Becoming Alien (26 page)

As Granite settled to the floor, Tesseract slumped in his chair, put his own tea aside, and sighed so deeply that I, remembering my own panic time, was embarrassed. “Did you sigh like that when I went to sleep after my xenophobic reactiveness?”

He smiled, sighed again, and said, “We’ll take him to the infirmary now.”

“Is his friend going to live?”

“He’s paralyzed. We’ve got him on a respirator. As soon as we’ve gotten the other birds stabilized, we’ll make a decision.”

Tesseract got up and knelt by Granite, who was down in a heap on the floor, and tried to rouse him. Granite mumbled a complaint in bird language. “Okay, my friend,” Tesseract said before calling in the Barcons with a stretcher.

Karriaagzh checked on us again. “Maybe a hot oil bath would be nice for him now.” He sat down bird-style by Granite and touched the other bird’s bottom eyelid, which flicked. “I don’t remember much of my first days here, but I do remember itching.”

Granite shifted around as the Barcons lifted him
onto the stretcher. Karriaagzh added, “Security must talk to them now, before all panic, but keep in mind they have their honor, loyalties.” The old bird ran a finger around the other bird’s ear holes and added, “Also, check for mites.”

While the Barcons tended Granite, monitoring him while he slept, I went on to deal with my schedule as best could. When I came back to the infirmary, a Barcon directed me to the showers. Granite was standing bare-skinned under a hot water spray, nictitating membranes covering his
eyes, huddled over while Barcons scrubbed him
and rinsed. Then they covered him with hot oiled towels and led him to a bird leaning cushion. He propped his
elbows on it and drew his
haws back and looked at me.

“Mites,” he said. “And xenophobic reactiveness.”

“They must have survived in the facial feathers,” one of the Barcons said, “then went down to feed on the new feather tips. If your feathers are messed up, it isn’t our fault this time.”

The Barcons were testing miticides on another bird, but for Granite now, they’d use lots of hot water and soap.

“Always something,” the Barcon concluded. “Now we’ve got to check all the bird kinds for mites, but probably only this
kind has them. Among them, I bet they’re epidemic. Such stress they put themselves under.”

Granite said dismally, “We must seem rather like a joke.” He stared at me, flashing the third eyelid again vertically across his
eyes. “We have special mite powders. But Red Clay’s crew seemed to be in too big a hurry to ask for all our equipment.”

“I’m sorry. Rhyodolite was boss on that one.”

The Barcon was incredulous. “Sent a Gwyng to fetch birds?”

“I’m going to tame that Gwyng the way I’ve been tamed,” Granite said.

“I don’t believe you’d be able to tame a Gwyng, bird,” the Barcon said. “That’s a hard-wired reaction.”

“In a sapient, there shouldn’t be hard-wired reactions,” Granite said.

“We’ll have to fumigate your room, so you both can stay here. You can get your schedule through our computer for duration. Someone will tell your other roommate.” They lead Granite by the elbows to another room; I tagged along behind.

“That Ewik won’t be coming here?” Granite asked.

“Is that xenophobia or is that something personal?” the Barcon asked with a wiggled nose.

“Personal.”

“He’d rather not associate with us,” I said.

“Well, we’ll let him seek other quarters, if he wants.”

Granite gestured assent and crouched down in the oily towels. The Barcons gave me a little electric heating cup full of more oil I could use when the towels cooled. In an hour or so, after they’d checked the slides, they’d take him out for another bath.

A little skinny bear brought me another plastic foam slab and some sheets. How is he?” she asked me quietly as Granite blinked and nodded.

“I’m okay,” he said. “How are you?”

“Busy,” she said.

The Barcons came back, and the biggest one said, “Mites in the ears.”

The third eyelid veiled Granite’s eyes, and he shuddered. I decided not to watch. He stood up and came with them before they went for his elbows. I wondered if backward knees worked better when the creature who had them was frightened and exhausted—he seemed to walk steadily enough.

While they were deep-cleaning his nares and ear holes, I fooled around with the computer, checking on what I could.

Barcons—species with eccentrically orbiting home planet. Weather varies immensely. Long winters. Longer summers. Extremely ecologically various. Includes among parasites a sapient, without space capacity. Barcons mildly xenoreactive to physical contact by species with null social distances. Hard-wired fear of oral or digital to oral contact with strangers, due to a parasite spread. First contacted 4.000 years ago. Further Information restricted.

∞ ∞ ∞

Granite came back without the Barcons. His ear hole had been scrubbed red; one of the nares bled a little. He crouched down and pulled the towels
around himself again. I poured on the hot oil while he asked, “And you went through this? You had a xenophobic reaction?”

“Yes.”

“Mites and aliens. What combinations. I should have thought about mites.” He’d had a rough day. “Did the Rector’s Man talk to you like that when you were upset?”

“Um, kinda.” I thought about how Tesseract played to the species differences even though the Federation wanted us to ignore them. Talk and get the sedative down, but the talk’s content depended on the species of the freaked. “We’ll both survive and get our blues,” I told Granite.

“All the creatures look more like you, Red Clay. My kind is so outnumbered.” He looked at the bed pad and said, “I think I’ll unwrap these towels and go to sleep, even if it isn’t a nice high bed. When will we have the third meal?”

“They’ll bring you something. I’m going to see if I can’t just go to the cafeteria.”

“Come back tonight.”

“No problem.”

“Are you afraid of me still, in your mammal squishy way?”

“I guess not.”

“Guess? Mammal answer. Was the Rector’s Man serious about the invitation? If that was said just to calm me down, I wouldn’t come with you, but I’d like to run.”

“I’ll check. But I want you to come with me, too. I don’t have many friends here.”

“Isn’t Tesseract your kind?”

“No.”

