Being Alien (3 page)

Amber-son folded his own little arms around himself and huffed out his breath slightly at her. They stared at each other—challenge eyes. He was a tough four-year-old. I held out my hand to him. He sniffed and said, “You have funny web odor.”

“Yeah, so I’ve been told.” I realized this was a one way conversation and signaled
yes.

“Outside?” he asked.

Yes.

“Good, Red Clay, I can show you (no Karst word for her). I call her something you don’t understand." He looked at me as if expecting a reply, then wiggled his shoulders. We went by the food storage room, that stale food room for foods already taken from the animals, where I poured myself a glass of skim milk, the Gwyngs having taken the cream.

“Better warm,” Amber-son told me, sucking air slightly, the muscle between his chin and his throat bouncing.

My hand, fingers loosely curled, was going to get tired, bobbing yes all the time, but he knew the head shake for
no.
I jerked my chin toward the door, and he ran out, clumsily like all Gwyngs, body rolling, arms as long as a spider monkey’s spread for balance.

Other little Gwyngs rushed out of the stable, babbling in Gwyng and Karst Two “Where have you been? Why did the big ones take you away? You smell funny?”

“They wanted me,” he said, his eyes suddenly more oily than ever. “I’m too important. This is Red Clay, my friend.”

“Smells funny," one of the Gwyng babies said.

“Maybe if I talk to…” Another one-way conversation.

One of the brood beasts came out from the stable and lowed, then loped up to Amber-son and stopped. A little Gwyng hopped out of the pouch and hugged Amber-son sideways, then the brood beast nudged them both back toward her tail with her blunt black-and-white-mottled head.

I decided to leave him, go back to the house and tell Black Amber, Wy’um, and Ghring’um—all of them, mad thumbs or not—that Amber-son needed more time with the other baby Gwyngs.

Black Amber met me coming back from the stable, stopped, arms folded across her chest, fingers tugging at her body hair.

“Why did you take him away from the pouch host so soon?”

“Mica… We want him to be extraordinary for male Gwyng (like Mica/pain). Grow-need-grow-fast.”

“He’s not Mica, Black Amber.”

She took me up against her hairy side. Her eyes looked down slightly into mine. “No, you are Mica/replacement. The bird will destroy my other pouch kin in dangerous missions (now happening).”

“What about going to Earth? I need to be better with my own kind.”

She ran her finger down my nose bridge as though she’d never seen it before. “What about your people in the undeveloped area and in Karst City? Learn to be good/better with them.”

“I want my own time, and
Americans.”

“Can’t return to your culture area.”

“But if you people, even surgically rearranged, can hide in
Berkeley
without being noticed, then I should fit right in. When I was in prison, I met a guy who planned to go to
Berkeley
as soon as they set him free.”

“You figure out much, awkward-with-own-kind.”

“And, you had some people you wanted me to meet.” 

She fingered her side where she’d been shot on Earth. “Some (I am forced to admit) were kind. One woman will follow the sound of your voice. Go back, be intimidated (or possibly not), return to me (not to Karriaagzh).”

Berkeley was nothing, I was sure, compared to Karst City. But Berkeley wasn’t rural Virginia. She saw my face go rigid and rounded her thin lips slightly.

I thought about Yangchenla as I flew from Ghring’um’s island, Black Amber coming with me. Black Amber looked over at me and said, “I have so much to worry about.”

“You’ve been a bad girl by Gwyng terms, haven’t you?”

“Don’t be stuffy/prig/moral dwarp. The Federation doesn’t care as long as I do my job.” She narrowed her eyes and twitched a foot as if Karriaagzh was before her, subconsciously kicking him off as though she were a small bat being attacked by a hunting bird. “And you saw the two other males.”

“I ought to get my own place,” I said, wondering if the two other males had had any chance with her, or were there just for show, to prove Black Amber’s matings were open, honest by Gwyng terms.

