Becoming Alien (33 page)

“Yes,” he said, standing in front of me. “They want us to pay tribute on interstellar commerce in Federation ships, or through Federation gates. Your Federation monopolizes the known geometries to force money from us.”

“All I knew was that I’d get a share of duties since I was one of those who first-contacted Yauntra. I don’t know anything more.”

“Plus charges on all things your many species claim to have invented first. I suspect honest independent discoveries aren’t allowed in your Federation universe. “

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Are we supposed to kill you and then be made guilty?” He stared at me, suddenly nervous. Maybe he’d taken an alien bait? “Just how long have you been with these people?”

“Around two years. Less.”

“What cargoes fly between planets?”

“Art things. Computer discs. Some minerals…lithium. Ideas are the main trade item,” I said, remembering the bit about ideas from a history lesson.

“We have lithium, also hydrocarbons.” He sat down heavily and leaned toward me. “Can you appreciate our position?” One grade of politeness.

“You’ve got me curious,” I said. “I appreciate your reluctance to trust the Federation, and I hope you understand why I can’t trust you.”

“Personal or political mistrust?”

“Personal, because you look at me as if I were a monster, armed as you are.”

“We have xenophobia, as your people reported to Karst,” he said. “Do you understand us now?”

A denial would have been more soothing. Filla had just sat there, listening. Now she got up, stretched, and said,
“Tom,
Red Clay, I am sorry. But my experiences didn’t include sex with hairy creatures.”

The phrase
So human an animal
drifted through my roiled brain.

“We’ll eat now,” Filla said.

The male and I watched each other while Filla cooked. “What is your Rector?” he said suddenly.

“A solitary bird. But his kind has space capacities, just doesn’t use them.”

“Tell Carbon-jet we plan to subvert the bird control of the Federation by organizing a tropical-species resistance group, ex-brachiators.”

“Apes,” I said in the Karst slang for our stock.

“Yes, we will pit apes against feathered lizards,”

“It doesn’t work that way. I’ll have to tell them all about our conversations.”

“We understand that.” He smiled. I wondered if he knew how fully I could reconstruct the conversations. Filla came in with dinner, and we ate out of bowls held in our various laps, each watching each for bad manners or totally alien weirdnesses.

Then I wondered if they’d given me more than an hour of pure silence.

Back with the pointed-nose Carbon-jet, memory-jogging plate to my skull, I asked, “Do you want to know what color his clothes were?”

“Just tell me exactly what was said, including foreign-language statements.” He reached over my shoulder to punch on a recorder, then stood behind me, holding the plate steady.

Exactly. Down the time line. I could even taste the food I’d eaten when we’d finished talking. After I’d told all my memory held, Carbon-jet tugged the plate—wet plop as it pulled away from my jellied hair and scalp. “We undid what they did to your skull computer, also,” Carbon-jet said.
Weird.
I went to wash my hair and dried it before I came back to Carbon-jet.

When I returned, C-j was entering data furiously on his terminal. The display changed, and he wrote strange characters with a light pen before saying, “I wish I could meet the Yauntry responsible for this move, especially since they knew I sent you.”

I was caught between two young intelligence officers strutting their stuff—elaborating lies and honesties for pure cleverness. Agile minds—I almost suspected Carbon-jet of being yet another ape.

The next day, Yauntry cops with big smiles came to the library room where Carbon-jet and I were working and told us, “No Federation creatures or message pods can leave Yauntra until the Xi’isisom files are returned.”

Carbon-jet stared at them with his challenge face, nose tucked down, the whole T of naked face skin even shinier. His microfilms for Karst—not going. Since nobody got radio waves to beat Einstein, Tykwing,
et al.,
C-j’s information was stuck on Yauntra. Unmanned message pods were easy to trap in gravity nets.

We couldn’t find a data entry for the missing materials under the title they’d given us.

Next morning when we woke up, Carbon-jet and I debated whether to go back to the sub-basement or not. We went, thinking that since we weren’t guilty, we might as well keep working.

