Becoming Alien (28 page)

“You’ll be busy. I’m putting a species group here.”

Most sapient species with seasonal breeding have the main rut in the spring. And if they didn’t, the Barcons adjusted them so the classes could stop for the breeding season.

In species unaffected by the season, older cadets joined a trade or diplomatic crew. First-year cadets went to the country in species groups. I was alone—so I had to go to Black Amber’s. Black Amber was pregnant. Unless the larva lived, which wasn’t likely, she’d come into heat after delivery.

When I met Black Amber at the docks, she looked only a bit thicker in the lower abdomen. “Red Clay (testosterone-fumed),” she said, sprawled across the bow of a rental hydrofoil, “come ride to Gwyng-owned islands, archipelago most like Gwyng Home.”

The hydrofoil skimmed across ocean that had barely gotten salty since aliens cooked the water out of gas-giants. At the island, the dock had no groove-way ratchets for the boat, so we tied up with real ropes. The Gwyng island looked tropical, with artificial cliffs crumbling behind the houses and strips of pasture.

More relaxed than I’d ever seen her, Amber hummed and swayed in the driver’s seat as I put our bags on the roof of our borrowed car. She called me Mica, oo’ed and corrected herself, but my skull computer still caught glitter on my Academy name.

Black Amber, still swaying, drove the car slowly up a coral-graveled road, until a Holstein-colored pouch beast, bigger than a rhino, lumbered into the road, followed by two more pouch hosts and a smaller black and brown blood beast with ropy veins dangling from its neck like dewlaps. Six baby Gwyngs followed them, two hauling up the beasts’ tails into the pouches. They poked their heads out around the tails to stare at us.

We stopped. Gwyng kids giggled coos like a pigeon roost, while I wondered when Black Amber would hit the horn. Finally the beasts lumbered off the road. Black Amber hugged herself, then drove on to a basketwork house like her beach house. The cliffs were close behind, a white limestone planet-sized stage set.

I carried the bags up the steps. “You know these,” Amber said, swinging a long arm at Rhyodolite and Cadmium.

They leaned against each other. “Dead-animal-eating-ape still studying the Barcon cut-up business?” Rhyodolite said.

“I bet you know about our breeding habits, but did they explain body bribes?”

“Shut up,” Cadmium told him. “Black Amber, it is open, isn’t it? You’ve invited a proper number?”

She didn’t answer, so Cadmium turned to me as I passed with the duffels, and said, “Doing eye dissection, I see.”

A muscled cloaca excretes their soft wastes.
I didn’t answer, but started remembering more Gwyng biology, the bones in their arms that gave them more grip than I had. How they hooked their hands around their shoulders so easily—as Rhyodolite and Cadmium did now, staring at me through alien eyes that saw polarized light.

“Come to witness Gwyng mating ritual? Like the film?” Cadmium said. “You do look at us like were biological cut-ups?”

The heat pheromone molecule is
sluggish in
the air. It affects both male and female behavior.
Black Amber twitched her shoulders and went through into another room. The walls were padded with grass mats.

“Stinky armpits, we like you well enough,” Rhyo said. Cadmium interrupted and Gwyng-talked a language my computer couldn’t handle. Rhyo said, “Cadmium wants you to sleep on the beach.”

I looked at their hands to see if the thumb-base glands were swollen—a sign that a Gwyng was angry.

“Our glands are empty,” Rhyodolite said. “We are waiting for Black Amber’s season. Not angry, tense.”

“Much stinky armpit sex-organ hairs odor from
his
glands,” Cadmium commented. “But no nose to tell him much openly/consciously.”

“I don’t have glands in my armpits.”

“Better to learn own biologic than other people’s,” Cadmium said. “We’ll swim/cool off before we eat.”

“Can I go with you?” I asked.

“Black Amber swaying from side to side and humming as you came here?” Rhyodolite asked.

“Yes.”

“Absolutely come with us,” Rhyodolite said.

