Becoming Alien (43 page)

Asked how he felt, negotiating with such a creature, the Encoral Ragar Sim said, “The bird is tough, intelligent, but not like us. But his alien diversions will not disrupt our economy. We promised all the corporations that.”

Karriaagzh rocked his body. “Karst can’t promise that,” he said softly.

On-screen again, I looked dirty-faced and apprehensive, while a voice-over commentary mentioned that I was learning to trust the Yauntries after my initial rudeness. The commentating voice hinted that Rhyodolite and Xenon, who went berserk when the Yauntries stopped our ship, had gated into the Yauntry system without Federation authority.

Damn them.
I remembered Xenon’s olive hackles swaying in null-gravity, his tense politeness.

Edwir Hargun talked about Tesseract as though he’d been an invited house guest. “The xenophobic crew leader,” Hargun told the Yauntries, “has since been learning better manners from birds like Karriaagzh.”

“Bird heroes?” Carbon-jet said.

Karriaagzh hushed him, as Hargun explained, “Part of Tom Red Clay’s rehabilitation will be helping me hammer out a non-exploitive trade agreement. He, too, is moderately xenophobic.”

Carbon-jet lay back and whistled trills. Karriaagzh clacked—that horrid sound again. “You don’t think that’s funny?” Carbon-jet asked him.

“I have no mammal sense of finding fun in potential dangers.”

“Well, you got off looking fabulous and tough. I heard they want me and Red Clay up on espionage charges. Do good, don’t give up immunity.”

Karriaagzh replied, “If we were slaughtered, Karst would just continue to blockade the planet. The Yauntries could evict us with abusive tactics, but the Federation will still be out there.”

I sat rigidly, trying not to be so afraid. Finally, I said, “I keep thinking about how alien I looked.”

“Mammals always look abnormal on video,” Karriaagzh said as he got up to pour water down his throat.

“I can’t expose my people to your technologies yet,” Hargun told me over the phone. He said it curtly, no politeness. “They’re shaken, so it’s too early to talk.”

Carbon-jet and I bitched at each other for two months over laser disc music and Yauntry novels while Karriaagzh and the Encoral Ragar Sim disappeared each morning.

When certain guards were on duty, a Yauntry with a sun-on-horizon crest would visit Carbon-jet. The first time, Carbon-jet told me, “Go ride those damn animals. I’ll tell you later what’s going on.”

But Carbon-jet told me nothing. After weeks of squabbling with him and riding with Yauntries who wouldn’t talk to me, I asked Karriaagzh if Carbon-jet and I could sit in on the negotiations.

“Great idea,” Carbon-jet said. “Especially since they want to negotiate us into jail here.”

The Yauntries would permit us to sit at Karriaagzh’s table if we didn’t communicate either verbally or by signal to anyone in the room.

The Yauntry guard opened the conference room door; we walked into a funnel-shaped room. “A theater,” Carbon-jet murmured, knowing a different kind of theater than the ones I’d seen. The conference tables were deep below tiers of seats. Giant fiber-optic bundles fanned out from the ceiling to spray light all over. Most seats were empty, but we passed two clusters of Yauntries, two different embroidered badges on their shoulders.

“Odd fingernails, besides all that fur,” one said.

“They understand Yauntro,”
his companion hissed. Carbon-jet looked at my hands and at his own, which did have odd nails, thick at the base, with a ridge through the center, as though the claws had been flattened.

“Not supposed to think so much about species differences,” Carbon-jet said as we passed them.

“You looked first,” I replied as we sat down at the end of Karriaagzh’s table. Karriaagzh and Sim glared at me, so I quickly shut up and sat very still.

Two tables faced each other across the pit—white hair against gray feathers. As the morning crept on, I found out how boring life-and-death negotiations could be.

Then Sim said, “Your people must know that attempting to suborn Yauntry intelligence is unethical.”

Looking at me and C-j, Karriaagzh replied, “I refuse to waive immunity retroactively.”

