Being Alien (18 page)

Marianne’s eyes locked with mine in the mirror strip across the top of the windshield. “It’s all right, honey,” I said.

“She’ll be with your new Rector’s Man/Person when we get back.”

“Has anything happened to Tesseract?”

Black Amber said, “We’ve decided that you need close contact/cultural understanding with/of another species. Jereks.”

I didn’t much like Jereks after one of them bit me in the thigh during a quarrel on Yauntry, but if that was the way the Federation wanted it, then I was going down a chilly burrow to deal with giant ferrets with shiny Ts of naked black skin across their eyes and down their noses. Bipedal and tailless weasels.

As the truck drove out of the receiving building and locked into the traffic control grid, I watched my fellow humans through the truck mirrors. We rolled through Karst City’s outer neighborhoods.

Molly gasped and said, “They use wood here.”

“Yes,” said Travertine. “It can be-recycled, modified with resins.”

“It’s all fucking squares.”

“Some houses are round,” the bird said, “in other neighborhoods.”

“And most of the skins are dark,” Sam said. He smiled for the first time.”

“Pale skin,” Travertine said, “is an adaptation to extreme cold. There are white and gold Jereks, white-haired Yauntries with fair skins, birds with paler feathers than mine.” He raised his shoulder feathers-slightly as if putting them on view. “Do I speak English well?”

“Yes,” Marianne said. “How did you learn?

“From the same Ahram who taught Red Clay Tom prestige English.”

Black Amber ignored us, hunched up against the far door with her webs strained tightly across her-chest, arms at her sides, thumbs behind the neck.

Marianne said to the bird, “But with your beak? You have a slight
…
accent.” She frowned as though that wasn’t quite the right word. “But…”

“Surgery,” the bird said, releasing the truck from the traffic control grid and turning a corner before locking us into the system again. We passed stucco and foamed aluminum houses, with little statue-filled parks spaced about five blocks apart.

The buildings got higher, near the Institute of Linguistics, a walled campus with six skyscrapers and several dozen smaller buildings, then we passed shopping streets headed off at right angles to the street we were traveling on. “We’ll give you bracelets to make sure you can get directions home,” Travertine said.

“Shit, we wouldn’t dare, go anywhere,” Sam said.

Travertine released us from grid control and waited until traffic was clear to make a left turn. We drove down a ramp in front of a twelve-story building about half the block long, fifty to sixty feet, and twice as deep. If we had a whole floor of that, I thought, we’ve got more space than a typical human house.

We all loaded Sam’s baby grand piano and the harpsichord into the huge elevator. As we rode up together, Black Amber said, “You have Gwyng neighbors.” Sam held onto both instruments—maybe he thought they’d bruise when the elevator stopped. I reminded myself that he was still drugged.

The elevator door slid down to reveal a loft space about sixty feet by forty feet. In the front facing the street were two picture windows, thicker than usual—I suspected they’d play computer graphics. Long slit windows on the side walls let in lots of light. Sam and the bird shoved the harpsichord out, then we all got Sam’s piano in place. I walked through a passageway behind the elevator onto a wraparound balcony overlooking a courtyard. I opened the first door off the balcony and saw a room with a bay window overlooking the building’s side yard. The windows in the neighboring building, like dark mirrors, reflected our building’s stacks of mirror-like bay windows.

Slightly dizzy from counting how many reflections in the windows mirrored each other clearly, I turned away. This room was about fifteen feet by twenty, not counting the bay. Closets? I walked in both interior doors—one was a closet, the other a duplicate of my toilet facility in my Academy dorm, but with a tub added.

I heard a noise and saw Marianne, pale, eyes huge, standing in the doorway. “Come in and see this.”

She came in and said, “There must be four bedrooms or whatever.” Then she looked through the toilet door and said, “I need to use this.”

I started to close the door behind her, and she said, “Don’t. I have to keep looking at you.”

“Marianne, don’t embarrass me.”

“You weren’t scared at all?”

Oh, that. “Oh, yeah, yeah. But they didn’t hurt me.”

She urinated, then fumbled for paper. “I guess that should be reassuring. Explain this language operation?”

“They re-activate your language centers, like when you were a child, so you can learn Karst One quicker. Like in two or three months instead of years.”

“A brain operation. Shit, Tom, you didn’t tell me about that. I can learn any language without that.”

“Then they put a computer in your skull that transforms Black Amber’s speech into sequential patterns. Without that, you’d never understand holistic language people.”

“If this operation messes up my Quechuan, I will kill you.” She pulled her underpants up and then pulled up her jeans and zipped them.

We went out together and looked through the next door into another room like the one we’d been in. In the back of the apartment, behind the courtyard, was a kitchen equipped just like Marianne’s had been, down to the recycling bins with stenciled labels. She kicked at the paper one and swore, crying and giggling, “Damn literalist fools.”

“Have you ever considered that we might have recycling?” I didn’t know, but if she kept on like that she was going to hurt her foot.

“I guess they’re trying to make us feel at home.” She began turning on stove burners. Each lit with a little whomp of gas and burned smoothly from high to very low. Along the sides of the gas holes, a fine wire glowed red. Marianne said, “The wire?”

“I don’t know what it does.”

“Bet it keeps the gas hot when the flame is low.”

“Or make sure that it all burns,” I said, trying to remember how other stoves on Karst worked.

Marianne cut the gas completely off and checked in the refrigerator. I saw glass bottles of milk. She asked, “Real milk?”

“Gwyngs raise Jersey cows.”

“They raise
Jersey cows?”

“Yeah, Jerseys give high butterfat in their milk, and Gwyngs metabolize lipids differently than we do.”

“Jersey cow lipids? Well,” Marianne said. She ran hot and cold water in the sink and said, “I guess it would be too much to expect that to be solar-heated.”