“You needed company right after
Yangchoochoo
left.” She never pronounced Yangchenla’s name right, despite her ability to memorize what to a Gwyng were nonsense sounds. She pulled off her Gwyng rig and pulled on the Sub-Rector’s uniform, full-length tunic and pants, twisting away from me so I didn’t see her front, but still acting rather post-heat, humming and brushing up against me as we left the plane. I felt embarrassed, as usual. She knew. Being Gwyng, she liked to tease.

Before I left, Black Amber sent me a message on my computer terminal: THREE GOALS. TWO OBLIGATORY, ONE OPTIONAL. RESEARCH JAPAN, GO TO DINNER WITH TWO HUMANS, FIND A WIFE. KARRIAAGZH AND I AGREE.

I leaned away from the screen and worried. Everyone told me that humans were weird. Even I wasn’t allowed to spend more than sixteen hours on duty without taking sleep time. Federation rule for fragile species, near xenophobes. Now I was going to have to face millions of my weird fellow creatures again. I was desperate to go back and scared, too.
Shit,
I thought in English,
no sooner than I adjust to here…

2
Berkeley

Space gates eat angular momentum and the space-time we skip between departure and arrival. Outside at intersect was
nothing,
not even time, much less a stray hydrogen atom. Granite Grit, who studied astronavigation, explained that we intersected through vibrating multi-dimensional hypercubes, but Gwyng mystics claim we destroy and re-create the universe with every jump.

At a Karst orbital station, I wedged myself into a round transport pod and sealed the hatch from the inside with six four-inch wing bolts, tightening them good with both hands. The in-transit light, one of a pair of little diodes over the hatch, went on a minute or so later.

The pod lurched like some giant was playing tennis with it, whirled a few times, stopped for ten minutes, then dropped and rocked forward gently. Before I got really claustrophobic, the arrival light flashed. I undid the hatch and pushed it until the seal peeled off.

As the hatch swung free, a blond Ahram about thirty years old, his head real blocky without the usual skull top crest, raised it to the catch position. He was lighter skinned than the Ahrams I’d seen before—my shade—and seemed to be shaved down in the face. As I climbed out with my bag, he backed away as if he didn’t know what to expect, getting a human delivered to him when Earth had billions of other humans around outside.

“You grow a beard?” I asked him in English.

“We’re various, too. Call me Alex. Here’s your passport and driver’s license. If anyone asks about your accent, you’ve been in Asia.” He spoke perfect English—the Federation had fixed his vocal organs just as I’d been surgically rearranged to speak good Karst.

I swung the hatch down on the pod and tightened the external dogs. The air turned blue around the pod a second before it skipped out of this space-time. I looked around the room—no windows, metal double garage door, gyp board walls—and saw two dehaired Barcons, looking like alien caricatures of Negro wrestlers. Dressed in jeans and UCal sweatshirts, they squatted by the wall, arms folded across their chests, a perfect match for size. Barcons made me nervous. They were generally Federation medics, remote in their treatment of our alien illnesses, but sometimes they used their medical knowledge to rebuild brains. They could kill for the Federation, but that was very rare.

But dehaired or in molt, they
could
pass for human—if you didn’t notice the jaws with too many angles between chin and earlobe.

The air felt muggy, but cool, full of traffic gas. I was in the Bay Area near a freeway. One Barcon said, “We’d better fix his fingerprints now.”

The other Barcon, wider at the hips, probably the female, said, “Be sure to tell him how to get his papers replaced if he gets mugged."

“We inserted the right data into the computer," the Ahram, Alex, said, “so you’re street legal."

“After
we change your fingerprints. Temporary, so don’t abrade them. We’ll redo the tips in a month. Lucky your law doesn’t take retina prints."

“What about my skull computer?” I’d just left Karst fifteen minutes earlier. Being here so suddenly was weird, not that I hadn’t traveled as fast before to really alien planets.

“If they find that,” the male Barcon said, “you’d be made as experimental KGB, and we haven’t given you an address."

“Alex? Can I get in touch with you?”

“We’ll be in touch with you,” Alex said.

