’s contact junker, but then I realized it was a Mercedes electric. The roof kept anyone above us from seeing which car I got into.

As we pulled out, the windows went opaque on the inside. The driver watched an instrument panel.

“Do you have cars like this on Karst?” Friese asked.

“We have some automatic lanes,” I said. I wondered if they’d shift interrogators on me, or if we’d all sleep for a while next. “Most sapients get bored if the driving is always done for them.”

They didn’t say anything. We drove for miles, then stopped. When I got out of the car, my legs were stiff and it was completely light outside, traffic noise in the air: rush hour, about eight-thirty, I guessed. But I couldn’t see anything except tree tips beyond a high brick fence around three acres of front yard that sloped up to the fence. In Virginia the builders would have put the huge house on the rise; here it was hidden by a small pond. The house wasn’t as huge as a high-class Yauntry hunting lodge, but it was big compared to most human houses I’d seen—about three stories, a copper mansard roof, brick with stone framing the windows.

“The CIA wanted to take you to northern Virginia,” Friese said, “but no, we had this here, and it’s surrounded by our people.”

The man who came out of the house wore a tweed country suit like the English advertise in
Country Life.
He had blond hair, blue eyes, and a long nose. I hated him instantly, a gut reaction. I remembered a black kid I knew in high school using
long nose
to mean
white.

Now I was seeing the ultimate long nose, a true WASP, one of the right Tidewater people, not one of my kind of Celtic-Cherokee mountain hybrids. Time to find the war clubs, time to go on a cattle raid, hide the women. A monster with eyes that sky shone through was invading.

He kept coming up to me, inside my personal space, then just looked at me and stepped back. “Why did they take you?” he said. Precisely a Tidewater person; how astute of them to turn me over to one of those.

“I tried to help one of theirs who was stranded.”

“Tried?”

“My brother shot him.”

“And you took your brother away to an alien jail?”

“No, we tried to help Warren.”

“Tried, again.”

“Warren, he killed himself. Nothing in the Universe could get him off drugs.”

The man’s thin lips moved into a slight smile. “You mean that literally.”

I shrugged, a human imitation of an alien imitating my wife’s natural shrug.

“I’m James Angleton.”

I recognized an old CIA name, obviously now a work name, and wanted to say,
and you can call me Red Clay,
but said, “I’m Tom Gentry. I was told to be completely candid with human authorities. I’m a contact officiator with the Federation of Sapient Planets.”

Federation of Sapient Planets
sounds better in Karst languages. In English, the phrase made us all smile. I felt a little less like a criminal they’d caught.

“And have you officiated for the Federation before?” Angleton said. “Done it, not just tried.”

“Yes,” I said. “And one species I helped bring into the Federation was initially quite hostile.” I realized the implications of what I’d said when I saw Angleton’s thin lips twist slightly, then go rigid.
Yeah, we think humans are potentially hostile.
“We humans have an odd reputation in the Federation.”
Yeah, I killed another sapient in what I thought was self-defense and was sent to you for doing it.

Angleton’s head bobbed slightly as if I’d surprised him with my quick read of his tiny lip flourish. He said, “And you’re bitter over that, yourself.” Both of us, I expected, would strain our face muscles over this interrogation, overriding our natural expressions.

Friese stayed in the car. Cromwell and the Marines got out and began walking toward the house with us. When we were about ten feet from the front door, an Air Force lieutenant and three enlisted men came out of the shrubbery and saluted Cromwell.

I asked, “Is Friese coming back?”

“Yes, but later.” Angleton smiled. A stocky man with slightly Asian eyes opened the door as if he’d been watching through a hidden camera. He wore a black suit with long white shirt cuffs showing, and cuff links. He and Angleton bent toward each other slightly. “This is Codresque,” Angleton said. “Show Tom Gentry to his room, Codresque.”

Pages of etiquette books flashed before my mind’s eye, the human manners Black Amber had forced me to study along with deconstruction and Claude Levi­-Strauss. The books told me that I was introduced this way to servants, but Codresque didn’t seem quite like a servant, gray around the temples, face crinkled in a smile, eyes like black beads.

As I followed Codresque through the entry hall, by a staircase all fluted wood and figured carpet, to an elevator, I remembered an anecdote of the American student sent home from the French aristocratic family for not knowing his forks and being too gauche to hide his lack of their kind of polish. Manners in humans cut as well as joined.

When we got in the elevator, Codresque said, “Three,” The doors closed and we went up. He added, without my asking, “The elevator only knows my voice.”

The upstairs was shabby compared to what I’d seen of the downstairs. He showed me to a small bedroom with thick drapes hanging over the windows. I remembered Karriaagzh checking the windows of his room on Yauntry, when we’d been negotiating with them, and suspected that here, too, the windows were barred, but I wasn’t going to look with Codresque watching.

“The aliens sent your measurements. We’ll provide your clothes,” Codresque said.
“
I’ll
bring them up in the morning.”

“I need a business suit and a dinner suit if we’re going to have any formal meetings,” I said, having wondered where my luggage was. “Or I can wear my Federation uniform.”

