Human to Human (6 page)

“Aren’t they embarrassed?”

“No, they’re completely feathered and, see, the toilets are opaque. We get off three parks from home, but they’re just small parks,” I said. “Are you okay?”

“I think so,” Thridai said. “The domesticity bothers me.”

I thought I understood. As a bird mother chased down and whacked a youngster about ten stories overhead, we reached the bus stop and got off. Again, the rubber band sound.

We walked into Lucid Moment District, Thridai not saying anything more. At my apartment building, I went into the ground-floor provision shop run by a city Gwyng woman, Awingthin. Thridai stopped at the threshold, then came in the shop himself.

“Hi, Awingthin,” I said. “Do you have any extra Sharwani foodstuffs?”

She looked over at Thridai and said in Karst Two, “(Out free) he’s allowed?”

Thridai’s throat bo’inged again and he said, “Yes.”

“Sorry/didn’t know you’d had a computer installed. Well, yes, I have food for you. Red-Clay, how is Cadmium?”

“I haven’t seen him in a while.”

“He should visit soon.” Her nostril clapped and the muscles under her facial wrinkles shifted. “And for you, this.” She handed me a slab of plastic-wrapped chocolate.

I gave her my credit card and she subtracted the purchases, letting me see the reading before she pulled out the card and handed it back to me. I’d just gotten another first-contact percentage from Yauntry duties, about two hundred minimum-wage days.

Thridai and I both reached for the food package, but the Gwyng put it in his hands. When we were on the elevator, he asked, “Don’t you have small elevators for the food? You’d never have to go into the shop.”

“We enjoy going in the shop,” I said. “Awingthin is a friend of ours.”

“Are my
conspecifics angry?” he asked, his eyes puffy again.

“What behaviors show anger?”

He groaned and asked, “You can’t empathize?”

“We’re semiotic animals. If we know what a behavior means, we certainly can empathize.”

“How do you learn what it means?”

“Thridai, it’s like your amusement sound. You have to explain sometimes. We’re not like lower animals; our empathy isn’t innate.” We got in the elevator.

As the elevator doors closed, he said, “Language is innate to the Universe.”

“What about the Gwyngs?”

He said, as we got out on my floor, “The computer does faster what we could figure out with time.”

“Gwyngs claim Karst Two doesn’t begin to convey the meaning they can express in their own languages,” I said. “We eat in the back room.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I can’t get into a Gwyng’s brain and prove they’re lying,” I said. As we passed down the south hall going toward the kitchen, I saw people with Marianne across the atrium shaft in the other hall. Thridai didn’t seem to notice anything, but I smelled something like a dog’s smell. Marianne waved, and she and the people with her joined us in the kitchen.

Then I saw the lion. Not a lion, but maybe a cross between a lion and a large ape, with a bobtail. It stopped and crouched. Behind me, Thridai squeaked.

One of the people with Marianne said to the beast, “No. Okay.” I looked up from the beast to the ungainly sort of bipedal ape creature, with motley fur, giving this thing orders.

“Marianne, this is Thridai. He’s here to help us with the other Sharwani.”

Marianne nodded to him and said, “I’m here alone half the time, so I’ve hired a Quara. These people are his handlers.”

The Quara sat down and nibbled off a claw sheath—huge claws—and then looked back at its handlers as if asking, who do I eat first?

“Can this one leave the apartment?” the handler who’d settled the beast said, pointing to Thridai.

“Yes,” I said, thinking maybe this would be better than having Karriaagzh, who’d lusted after even a Jerek, hanging around Marianne.

“This one, smell, memorize. Not like others. Don’t control him.”

The beast shrugged and padded up to Thridai and snuffed hard at his crotch, then his fingers. Then it said, “Yes.”

I said, “How intelligent is it?”

The Quara looked at me, then at Marianne, who said, “His name is Hrif. He’s intelligent enough.”

Hrif looked back at me and said, “Yes, Hrif-self.” The handlers talked to each other in their own language and then to Hrif. The one who’d been talking said, “Keep the sentences simple.”