“We suspect contacts with you
will
de-stabilize us. The computer in the first ship was beyond anything we have. And what if a species tries to dominate the others?”

Karriaagzh said, “Only medicine is dominated by one species—the Barcons, who don’t use that against the rest of us.”

Sim looked for a Barcon, saw one, and shuddered slightly, then said, “Can we keep our native physicians?”

“Of course. And species don’t always agree along group lines. Close parallels can be most annoying.” Karriaagzh added in Yauntro, “Send observers to Karst from each corporation if they function as semi-independent political units.”

The discussions veered off into dull discussion of the nature of the observers on Karst and Yauntra, what Institutes might be observed, etc., etc.

Then Sim said, “And we must discuss retribution for the Federation damages to Yauntra’s defenses.”

“Define your Yauntro term ‘retribution,’” Karriaagzh said. As he listened, he slid his nictitating membranes a quarter way over his eyes and raised his feathers—deep in thought—while Sim explained slowly that the Yauntro term meant money for damages paid by a nation or corporation to another.

Suddenly Karriaagzh seemed to understand. His feathers snapped flat, the eyes opened wide, membranes back. “I believe,” he said stiffly, “that this is somewhat like a Karst II term that means, depending on pattern context, something similar to the Karst I word for punitive damages.” The crest started rising. “Punitive damages?”

Encoral Sim leaned his chin down on his folded arms as he listened to Karriaagzh.

The bird eased his crest down, all the time staring at Sim with those yellow eyes. “You can’t mean that,” Karriaagzh said. “Perhaps mutual recompense—we’ve both suffered from misunderstandings.”

Hargun closed his eyes and leaned back up, then suddenly caught Karriaagzh with a full gray stare. “Bird,” Sim said, “you’re so expressive for a feathered space creature. But not always convincing.”

“Perhaps the Federation could give money,” Karriaagzh said, “for startling you so badly. We understand your species is afflicted with xenophobia—most of you. Would this be offensive?”

Damn them, they enjoy this.
Karriaagzh moved more fluidly than he let himself move on Karst, and he spoke damn good Yauntro from so short a study of it.

“We will admit to being startled,” Sim said with a smile, “if you pay your debt without disrupting our economy. We don’t use your currency or trade items could hurt our local manufacturers.”

“We’ll give you training. Your corporations and government can figure out how to use it,” Karriaagzh replied. Sim grimaced. Behind me, Yauntries drew in hissing breaths.

We all ate lunch standing around the table Karst-style as Karriaagzh’s Barcons and native Yauntry servants brought food in. The two negotiators kept hammering.

“Laws?” Encoral Sim asked, gray eyes slitted. “What laws will your visiting scholars obey? Ours? Yours?”

“Negotiator, except for sexual and eating behavior, we’d obey your laws on your planet. But give us time to learn them. We can’t waive immunity until we do. As for your students on Karst, should you send them, we would like to discuss how appropriate
your
laws would be in
that
context. We’ve given you copies of Federation legal codes and the rules of space claims, interplanetary trading.”

Sim looked briefly at me and Carbon-jet, the tokens in this game. “So many regulations. We’re still translating. How are we to protect our adjacent system space?”

“We protect any species’ title to its solar system—inside that is planetary business,” Karriaagzh answered.

Sim considered that as he chewed, then said, “What limits to raw materials? Anything necessary that the universe will run out of soon?”

“Considering the gates, and considering that we control breeding and migration on all systems except systems of origin—Yauntra’s solar system for your species—there are almost no limited resources.”

“Lithium? Aluminum?”

“Lithium’s rare, but no one forces you to sell.”

Hargun came up. “Will your creatures be decent among us?” he asked as Karriaagzh gorged on meat. “I’ve heard bird sapients get sexual pleasure from feeding gaping babies of any species. Will even feed inanimate objects.”

Karriaagzh grabbed his lower mandible. Muscles between his eyes quivered. His crest shot erect, and he stared at Carbon-jet, then at me.

