Being Alien (26 page)

Love,

Tom

I never realized I could be so lonely for a particular human face. After I sent the letter, I turned the hologram walls black, curled up on my bed, and just ached for her.

Ersh came in, looked at me, and said, “You hurt?” Without speaking to him, I got up off the bed and went to my toilet, washed my face, then came out. He was still standing there, a flesh flap protruding slightly over his bottom lip. I said, “Sorry if I was rude, but I was just connected to a woman recently.” That wasn’t going to make sense in Wrengu, but he figured it out, old lizard.

“You wouldn’t bring your breeding partner to a place so dangerous, would you?”

“Actually, she’s still learning.”

“Actually, this is very dangerous.”

“Yes, I guess it is.”

“If we let the Sharwan rule us, then no bombs will be dropped. If you can’t stop one bomb, your help will damage us.”

“The Federation is supposed to protect you from species like the Sharwan.”

“I’m glad to press you while you’re vulnerable. You’ve given me information no one could give us, 'supposed to protect'.”

He had mental gears I didn’t. “Give you information?”

“Joining the Federation is dangerous.”

“Giving in to the Sharwan is dangerous.”

“The Isa governments are talking to the Sharwan. They won’t drop bombs if we join them. Will you then attack us?” He left then. I lay back on the bed in shock, then got angry. We’d done all the work of a first contact, now they're telling us if the Sharwan got one bomb through, Isa governments wouldn’t have anything to do with
us.
Then I wondered if I’d done anything wrong, if Rhyodolite had insulted the Sharwan.

But, if I had vestigial webs, they’d twitch when I saw Ersh.

One bomb—I wondered if the Sharwan who’d gated into the Federation station had bugged us. One little flash of light wasn’t a bomb from space, either, Squad Leader said. Ersh’s scale rings rang like wind chimes in March as he watched the flash and heard his people call him back.

The Sharwan cut in with a video—grinning, grinning, those high cheekbones like folded hawks’ wings.

“Call us back if they exploit,“ Squad Leader told Ersh. Ersh rolled his eyes back, then flicked out his thick tongue. He said nothing, pulled his tongue back and climbed into a transport we were giving him.

After Ersh left, Wool stared at the television screen and said, “I pity them.”

Squad Leader sent down capsules to Federation spies surgically altered to look like Wrengee and already in their cover positions. I saw Granite Grit watching intensely and realized the spies on Isa were his kind of bird. Isa wasn’t abandoned yet.

The Institute of Control people began mock-scrapping with each other as they loaded their transport pod and gated to their secret coordinates.

Those of us on the observation team wrapped the whole station in gate cables and moved it back to the fringes of the Karst System. Wool asked, “Does anyone want to go back the slow way?” His grey mottled skin looked ashy.

Granite said, “I don’t want to do anything next, not right now.”

“A Sharwan group fled Rhyodolite’s linguistics team,” I said. “Maybe someone then did something wrong…” And then again, maybe my fears insulted Ersh.

We took a week to get home, cruising through the Karst System, not talking much to each other, just looking at the ice planet, that supposedly lucky thing to see, and at the gas giants, then the shuttle came spiraling down out of Karst orbit like a wounded bird. Marianne was waiting at the terminal with Black Amber. I climbed down the shuttle ladder with my bag and said, “Isa turned us down.”

Marianne said, “They were fools.”

Black Amber said, “You (both) can go home. (Karst City) now. Marianne is now in training. Bright female, almost like a Gwyng.”

We embraced then, Marianne and I. “Warren okay? How are Sam and Molly?”

“I’ve got to talk to you.”

“The brother,” Black Amber said, “Defended himself (dangerous to pick on/city Gwyngs only tease/hissing). He’s crude/primitive. Embarrassment to you, I think.” She didn’t offer to drive us home, just turned and left in her car.

“I know which bus,” Marianne said “She’s upset over something.”