“He’ll stink up the whole ocean,” Cadmium said, then launched into impassioned Gwyng that I couldn’t follow.

We trudged down to the water. After I’d had enough, I hauled out and sat on the beach watching them. Flight neuro-wiring gave Gwyngs mean butterfly strokes, boosted by their armpit webs. I wondered if eventually Gwyngs would evolve into aquatic creatures, swimming off with those long waterbug arms.

Cadmium and Rhyodolite disappeared into the sun glitter. I finally spotted them, lost them again. After about two hours, they came rolling in on the surf, tired.

We were all resting in shallow water, letting the waves lift us up
and down while our hands grabbed the bottom against the undertow, when Black Amber stepped out onto the deck. She only wore a short shift cut out under the arms so the webs were bare. Like a cat, she rubbed her lips against the deck roof posts.

Rhyodolite and Cadmium hurried out of the water to her, questioning her in Gwyng. She appeared dazed, but she finally asked me to approach and explained, “My womb cleared, but the nymph didn’t pouch. I’ll be attractive in a few days.” She sniffed. “Red Clay (glitter), your web glands
will
be a problem. We become even more nose-sensitive during season.”

Then she pulled herself up by the post while Rhyodolite and Cadmium told me, as I’d heard in class, that the nymph was no more to them than a nocturnal emission was to me.

“Her friends want a viable Black Amber child to raise as pouch kin,” Cadmium said. “She’ll try until they get one.”

“His odor is impossible,” Rhyodolite said.

Black Amber said, “(One of you) take him to the city for a Barcon armpit job.”

Rhyo called the Barcons to explain what they wanted done to me. Then a Barcon spoke and Rhyo pulled the receiver back and stared at it.

“A (female)
h’mn
is looking for you,” he said.

I felt coldly startled.
“Human?”

“That noise.” He talked to the Barcons some more, and then said to me, “Female con-specific primitive.”

I felt bewildered. One of those people? “How did she find out about me?”

“She asked for a cadet
h’mn.
Only one.” Rhyodolite’s lips pursed, the wrinkles deepening, and his nostrils flared a bit at the top.

Cadmium leaned against Black Amber and tried to rub her tummy, but she swatted his hand away. “Cadmium, you take him in,” she said.

After the Barcons scraped my armpits, they showed me into a room with a low table, which was set with handleless cups, an electric kettle, and leaves compressed in a brick. I picked up the brick and sniffed—tea!

An Oriental woman, dressed in a brown tunic and pants, a plaid scarf and embroidered boots, came in with a tray of cakes and butter. She stared at the bed, which I hadn’t noticed before—
my
sheets on it and some furs which must come from her custom,
I thought, suddenly shy.

A Barcon introduced us, “Cadet Red Clay,
Tom;
this is Free-Trader
Yanchela.”

She had an impassive, almost flat face, a woman of about twenty-five or so, I guessed, with her hair long. Washed, but not cut.
“Tum,”
she said with a bow.

“Tom,” I corrected. “Yanchela?”

“Not to talk as out-species. Yangchenla.”

“Yangchenla?”

“Tom.”

“We’ll leave you both here, if you want.”

She nodded curtly. I showed her to a cushion by the table and began trying to fix the weird brick tea. I was a bit intimidated by her.

“Here, let me,” she said, crumbling off a bit of the brick and setting it up to boil in an electric teakettle. “These kettles are very convenient, don’t you think? Cleaner than a fire.”

“How long have you been here?”

“I was born in the city. My parents had me educated in the language of most of these creatures, my brother also.” She had an accent, the tongue and larynx hadn’t been re-built, but she spoke like she thought in Karst I. “The old guys think Karst is a supernatural punishment region. This place doesn’t seem supernatural to me.”

“You did come from someplace else, originally, if you’re the same kind of people that I am.”

She looked at me, then checked the tea. “So you’re a cadet here when none of my kin are given a chance.”

“Why can’t your people become cadets?”

“Something about sponsorship. You say we came off another planet? What happened between when we came off and now, when you came off?”

