Becoming Alien (14 page)

“I can’t adapt,” she whispered.

After three months, the bears took us both back to the hospital for the computer implant operations. The other six were also back. Since the operation, they had learned about Karst and Karst I in species houses with their own kinds.

As I recovered from the terrible post-operative head- and earaches, I realized, hearing Gwyngs talk, that the machines that replaced our left temporal bones didn’t translate Karst II directly into Karst I, but transformed the Karst II patterns into a whispery voice speaking sounds we had to learn to hang meaning on. Sometimes, the Gwyngs clicked their tongues—a moist clink sound—and turned on a computer function that made us see images in our minds’ eyes.

Karst II speakers bothered Calcite. “I hate them, whole different mind fields,” she said. “To make me hurt like this. The machine garbles more than the machine interprets.”

“The one I wanted to talk to most is dead,” I told her.

“Talking to monsters is stupid,” she said.

Over the next couple of days, Calcite developed pneumonia but refused to rest. Instead, she paced the ward, stopping to stare at a mirror by the nurses’ station, then looking back at us and shivering. All the other sapients seemed to expect that I’d know how to help.

“Aren’t they both the same?” I heard someone whispering as I walked toward her. She stopped pacing and turned around to face me.

“Calcite,” I began. Her mouth opened wide, impossibly wide, and she lunged teeth-first at me, almost a dive at my throat
The mouth, so wide, teeth glittering.

We ended up rolling around on the floor, me trying to grab her, push her away without hurting her. Finally, a Barcon got her by the back of the neck. She didn’t kick or scream as they led her, glassy-eyed and rigid, to bed.

While the Barcons tended her, I heard one of those birds with hands lecture on the damn computers.

“Basically,” he told us, “the computer transforms distinctive features since Karst II slices perception differently and uses echo-location mapping structure in communication.”

Fucking unreal to hear this lecture with Calcite going nuts.
I was surprised to find I thought that in English.

The bird spoke Karst I and Karst II, both accented since the birds couldn’t take Barcon brain re-building. Lucky him, I thought A Barcon handed the bird a note, and he cut his lecture short and went to Calcite’s room.

She was the only other refugee in the batch and, even knowing I shouldn’t, I identified with her. “Can I come in?” I asked from just outside her door.

“Why not?” she said. “All the other monsters are here.” Her face was mottled, propped up with pillows.

“I had no idea you’d take the cultural transition so hard,” the bird said. “You seemed so bold.”

“I’m a savage to you. Dumb,” she told him.

The bird looked at me, feathers puffed up on its face. “Don’t die. This male seems to be doing well He’ll miss you.”

“He’s another monster. None of you will miss me.”

A Barcon reached for her with an injection machine. “Yes,” she said, fending it off with her arms, “force me better and make me your pet Red Clay, they’ll do it to you, too. Refugee, stinking refugee.”

The Barcon held her down for the injection, leaning against her. Calcite tried to bite him, unhinging her jaw like a snake. The Barcon flexed his nose as he backed off, the job finished, and said, “We medical people are never fully appreciated.”

Calcite tried to scream as she slumped off to sleep.

One of the Barcons looked up at me, trembling by the door, and said, “Don’t identify with
her,
refugee. Her kind eat each other.”

Two Gwyngs, thin lips pooched out into oo’s on their muzzles, scars around their nostril slits and eyes, came to see me in the hospital a few days later.

“Rhyodolite! Cadmium!” I recognized something about them even though I’d last seen them looking rather rattily human. Cadmium had yellow streaks throughout his sleek short body hair and on his head hair, even in the thicker fur over his eyes, a brown and yellow pied Gwyng.

Neither spoke English anymore.

“(In-two-rotations/days) you/refugee Red Clay with us leave (unless you/we make other choice),” Rhyodolite said, or at least my computer said for him in its whispery little voices.

Weird computer—it gave me sensations, complex modifications in overlapping ghost voices and brain images, a visual of other humans, Asiatics maybe, and a certain sense of reservation on the Gwyng’s part.
Boy,
I thought,
Gwyngs’ intelligence sure is different from humans’.