Filla and the male Yauntry who’d been at the cabin last time were both there, looking at me as if they knew I was bait, but still, hook and all, they had to take me.

“Would you like to go back to the country?” Filla asked, her hair back to a more normal Yauntry color.

“No,” I said.

Carbon-jet looked up at the silent male and lowered his nose slightly, then raised it when the male smiled and moved a hand to his waistband. Where human pants had pockets, the Yauntry pants had a fold and a lump…
there, that’s where the gun
is. Carbon-jet said, “Tom, maybe you’d better go with them.”

“Come on, Red Clay
Tum,
we won’t hurt you.”

“Why is everyone doing this to me?” I gripped the chair, then saw Carbon-jet’s rigid face and went with them. The country we drove through looked less and less Earthy. We went to a different cabin, stone and cold, up in their tropical highlands.

I’d come only with the clothes I had on, but they produced other things of mine someone must have snagged from the apartment.

At first, I was really scared, thought they’d kill me, or bring me up on spy charges and pen me here alone on Yauntra forever. Or maybe, I figured when they didn’t speak to me but locked me in a stone room with an iron door, they were waiting to see what Karst would do.

Since they’d forgotten my razor, I grew stubble, which exasperated Filla. The two Yauntries were so damn wary around me, either keeping a jump away or crowding in close, sweating through the old parallel armpit glands. Stink glands. They’d both walk me outside by a little creek where I’d flip stones over to uncover flat crabs that were Yauntra analogs to crayfish.

The third day, the male said, “So far, they’ve done nothing for you, animal.”

I sat hunched up against my room’s stone wall, staring at him. It seemed we sat for days, them watching my face hair grow, my
mind
tightening up in a knot, blanking out the alien people, landscape.

“You’re destroying me,” I finally said.

“Take him outside,” he told Filla.

As she walked behind me, I wondered what I could eat to make myself sick, force them to take me to a hospital, something. But they
might
let me
die. Alien should have known
fuji
was poison.

Finally, one day, a phone buzzed. Filla’s brother took it off the wall and into a separate room, then came back, scowling, talking with Filla in their strange language.

“We’ll have company soon,” she said to me.

After about an hour, we heard cars driving toward the house. Then I saw, out the window, at least a dozen Barcons and Jereks. The Rector Karriaagzh ducked through the door, with a needle-gun in his four-fingered hand, crest erect and quivering, followed by Carbon-jet, Black Amber, and Edwir Hargun.

“He tried to disgust us by the neglect of his personal grooming,” Filla said in Karst. Black Amber’s nostrils clapped, but then she oo’ed at me.

“Shut up,” Karriaagzh said in Yauntro. He invaded the Yauntries’ personal space with beak and toes. Filla backed against the farthest wall.

“Sir,”
I said, “they think you’re the Federation’s ruler.”

Karriaagzh looked at the frightened Yauntries and at Black Amber, who kept her own distance. He coughed, then said, “If I were, I wouldn’t be here.” Looking at Hargun, he asked, “Does my height affect your judgment so adversely?” Hargun studied the cold stone floor and his own people’s faces.

I wasn’t sure what was happening, but Edwir Hargun didn’t give me or C-j any eye contact. Occasionally, he’d squint at the Rector as we all got into various cars, including one without a rear seat for Karriaagzh.

We drove back down the mountain to a landing grid, outside Uzir. When the cars emptied out, we all stood around the blue light bringing in another Karst ship. Hargun looked at all the Barcons and Jereks with guns, miniature robot cannons cruising like vicious high-tech turtles, while Black Amber watched Karriaagzh as if he were the dangerous one.

“The blockade will continue, for your own good.” Karriaagzh told Hargun. “Only the medics and the young cadet will accompany us, so we’re trading hostages. The others will stay.”