“Parts of
Earth
are almost like here. We’ve got electric
tea
pots, cars, buses, airplanes, but we don’t use the transformation gates.”

“You will explain the transformation gates sometime. So
you
say we didn’t evolve here?”

“No.”

“And that the people on the original planet are now almost like the creatures here.” She used the word for non-differentiated animal for
aliens.
“The old men say many cycles of cycles, grandfathers of grandfathers.”

“I bet the Academy or Federation has records.”

She poured tea. “Many more of us?”

“Yeah, on the other planet.”

“Is their breeding controlled by creatures?”

“No.”

“The Barcons told me I could have a child by you. They’d pull this out.” She showed me a long hard ridge in her arm.

I wondered what their country was now—most of Asia was Russian or Chinese. “What should I do? My sponsor says she’ll send me to live with your people if I don’t do well.”

“Become an officer. Officers in the Federation live well.”

“Sometimes, I get very lonely. My roommate warned me not to become these creatures’ pet.”

“Roommate’s a wise creature.”

I sipped the tea and saw oil, butter, floating on top of it. Buttered tea, not too bad. We sat quietly drinking. Sexual tension built, until I leaned back from the table. She looked away, something subtle and fine broke, as though I’d exposed myself. Maybe it was how I leaned back. I winced.

“Yangchenla,” I said.

“Chenla
is a name, too.”

“Chenla, I’d like to see more of you. I want…”

“Perhaps when you are an officer, you can sponsor one of us into the Academy. And if seeing me again will help you survive to become an officer, I’ll see you again.”

“It would keep me sane,” I said.

“I would like to see the records on my people,” she said. “If…”

“I couldn’t find out anything about the planet we’re originally from,” I said.

“Do they let you off the Academy grounds?”

“Yes.”

“Come visit me at my shop.”

She stood up. I didn’t know where her shop was, so I asked, “Can you write down your shop address?”

She handed me a card, bigger than an Earth business card.

“If you liked the animal milk oil/fat, I have it too. The creatures who can’t talk language love it.”

“Gwyngs. My sponsor’s a Gwyng. My skull computer transforms their languages into one I can understand.”

“Do we have skull computers on our planet now?”

“No, these guys implanted it in me.”

“Invent something. I don’t always want to be from backward people.”

I couldn’t tell if she was joking or not. “We’ll help each other,” I said.

“Tom, then? You will help us?”

“I thought I had to choose between being with the
humans
in the primitive range or being a cadet.”

She froze when I said
primitive range,
bowed slightly, and began to leave. At the door, she said, “Stay with the Academy. Be a very good cadet. Don’t call the waste that name.”

“So you didn’t mate,” the Barcon technician said as he cleaned out my armpits and handed the swabs to another Barcon for freezing. “We’ll make you sweet-smelling for Black Amber, but your woman might miss your scent, so afterward, we’ll give you back the bacteria that contribute. Black Amber doing a body bribe again, or has she invited more than Wy’um?”

“Open,” I said.

“Well, we’ve made changes in Gwyng matings,” the Barcon said, “with suppression drugs and chemical attractants. Corrupted a whole species, I guess.”

All the Barcon noses wriggled. The Barcon who’d been talking depilated me in the armpits and gave me spray cans of deodorants and pheromone disrupters.

Feeling almost like I did after they first stripped off all my hair and put me in cadet black, I re-joined Cadmium, who sniffed and oo’ed.

“Good-for-sex female?” he asked.

“No. We just want to be friends.”

“Be friends with Black Amber, have sex with your female,” he said. “I’d rather not be friends with Black Amber now, but she has no Mica (glittering in Red Clay) young friend/helper during matings.”

After a bus dropped us off at the marina we hydrofoiled it off to the island. “So,” Cadmium finally asked, “what did the female want?”

“She wants me to sponsor them when I can afford it.”

“Might lose on that. You have to make some linguistics teams, first-contact teams, trade missions, first. Get your own money, then sponsor people who’ll make money for you, not primitives.”