Being Alien (10 page)

“They don’t kill you for breaking cover?” Carstairs asked. His glasses were askew again; his face looked pasty, as though the skin was loaded with sweat about to bead through his pores.

“You think we lied about not hurting you. You wonder if they’ll kill you for finding out?” I asked. The sweat slickened on Carstairs’ face.

“You can’t prove a damn thing,” the chief Barcon said. “You’re a notorious drug user. You want an exclusive on the physics. Why should you betray us?”

“What about me?” Reeann asked. I felt her body shift, shoulders squared, as though she’d die fighting if the answer was wrong.

“Will you mate with Tom?” the smaller female asked.

For a second, there was no sound, no air. Then Reeann’s eyes seemed to spin. “Mars wants women,” she said before collapsing on spilt beer, choking on the laughter, legs thrashing under the table.

She settled down breathing hard, tears in her eyes, then looked over at me.

“I said something wrong,” the female said, jaw flexing.

Reeann fled to the ladies room. Carstairs looked at us and bit into his hand, teeth really in the flesh, sparkling eyes surrounded by the black-rimmed glasses. The waitress came by and mopped up the beer, face utterly impassive with curiosity.

“I guess I’ll never be good with humans,” I said. “You’re fuck-ups,” Carstairs said. “Not machine-brained invaders of superior ruthlessness.”

“It’s a hardship post,” the female told him.

3
Alien Landscape With Woman

Marianne—I dared not walk by her house after that night in the bar. The Barcon couples left the bar quarreling between pairs, solidarity in marriage as I’ve never seen in humans. One real black whispered to his lady, “Must be Africans.”

Again, I hit the books, saw an old video of an almost kamakazi sales school, read all
Harvard Magazine
had to say on Japanese, discovered obscure articles about nuclear reactors in Zaire and on the Navajo reservation. All my friends were aliens and on another planet. I didn’t have friends here, human or otherwise, I kept thinking to myself as I booked down with Japanese data.

Then, three days later, Marianne came by, smelling of warm skin and gardenia perfume, in shorts as if the weather were warm, with a rugged hippie shoulder bag dangling below her elbow. I opened the door and was terrified that she’d burst out laughing again. She said instead, “Roger Strigate wants you to pick up your bike.”

That was another life, Reeann
, but I said, “Okay.”

“Then we can go riding, out,” she said in a small voice, “away from the city.” She looked at the walls near the door as though searching for bugs.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I want to know about John Amber” she said. “He was odd.”

“Odder than you think,” I said as I got my shoes on.

In the drive, her car, another eco mobile, sat on fat dune tires, su burnt fiberglass and chrome bike racks.

“I’m sorry I laughed,” she said.

I didn’t reply then but as we got closer to the bike shop, I said, “I hate having my women arranged for me.”

She didn’t speak herself until I paid Strigate the rest of the $3000 for the bike, riding clothes, funny shoes with slotted plastic biscuits on the soles. Then she said, “Let’s pretend none of this weird stuff is going on.”

“Yeah, I’m researching Japan to help an African country develop without getting economically in hock to the West.”

“An honorable profession,” she said “Better than being an out-of-work linguist who won’t do government work.”

“What I’m doing
is
government work.”

“CIA, USA. My parents’ bad guys.” We loaded my bike on the rooftop bike rack beside hers, then put the other stuff behind the front seat. “The government that put you in jail for drugs."

“I wish had turned my brother in. No, I don’t… Reann, he was tabbing Quaaludes, making speed, using. But he was crazy, too, and my brother.”

We drove though modern suburbs planted on western movie set type hills, then out farther. “Tom, you don’t have to be back soon, do you?

“Hell, they’re, giving me an opportunity to slip back into human culture if I want to hide forever under a phony name.”

“Do you want to go back?”

“Shit, yes. I don’t want to get stuck here.”

“Does Earth seem provincial to you now?”

“Yes and no.”

She found a park by water she called a slew, “spelled ‘slough.”

“Slow,”
she said as she began getting the bikes off the rack.
“
I thought we’d ride about twenty miles in flat country.”

“Twenty miles!”

“Sure, you’re in basically good shape. I’ve seen you running around the campus ParCourse.”

“You’ve been watching me?”

“Yes,” she said with a little, very unsouthern hiss. I turned from her as I felt heat rise in my face and reached for my bike. She moved closer to me, hip to hip, and unhooked what I’d just learned to call a quick release, a cam-operated squeeze bolt loosened and tightened with a chrome-plated lever. The front wheels were in the car with more quick releases skewered through their hubs.

Silently, she showed me how to put the wheel in the front fork and adjust the quick release to clamp the wheel firmly, then she said, “I thought about telling someone there were aliens in Berkeley, but too many people in Berkeley claim to have met aliens already. And I found out lots of fringe academics know Alex, a popular fellow.”

“He’s manipulative,” I said.

“No kidding. What about the fake blacks?”

“They’re hard to get to know”

We leaned the bikes against the car and pulled on our fingerless gloves, strapped the helmets tight. I swung one leg over the bike and stood straddling it while I watched her put one cleated shoe in her left pedal, wiggle it until the cleat slot went down over the pedal bar. She pulled up and tightened the strap. “Leave one strap loose, so you can yank that foot out. Make it a habit to leave the left or right loose—just one side all the time.”

Could you give me some books on this?” I felt weird taking instructions from a woman, especially one I was sexually attracted to.