Hrif said, “Go sleep?”

Marianne said, “Yes.”

“Miss you,” Hrif said to his handlers.

“Smell this one,” the second handler said, coming up to touch me. “He also gives orders.” Hrif swung around and snuffed at me and then padded back down the hall.

Thridai asked Marianne, “Why do you think we’re so dangerous?”

Marianne said, “The female tried to claw out a friend’s eye.” She didn’t seem too happy about Thridai being here, her arms out from her sides, her legs bent slightly.

“Easy, everyone,” I said. “Let’s go talk to the Sharwani.”

Marianne said something, and Thridai answered her in the same language. She said, “So I am speaking correctly.”

“Maybe the wrong language for them,” Thridai said.

“No, I’ve heard them talking. That’s why I got Hirf. I’m not a xenophobe, really, but the female is very angry.”

There was, I realized, a difference between xenophobia and the sane practice of caution around strangers, regardless of species. Thridai nibbled at his fingertips, narrow thin tongue tapping out between his teeth, then said, “Let’s see them, then.”

We walked up the north hall and saw Hrif lying over the threshold of my room, his massive paws out in front like a Sphinx. At the polycarb wall, the three Sharwani strained to see him.

Thridai whistled air against his teeth. The female turned and grabbed her mate’s shoulder. They began talking Sharwanisa to him, hands scrabbling against the glass as if they wanted to touch him, the female’s wrist cast bumping against it.

Marianne said, “I hadn’t noticed before, but they all have big fingertips.”

“Yes,” I said. “They like to touch, and they see infrared. A polycarb wall is sensory deprivation to them.”

Thridai said, “They’re only minor officials in the occupation. Why don’t you let them out?”

I said, “We can’t let them go just on your word.”

Thridai talked to them some more. I wondered if we could trust him. He turned back to me and asked, “Won’t the guard beast protect you? And you have control bracelets. I wore one before they installed the skullbone computer.”

Marianne said, “They have to learn Karst One.”

I thought about being in jail and looked at the female, who quivered, hands pressed on the glass over her head.

“Only on this floor,” I said, then went to lock the elevator.

As I passed him, Hrif got up, heavy hips swinging from side to side, and padded up. Marianne said, “Stop fast moves.”

“Him, too?” Hrif said, gesturing with his head at Thridai.

Thridai said, “I’ll accept that.”

Marianne said, “Yes.”

Hrif said, “Nervous. Dumb.” He lowered his haunches first, then his forelegs and shoulders, and peeled another claw. I came back and unlocked the door to the clear wall we had the Sharwani behind.

When they came out, trembling, clutching each other, I felt like a bully. The female said in Wrengu, “Go we outside?”

“We want you to learn our language.”

“Your female knows our language.”

“Some,” Marianne said. She spoke a few words of Sharwanisa then, and the female looked down and stroked her son’s back with her fingers.

Thridai said, “Her name is Chi’ursemisa. He is Hurdai. The child is Daiur.”

“Why us?” Chi’ursemisa asked in Wrengu.

“We need to understand your species so we can calm it down,” I said.

Hurdai said something and bo’ingd deep in his throat. Marianne whispered to me, “He said, ‘I told you we are samples.’”

Daiur said, in Karst One, “Where’s Karl? I’m hungry.”

I was as surprised as I’d been when the guard beast had Spoken. Marianne said, “Karl’s visiting friends tonight.”

“We’ve got enough for everyone,” I said.

Hurdai said something. Thridai translated this time, “He’d like to cook.”

“I’d rather he didn’t get near the burners,” I said. Thridai spoke again in Sharwanisa, then Hurdai said something more and they talked a bit without translating.

Hrif moved his joints and legs again and came after us, head down, sputtering about duty, his bobtail swinging like a club. I wondered if his kind naturally knew speech or if a computer translated animal sentiments into speech. He settled by corner cabinets we didn’t use that much. Marianne said, “Fine. Good.”

