Becoming Alien (29 page)

I’d never thought much about this side of the Federation before. Black Amber would get a cut from deals I made-for sponsoring me. “Black Amber isn’t sure I’ll make her money, either, is she?”

“You’ll be going on a linguistics team to the people who captured you—and you have a first-contact trade share. Your kind’s female is a free trader, she can explain much, your female-not-for-sex (you’ll be sorry).”

We tied up at the dock and drove the car to Black Amber’s borrowed house-and-herds. Even in the short time we’d been away, Black Amber’d collected an entourage. Wy’um of the History Committee was standing almost belly to belly with her when Cadmium and I came dragging clothes, deodorants, and part of a tea brick into the main room.

While her dazed eyes looked down, he reached up to tickle her birth hairs. She leaned forward to trap his hand between their bodies.

Cadmium grunted. “Open mating?” he asked, stopping beyond them at the threshold of the next room.

The other male Gwyngs looked from Wy’um and Amber to Cadmium. Cadmium grunted again and quickly went into the depths on the house.

That night, the other males threw Rhyodolite out of Black Amber’s room. He screamed at her and tried to shove the door down, but Wy’um and another male, Wy’um’s pouch kin; pinned Rhyodolite to the floor and watched his neck vein throb before they tossed him out on deck. Then Wy’um came over to me while his pouch kin wrestled with the other male Gwyngs.

“This is like First Contact Parties,” Wy’um said. “Never talk about it to others.”

Then while his kin blocked the other suitors, Wy’um slipped into Black Amber’s room.

Cadmium pulled me out to the veranda. “Try to keep them from tearing at her. Be junior, prematurity, pouch kin. We love her, but…”

“Fuck it.”

One of the suitors overheard. “Odd thing to say, as though it were a curse.”

Later that day, neither Cadmium nor Rhyodolite could get near Black Amber as the older male Gwyngs swarmed over her, talking so intensely my computer only gave me phrases.

I worked my way up to her and asked what I should do. Her hormone-dazed eyes, huge and alien, roved over me. Before she could answer, Wy’um’s pouch kin grabbed me.

Me shocked, enough to fight back, we rolled to the floor, his funny muscles twisting under me. My elbow hit a web. A chill, feeling that skin give and recoil. We gripped each other hard, bodies rigid.

The male Gwyng sniffed once—no Barcon magic could cut all the ape smell—and koo’ed. We both relaxed and let each other go. “Fix us tea and food,” he said.

Rhyodolite and Cadmium gnawed stones outside, too young for a dominant female, too attached to leave. But they waded back in and got shoved out by the older males, again and again. They never turned on each other. Pouch kin didn’t.

I fixed tea, cheese, and oil drinks. All the Gwyngs in the house went naked now. Amber, looking sleepy and slightly scratched, came out and sniffed at me. Remembering female cats who’d approach anything male, I got flustered. She winced, squeezed her nostrils shut—residual ape odor—and took the tea.

I stared at her oval pouch slit, a little lower than the navel was on us, and at stiff hairs between that and the crotch. Moodily, she sat down and sipped her tea slowly; the males didn’t molest her when she was sitting.

Black Amber’s heat went on and on. After five days, my groin ached, and I spent most of my time on the beach when I wasn’t needed in the kitchen. Cadmium, Rhyodolite, and I ate clams, commenting on the resemblance to female sex parts.
Why didn’t I try something with the human woman?

One afternoon, Rhyodolite, lying utterly dispirited on the sand beside me, said, “Raw aching cock.”

Cadmium, sitting, arms wrapped around himself, said, “Two or three raw aching cocks.”

I got up to play with the younger Gwyngs, but they koo’ed and ran off. Little fuzzy kids about two and a half feet tall, with huge eyes, hopped up on the brood beasts’ pouch necks, holding the pouch openings spread, watching me.

Older Gwyng children looked pointedly, at the house and at me and talked about the situation.

Poor old Tom-meat-eating-ape, too smelly to get some.

Cadmium said, “Red Clay (without Mica), you’re letting Black Amber get scratched.”

“They’ll beat me up if I try to interfere.”