Karriaagzh’s transport materialized on the grid, and a crew of the most mixed aliens—pug-faces, birds, the skinny shiny blacks—rushed down the ramp while the transport was still rolling off the cables. Carbon-jet, who’d been the weirdest alien previously on Yauntra, talked with Karriaagzh in a strange language, then left, sounding querulous, with a troop of Barcons and five robot guns.

“You will get in, Ambassador;” Karriaagzh said to Hargun. “Then you can call for whoever you want to have come with you. Would one of the people who held Red Clay hostage do?” Karriaagzh asked in Karst.

“Sir, we take this as a kidnapping;” Hargun said, looking back at the other Yauntries.

“Fine. Shall I drag you? You kidnapped Red Clay.”

“I have to have witnesses,” he said. “The ones who should come with me had experience in handling aliens earlier.”

“Can Black Amber ride with us?” I asked.

Karriaagzh pulled nictitating membranes over his eyes and spat air—bird disgust. “Go talk to her, if you must. She’s going back in another transport.”

Before she got in her transport, we embraced, first Gwyng-style, then human. “Karr’aggzh uses,” she said, brushing the fuzzy backs of her fingers over my stubble beard.

Surprising how glad I was to see her, her to see me. She tried to smooth down my new beard, oo’ing and koo’ing softly. “What happened?” I asked.

“I did what I had to do/was forced by my concerns to do. But the bird bent me with that. Come to rest at my house after. Or at Tesseract’s…might be politically more expedient/less…”

She stopped mid-pattern, holding my head gently with her fingertips, and kissed me on the eyelids, strange dry little kisses. “Go now, to the bird,” she said.

After her ship disappeared in a shimmer of blue, the Rector’s transport rolled back onto the net. Hargun’s witnesses arrived in a Yauntry helicopter flown by Barcons who hustled them up into the transport.

We didn’t gate far, just to a Yauntry space net station the Federation people had seized and encircled with Karst cargo bellies.

As we sat in the Rector’s salon, Hargun in a chair, Karriaagzh on a leather pad, and me on the floor, Karriaagzh explained to Hargun, “We camouflaged most of our ships. Yauntry panic wasn’t considered useful.”

Then we swung by the first of their four moons, not as big as Earth’s moon, but still none too tiny. On the blind side of the moon, I saw Karst ships, glittering side by side, like wasps on a nest.

Even though Yauntra wasn’t my planet, I felt cold and scared. “I hate xenophobes,” Karriaagzh said. Edwir Hargun finally drew in a breath and blinked rapidly as he looked at the ships. Karriaagzh continued in Yauntro, “All of our representatives obeyed your restrictions. None deserved to be tempted to desert us.”

I wondered if I was in trouble now.

“Sir, you violate my goodwill,” Hargun said. He stared, silent, almost quivering, out the glass viewport as we passed the third moon. An eighth of the moon’s outside hemisphere was shiny with transports, an eerie sight even for me.

Hargun didn’t speak again. Karriaagzh ordered his ship to begin gate hops to Karst.

The viewports turned to perfect mirrors in the jump fields—no “out” for light to escape to. The Rector watched Hargun’s reflection flicker on and off, then spoke again, in Karst but slowly. “Once we have five hundred planets in our Federation, no species or group of species could possibly think of trying to dominate. Although we are relatively smaller than I’d prefer, I let new species test the Federation before joining. But it’s a waste of energy.”

“Would we be exterminated if we attacked?”

Karriaagzh faced Hargun directly. “Ambassador, we don’t want to destroy any uniqueness.”

“Don’t
want
to,” Hargun echoed with his own emphasis.

We entered the gravity net near the Karst sun’s outermost planet. The Rector’s ship cruised around the space yards, so he could point out the freight capacity of cargo bellies, and note the anti-piracy vessels, and the gravity warp capacities of the reserve nets. “If you believe me,” he told Hargun gravely.

The viewport flashed into a mirror again, then turned transparent to show Karst rolling through space beside us. Karriaagzh said, “Rotate to Ah-5,” and we turned, gas hissing, to face a huge satellite that looked like two dragonflies fighting—metal gauzy wings and crystal ports.