“I’m supposed to come with you and learn how to understand Karst II at Black Amber’s?” I asked, wondering how the computers in
their
skulls would get what I said across.

They oo’ed again.

The day Rhyodolite came for me, Calcite screamed at all of us in her old language. When no one understood her, she, with her tiny body, shoved the tall black female. As a Barcon came toward her with a drug cube, she backed up and froze, trembling, against the dayroom wall.

“Red Clay,” she screamed. I started toward her, but the face twisted, baring her teeth. A Barcon stopped me and swung me around to Rhyodolite.

“Red-Clay-with-social-problems,” Rhyodolite said, rocking me side to side.

“I’m not like her. Not primitive,” I said.

“Cute,” Rhyodolite said as Barcons immobilized her under a net.

“She wasn’t my species.”

“Xenofreak. Not-you, on ship, you were nervous/maybe tired-silly.” He looked at me and oo’ed. “Species difference/no problem for sexual stimulations.”

“What happens to her now?” I asked.

A Barcon answered, “She wasn’t fully sapient as she couldn’t use all the grammatical structures. As you’ve had some space shock symptoms yourself, Red Clay, I recommend a mild tranquilizer. Rhyodolite, don’t socially mob him Gwyng-style.”

“We are not socially obsessive and you (anti-social, isolated) should(not) talk/gossip,” Rhyodolite said.

“Don’t shit in my ear, Gwyng,” the Barcon replied.

Gwyngs. Tropical islanders with blood-pump tongues, they lived by the ocean. As we drove up, I recognized the houses from space station holos, walls of planks woven together like baskets, but nobody there had told me those were Gwyng houses. Behind the houses, animals grazed.
It will at least be calmer here,
I thought.

Inside Black Amber’s house, Gwyngs, elbow to elbow, lay around on foam mats covered with squishy fake hide. Or they squirmed into tube sofas, two or three together, koo’ing.

Little Gwyngs and the three Earth cats came and cuddled up to me. And I was eager, with my touch-crazy ape hands, to stroke them—the familiar cat fur, the strange feel of the Gwyngs’ smooth stiff hair and thick skin.

“Black Amber’s busy (in her room) with dispatch box (today’s),” Rhyodolite said, “but when she finishes/stops, she’ll ask to see you.”

The Gwyng adults hanging around the house memorized my features, then went on squirming together, chatting in Gwyng languages my computer couldn’t transform. Finally, just as I was about to ask Rhyodolite if he’d show me the beach, Black Amber came out and said, “We have no fixed mealtimes, so your food is in our food storage room for your self-service. Red Clay, not much personal time (don’t care to give any).”

At least, that was what the computer gave me.

Black Amber, a major Gwyng official, fussed with visitors and dispatch boxes all day every day. Periodically a bell rang and she went into a private office, built of metal and plastic and set in the house like a giant safe.

Most mornings, some Gwyng kids and I walked on the beach, followed by the pouch-host animals—motley creatures like cows crossed with rhinos, or long-legged hippos with Holstein skins. Gwyng kids clambered over them, sliding into the pouches if they were small enough.

The bloodstock animals, varicosities dangling like ropes under their fleck and shoulder skins, stayed more aloof. Some of these were milked like cattle, besides being blood sources. I helped the Gwyng kids with the milking machines and the electric blood drainers—nothing primitive about that.

And in the strange basket-woven houses, with floors that bounced gently underfoot, I saw screens that played odd fast-shifting patterns.

“Black Amber, your TV set seems to be broken.”

“Not vision electric pattern, but/more pattern of understanding,” she said. “News language.” She looked up at the screen. “Gossip/social babble.”

“You can read that?” I asked.

“Even (I personally/not all Gwyngs) holograms/light interference patterns.”

She stared at me—what, I wondered, did she see? There was a sparkling distance about her, the scars and the glossy dark fur with reddish undertones. “What do you know about savage female-placental (who xenofreaked)?” she asked. Her hot thin finger dropped on my wrist, right on the pulse.