Cadmium said, “They haven’t broken our bones.”

At night, pebbles rattled against Black Amber’s windows, and cars scratched off down the coral rubble road. I could relate to that.

Wy’um and his pouch kin took over in Black Amber’s bedroom. Another suitor, a grizzled blond like Cadmium, but with blond hairs more mixed in the brown, like a roan, asked me, “You were supposed to be the non-mature kin?”

“Yes,” I said, being utterly careful not to nod.

“It’s just the show of being open. We’re leaving.” He’d been bruised and scratched, as had they all, some from Wy’um and his kin, but more from Amber herself. “Help me dress.”

The Gwyng leaned heavily against me as he pulled on briefs. Other suitors, groggy and unhappy, with dilated and spongy webs, some torn, got dressed too. “Wy’um should know better,” one said.

That night, after the other suitors had left Black Amber to Wy’um and his pouch kin, a hugely swollen brood beast came up to the house and bleated. Black Amber and the two males came out on the deck as Cadmium, Rhyodolite, and I came up from the beach.

The brood beast lay down on the sand and expelled a deformed, almost adult-sized Gwyng. The gray-headed thing scrabbled at the sand with bony hands and drooled milk. Its eyes were white.
Blind.
But the nostrils clapped and fluttered, and the head turned toward the deck.

Black Amber hissed.

The brood beast climbed to her feet, nudged the creature, and lowed at us. As the Gwyngs looked at the creatures mewling in the sand, they sobered up from their sexual daze.

“Reminder of death for us both,” Wy’um said.

Black Amber grabbed a deck pot and nodded. Then she said, “Tom, sometimes a Gwyng, when changing into a near-corpse, gets into a pouch mother, who takes care of it. Misplaced maternal instinct. Near-corpses are like nymphs to us, but other species find our attitude cold-unfeeling, heartless.”

The thing squirmed toward us, twisted fingers clawing through the beach grass.

“It is a Gwyng, then?”

Wy’um said, “It was on the History Committee when it was alive/social.”

“Why doesn’t this happen to Karriaagzh?” Black Amber asked.

“Wy’um, may not be directed against you,” his pouch kin said. Rhyodolite and Cadmium stared at the creature and made strangled noises.

“My pouch sister’s beast,” Wy’um said. “She couldn’t have had anything to do with this.” Wy’um leaned over the veranda rail and vomited.

The old Gwyng opened a toothless mouth and squealed, then shuddered. The host beast stamped her feet, then nuzzled the old Gwyng and tried to roll it toward her tail. The body moved limply, utterly inert now.

I went up to check the pulse. After a minute and a half, I found nothing. The pouch mother butted at me, then moaned before shuffling down the beach.

The old Gwyng was dead. Wy’um went in to call his sister as Black Amber eased me away from the corpse.

Are you shocked?” she asked me.

I felt numb. “If a Gwyng’s senile, what happens?”

She stared out over the ocean. “They cool down and die of lung mold. Or they swim and lose track of land.” I hated seeing how she stared at the waves after she’d said that, as though she expected to die in them. “Or,” she continued, “they crawl into caves, under houses, and die.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Lingering as a near-corpse must be dreadful—to hear without being able to speak…better to go quickly.” She looked back at me thoughtfully, but began drifting back into the heat spell. As she rubbed her head against the veranda rails, she said, “Perhaps the near-corpse brought us a new life.”

Her rear got itchy; she scooted it over the board flooring.

“You seem very alien to me now,” I said.

She put her fingers to her mouth and pulled her lips into an imitation smile. “I
am
alien to you. Karriaagzh is wrong. Not all minds have the same plan. “

In another three days, Black Amber settled. She dragged out a battered box of Gwyng beach things, pulled on a pair of green rubber hand fins, shrugged at Wy’um, and took a long swim in the ocean. Wy’um and his kin left while she was swimming.

When she came back, she said, “It’s over. Help me clean and spray.”

While I sprayed Gwyng heat pheromone disrupter around, she crawled into her tubular padded sofa. “Wash my bedclothes and shifts with more pheromone disrupter,” she told me as she was falling asleep. Cadmium and Rhyodolite were gone.

