Being Alien (30 page)

“But there’s no permafrost,” Marianne said, a non sequitur, I thought, until I remembered Agate’s pets who ate food imported from Jerek Home. The creatures, who had bloated noses and ragged coats, sweated all the time. Too hot, even in, Karst’s north, for them.

North of Karst City—first plains and hills, then higher mountains which flattened out, covered by deep green forests, hundred of miles of them, threaded by creeks and rivers. Mountains surrounded the Polar Ocean, which was bigger than Earth’s Arctic, not so landlocked. From what I’d studied about climatology, I knew both the bare black mountain rocks and the ocean itself warmed the far north here, but the sky stayed clouded all winter inside the polar mountain ring.

Marianne blinked when we hit the fog bank. “It’s like the Aleutians,” she said. I visualized a map and said, “Yeah, water all round.”

Our pilot began taking the plane down. A chain of little green lights glowed by the airstrip, snow in piles beside it. Other lights guided us to the Jereks’ house. As we walked beside the row of small green bulbs leading to the house, I heard a high-pitched whistle. Lisanmarl came, strolling on her short legs through the fog, naked except for a short leather loincloth, the tips of her fur wet from condensed fog, her black nose swaying from side to side.

“They didn’t do it, she said. I knew what it was Chalk and Agate didn’t do—she hadn’t been neutered.

Marianne smiled me a smile that said,
if I catch your hands straying below this creature’s waist, I’ll cordon off my pussy with barbed wire.

“Hi, Lisanmarl,” I said. “Marianne and I are here to talk to your parents. Marianne wants to talk me into getting a breeding permit.”

Lisanmarl dropped her nose and hissed as if I’d smacked her. “I didn’t ask to be a sterile." Marianne’s lips jerked; she looked as abashed as I felt. Lisanmarl whistled softly and rubbed her hands down a leg of each of us, fast, and skittered away down the chain of green lights.

Chalk and Agate sat on the veranda in Jerek leathers, the front and back flaps longer than Lisanmarl’s, down to the ground. I shivered to see them, but they seemed very comfortable drinking iced drinks with fog condensing on the tips of their, fur.

Marianne said, “Your fur must insulate you very well.”

“The design catches water when the temperature is around freezing,” Agate said. “Did Lisanmarl pester you?”

“No,” I said.

Lisanmarl hissed slightly as she went inside.

“You must admit,” Reeann said, “that most human fathers would just have their daughters spayed if that would cure them of a permanent estrus that could be lethal.”

Yeah, the Jereks allowed their steriles a lot of civil liberties. Lisanmarl could even sell herself as a sexual entertainer. Chalk and Agate were unhappy but Lisanmarl hadn’t had her malfunctioning ovaries stripped out.

While Marianne unpacked, I went to the bathroom and the kitchen to see what they brought in for us to eat: milk, greens, beans, white square curds—either cheese or bean—and what looked like two fryers—frozen birds the size of chicken fryers, at least. When I came back to our room, Marianne said, “Chalk said we should come down to the tunnel in whatever clothes it takes us to be comfortable.”

I said, “It’s chilly down there.” We put on pants and tunic-length sweaters and carried our parkas. Down the elevator to their space.

The tunnel was as I’d remembered: dimly lit, cold water running between stones on the floor, water filling a tube and tipping it over, the plink, plink of dripping stones over pools. And the smell—wet fur, wet stone, mildew. Marianne blew out her breath—it barely fogged, the air was so humid. She said, not quite questioning, “You were led down here by pheromones and Brahms?”

We heard weird chimes then behind the first door on the right. Come in,” Chalk said, then the chimes began again, slightly discordant to a human ear. Marianne went in first and gasped. Chalk and Agate sat in front of rows of stones threaded on monofilament—jadeite, jasper, triple rows of stone chimes ran the width of the room against the left-hand wall. Candles on gold stands—six feet, seven feet high—flickered in the air currents we’d stirred as we entered the room. There was another odd light in the room—then I saw chunks of luminescent wood—fox fire—strapped to the ceiling. When the bioluminescence died, they could take out the old wood and put in new.

