Becoming Alien (11 page)

Isolation seemed to distress Black Amber, who called me to her room a couple of times. But when I came in, she stared at me and didn’t speak. Once she said, through the machine, “Still a monster, I see.”

As she got better, she exercised with free weights and I spotted for her. But otherwise I was bored, among the static holograms. “Teach me your languages,” I’d ask, but all the aliens refused, saying that would interfere with the language operations.

Finally, the Gwyngs tussled and Black Amber beat them all. “You bluff bone-breaks,” Cadmium accused her.

She looked at him and koo’ed.

“So we’re ready to go back to Karst,” Tesseract said, watching Gwyngs squirming bodies together, Black Amber top Gwyng, social again.

Black Amber came out in a green uniform embroidered with real gold bound up in the piping around the neck and sleeves. Her body and head hair, freshly washed, picked up red highlights. I still saw scars on her face where the Barcons had re-built it, but the puffiness was down, the Gwyng wrinkles deeply grooved from her nose and eye comers.
Slots for air when she presses her face against a blood animal,
I realized.

“Pre-cadet uniform,” Tesseract said, handing me a pair of baggy white pants with wrap strings, a little hand riveter to use for making string holes, and a white tunic that came down to my knees.

Black Amber silently showed me how to fold the pants front, where to put the rivets. Then she bumped elbows with me for the first time, and oo’ed, just a little.

Tesseract said, “Welcome, Pre-Cadet Red Clay. Mica gave that as your Academy name.”

“Being a cadet is not a delight,” Cadmium said.

There’s no sense of distance with space gates. Instead of bumping dozens of light-years from gate to gate, I might have been in a boxcar, being coupled and uncoupled in switching yards. The Gwyngs, frustrated after getting me instead of rescuing their own, slumped together and stared at the walls. At a gate a light-day from the Academy and Institutes planet, I heard more radio chatter in alien languages, clunking sounds against our ship. Tesseract led me through a grey plastic tunnel as we switched to a dual-drive ship.

“I want normal space time,” Black Amber said with the box. Steel slabs pulled back into the walls.

Tesseract turned off the cabin lights so as not to dim the stars. “There’s Karst’s sun,” he said to me. “Looks tiny out here.” The Gwyngs looked out briefly and went to the bunk room.

Around the sky, I saw huge puffs of stars and glowing gas. In the near space, tiny space-suited figures worked around hundreds of space transport pods, from small one-man diving-bell-like units to huge round container vessels as big as moons. Welding torches glittered like dust motes.

“Black Amber wanted a week on reaction drive, but since she’s asleep, I’ll get us a bit closer quicker,” Tesseract said. He closed the shutters and sat down at the controls. We lurched again.

Then Tesseract cut off the gravity to let me float, pulled back the shutters, and rolled the ship slightly. Under us, I saw the curve of a big planet with a ring like Saturn’s. We drifted closer, and I saw lumps in the ring—coarse rock cobble. Tesseract talked to another alien and waited for the time-lagged replies.

“Always charming to see someone see space the first time,” Tesseract said as he started the rocket drive. “Most of us see the emptiness as a nuisance, not part of the structure. But for you, all this is powerfully charming, yes?”

“Oh, yes.”

“It’s still the universe that built us, even if we evade its distances with our agile minds.”

While I was still staring into space, the Barcons came in. “We’ve got to continue working out your biologic,” the big male Barcon said.

“What do I call you?” I asked.

He looked at me without changing his expression. Tesseract smiled. “Ah, Barcon, he has to have a name. Human nature.”

“S’wam.”

“The Earth alias, plus the Barcon form for male,” Tesseract explained.

“We don’t get too close to our medical subjects,” the female Barcon said stiffly.

I followed the Barcons to the medical bay where S’wam punched tiny holes all over my back, dabbing each with a different chemical. “We need to know what chemicals to use when we operate on you for language.”

“Operation for language?”

“When we put in the skull computer and make space in your language center for new languages,” S’wam told me as he rolled plastic film over my sore back.

I was going
what
inside my soon-to-be-violated skull.

“I’d spray to ease the sting,” the female Barcon said, “but we want pure reactions. We’ll wait until we get to Karst before doing brain tissue biopsies. Sleep now.”

“I’ll try,” I managed to say. The cats squalled in their boxes. Was I just another exotic pet, I wondered, and how could Barcons be confused with black humans with their slanted eyes, skinny jaws with too many angles, noses that wriggled.