After I finished, she dragged herself out of the tube and put on a fresh shift. “We have to have a reconciliant social gathering for everyone. I promise I will help prepare the meal.” She held out long thin trembling fingers to me. “Hold me,
Tom.”

I looked at her legs, the webs collapsed along her sides, the wrinkled face and nostril slits.
Delicate nostril slits,
I decided, still uneasy, not sure what she wanted. She moved toward me, then stopped, aware of my nervousness.

“I’m supposed…to reassure you…that it was fun…if you were a real immature Gwyng,” she said. “But it’s a bit frightening, too.”

I took her fur-backed fingers. She moved up and leaned sideways against me. Looking up at me, she said, “Male, taller than I am. Are you driven like we are?”

“It’s different.”

“Like Karriaagzh? I need to eat,” she said. “Come with me to the herds. Or the cooler room,” she added when she saw me flinch. “Is Karriaagzh really going to outlive me?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can get Wy’um to set you up in Rector candidate progression. You’re not from a Federation species—you can be Rector without waiting four hundred years for your species to be trusted not to use your position.” She was trembling from exhaustion, yet still obsessed with Karriaagzh.

“If he lives to be 150, then I’ll be an old man when he dies. Or dead myself.”

She didn’t reply, just poured blood and oil into a large glass and looked through a drawer until she found one of their broad straws. Then she looked at me while the tongue muscles pumped away. When she was through, she said, “I don’t want the History Committee forgetting me.”

“The Gwyngs will, won’t they?”

“You other sapients have contaminated us.” She was Gwyng-planet born; she knew what her people were like in a pure Gwyng culture. Maybe all of us did mess each other up. “We need to bring in new species gradually. Too confusing/brain dilations/reductions.”

“Want me to help wash out the scrapes and cuts?”

“Rub out muscles,” she said, oo’ing.

It’s just like rubbing down a horse, I kept telling myself as I knelt over Black Amber, who sprawled out on a floor mat. The muscles were not quite human. Her reddish black hair wasn’t quite as coarse as a terrier’s. “You were going to fix the party food?” I asked as she dozed off.

“Sleep some first,” she said. “Sit by me

“I’d better work on the party food.”

“My
heat is over,” she said, catching something in my tone.

All the male Gwyngs who’d been shoving for Black Amber’s cunt earlier, their female pouch kin, Rhyodolite and Cadmium—all showed up for this party. Black Amber greeted them on the veranda, even though one of them must have sent us the dying Gwyng.

But she hugged side to side with everyone, fed them oil drinks, and soon everyone bumped shoulders and told each other what a good time they’d had—as though they’d forgotten the scratches and bruises—and what a good Gwyng woman Black Amber was.

Gwyng hypocrites—I couldn’t believe them. Wy’um bent Rhyodolite over his knees and sang in Rhyodolite’s mouth until Rhyo relaxed completely, letting his vocal cords vibrate sympathetically to Wy’um’s. Each began pairing off to sing each other’s vocal cords, and Wy’um finally leaned back utterly limp across Cadmium’s knees, song and under-song vibrating through the room. They all sang that the life/net of dancing patterns was wonderful.

Wy’um finally pulled himself up off Cadmium’s knees and said, “I’ll leave early.”

“Fair enough,” said the older blond-grizzled Gwyng who talked to me during the event. “We left early before.”

Finally, well after midnight, the party ended with a heap of talked-out, socially reassured Gwyngs dozing on floor cushions—Black Amber and her pouch kin twined in among the rest.

My crotch still ached. Alone I crawled into the tubular sofa which smelled of Gwyng. Wondering why I didn’t try to get that human woman, I konked out.

When I woke up, the house owners were talking to Amber, who told them she’d try again.

One female said, “Sorry I threw gravel at the windows, Sub-Rector, but my pouch brother was with you, and I worried that he’d have a hard time.”

As we hydrofoiled back to Black Amber’s own house, Cadmium asked, “Why do you have glands that signal anxiety? I can understand the biological survival value of signaling anger. Knowing who to avoid preserves social relationships for when the angry one is calmer. But anxiety?”