“Nymph pouched, I bet, and, nobody would take it.”

“Tom, she’s only forty-two, but that’s like sixty for a Gwyng. She was sent here to become Rector. Now that won’t happen.”

I thought about the Gwyng planet, shattered into Islands and small continents by super-active plate tectonics—Gwyng healed fast, died fast. An image of a senile Gwyng falling out of a host beast pouch onto beach sand, mewing, nostril slit snuffing for other Gwyngs who avoided the aged, the insane—Black Amber twenty, twenty-five years, from now?
“Marianne, I just want to be with you for a long while,”
I said in English. We got on the bus and traveled through the various districts like a cultural kaleidoscope—glass houses, wicker houses, square and round houses, all filled with aliens who looked more or less alike, were wildly different inside their skulls. I changed my mind from minute to minute—alike, wildly different, alike.

“Was it awful?”

“I wanted them to join us and not just for the first contact shares, too. The Isa planet people—they touched my xenophobia. I wanted to overcome it.”

“Black Amber said the contact was outrageous—forced by Karriaagzh.”

“No, it was forced by the Sharwan. Pretty little
vr’ech,
gold fur and blue eyes, beautiful, at least to me.”

Granite Grit came up and embraced me, awkwardly, not his species’ social gesture. “We tried. Now I go home and we breed again.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Marianne said. “Lose something, gain something. Tom, have you considered that we ought to do that, too?”

I couldn’t bear to argue with her right then.

8
Discovering the Humans

After all that, once we did land on Karst, the watch crew was ordered to a terminal debriefing room. Grand Senior Officer Zircon XI, a grey-and-black-furred creature with slightly matted silky head hair, was waiting for us, his triple eyelids, like a, bird’s, sweeping out of sync over his black eyes, no pair of eyelids blinking synchronized with others. Like Wool, he never mentioned his species.

Granite Grit, crouched down on his hocks, body pressed to the floor, asked the Grand Senior Officer, “Do we get turned down often?” I knew Granite wondered if the failure was his fault. I felt, perhaps, it was mine.

Wool looked at GSO Zircon and grunted, then half lay on a long bench, one leg twitching, eyes half closed. He, not GSO Zircon, answered, “Rarely. Percentage wise, more with non-mammals.”

Granite’s head feathers flared slightly. He stiffened, then slumped again.

GSO Zircon said, “We’ll watch both of them. If we can get the Sharwan to talk again. . . we haven’t had a problem like the Sharwan in years.”

We continued talking, replaying the contact steps, trying to reassure each other that none of us did anything wrong.

The Grand Senior Officer Zircon finally said, “We’re repeating ourselves here. Go home to your own.”

I walked back into our apartment, and something was right about the air. The harpsichord stopped. Sam and Reeann looked at me. I felt strangely out of place. “Nice to be among humans again,” I said. “Where’s Molly?”

“Off with the Tibetans learning hand-sign since she didn’t go through the second operation,” Reeann said, somewhat stiffly. “She wants to communicate with Gwyngs.”

“Warren?”

“He’s out in the Preserve,” Sam said. “Gwyngs have a grudge against him.”

“Yeah, I…I’m tired. The contact didn’t work out.”

Marianne looked at Sam, then back at me, eyes going up and down, before speaking. “I understand refugees don’t have much position here. So you take the most risks.”

I almost wanted to invite some of the Tibetans over—almost. “We need more humans here, but not the Tibetans,” I managed to say. I hadn’t realized how terribly tired I was—
please cuddle me, Marianne
—and sweaty still.

“Karriaagzh and I have been talking about that,” Marianne said.

I said, “Karriaagzh wants to contact at least everyone who has halfway conceptualized the possibility of decent intelligent life on other planets.” The idea seems impossible now—dump everyone into a technological stew: plastic beggars, the lithium rich who’d sell centuries worth of energy for information on shifting molecules, and xenophobia movies to play to the doubts in all of us. I couldn’t deal with that today. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Ersh watching a bomb explode on his planet.

