Being Alien (33 page)

All the Tenleaving guests weren’t precisely apes, but we all had flat faces, short torsos, long arms, and most of us had thick but flexible wrists.

I felt awkward pushing the bike up to the room reservation terminal, dressed in skin shorts, but everyone else was in species clothes, from naked fur to head to toe wraps.

“They don’t show anything,” Marianne said, looking at two people whose genitals were invisible under their fur.

“No,” I said, picking the room cards out of the top of the terminal that obligingly printed me a map to go with them. We went out the fifth door onto a swinging bridge, pushing the bikes and holding on with our free hands. All around us was a river with falls, trees that dangled out over rocks, solid green vines with no leaves, just tendrils.

A shiny black couple waited at the opposite end of the bridge until we got safely across. “Fun?” they asked.

“Yes,” Marianne said. The female touched the bike seat and said something in her own tongue to the male.

“Where can we get these?” the male asked.

“We brought them from our home planet,” I said. “It hasn’t been contacted yet.”

They backed up a slight but noticeable bit. Marianne laughed as if being a refugee didn’t bother her at all.

Our room was glass walls, a carved white ceiling, and dark green velvet drapes and rug. With the drapes back, the double bed on the platform in the center of the room was like a raft in the forest. When I closed the drapes, the only light came from tiny clerestory windows high in the ceiling.

“It doesn’t bother you that we’re refugees?” I asked Marianne.

“Tom, don’t let those fools depress you,” she said. “Trung figured out the gates, drunk as he gets. We’re as smart as most of them.”

“Trung figured out the gates?”

“Yes,” she said, stripping off her sweaty bike clothes. I looked at her belly but she wasn’t showing yet, of course. “You shocked?”

“That doesn’t count for Federation admission.”

“Well,” she said, “It can help.”

“Marianne, are you…” I had been about to ask her if she was smuggling information back to Carstairs, but didn’t want any listening wires to hear her answer.

She looked at me, faintly trembling, then looked around and saw a door I hadn’t noticed before, between drapery and folds. “Bet it’s the shower.”

It was. While she showered, I worried about her, hoping that she wasn’t smuggling the information to Carstairs because then she would get caught. Carstairs was too sloppy.

When she came out, I did ask, “But what does Trung do with the gates?”

“Ah Tom.”

‘‘Marianne, has he told anyone?”

“The officials don’t know unless this room’s bugged. What would they do to him?”

“I’m sure the Federation can detect gates. They block gate access over most of Karst.”

“Tom, I shouldn’t discuss this with you, but Trung and I have Federation protectors.”

As I stripped and showered, I wondered if she was afraid to talk because the room might be bugged, or if she was afraid I’d turn her in to Black Amber. That was a depressing thought.

We’d brought lightweight tunics and pants in bags behind our seats, and underwear, things that we could wash and dry each night. “Where do we have dinner?” I asked after we’d both changed into the tunics.

Marianne opened the drapes. As we stared out over the landscape of trees, bridges, glass-walled rooms, and a rainbow in the river mist, she said, “What about room service?”

* * *

About ten at night, we were lying under the covers with the drape remote control box under our pillow. Marianne put her hand on my stomach and touched my navel. I felt clammy, cold.
My child will grow up thinking all the time in Karst One.

At eleven, she said, “It’s all right, honey.”

Now furious and wide awake, I knew why my fellow human a generation back killed a Barcon. If a Barcon came in the room now, I’d kill it. Controlling our reproductions, hell. I wasn’t ready for this.

“What,” she asked, “bothers you the most about it?”

“That you didn’t ask me more, that we didn’t discuss it.” That we didn’t wait.

“All this is natural, this nervousness. I asked them about frozen zygotes in case.”

“In case what?”

“In case something happens to you before I have two children. I want one more of yours.”

Immortal sperm, what a great idea. I felt better, but couldn’t get an erection. We went to sleep.