“Hungry, too,” Hrif said, without raising his head.

Thridai asked, “Is this a standard living quarters layout?”

“Yes,” Marianne said. She went out, leaving me with all these people, and brought back Quara food like dog kibble in a plastic can. Hrif ate while she ran water into a bowl for him.

“Shouldn’t you feed us first?” Chi’ursemisa asked. Thridai talked to her and then said, “We’re from the same group Shar. Shar means The Planet, but I expect everyone calls their planet that before space travel.”

I wondered if they knew each other before capture. “Who will cook?” Marianne asked, beyond caring whether the Sharwani knew each other before or just went to the same museums.

“If you’ll let me, I will,” Thridai said. “We need an oil suitable to us and a shallow pan.” He took the food that we’d been feeding Hurdai and Chi’ursemisa, with the same oil, and did entirely different things with it than we’d been doing, crisping vegetables I’d boiled, leaving the meat almost raw, and rolling out their bread into big floppy wafers much like the plastic discs they’d used to pick up their food. When he made tea, he left the leaves in.

Marianne said, just to me, “Obviously, what we’ve fixed for them has been like prison fare.”

Worse, I thought. I wondered what Ahrams or Barcons would have done with corn meal and beans if they’d tried to feed me what I usually ate back in Virginia. Beans baked hard as stones?

Chi’ursemisa took the first plate and touched the food with her fingers, then began babbling to Thridai between scoops of food on her flat bread. He looked at us, hair flaring on his head slightly, then handed Hurdai and Daiur their plates. Chi’ursemisa kept talking.

“What is she saying?” I asked Thridai.

“She’s just talking,” he said. “Nothing strategic.”

“We didn’t mean to fix their food wrong,” Marianne said.

“I told them you didn’t,” Thridai said. He fixed his own plate, and the Sharwani all sat on the floor to eat. He looked up at us and said, “The platform you have is too high and not big enough.”

He was looking at the table. “Oh,” Marianne said. I microwaved some human food pouch stews, and we both sat down on the floor to join them, eating with spoons. Chi’ursemisa kept talking, sometimes articulating when she inhaled.

Marianne finally interrupted and said something in Sharwanisa. Hurdai’s eyelids swelled, but Thridai stroked under Hurdai’s lashes with his thumb.

Hrif went rigidly alert, utterly silent, his club tail raised off the floor.

Daiur said, “Mother hates us around all the time.” Chi’ursemisa stopped talking and stared at her son.

I wasn’t sure whether she understood or not. Thridai spoke Sharwanisa to Hurdai who spread his fingers and moved his hands at the wrists side to side, a wider movement angle than a human ulna and radius could make against human wrist bones. They both looked at Chi’ursemisa, who put her hands over her eyes, palms against the flesh under the eyes.

Hurdai looked at Marianne and spoke Shariwanisa. She answered him and said to me, “They want know what we want. I said we can only explain in our common language, so they have to learn that first.”

Chi’ursemisa said, in poor Karst One, “Beyond that?”

“We need to learn about you and you about us,” I said.

“Jailers,” she said in Wrengu.

“You jailed the Wrengee,” I told her.

She put her hands back over her eyes and didn’t answer, then asked, “Touch I you?”

Marianne said, “The Quara might be nervous.”

“Touch, no hurt,” Hrif said from his comer.

Marianne and I looked at each other, nervous about who should get touched. Marianne moved her legs around to a kneeling position and sidled up to Chi’ursemisa. Chi’ursemisa’s fingertips swelled as she raised her hands and put them on the top of Marianne’s head. The fingers rotated slightly as Chi’ursemisa brought her hands down the side of Marianne’s face. They stopped at the ears, then the index fingers circled in Marianne’s ear canal while the thumbs and other fingers felt around her outer ears.

Marianne giggled slightly, as if Chi’ursemisa tickled her. Chi’ursemisa pulled her fingers away from Marianne’s ears and began to feel her mouth.

I asked, “Do you need to do this?”