Marianne said, “Tom, let me fix you some tea.” She went into the kitchen in the back while Sam and I stared at each other.

“Warren and Yangchenla?” I finally asked.

“No, not Warren and Yangchenla,” he said, looking away from me. Warren and Molly, I thought, but he must have guessed what I was thinking and added, “Not Warren and Molly either. Your brother’s quite the character. He’s distilling liquor for anti-Buddhist Tibetans.”

“Shit no.”

“You had me kidnapped. I had no idea what I was getting involved with. I didn’t believe it was real.”

“Are you working? Getting music work?”

“I play for the aliens. You ever see a xenophobia movie, holo?”

“Yeah, Karriaagzh is in an old one,” I said.

Sam swayed back slightly and lowered his chill. “I’ve been approached to do one of those. And I play music, but the people here have every species' way of being tricky. Creature like me can get good and cheated here. Yangchenla says I have been.”

“Yangchenla?”

Karst One has a slang term that means both meanly endowed in comfort/sex organs and stingy with one’s lovers. S
am used it—the closest English is “prick”—when he said, “You were a prick with her.”

“Sam, I couldn’t adjust.”

“Tom, you little refugee; you can adjust to
vr’ech, uhyalla,
but with other humans, you’re just a
Virginia hick.”

“She wanted me to do things for her that I really couldn’t do. You understand that we’re not really high-status beings here, don’t you? Even with Academy and Institute affiliations.” Maybe be was in love with her? Stupid to argue with a man in love.

“You hated her family. That’s what really bothered her. You wanted to isolate her from the other humans. Just you and her, and you weren’t there much.”

Warren and I were like that, isolated back in Virginia. “Those humans were more alien than some of the other sapients,” I said “I wanted to be among people better than me.”

“Now you’ve got Marianne—she’s definitely your superior.”

Marianne came back in and said, “Sam, stop.”

Sam went to his room, came out with a keyboard under his arm, and went to the elevator, pushed the button for it, staring at the door, shoulders squared, knees slightly bent.

As the door slid down, he kicked at it, saying in English, “
Fucking alien elevator door.”

Marianne handed me the teacup and said, “And this is alien, too, for human nerves."

“Let’s not go out for a while,” I said to her, taking the cup and going to sit on a leather wing chair that she’d gotten while I was away. The hide was softer than the leather mod chairs Warren had bought with drug money—a non-Terran leather. I sat sipping the tea and stroking the arms of the chair. There were more changes: carpet on the floor, curtains on the windows, glass flower vases full of irises—where did she get irises? “You’ve fixed the place up?”

“Yes. Alex sent me the irises.”

“How are you in touch with Alex? I thought you didn’t like him?”

“Through Karriaagzh, who says that if we’re discreet, we can visit Earth again, not Berkeley. London, maybe, or Toronto. Or Tokyo?”

“You been before?”

“To London and Tokyo. And Bolivia and Peru.”

“God, I never went anywhere.”

She curled up on the carpet by my chair and said, “No, just to Karst, Yauntra, Gwyng home, this new planet.”

“Reeann, all I get to see is little bits of a planet, for a few weeks. Except Yauntra, then we were locked up on a farm for a few months. And I was locked up in a couple of other places on Yauntra, by myself."

“We can travel. Academy and Institute people can go free to any planet that allows visitors. Lots of them do—there’s a regular tourist industry. You’re getting money from
uhyalla
visiting Yuantra already.”

“Fir-in-Snow takes them out on tremendously expensive hunts. Karriaagzh brought back movies. It doesn’t balance the trade.”

“Tom, do you want to travel?”

“I don’t want to see any
vr’ech
right now.”

“Not even Karriaagzh, Black Amber, or Granite Grit?”

Their images rose in my mind, but slightly transformed toward human norms, I realized after a second. “Not
right
now,” I answered.