In the morning I woke up to a fine erection. I closed the drapes and ran my thumbs around Marianne’s nipples.

The next night we went to a bar. Marianne couldn’t drink alcohol or take any drugs, so we sat and watched the other exbrachiators get drunk. “Funny,” Marianne said, “I feel very comfortable around them, but more like an animal.”

I’d noticed the same thing. With Gwyngs, I strained so much to understand them that I wasn’t aware of myself. With other humans I was just me. But with these guys, I was an extropical brachiator with odd habits, but the other guys were also funny in just the right ways. We went with cliffs, climbing trees, lianas, and swinging bridges.

The shiny blacks with the pointed noses came over with three furry sapients. The female shiny one said, “I’m Jasper Thirteen with Jasper Fourteen. Are your machines…was great expense involved?”

Jasper Fourteen asked directly, “Can we borrow them?”

“To ride?” Marianne asked. In English, she said,
“We ought to see if we can patent the concept.”

They raised their hands, fingers curled toward us, and brought them down yes, yes twice up and down. The three furry people watched.

Several thousand dollars worth of Roger Strigate bikes.
Marianne adjusted the seats for them. I thought they’d head to the elevator, but no, they rode out on the walkways, across the swinging bridges. I had to look. Marianne threw a fit against a chair-size cushion in the lobby, kneeling beside it, clutching at the piping, biting into the upholstery, choking on her laughter. The Jaspers came back and he said, “Very nicely scary, like xenophobia movies.”

“Will you sell them?” she asked.

Marianne said, “We could sell you the design.

“Are they patented?”

“Not here, but…”

He pulled a camera out of his vest and took all kinds of pictures then handed Marianne a plastic credit chip “Our thanks. The design could be improved for slow travel balance.”

“You’re supposed to use them on cart paths,” Marianne said, pocketing the credit chip and wiping her face.

“We’d like to ride them down the cart path from the elevator,” one of the fuzzy guys said.

I remembered the incline coming up and shook my head.

Karriaagzh came for us on the fourth day, in bare feathers frayed by the clothes he usually wore. He stepped through the meal hall like a xenophobia movie character, hocks rising high, beak slightly parted to show the flat pointed tongue tip, feathers tight against his head, yellow eyes fixed on me. I hadn’t seen him in a while, I realized, and not in bare feathers in over a year. That was why he was looking so alien. Then he looked at Marianne, and his feathers loosened.

He said, “Tom, Marianne, the Wrengee and another of Isa have asked for help, so come with me. You have time to get your machines and clothes.” He went to the edge of the room, stared down at the roiling water and the rocks, then crouched and shuffled back. When he was well away from the edge, he sat down, palms on the floor.

“You want to go with us to our room?” I asked.

He flicked his crest at me and said, “No, thank you. Heights to me are not, as you mammals say, humorous.”

I remembered Granite Grit climbing up rocks, not thrilled but not anxious, either. Did Karriaagzh’s species have an aversion to heights that Granite’s species didn’t have, or was this personal, a phobia?

We got our bikes and clothes and went out. When we got back, a young shiny black kid was fingering Karriaagzh’s scales while the kid’s parents dabbed at each other nervously. Karriaagzh had his eyes closed. The kid reached for the crest feathers just as his mother grabbed him.

“Tell him to be gentle with them,” Karriaagzh said.

“We’re back,” Marianne said. As Karriaagzh rose, the other guests began chattering again. Marianne went up to, him, reached up, and stroked his shoulder feathers.

“I’ve been lonely,” he said, “and off by myself.”

Marianne said something in a language I didn’t recognize.

Karriaagzh wiggled feathers all over his body and said, “How did you learn
that?

“I called up your language from Linguistics records,” Marianne said. “Does it bother you to hear it from mammal lips, not a beak?”

“You smear some sounds,” Karriaagzh said. He tightened his feathers. “I should have worn my mammal clothes, to remind me of where I am.”