“This wasn’t here when I came down before?”

“No, we change our tunnels often,” Agate said. “We will suggest something, and we want you to sit and listen to our chimes before you reply.”

Chalk said, “You should work with Yangchenla, Sam, and the other humans. Improve your cultural level here.”

Agate added, “Just because Yangchenla and Sam had a good idea first is no reason for you to be stupid.”

“And don’t talk until we’ve finished playing,” Chalk added just before he struck a chime stone. They turned their backs to us and moved up and down the rows of chimes.

The music sounded almost like Yangchenla’s music. I shuddered, wanting to grasp these notes, change them and make the music be what I’d expected. Instead, the, slight discordances made me uneasy. I looked at Marianne. She exaggerated a wince.

The sounds weren’t quite like nails on slate. I thought about being human with the Tibetans, with Warren. Shit, Warren and Sam adjusted better to the Tibetans than I did—were they more primitive than me? I felt a bit racist to think that—of course, Sam wasn’t as primitive as I’d been when I first came to Karst.

I remembered one time when Yangchenla, naked, accused me of hating other humans, of wanting to be a Gwyng, an Ahram. Her kin were as capable as I, she told me; we were all hopelessly human. She then pulled on the Coke-bottle green American girl dress Tesseract had given her years earlier to wear for me when I first slept with her. After she’d jerked the dress on, she screamed—the air seemed crumpled by it—and ripped the dress down the bodice, stepped out of the ruins, and put on Tibetan clothes.

“Why,” I’d asked her.

“Because you want what isn’t here,” she had said.

Now I had Reeann and we both hung out with non-human Sapients in Karst City and in space. Maybe Molly was right, give the aliens a good genital embrace?

Warren—Warren fit right in with the Tibetans. The Federation sapients mangled one another
—cultural contamination, rebuilt language centers and organs—and sometimes went further than that. The Barcons could destroy and rebuild whole personalities, and I’d bought Warren to that possibility.

The stones quivered to silence.

“Do you hear them as being in tune?” Marianne asked.

“No, these are bitter stones,” Chalk told her. “They unsettle.”

“Do we seem like Tibetans to you?” I asked.

“We won’t judge a whole species in a lump,” Chalk said, his nose dropping as if I’d annoyed him.

“Yangchenla ripped up a dress I liked.”

“You wanted to completely deny her family.” Agate sat down, kneeling, her short legs splayed out to either side. She fanned out the leather loincloth in front of her.

“My family’s dead,” Reeann said.

Agate looked at Chalk and answered, “Not your sister.

"And Tom has a brother. Your parents are dead and that’s sad. At least, it would be to us. But you could have children.”

“I want a child, but we’re not as pair-bonded as you,” Marianne said.

“We have no choice. We nurse a child together; we bond. There seems such pain in breaks when the species has a choice.”

Chalk added, “I hope you are both committed to taking care of the child. But Marianne can reproduce herself even if you don’t want a child, Tom.”

Since I saw by her face that Marianne wasn’t going to say anything, I said, “We heard something about bears.”

Why were we talking about children?

Chalk picked up the stick he’d used to strike the chimes and bit it. Agate made a noise between a hiss and a whistle.

“If bears are a bad idea, tell us,” Marianne said.

“They would take care of your child,” Chalk said. “But you distort their mating patterns by providing yourselves as child surrogates.” Agate interrupted in Jerek and they discussed us in a language we couldn’t follow.

“Oh, get a bear,” Agate said. “But human con-specifics would take better care of a human child than a bear would.”

“No human child could grow up normally here,” I said.

“It’s very awkward for Tom,” Marianne said.

“Having Tom try to be a non-human is also awkward. You’re a human. He’s a human. The others are human, too,” Chalk said. “If their wombs aren’t nourishing their embryos well enough to get good baby brains; or if they don’t know the right experiences to grow the brains properly, then the Federation should help them more. You and Tom are fully intelligent.”

