Being Alien (14 page)

Sam said, “I’d like you all to leave. Now.
Don’t
come back. We have nice quiet little lives here and don’t need aliens and FBI to tweek us.

S’um said; “But Marianne and Tom. . .”

“What about Marianne and Tom?” Sam asked.

The Barcons and Alex began discussing
T’iom
and
Reian
in Barq. Jackie finally said in English, “It’s not polite to tell you, but they’re lovers.”

I almost laughed. “I’m sorry, Marianne.”

“It’s all right, Tom.”

“Sam,” Jackie said,
 
“
it would not be fun to betray all of us to the FBI.”

4
Leaving and Reasons to Leave

A grey car rolled into the driveway a day later, big gas-burner, and two guys in business suits got out, one with a briefcase; I saw them in the peephole and thought about running, but opened the door.

“Hello, Tom Gresham?” the older of the two men, the one without the briefcase, said.

“Yes,” I said, praying to my fake fingerprints.

Before he said another word, he held up a glossy of Jerry Carstairs. I figured they’d start there. Something buzzed in my head, and my muscles relaxed as if by remote control. Remote Barcon control.

“You know Jerry, Tom,” the older man said. “We’re field agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’m Special Agent Peter Friese.” He showed me his badge.

“I’m Edward O’Neal,” the other one said, flipping open his badge case. “I hope you’ll be willing to tell us what you know about Carstairs without a subpoena.”

“I don’t really know much about him. I’ve been traveling in Asia a bit. Look, I’ve got a trust fund.”

They stood in the door, looking at each other. “May we come in?” Friese said.

“Sure.” I backed away from the door.

“What do you do with your computer?” O’Neal asked, almost conversationally.

“I’m trying to write about Japan. I get bored just living off a trust fund.”

“You have an odd accent?”

“Asia. I also jammed a spoon up against the back of my upper teeth one time when I was tripping.”

They smiled at that. “What does Jerry Carstairs like to talk about?”

“Weird stuff, like dimensions. Drugs, but I guess that’s not so weird for Berkeley,” I said, having seen them relax slightly when I lied to them about acid and spoons up the mouth. Cops always feel superior to sloppy druggies.

“Did you ever ask him about Lawrence Laboratory?”

I shook my head. O’Neal opened his briefcase and pulled out a photo of Alex. Shit. “Alex. People in Asia got him to meet me at the plane.”

“Do you have his phone number?”

“No.”

They stiffened. “Can we see your passport?” Friese said. I got up and went back to the bedroom, O’Neal following me, found the passport and showed it to them. Damn Institute better have forged a good one.

They pulled a small copier from the briefcase and ran my passport through it, every page with stamps. I figured they also had my fingerprints.

“We’re concerned about Jerry,” O’Neal said. “Perhaps he needs hospitalization?”

Yeah, I thought, for talking about these aliens he’s met. “Why?”

“We don’t understand why anyone who had a good job like his would suddenly quit,” Friese said.

“And then apply for a grant to study dimensionality,” O’Neal said. “Was Alex putting pressure on him? Did you ever see signs of a quarrel?”

“They went on a camping trip together.” I hoped the FBI knew this already. O’Neal tittered. Friese looked at him, then back at me. “Are they lovers?”

“Not that I know.”

“Ah, Alex. Lots of marginal types know Alex, Tom. Ex-post-docs, dropout weapons designers.”

“I think Alex is crazy, not Carstairs. He tells people he’s an alien sometimes.”

The folks monitoring my skull computer weren’t happy right then. But the FBI guys laughed and relaxed. O’Neal asked, “Tom would you become friends with Alex for us. Tell us if you think he’s asking Carstairs about his old work?”

“Sure,” I said. Inside, a little mental me was jumping up and down. I’d lied to the FBI and got away with it.

Then O’Neal unplugged my phone, opened his briefcase, jacked a small computer into the line, “We’re wiring your passport photo and prints in to Washington. Just a routine check.”

“Sure,” I said. The little mental me went into a crouch. The computer hummed like a hard disk, then I heard an inkjet hiss over paper. O’Neal ripped the sheet off, showed to Friese. They nodded, but didn’t show it to me.

O’Neal pulled out his modem jack and shut the briefcase, leaving my phone unplugged. “We’re going now.” Friese said. “We’ll be in touch.”

“You have a card so I can call if I find out anything?”

O’Neal pulled his cardcase out of his jacket pocket and handed one to me.” And we’re in the phone book if you lose the card.”

Sub-vocalize,
a voice in my head said, the skull computer tapped into my brain’s verbal centers.

I sub-vocalized,
They didn’t ask about Barcons.

No, nor about the Schweigman sisters.

Alex came by later that afternoon. "The FBI were asking about you,” I said. “One left his card.”

“Let me call them, Tom. Where’s the card?’”

“The FBI card?”

“Yeah.” I reluctantly gave him the card.

He dialed and asked for O’Neal. “Mr. O’Neal, this is Alex Hinderland. Look, do you want to talk to me? I’m a friend of Jerry’s, and I didn’t like him working for the Feds, okay, so I asked him to quit or I’d stop sharing my cannabis with him. Shit, how do I know whether he has a permit or not. Yeah, I’m an alien, sometimes. When the astral projections are right, I share this body, just like in
Radio Free
Albemuth.
Maybe I should…you wanna see my passport? You know my car, license XKALAY, it’s in memory of Philip K. Dick. The man knew. Stop me and we’ll talk. But talk to
me,
okay, when you have questions. Don’t bug my friends.”

I almost expected hundreds of grey government cars to come squealing into the parking lot then. Then squads of Barcons gating to Earth, to this apartment.