I blushed. Eyes fixed on me, motionless even though the membranes slid back and forth across them, Karriaagzh said, “Sirs, I have as part of my mating and bonding behavior such an act. Under stress, the act comforts. Did you not share sex with your female, Hargun, when you came back here?” Karriaagzh seemed to stare into my brain, see me with Yangchenla. “While I’ve been away from my own kind for over fifty years, these drives are powerful, as much they amuse sneaky young mammals.” He finally looked away from me.

I raised my hands alongside of my nose, trembling.

Karriaagzh continued, “It is not equivalent to your vomit. We have an organ that cleanly grinds food and the bolus is odorless and very nutritious. The babies…”

“Hargun’s sorry he brought it up,” Sim said, “but your food-grinding organ was throbbing over
his
babies.”

Karriaagzh, nictitating membranes half covering his eyes, looked stiffly over the Encoral Sim’s head. “The Federation brings us knowledge of all the ways that Mind works out life systems. Yet, in our sex acts, we often look foolish. In following instincts that bind matter to mind, perhaps no species is completely intelligent. Between all of us…”

“You’re saying sex makes us fools?” Sim asked.

“One of my cadets was made a fool here, over sex,” Karriaagzh said as he slumped down to the floor, taking his meat plate with him, nibbling away with his beak.

I rushed out into the hall and Carbon-jet followed me out whistling merrily. “Sneaky young mammal,” he said.

I guess I shouldn’t have explained to them about the Rector. “
They’d asked about it when he wriggled his crop at the Hargun kids,”
I said, slipping into English.

“Karst I, boy, Karst.”

“He wriggled his throat organ at Hargun’s children. They must have connected what I said with Karriaagzh’s going out at the first dinner.”

“He made Hargun look prissy.”

That night, at a Yauntry-style formal dinner, I dodged my waiter and apologized to Karriaagzh.

He pecked my head almost hard. “For that, you wash the stones.”

Yuck, those meat-greasy stones.
“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Carbon-jet was amused?”

“He thought you made the best of it.”

After dinner, I went to the Rector’s room. Karriaagzh was crouched on the red suede mat in front of an English falconry book, surrounded by feather-cleaning paraphernalia: sawdust in a big shaker, combs like serrated knives, oils, razors, towels, and plastic pins. Beyond the mat was his feather dryer. I looked at the tools and Karriaagzh; cleaning him feather by feather could get real old, real fast.

“Sit down beside me. I want you to read this.” Nervously, I sat, and he passed me the book, open to a section on feather repair—imping.

As I looked at the photo of a hawk on its back with a wing stretched out, Karriaagzh inspected himself in a three-way mirror and said, “If you cut out the kinks on the bigger feathers and splice the feather segments together, I’d look less like
a dirty old man.”

I was startled to hear more English, then felt guilty that I’d told the Yauntry about his pleasure reflex.

“Do these tonight,” he said, pointing to about ten feathers.

“The longer these negotiations last, the better I’ll look.” He caught my reflected eyes in the mirror. “Your species trained hunting birds—interesting to think about, for me.”

Where to begin?
I cut and spliced, using glue and plastic needles inside the feather shafts. Down silkier than Granite’s came out in my hands and stuck to the glue. The musty feather smell made me gag. “What’s happening?” I asked.

“Molt,” he said. “It’s stressful for us.”

I sat behind him, holding the feathers until the glue hardened. After the last splice, Karriaagzh went to shower, taking a bottle of soap with him. I looked through the falconry book until he came padding back, totally sopping wet, the big hoof nails on each foot cut short. He patted himself carefully with a towel and turned on his dryer.

“Tom, what are Gwyngs to you?”

“Black Amber’s my sponsor. What else do you mean?”

“Wy’um, her heat. Did she use you to scare away the others?”

“Sir?” I wasn’t raised by Warren for nothing. Sometimes, it was better to seem stupid. “I just made tea. Did get tackled by one—I can’t tell them all apart.”