“That?” Codresque said in such a tone that I wasn’t sure what his implications were.

“It is a true uniform because it makes all of us more uniform, covers the body shape, the major joints. I have a decorations sash that goes with it for formal occasions.”

“Yes, Mr. Gentry. They sent the sash with your extra tunics and pants.” He left, locking my door. I went to the drapes and began to lift them, but not enough to see if the windows were barred or screened. I didn’t want to know. I wished Marianne and Karl were with me.

Codresque came back, a nightshirt folded over his left arm. “Here’s a sleeping shirt. You will give me that uniform to be cleaned and pressed.” He sure wasn’t sounding like a servant now. I realized this was a modified skin search, not the strip, lift, and spread of jail, but just a little check to see if I’d brought any medium-size weapons. I unbelted the tunic, pulled it off over my head, took off my shoes and socks, then unzipped the fly and pulled the pants off. Codresque turned the pants inside out and said, “The pants are European.”

I said, “American. The Federation lets us tailor species cuts around the genitals if we want. The tunic covers that.”

“Europeans invented the trousers,” Codresque said. I stopped undressing and stood in my briefs, which I’d picked up in Boston last time I’d been on Earth. Codresque stretched out his hand and flicked his fingers back against his palm.

I took off the briefs and said, “Most of us don’t really want to see each other’s naked alien bodies.”

He sighed and handed me the nightshirt. It was like a hospital gown—only to the knees—except that it buttoned down the front. I said, “I’ll need a shaving kit in the morning.”

“Certainly, Mr. Gentry.” He left and locked me in. I opened one of the other doors and saw the toilet with a washbowl standing beside it. The third door was to a closet full of empty wooden hangers. I pulled one off the rod and hefted it in my hand. It might make a weapon against one man. I sighed at myself and put it back.

Who was I here? The teenage criminal assistant dope manufacturer? A deculturated human? I closed the closet door and went back to see if the debriefing team had left me anything to read.

Nothing. I sat in a chair by the bed, wondering who I was, and then realized what Karst had made of me: a person who knew the right English, exercised to the physical grace we tended to see more in other species than ourselves. Black Amber said once that grace in a creature worked almost as well as manners. My adult life was formed by Karst, not Camp 28.

A substandard-dialect thought slid into my head:
Yeah, Tom, tell it like you wanna.

Don’t, I said to that thought. I am a contact officiator. Karst made me, not Karst, the Federation made me come here.

I pulled back the sheets and lay down. My last conscious thought was that I should get up and turn out the light, and then I dreamed confusing dreams about Marianne and Karl David, Alex accusing me of something.

In the morning I woke up when Codresque brought in an electric razor and breakfast—covered dishes on a tray. As I shaved, he went out for my suit and briefs.

“Thank you,” I said when he returned.

“We heat the plates, so it should stay warm,” he said.

Right, very proper way to serve food. One book recommended using a microwave. I nodded as if we’d done that all my life in Floyd, then felt ridiculous, but then how would it sound to say,
we have studied your human customs in deacquisitioned library books?

Codresque smiled. I turned around to pull on the briefs he’d given me and then dressed as if foreigners brought me my clothes every morning. “When will you call me for the interrogation?”

He stopped smiling and said, “At any time.”

I sat down and looked at what they’d put on the tray. Eggs, grits, biscuits, coffee—the semotics of that were blunt enough. I said, “I guess it might be a while before I have
villag
for first meal again.”

He nodded as though he knew precisely how Yauntry pseudo-bean jelly tasted and left. I wondered if I was reading too much into the breakfast menu and felt vaguely bad-mannered.

After breakfast, no one came for the dishes for what seemed like hours. I finally tried my door to see if I had been locked. Either the knob stuck and then turned, or someone, watching me through a camera I hadn’t bothered to look for, unlocked the door as I turned the knob. The door opened, and I walked out onto the landing.

I felt acutely watched, trying not to act sneaky or hesitant.

Codresque met me in front of the elevator and said, “There’s a bell button in your room. And you can use the stairs now.” We went downstairs.

I said, “I’d like something to read if Mr. Angleton isn’t ready to talk to me yet.”

“Perhaps you’d like to walk in the garden?”

“No, I’d rather read. I’m still tired from the trip.” Angleton came up to us now, dressed in white shorts and a white knit shirt without any brand insignia on it.

“Tennis, anyone?” He said it as if asking was a joke.

I wondered if I wasn’t feeling more stiff than tired. “Could you teach me?”

“Humans don’t play tennis on Karst?”

“No, James, we play chess and ride racing bicycles.”

“Well, let me hit a few balls against the machine, then I’ll see.”

Codresque said, “He also wants to read.”

“Let him have the
New York Times.”

Out the window, I saw the guards disguised as gardeners moving through the foundation bushes. Codresque, for an instant not at all a servant, smiled at me and went to the foyer. He came back with a small computer screen on a tray and said, “You’d be more comfortable upstairs. I’ll bring your tennis things when you’ve read enough of the
Times.”