In the bunk room the Gwyngs were sleeping, twined around each other, Black Amber in the center. The Barcons pulled down a narrow bunk for me on the wall across from the Gwyngs’ large pallet.

“We brought human drugs and beer to make you sleep better,” the female Barcon said. “We are all very tired and want you to be passive.”

“Some drugs and beer are dangerous.”

“Aspirin?” the male Barcon said, handing me a cold beer and a couple of little white pills that looked exotic in this environment.

“Thank you,” I said, sipping the beer, swallowing two aspirins. “I’ll sleep better now.” My back ached. “Good night, S’wam.”

“No real night here. Sleep.”

I lay down on my stomach on the bunk and looked for the covers, but all I saw was a little rheostat that made the space warmer or cooler. “Okay,” I mumbled.

I looked back at Black Amber, whose face showed thin scars in the dim crosslight. Tesseract came in, and I whispered to him, “I’d be more comfortable with a sheet.”

He handed me a cross between a sheet and a blanket, made of paper, then crawled into his own bunk, big body twisting under a similar sheet.
But they aren’t like paper, exactly.
I thought,
they don’t rustle.

Quiet, disposable alien sheet. I could hardly relax under its strange texture, but finally I dozed off, dreaming of deer mocking wolves. Waking with a jolt, I saw the Barcons together in a bunk, softly murmuring to each other. Tesseract was gone, but the Gwyngs were still sleeping.

Must have woke me when Tesseract changed shifts with the Barcons,
I thought. I slept again and dreamed horrible murky dreams about a cat who shot at me. Finally, I woke up again, turned up the rheostat-controlled heat, and lay there, afraid to look at the aliens right away.

“Can I see your back now?” S’wam asked as soon as I stretched. I almost rolled over, but remembered my back just in time, so wriggled out, trying to keep from landing on that sore skin. The Gwyngs had gone, but Tesseract was asleep again now, snoring faintly, his mouth open, big teeth faintly visible. I pulled on the white pre-cadet pants and, sweating a little, followed the Barcons to the medical bay.

S’wam let me see my back through mirrors. Three test holes that had begun to itch looked red, while four others had turned black. S’wam ran a tickling rod around the seven messy punctures and washed out the holes, cleaning out the dead flesh. His mate finished up with little suction cups that sprayed and drained each hole.

“Well,” S’wam said, “we now know how to kill you.” He checked off boxes on a chart and spoke his language into a dangling microphone, then re-sealed the cleaned areas, which felt very sore now. “You like space? You must see this,” he said.

This
turned out to be an ice planet, so close it filled third of the viewport. The Gwyngs stared at it without talking. Fractures in the planet’s ice glaze splintered sunlight into colored and white flares.

So beautiful.
“You also find it beautiful, Black Amber?” I asked.

She looked at me and back at the planet. “Lungy see’ng i,” she tried to say. Then she waved her hand at me, not wanting to leave and get the English-speaking box. “S’oos be.” She moaned.

Lucky seeing
it,
supposed to be.
Earlier, I’d noticed hand signals that seemed to be for
yes
and
no.
I raised my fist and said, “Lucky seeing it, yes? You nod the fist like this for
yes?”

She grabbed my head and covered my mouth. I held myself still against those long bony fingers, feeling them squirm over my lips. Her other hand twisted my hair. As the ice planet slowly drifted away, Black Amber pushed me roughly away from her.

Then she found a writing pad and wrote to me.

Signal agreement by cupping the hand
slightly
and bringing it down. Do not make fists at us. Do not. It is supposedly lucky to see Ichrea on an incoming flight. Hideous to have you here and not Mica.

I read the note and looked up; Cadmium closed his left hand and made a fist, pumping the fingers. Then he opened his hand under my nose. Even with it surgically adjusted to look like a human hand, I saw a hole at the base of the thumb, wet fluid around the hole. I sneezed—my eyes watered.

I cocked my elbow and puffed my armpit at them. Cadmium jumped for me, biting at my armpits.

“Stop. Now,” the female Barcon ordered, grabbing us in her massive hands. I trembled.

Rhyodolite said, “Cadmium isn’t sure of human challenge signals.”

“He made me sneeze.”

“Odd or even,” S’wam said.

“Odd,” Cadmium quickly replied.

“I punch the computer for a random number. If odd, Cadmium apologizes first. If even, you.” S’wam touched buttons on a console. The number was odd.

Cadmium caught his head just about to bob and said, “I apologize. I thought you insulted the Sub-Rector.”