“Tom,” she said like both she was sorry and I was a jerk. She pushed a stray hair under her helmet strap and looked at me with her gloved right hand knuckles against her left cheekbone, elegant inside her weird clothes. I did as she said and felt trapped on the bike, pulled the strap yight and then lifted my foot. She pushed down on her raised pedal and swung her foot up into the other toe clip. I tried to imitate her but ended up with my foot on the wrong side of the pedal, the clip dangling underneath.

“Keep pedaling. When you build up momentum, flip it with your toe”

I pedaled like a crippled man, flailing at the pedal with my toe. Finally, I slid my foot in the clip, and began pedaling furiously. The bike went smoother the faster I went.

“Fun, isn’t it?" Marianne said from beside me, her bike going without little jerks from side to side.

We began giggling. Like normal teenagers, I thought, having never had normal teen times. All the languages I knew zinged through my mind making up epitaphs for her
—karrer zullila,
op wul, lost bossy bitch,
frantul”—
I decided. I wanted her as all of them. She took me away from my fear of being trapped as the parole breaker, alien sympathizer. We were just two kids on bikes, anonymously zinging by suburban yards now, too fast for our ages to show. Still giggling. Then she said, breathing hard between, phrases, “Alex…really terrified of jail? You sent here…to urge him to be more discreet.”

Well. Probably. “Nothing…is done…on Karst…for just one…species’s…reasons.” I noticed there was more air gulping between my phrases than hers. Suddenly I felt what had to be my liver, metabolizing lactic acid that burned back. “Slower.”

She tightened her lips and sat up on her bike, coasting. I said, when my lungs settled down, “I hate talking about jail. My brother got me into drug making.”

"Where’s he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Shouldn’t you find him?”

“I couldn’t, but maybe someone else could.”

“Is he dangerous?”

“Not to a woman.” I guessed that was a safe answer.

“You were pushing the pace, Tom,” she said. “Is this more comfortable?”

“Yeah.” Yeah.

“What do you do for your…Federation, is it?”

“I arrange trade contracts, watch non-contacted sapients’ television programs. I’ve learned two non-contacted languages as best we could extrapolate them. I study contacted sapients behavior and history. If two species are quarreling, a lot of times a third species can figure out how to solve the problem.”

About a mile down the highway, we passed other bike riders going back toward the parking lot. They waved at her, she at them. Then, just as I’d decided she wasn’t going to respond, she said, “I wish I could do that. I’m a linguist, but primitive tribes are so glicky. Really, fleas, leeches…do I sound bigoted?”

“Leeches are…glicky?” I’d never heard that word before.

“I’m never going to do shit on a bike.” She bent down and loosened her toe straps “And I’m whining again. Don’t kidnap me. I’d miss my sister.”

“She could go, too.”

Marianne’s bike swerved. “And Sam?”

“Yeah, they want a human social group.”

“And your brother. We’re all wasted on Earth, no?”

“Yeah.” I didn’t tell her she’d be Support, not Officiator.

“Is there something horrible up there that you’re not telling me about?”

“Other humans. From Tibet, about 500 years ago They helped a ship during a contact war. I think there were two Federations then, but the computer’s got nothing on that.”

“Umm, well, Tibetans. I guess I can’t escape them.”

“They do have fleas. And the women tape down their breasts and run little shops in the city, some of them.
City
Tibetans don’t have fleas, just the Preserve ones.”

“Well, we won’t be the only humans there, then?”

“Not hardly. About 200 of them, maybe fifty or sixty in the city.”

“Just one city?

“The planet’s artificial. It gets to you sometimes—every plant is imported. The geology is faked. The
vr'ech—
that’s Karst for sapients or aliens—wanted the Federation held out in space off from inhabited planets.”

“Vr'ech,
what’s the singular?”

“Ech,
but it’s considered too alienating.”

“Why?”

“Like you’re real and the other guy isn’t. We aren’t really supposed to speak of other sapients as
vr'ech,
but rather
uhyalla,
creatures, both sapient and nonsapient, us and them. Uh, the inclusive plural prefix."

“Unofficially, then, there’s bigotry?”

“Some of the
uhyalla
are very
ech.
We have to know the differences, really, even when we try to smooth them over.”

“Would you want to stay here?”

“I have obligations.”

“Also, you skipped parole. But you could buy false papers so easily.”

I didn’t answer her. A line of skinny guys on bikes like ours came whizzing up, amazingly silent for things going over twenty-five miles an hour. Chattering among each other, they began to pass us. Marianne looked up and said, “Mike.”

“Marianne, jump on back.” 

She said “I’m just cruising.”

“We won’t make you take a pull. Just suck wheel.”

“She doesn’t want to,” I said.

The guy laughed and stood up to stomp his pedals and catch up with the others. He pulled in so close I thought he’d run into the other bike rider’s back wheel but hung in at three inches, drafting like a race car.

I said, “They wouldn’t hunt me down if I left but I couldn’t do anything here as interesting as what I’ve been doing. And I’d miss the other species. It’s like living in a zoo where the exhibits explain themselves, or listen to your theories about how they evolved socially.”

“Super neat.”

“Did you wanted to ride with them?”

“I don’t know what I want. Yeah, I want to know what would my status be if the other humans have fleas?”

We rode on by oaks with normal-sized leaves growing by the water, up hills covered with manzanita, those orange branches twisted so much they looked like they had muscles, sage, then past houses sunk in the earth with huge black solar panels covering their roofs.

I said, “Here looks as alien as any place else.” 

She said, “I grew up here”

“They logged off the trees, so you’ve just got brush.”

“No, rainfall’s scanty.”

“Marianne, if you come back with me, we can find a place on Karst where the rainfall is scanty. They made the planet to suit all sorts of creatures."