“I thought maybe you’d grow a crest and thicker jaws when you matured,” Granite said as he lay breast-down the foam pad. He looked at it, then prodded the foam with his beak, a little nervous again. “I’m sorry I thought of you as a lactating monstrosity. Your sex doesn’t lactate, does it?” He pulled the covers over his head, going with the quill grain.

“No, we don’t lactate,” I said.

Slowly, his bottom eyelid rose again, this time, I suspected, more worn out than sedated. When he laid his beak down on his hands, I left quietly, to meet my schedule.

The next morning, I woke up on my strange mattress and looked over at Granite Grit sleeping on his pad. Funny, when he was asleep, he looked more alien—as though talking drugged the brain’s visual functions. Silent, he was a heap of yellow skin studded with feather pins, a beak with a tiny hook on the end of it; and muscles that slanted differently than mine. I got up quietly and dressed while a Barcon came in to check. The Barcon waited until I was dressed, then followed me out into the hall.

“We’ll keep him here until tomorrow, then he can go back to classes. And how are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“Lonely for your own kind? We wondered about you tagging along with the bird.”

“I’m all right,” I said.

“We can get you a female from the other culture group of your species, if you need.”

“Everyone seems so surprised that I’m doing so well,” I said, going toward their computer to get my schedule. I was a bit annoyed, a bit worried. Maybe something always hit isolates eventually.

“I couldn’t live without my mate,” the Barcon said. I printed my schedule and left, not sure what to say.

Two days later, when I got back from classes, Granite was talking to Tesseract. “I’m not afraid of anyone, exactly,” Granite said, “but I’m afraid of…”

“Well, don’t be afraid of me,” Tesseract said. “You don’t like being odd here?”

“Not at all,” Granite said quickly. “But our home planet officials… I don’t want to be in precisely the position I’m in.”

I came on in and asked, “Should I go back out and eat?”

“Take Granite with you. I’ll give you passes for outside, and movie tickets. Semi-illegal movie, but I thought you both ought to see it.”

Granite rose and said, “What happens next, to us, to Sulphur?”

Tesseract said, “We could maintain him until the feathers grow back. Then… As for you, we’ll talk to your people.”

“You’ll decide
then.”

“He won’t go back all ugly,” Tesseract replied. He handed me the movie tickets, drew out a little map so we could find the place, and gave us off-Academy passes. “Blue bus number 3 will always get you back here,” he said.

“I can’t distinguish blue from violet,” Granite said, “but then you can’t see shades below violet, can you?”

“Some can. I can’t,” Tesseract said.

I said, “I can tell blue from violet, Granite.”

After dinner, we started out. Granite asked, “Have you been outside the Academy grounds before?”

“Yes, several times, but not around here.”

He slowed down his strides and I half jogged to keep up with him. We showed our passes at the gate and looked out at the city, peddlers, tremendous numbers of aliens in all sorts of clothes, all sorts of colors. Hairy, not hairy, feathered, naked skins of all sorts of textures. Aliens, walking along, buying from other aliens, getting on alien buses, all totally calm.

“I hope,” Granite Grit said, “we don’t meet anything that’s afraid of me tonight.”

I opened Tesseract’s map and looked for the bus that would take us to the movies he recommended. Are we being followed? I wondered, but I didn’t mention my suspicion to Granite. What could I do if Granite went xeno again?

We went to the back of the bus so Granite could hunker down on the floor without getting in anyone’s way. “They didn’t design these for us,” he said, holding on to my knee. As the bus pulled back into traffic, he swiveled his head around at all the people. “We’ve been followed. I’m glad, actually.”

About ten blocks later, Granite looked at my map and pushed a button. The bus stopped and we got off, three doors from the building. It didn’t look like a movie house; but when we showed the man at the door our tickets, he let us in.
Semi
-illegal movies? I thought as we walked into the screening room.

Granite managed to wriggle up on the seat by me, near the aisle. Before the lights went down, I noticed that most of the people in the audience were in blue uniforms.

Three giant Ahrams with elephantine legs stalked across the screen. My heart jolted; this was an alien horror film. The audience screamed, laughed, told the filmed Ahrams that the digital distortions were biophysically incorrect. As Granite, beak parted slightly, watched the movie, the pin feathers on his face writhed.

“You watch so I can look at you,” he said about midway through one Ahram’s attack on a Gwyng, seemingly tickling the smaller sapient to death.

“Okay.” I laughed nervously.

“Laughing. Is this funny? Split between xenophobia and mock of xenophobes.”

As we walked out of the movie theater, Granite Grit looked at the various aliens, furred, naked-skinned, feathered, and said, “I guess Tesseract wanted me to know mild xenophobia is accepted. We can deal with it.”

“It was a very strange movie,” I said.

As we waited for the bus, Granite said, “We thought force held the Federation together, that some one species was dominant. What force?”

“Maybe,” I said, somewhat reluctant to voice what I was thinking, “all the species’ mutual jealousies keep the system honest. And new species can’t afford not to buy in.”

“Such a bait for joining—a five-thousand-year-old collection of all the stars’ thinking.”

“Curiosity drives intelligence,” I quoted from somewhere.

“But the tension!”

The next morning, we started for the country in Tesseract’s little flier. As Granite Grit boarded, he apologized for being troublesome.

Tesseract took Granite’s hands and accepted the apology.

“I’m even glad you made us see that movie,” Granite added as he looked for a convenient place to sit.

Then up we flew over Karst City into the interior. The ancients who built Karst with the transformed energies of space war knew beautiful geography: plains enough to rest a plainsman’s eyes and fatigue my mountain-bred ones, then a river and mountains with forested foothills merging into plains again.

“This river’s tributaries go up into country made to look like an old continental surface,” Tesseract said. He turned the flier and went up a river that looked like the Dan, bouncing on its rocks.