I said, locking eyes with him, “I intended no insult. I’m alone here.” Because I felt my lips begin to quiver, I looked away first.

“I think,” S’wam said with a big sigh. “I should take another look at your back.” In the medical bay he took my chin gently in his hands and said, “Move slow.”

He unwrapped my back, put stronger solutions in the test punctures, then re-plasticized it. I noticed when S’wam turned to go that he didn’t walk like a black man or a white. The medical bay door closed behind him. They’re all aliens, I thought as I looked around me.
And I can’t go back.
The only familiar object was a mirror. I went over and looked at myself—needed to shave.
Maybe I can talk to Tesseract, if he’s awake.

There’s no handle on the door.
I was sure they’d locked me up, but when I moved closer, the door slid into the wall. In the bunk room, from the back, Tesseract looked human enough: same shoulder muscles, curve of the spine. Big, though.

I asked, “Can I talk to you?”

He rolled over and yawned hugely, exposing giant nut-cracking teeth. Alien, broad-skulled with that bald bone ridge on top, thick jaws. I felt faint.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“No,” I said. He reached for my hand and we both felt me tremble. I sat down, gripped the chair arms hard, afraid they’d cut off the gravity and let me float off into space. “I’m lonely. I’m scared.” When I heard myself, I got worse scared. “Xenofreaking?”

“Little carnivorous ape, if you were xenofreaking, you’d be screaming with your back to the wall, not trying to talk to me.” He sat up and pulled on a top. “But you’re almost as intense as the Gwyngs.”

“Do I make you nervous?” I asked. The universe, I thought madly, will be fair if I make one alien a little nervous.

“Yes. Come let me make you tea.”

“Keep talking to me in English,” I said.

Tesseract spoke continuously. “Have you read Jane Goodall and other human writers on chimpanzees? We consider that you might be chimpanzees ‘writ large,’ so to speak. Very flexible, can be social, can be independent. You should be able to survive this better than most primitives.”

By the time we reached the eating bay, I felt foolish. Cadmium came in and Gwyng-talked at Tesseract, who answered curtly in the other tongue. I just heard the Gwyng, couldn’t look at him, and was glad when he walked back out.

“He’s nothing like Mica,” I said, sipping an alien tea.

“Mica was terribly promising for a male Gwyng,” Tesseract said.

Black Amber came in next, eyes rigid in her skull, gaze fixed on me. Tesseract talked to her while I, stupid and primitive, cycled between terror and anger at a million miles a minute.

“I guess,” I said, daring to interrupt them, “if you wish for the stars and get them, you run a risk.” The tea hit then, and I leaned my drugged head down on the table. “Strong tea, Tesseract”

A thin finger rubbed down my neck. I mumbled to Black Amber. “I’m sorry you got hurt. I didn’t want Mica to die.” Rhyodolite and Cadmium stuck their heads in, fake humans looking more and more ragged as their bodies struggled to grow back proper Gwyngs. I felt the tea coming back up.

“Could they stay back a bit?” I said. “They make me more uneasy than you do.”
Stupid, stupid,
then another quiver shook me. Tesseract said something and Cadmium and Rhyodolite went out.

It’s like a damn parade,
I thought when S’wam came in shortly after. The big Barcon moved around behind me slowly, one hand on my shoulder, to look at my back. He shook me a little, then went out and brought me a small green pill.

“Muscle tension like a computer misprogramming itself—or feedback in a microphone. This relaxes, can’t hurt with Tesseract’s tea,” S’wam said. “Take it if you like.”

“I don’t want to be alone.” I took the pill with more tea. “But even with Tesseract here, I am alone.”

“I’ll talk English with you until you fall asleep,” Tesseract promised.

“I’m glad S’wam didn’t grab me and give me a shot.”

“Too much taking away control already,” S’wam said as he patted me on the shoulder, just missing the test holes.

I sat, afraid I’d collapse if I stood up, but then finally decided to look out the viewports. Aliens surrounded me. When we got to the chairs by the viewports, I saw the two sort-of-human Gwyngs already there.

“Are you all right?” Rhyodolite asked. I nodded. “A human male,” he said in sleaze tones through the blackgirl face, “showed me how to make humans feel better.”

Oh, no,
I thought, afraid this was going to be sexual.

He came over and stood behind me, rubbing into the tops of my shoulders and neck muscles with his shortened fingers. “Tesseract,” Rhyodolite said, “If Red Clay had fur you’d like doing this.”