“Her people sent ships up to manipulate their lower classes.”

“Farce to attempt/force contact with species-without-space drives. But perhaps/because since I am (just) an Under-Rector, the bird sneak-changes policy.”

“What
happened to Calcite?” I asked. “If Calcite’s caught in some Karst infighting…”

“Hush.” Black Amber took her finger off my pulse. “Skull computer gives depth/complexity from your speech. Better than your Ang’ish Emotions complex.”

Then she scooped up an Earth cat, who’d purr for whatever scratched behind its ears.

Black Amber refused to sponsor me at the Academy, so I waited for another sponsor. Tesseract visited occasionally, to teach me proper English and speak Karst I with me. “Some days,” I said in English, hearing that my voice tones weren’t quite human now, “I think I’m just a live souvenir you picked up off the Blue Ridge.”

“You can’t go back.”

“What about Calcite?”

“We might send her back. Her people aren’t as sophisticated as yours. The whole incident would fade into myth.”

“They’ll kill her,” I said.

“She’s not fully sapient.”

“Being murdered would hurt her just the same. Didn’t you test her before you brought her to Karst?”

“The bird was desperate.”

She was right, I thought. They liked refugees because our stunts indicated we’d keep stunting on, brave little half-sapients, saving them. “So she dies.”

“Tom
Red Clay, she isn’t dead, just out of the Academy. We might find a primitive species to put her with.”

When he left, I stripped to shorts and went down to the beach.

Karst’s beach soothed me. Funny, because I’d never been to any ocean on Earth, but this alien water sent me noisy waves full of shells not much different from ones I’d seen at school. Beaches and waves had to be alike on all planets: sand, waves and wind, shells. A row of white bird-things flew by, flying the same as birds. I sat down in the swash where the waves slid back, searching for shells that looked most like Earth ones.

Rhyodolite came down after me—I suppose Tesseract told him I’d been worried about Calcite.

“Shells,” I said, “the same as Earth’s.”

“Growth by mathematical series,” Rhyodolite said, dropping down in the wet sand beside me. After we’d watched the waves a bit, he asked, “You miss/yearn sexually for, the Calcite (a bit animal)?”

“Not really sexually, but she isn’t an animal, you know.” I shuffled through a heap of small shells looking for spiraled ones.

“Don’t identify with her. We might misjudge you.” He looked over at me, face wrinkles in deep shadow from the sun, nostrils faintly quivering as he breathed in and out. Somehow he’d gotten sand on his little chin. “I have been forced (mildly) to be a sneak-sex-getter,” he told me earnestly, maybe testing me, trying to get me to reject him. “I am small for a Gwyng. On your planet, Black Amber took sex-period suppressants, not me. One year. Then she was shot. Barcons and Cadmium came. No chance after Cadmium.”

“Isn’t she like your mother or sister?”

“No. I was given to her as nymph. Hard loss to have a small body. Larger the Gwyng female/more social power. Small males play forever.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know about this confession. He was about five-two, Earth measure. But he was wiry—worked out with weights, ran, swam, played a weird ball game. I was lonely for ball games. “Could you teach me hazard?”

He didn’t answer me as he paced a bit on the beach, body rocking over his short legs. Then he looked at the surf before sitting down beside me again. “Xenofreaked placental female Calcite is not xenofreaking now (more or less).” His thin fingers rambled through the sand, pounced on a tiny clam, split the two shells. After eating the clam, Rhyodolite asked, “You interested (in
any
way)?”

“She doesn’t make me feel less lonely.”

“Introducing to own species coming,” he said, seemingly satisfied. “Black Amber has arranged.”

Whatever he was, flanked by Barcons, sitting with raised shoulders in coarse brown wool robes, he wasn’t American. I hoped he really wasn’t another human, but I knew he was, maybe by smell, body posture. His sweating face looked almost like an American Indian’s. Stocky, Asian? His hair was bound up in cloth-covered cords.