Alex listened to the man for a bit then. Finally Alex said, “I’d rather tell when Tom can’t hear.” Alex hung up and laughed. Then he took out some trade tools and programmed the FBI bugs to pick up synthetic conversation about drugs and sex. “The program,” he told me as he worked, “will let them hear Marianne synthetic talk if she comes over, realtime radio or TV when you turn them on, computer noise.”

“Yeah,” I said, “and if they find out what you’ve done, I’m fucked.”

“It’s done with little microgates. They’ll collapse if the apparatus is moved. If we have an earthquake, even.”

“Terrific. Are you being sloppy so you can get pulled from this place?” He seemed obsessed with getting, trapped on Earth in jail, and yet loved how our human energies, behaviors, languages, jazzed him up.

Marianne didn’t come over the next day, but two days after the FBI visited, she came over in brilliant green bike shorts and a matching green and white jersey. “Get your bike. We need to set up your training routine,” she said.

“Have the FBI been by to see you?” I asked.

“Oh, just foolishness over some weapons engineer who developed a conscience,” she said.

I changed into bike shorts and the jersey while she loaded my bike on the roof rack. She seemed so cool. Outlaw cool—maybe her family wasn’t so different from mine? I didn’t say more since at least Alex and maybe the Barcons had technology enough to bug my apartment.

What with all the combined speeds and variations, I doubted a gate could be focused on us while we were erratically pedaling. Of course, they could bug the bike frame.

I got my water bottles out of the freezer and wrapped them in a towel—a trick Strigate the frame maker mentioned when picked up the bike and equipment. Marianne was waiting out in the living room, rocking on her cleats, heels in the air, then toes.

We loaded the bikes on top of the car and she said, “You need to start training regularly.”

“I need to get away from that apartment regularly.”

“You still reading about Japan?”

“I need to read about Japan but don’t think it’s really relevant.
”
In two senses I was beginning to think that we’d have to solve our human problems in our human terms, not copy from humans. “I need to be better with Americans.”

“Socialize more?

“With you.”

“And with others, Tom?”

“Yeah. I’ve become a recluse. I can survive but it lacks something.” Like Black Amber’s approval.

“I could take you to parties.”

“Fine, Reeann.”

“Reeann, I like that. My kid nickname was Pot.” She wrinkled her nose up and bared her teeth.

“Marianne—Mary Jane?”

“Marijuana’s not the same, but most Berkeley kids don’t read Tennyson and Shakespeare.”

“I have friends who made me read Shakespeare.”

“Marianna in the moted grange, besieged on all sides."

“Parents shouldn’t name kids things like that."

“Better than Action Faction Sun Power or Moonberry.”

“Yeah. Take me to some of your parties."

We drove straight back into the hills, not as far as the delta this day. When we got away from the car, I began explaining my life to Marianne, including Warren’s contribution to my delinquency. She said, “I’ll help you find your brother. If these people are advanced maybe they could cure him.”

“I feel like he’s my responsibility, but he’d embarrass me on Karst, worse than the Tibetans.

"Don’t you need to find him and deal with it?” She stared at my down tube as we began climbing. “Shift down.”

I shifted, then again in back to the largest rear cog. The bike became heavier and heavier. “Yeah.” I couldn’t say more, and she didn’t speak again until we went over the hill.

“You were poor?”

“Yeah, we were poor orphans. Why do you think Warren got involved in drug making? It was the best money he could get, better than Amway, real estate, farming.”

“Being born poor isn’t your fault.”

“If I make a lot of first contacts and work with linguistics crews and trade treaty crews, I could do well in the Federation."

“Bright country boy and the aliens saved you. My parents met a radical priest once. He was born poor in Virginia, too. The Catholics saved him."

“So, will you marry me and come back to Karst?”

“Promise me that I’ll be trained in the Institute of Linguistics and leave Molly and Sam here.”

“They want to bring you all out now.”

“Then we bring your brother out, too. My agenda.”

The Federation would probably like that—get out all the humans who knew, except Carstairs, who was too fascinated to blab. And if he did, who’d believe him.

“Alex,” Reeann said as if thinking along parallel lines, “is a slop.”

“Slob?”

“Slop, and a slob, too, I bet. Are his kind like him?”

“No.” I thought about Tesseract, “Most of the other ones I’ve met are dark-haired, bald over the skull crest. The Barcons rearranged Alex’s skull bones so he could pass for human.”

“They scrambled his brains, too, I bet,” Marianne said. We had to drop back into single file because of traffic, then another hill took my breath away. I wanted to pull my feet
out
of the toe clips and walk up, but as long as Reeann could pedal, I would, too.

“Maybe growing up on Karst does that to you? I’m not sure I’d want to have children there,” I said, then added, “I can’t write Warren directly.”

“I could write him. Why was John Black Amber looking for her son around Berkeley?”

“Warren sent an alien locator device to a gal in Berkeley that he didn’t like. Had a guy in Roanoke do the actual mailing.”

“So John Amber found them and got shot.”

“They thought it was stolen military equipment.”

“Well, it was, wasn’t it?”

“Tell Warren you know I’m okay. Make it that you met me on a bus and I begged you to start writing him."

“And felt guilty about not doing it sooner. Haven’t seen you since…” She thought a bit. “You were riding through the country with bike camping gear, a very quiet guy but I never thought anyone could be hiding out from the law on a bicycle.”

That struck me as so hilarious I choked off my laughter.

“As soon as we know where he is, we snatch him.” She sounded gleeful.

Another hill, and another hill on top of that—all these hills began pulling my quads. “Gear down and spin,” she kept telling me.

Marianne sent her letter out to find Warren. Then we all went on with our lives as though we had nothing to hide from the FBI. Both the Schweigman sisters and the Barcons thought that was the best way to deal with them. The Barcons came by the Schweigmans once a week and told an FBI agent who cruised by one afternoon that they were fans of Sam Turner.