“If their wombs aren’t nourishing their embryos…” Marianne repeated as if she’d just gotten a clue to the universe.

“Don’t you know that the female must be well grown and then fed and exercised properly while the fetus is developing to make good brain development? Then as the child grows, learning helps the brain become more complex."

“We kept arguing heredity and environment when we discussed that,” Marianne said.

Chalk said, “Absolutely everything is important. That’s why we have fetus-bearing classes and child growth classes when we know the species’ developmental biology.”

“Oh,” Marianne said like perhaps we were dumb.

“We’re a bit harsh on this because of Lisanmarl. Barcons are researching that developmental problem.”

“Will Barcons deliver me?”

“You’re intelligent enough for a child-birth group."

You’ll learn to aid one another’s births. I’ll have another child to replace the breeding potential we lost with Lisanmarl,” Agate said. “We can do it together. And with Yangchenla.”

“I don’t want to have a child now;” I said. “When we’re ready, how, precisely, do we get a breeding permit?"

“This is for Ree’s child, as an Institute linguist.” Chalk reached into a cabinet and brought out a piece of fiber-surfaced material like plasticized paper, no, parchment.

He slipped a needle out of a case and came over to me. When he showed me the form, his face shifted up and down as though he wanted to watch my expression but didn’t want to give me a challenging stare. Printed on the form was “Officer/aspirant mated couple Red Clay/Ree Karst cycle 5,062, the nineteenth light period. A breeding permit for Ree with sera samples attached. Witnessed by Rector’s People Agate and Chalk.” A second circle was for the female’s pregnancy test.

Chalk went over to Reeann, took her index finger, and pricked it. I said, “Reeann’s baby Reeann’s baby? She’s my wife. I…”

Reeann looked up at me as her blood fell on the second circle. “Tom, better to nurse while I’m still in training. Being out on teams is risky, no?”

Agate said; “Would you want this to be semen sample baby? And, Tom, the Barcons want your help in subduing Warren.”

“Oh, damn you all.” I felt trapped by humans and aliens. The whole universe forced me to be a brother a father.

Chalk said, “They’re trying to bring him for brain mapping. He’s being uncooperative.”

“Do I deserve this?” Warren asked me. He was in a cage, hunkered up on the bunk with his arms around his knees, a cigarette in one hand. I was inside with him.

“I’m sorry, Warren. They say they can help.”

“They’ve been netting me every month to inject that damn Prolixin.” He dragged on the cigarette, pinching it between his fingers and squinting through the smoke. “Okay, they did ease down the doses.”

“Why didn’t you just come in when they wanted you to?”

He crushed out the lit tobacco and stuck the butt in his shirt pocket—an American-styled shirt in Karst fabric. His Tibetan girl must have made it for him, “It’s insulting. I was almost free when you guys dragged me off.”

A Barcon came into the hall between the holding cells and watched us. Warren scowled at him. I said, “Warren, I couldn’t have left you there, that way. You were…you’re, my brother.”

“And you’re a pouch-hole licker.”

“Warren, don’t be hostile.”

The Barcon finally spoke. “Brain mapping goes easier with a cooperative specimen.”

Barcon, specimen is the wrong word to use, I thought.

Warren bit down on his lips, lips completely curled inside his mouth.

The Barcon plucked at his shoulder fur while he said, “Warren, we’re leaving your personality intact because you are a sapient. Your Karst language shows full structure, even though you try to distort it toward the primitive dialect variation.”

“Nifty,”
Warren said in English.

“Warren, please cooperate. They’re going to help you.”

“Whether I like it or not.”

“Your drug use shifted brain chemistry and some structure,” the Barcon said. “We will try to restore function."

“I did drugs because…”

The Barcon interrupted, “The environment changed for you and the other humans here. It can continue to change.”

“We’re not in Virginia anymore, Warren.”