I didn’t like that; it reminded me of major drug investors who sent out thugs in untraceable junker cars with muddy plates, the guys who forced my brother Warren to make drugs for them, back in Virginia before Karst rescued me from that life. “I’m loyal to Karst,” I said.

Alex said, gesturing at one of the Barcons, “Jack here was mugged.”

I got embarrassed for humans all over again. Of course, they couldn’t trust
me—
I was from a long line of xenophobic/philic flip-flops who believed aliens would eat them or save them.

The Barcons wiggled their noses. Amused, the bastards. Alex said, “Tom, sit down. I’ll try to get you oriented while the guys work on your fingers.”

I sat on a metal stool while the Barcon sprayed both my hands with nerve deadener spray from a bogus Windex can. Alex sat cross-legged on the cement floor near my feet. “We’ll put you on the San Pablo bus when we finish.”

The only human city I’d ever been much in was Roanoke. “I could get lost.”

Alex unfolded a map while the Barcons peeled off my finger skin. “Here. The main bus connections are at Shattuck and University. We’ve rented a place for you just off Shattuck on Milvia, so you can walk to the university and the co-ops. Black Amber rented an apartment in the same building.”

“Near people she wants me to meet?”

The male Barcon grumbled Barcon language about
Gwy-on-ngs
and
Black-re-Amber.

“And you’re going to leave me by myself, so I’ll get lonely enough to call on them.” Black Amber gave me the woman’s address just before I left Karst.

“Tom, you’re acting suspicious, just like a human.”

“Alex, he is right, though,” the female Barcon said.

“We will leave him alone to make contact.”

I half wanted to spit in their eyes and go back to Karst. 
“So I have an apartment already. Do I have a bank account?”

“You’ve got to set one up. You’ve been in Asia, remember. You know Yangchenla’s language."

“Shit, if anyone knows real modern Tibetan…”

“You learned an obscure dialect. Asia’s very fragmented, even for a human territory."

I studied the map, found the university sprawled over a huge chunk of it. “I’ve got to do research on Japan while I’m here.”

“You’ll get a library card for about twenty dollars as a Berkeley resident,” Alex said. “The library’s okay, but you’ll still have to carry out bound books, though—no terminal texts for non-students."

“Oh.” I was so used to accessing texts through the computer that I'd forgotten about checking books out.

“Setup an account with the Bank of America near the Co-op. Electric money is waiting for you.”

“Fake credit?” They’d make me an outlaw again, data junking the Bank of America.

Alex said, “Don’t be so touchy."

“It’s his planet,” the female Barcon said, bent over my right thumb, carefully rolling down the fake skin.

“I’m nervous; I broke parole when I left Virginia.”

Alex looked at me as if he’d just realized I was not simply another rude human. “Okay, we’re nervous too. You’re the first human refugee ever to get a home pass.”

“I’m nervous about other humans here.”

“You’ve got to learn how to deal with major humans,” Alex said. “First contact’s due in about ten years. Much better if you can help us deal with them.”

“Are we really that awful?”

“No, no, not
that
awful.” Alex smiled at me. “We in stay in touch, I promise.” He tapped my temple over the skull computer so I’d realize how.

They’ve set it up so I’ll have
to meet people.
My face went hot. I didn’t say anything more while the Barcons stripped the rest of my fingers and rolled cultured fake print skin down the tips They glued down the grafts with glop that was also anesthetic.

“Don’t grip anything too hard today,” the male Barcon said. I picked up my bag strap with the palm of my hand—a big duffel bag full of clothes that some alien, maybe Alex, had bought me in Berkeley. Alex opened the garage door and we went to the street.

My brain made Berkeley look like Roanoke around the railroad yard—good old brain using its familiar templates. We waited at the bus stop with weird half-breed sorts, Mexicans, Asians. One black guy stared at the Barcons, at Alex, and then at me, shrugged as if bewildered.
Yeah, they don’t look real Negro, noses too thin, too many angles in the jaws.