As we left with him, the brachiators behind us talked even louder. When the elevator reached the base of the cliff, Karriaagzh sighed and rubbed the ridges about his eyes.

“Does Black Amber approve of this?”

He spat air and wiped his beak with his fingers. “If I agreed with her, she’d switch to take my old position.”

I didn’t think so, knowing the Gwyngs, but I didn’t say anything. He’d driven up in an electric cart, too small for the three of us and the bikes.

“I’ll run,” he said, bouncing on his hocks. Marianne touched his arm again as she went by him to get in the passenger seat.

His seat was missing, so I piled our bike bags there, sat on them, and began heading back to Karst City at maybe twenty five miles an hour. I said to Marianne, “I’ll slow up if he starts panting.”

He didn’t pant at all for thirty miles, just strode along behind us, head level, neck flexing, drafting the cart. I could see him in the rearview mirrors.

“Tough old bird,” Marianne said.

“The age is an act,” I said.

Karriaagzh saw us off at the Karst transport center.

Marianne looked at the transport pod and said to me, “It’s so small.”

Karriaagzh sat down on his hocks and flicked his nictitating membranes back and forth. Air hissed out of his nares, then he said, “You both need experience. This may not be as pleasant as a truly good first contact, but there’ll be no surprises. The Wrengee asked to talk to Tom now.”

Terrific, I thought, we don’t have to worry about the aliens we’re contacting, just the other aliens, those pretty little Sharwan who don’t want the Federation in their space. “Is this contact point adequately defended? I’m not sure I want Marianne to go.”

“It’s as well defended as Karst itself,” Karriaagzh said.

I remembered that Karst had been bombed to glazed rock about 500 years earlier.

We both climbed into the transport together, knees intermeshed.

I tightened down the hatch bolts, then we went through the longest series of lurches I’d ever experienced.

After a claustrophobic fifteen minutes, Marianne said, “What’s happening?”

“Long route,” I suggested. The air seemed stale, the sides of the egg…no, they couldn’t be collapsing.

Another twenty minutes later, we stopped lurching. The arrival diode flashed, and I opened the hatch.

Travertine in his olive feathers helped me out. He looked from Marianne to me and back again, holding the door half opened. “You,” he said and pulled the door the rest of the way up. “I’m replacing Granite this contact. Hope the roundabout trip didn’t upset your mate.”

Marianne said, “‘Hello, Travertine.”

“Capable of recognizing me, thanks.”

Wool said, “Climb out. “ He wore regulation pants, two lumpy nipples showing above the waist band, his fuzzy chest sweat matted.

We climbed out with our luggage and saw a big screen playing Wrengee movies. The one walking into the camera angles now had inflamed wattled earlobes and rips in his scales, as if ornaments had been tom out of the drilled holes. Wool said,”Recognize Ersh?”

“No, the one in front?” I asked. “How did you get in touch with them?”

Wool sighed. “Another bunch thought they were making a deep space first contact, but it was just these clowns changing their minds.”

“Unless we’re going to talk to them right now, show us to our room,” I said. Wool pulled himself up and went to the computer. He wrote something on the pickup slatem and the printer sprayed us a map.

“Follow the guide lights,” Travertine said. Wool pushed another button, and green lines began glowing in the ceiling, pulsing toward a door.

“Nothing irises open,” Marianne said as we passed through it. “You know, like a Camera lens?”

“Too complex to keep in good working order,” I replied, “when you might have people bouncing each other off the doors.”

She said in English, forgetting that Travertine could be bugging us
, “The Wrengee look creepy.”

“They’re very blunt-spoken,” I said, wondering if we were being tested for hardwired reactions. Travertine was a trifle hostile to both Gwyngs and humans after his con-specific Xenon was treated coldly by Rhyodolite and me. When our transport was stopped by the Yauntry, Xenon must have panicked because he felt caught between xenophobes. His moves frightened the Yauntry into killing him.