“We’ve got fusion generators here,” I said.

“Nice enough kitchen,” she said, looking out the windows over the sink. I was relieved to see American chairs around the table. Marianne said, “Let’s see the rest of the house.”

On the other side of the courtyard air shaft were two more sixteen by twenty bedrooms, each with a bathroom. Beside the elevator was a fifth bathroom, this one multispecies with a sliding basin on a rail, a sandbox, a slit against the wall, and a shower with controls for heated dust or chilled water. Travertine the bird saw us peer into it and said, “That’s for visitors and me.”

“But it’s got a little, regular basin.” Marianne said, fiddling, with the water lever and temperature dial. Steaming water ran into the basin. She rolled the dial to the left and got cold. “This work like your dial thermometers?”

I tried to remember if I’d ever seen a dial thermometer on Karst. Nope. I shrugged.

“It’s the opposite of Earth,” she said. Her body-seemed to jerk itself into alignment. “I want to see the sky tonight.”

Molly and Sam were asleep on the sofa we’d brought from Berkeley to here, wedged together gripping each other.

“Let them alone,” Black Amber said. “You’ve got eight days together, Red Clay, then you’ll come with me while Barcons put language in Marianne’s skull.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Gwyng Home,” she said, pinching her shift and pulling the cloth out over the pouch hole.

In the morning, Sam woke up restless, the tranquilizer metabolized out. He played jumbles of music on his piano or the harpsichord, or paced the perimeters of the loft, stopping to look out each window, his feet bare, the pale sole skin showing around the edges.

Travertine ruffled his fathers and said, “If you think you wouldn’t freak, Sam, I’ll take you to hear music.”

Sam stopped pacing.

“Let’s all go,” Marianne said. “We won’t have much time together.”

“That’s right,” Travertine said, “Tom will go with Black Amber and you all will have the basic language operation. We…”

“Thought we’d freak?” Molly said.

“Well, we thought it would be easier if you stayed together in your social group. And better socially if you have the proper accent. We have enough tangle-tongued humans wandering around.”

I sighed. Marianne asked, “That rough?”

“Alone it wasn’t all that nice,” I said.

“Tonight,” Travertine said, “we’ll go out on the town. Is my idiom correct?”

“Sure,” Sam said. He went digging through a bag we hadn’t moved into a bedroom yet and found his shoes, a pair of Weejuns, and slid them on sockless. Then he pulled out a glasses case, tried on a pair of mirror shades that made him suddenly sinister.

“The light isn’t bright at night,” Travertine said. “That’s when the music is usually played, even on Karst.”

Sam pulled them off and snapped the earpieces together so hard that Travertine’s beak reflexively recoiled and snapped, too. I asked in Karst, “Travertine, what did he do?”

“Your dark-skinned human is snappish.” Travertine’s head drew back on his long neck that was usually hidden in his feathers. “Perhaps we are overcrowding you
humans,
two males in the apartment?”

“What did he say about humans?” Marianne asked.

“That you were getting bored in the loft,” Travertine said. “Your bicycles are here. Tom could take you out.”

Sam sat down at the harpsichord and began playing runs of high baroque music. Travertine moved the piano bench out of the way and pulled a sofa cushion over to sit on, knees bent backward. His nails, almost like ours, clicked over the keys without pressing down enough to strike a note, patterning after Sam’s fingering.

“Do that again,” Travertine said.

Sam slowed down and played a phrase.

Travertine’s fingers stumbled through it. Sam laughed and relaxed. “You’re not so good, it’s a relief.” The bird’s face feathers puffed up. He had tried.

“Ree, we’ll “be okay if you and Tom go out,” Molly said.

“Nobody’s going to freak out if they see us in bike shorts?” Marianne asked.

“Wait, put your wristband on,” Travertine said. He added in Karst, “Tom, pull a map.”

I pulled a map up on the computer, printed it, and asked, “Can we ride bikes anywhere? They go about half as fast as Karriaagzh runs, and they need a hard surface.”

“Try the electric cart paths, then.” He pointed to the map I’d called up. “Here’s the closest one. We’re here.”

We began giggling in the elevator ride down to the street, holding our $2000 bikes, dressed in skin shorts, rocking on our cleats. “Going out to explore an alien planet,” Marianne managed to get out between giggles.

“We better be able to stop giggling,” I said.

We stopped when the elevator doors slid open and two tall shiny blacks, not human, not Barcons, got on. They asked, “What home?” in Karst One.

“A non-contacted planet at present.” I fished around behind me for my wallet.

“Are the plastic rockers on the bottoms functional?” the female asked.

I lifted my foot so they, could see the pedal slot. They murmured to each other in their home language and said, “Thanks,” more or less in Karst One.

Marianne’s abdomen began jerking at irregular periods. At ground level, as the other couple walked out of the elevator, she asked, “Did they ask about the cleats?”

“Yes.” She laughed until she choked. I didn’t know why she thought that was hysterical. We continued, down to the basement. We wheeled our bikes out through the basement doors arid up the ramp, down two blocks, and then we began to pedal on the electric cart path.

“How big is the city?” Reeann asked.

“About fourteen million sapients.”

“What do they do?”

“Everything from make interplanetary trade deals to farming and cleaning houses.”

The path we were on ran behind the buildings through gardens, then down or up over the streets and train tubes. Faintly reddish green trees with matte grey trunks and drooping skinny leaves bordered the path for a mile or so—each tree hit by extra electric lights. Three shiny black kids darted after a flat doughnut-shaped airfoil like a Frisbee.

“They aren’t even surprised?” Reeann asked.

“No, you expect to see different-looking sapients here,” I said, realizing the shiny skins and reddish trees came from a hotter sun than ours.