Being Alien (38 page)

“Eighth rotation at the longest.”

The Jerek waited just outside while I went into the store and called up to Marianne. “Hi, you be okay if I went out to check on something that came up in my messages?”

“I guess. How long?”

“Eighth rotation, maybe.

I gave the phone back to the Gwyng who ran the store. She said, nodding at the Jerek “Those (drug users) steal/make physical danger.”

We took a bus to the northside slums, the little Jerek hugging herself and shivering. I felt terribly conspicuous in my officer’s tunic and pants around all the others dressed in shabby species clothes, some in visitor’s brown tunics or pre-cadet white, When I saw other blue tunics, I felt almost relieved until I remembered that officers who visited down here were generally after interspecific sex. That’s what I looked like I was after, following this Jerek sterile.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Moolan,” she said, not giving an Academy mineral name contact designator.

“That’s a Jerek name, right?”

“Right.” She turned her nose down and stared at me, full frontal challenge face. I remembered that most Jereks gave their tunnel as part of their names. She said, “In here.”

We went into a hall that stunk of alien pisses, lit by bulbs covered in wire-reinforced plastic. Was this a ruse? Moolan opened a door and went in, bare feet patting on a concrete floor. The room was dimly lit, as dark as Chalk and Agate’s tunnel, but the air was stuffy, the same medicinal stink as Warren’s drug operation.

He was inside. I heard her say, “I need some,” and his laugh.

“So, Warren,” I said, walking into the room.

Little brother the officer.” He was lying on a cushion, wrapped in imitation furs.

“Warren, this isn’t good for you."

“Shit, getting ripped up inside the brain is?” He said to Moolan, “I evaporated it just right for you."

She seemed to know what he was talking about, where it was—a small vial full of bluish powder that she poured onto her thumb nail, below the center ridge, just a tiny trace of the powder. She snuffed the powder off her nail and stared at us gravely, almost frozen.

“Keeps her from coming after my cock,” Warren said.

“I wondered.”

“I love her, but not for that,” Warren said.

Moolan said, very slowly, “This would kill me, this wonderful drug, if I weren’t dying already. Wonderful lethal conditions. “

“Is it too late for you to have your ovaries out?” I asked.

“O-o-oh-yes-s-s. She began nibbling her tongue, none too gently, then she stiffened and cried out.

“Fake sex,” Warren said. He got up and stroked her, then picked her up in his arms and carried her into a colder room. Not knowing if I should or not, I followed him. He laid her down on a mattress covered with something like Velcro. She twisted against it, shedding fur into it.

“Warren.”

“Barcons were killing me.”

“They said you thought you were hiding from them.”

“Why don’t you both just let me go to hell in my own way? I found where I fit. We take care of each other, Moolan, me, the rest of us flop-outs.”

“Warren.”

He said in English, “
Can’t you say nothing but my name?
”

“They said you’d still be you.”

“My body, with different memories. Things didn’t connect. They were killing the real me inside the brain.”

I didn’t say anything, remembered the false memories in another brainwipe victim, then realized that I’d thought
victim
. Finally, I managed to say, “I’m sorry I brought you here.”

“No problem. Most drugs here do less damage than speed. More advanced biochemistry, right. Some do worse, but the damage is so much more fun.”

“Warren, you weren’t using drugs in Richmond.”

“What the fuck you think Prolixin is?”

“Why did you want to see me?”

“Call off the Barcons. It’s my life, and it’s no worse in this slum than any other.” Warren bared his teeth in a grin that didn’t quite work and said, “We need drugs to smooth out the xenophobia in my slum here. Good drugs turn us all into
Technicolor
fascinations.” He used the movie word in English.

His bare feet had raw sores on the tops of his toes, and one heel oozed a clear liquid. He was freezing with his Jerek. Shouldn’t I turn him in for his own good? “Warren, you could do better than this. We can’t be that much different."

“Scares you, doesn’t it?”

“I won’t ever become like you.”

“Call off the Barcons, little brother, or you’ll be sorry.”

“Warren, I can’t abandon you.”

“Shit, don’t. Come visit. Try some drugs.” His grin was crooked, as though his brain couldn’t quite communicate through his facial nerves, signals scrambled.

I didn’t say anything more, just walked out alone, looking to the street like a whore’s customer. When I got out of the slum and caught a bus, I cried, the tears burning as though they’d clotted inside like bad blood and came out half scab.

Everyone on the bus with me went silent, then murmured until I got off. I took the elevator up. Marianne said, “He’s using again.”

“Yes.” I slumped onto a couch. “What do I do?”

“I asked what the drug laws were here. They’re relatively liberal. The Barcons pull in dealers when the drug use in a population goes over a certain percent. It’s a hundredth percent total living hours for where we’re living. I found out through the computer.”

I went to the terminal and called up the percent for where Warren was living. Two percent total hours, A twentieth of the population could stay stoned all the time. All the population could get stoned one hour a day. “What do they do to dealers?”

“Don’t ask,” Marianne said.

“He had sores on his feet,” I said to her as I typed a message to the Barcons in charge of Warren: WE MUST TALK. Then I stood up, almost tripped, slightly dizzy. “Is Karl sleeping?” Marianne nodded, then hugged me sideways like a Gwyng. We went in hip to hip to watch our sleeping son.

Appalled again at how tiny he was, I said, “I don’t want anything ever to hurt him or you,”

Marianne squeezed me and said, “All I hope for is that nothing damages us permanently. Any of us.”

That sent my thoughts back to Warren.

“We don’t understand why you insist on continuity of personality. If we remove his addictive nature without changing his memories, he’ll know he was changed, and if he considers it tampering…” The Barcon trailed off without concluding the statement. We were sitting in my little Academy office, a report from the Institute of Control about the Sharwan and the Wrengee on my terminal screen.

I was getting very depressed today, no good news. “He wants you to stop treating him. He said I’ll be sorry if you don’t leave him alone.”

“He’s a known drug technician. He’s marked to be brought in if the rate becomes excessive. Then we treat him as is prescribed.”

“What’s that?”

“Drug aversion.”

“He wouldn’t use drugs again?”

“Officer Red Clay, he could never even go near them.”

“What can be done?”

The Barcon sighed. “A personality re-structuring with some false memories."

“How many years do you think you’d have to cut out to give him a drug-free past?”

“We haven’t examined that issue completely.”

“He’s been using since he was fourteen, not excessively, but…” I felt as though I’d been drugged myself, some amphetamine that burned the myelin off my nerves and left me jangling. What, I asked myself, was I defending? "Can you give him memories of tapering off, of stopping? 
Cancel these last few weeks?"”

“Will you authorize?”

“He’ll hate me forever.”

“We…” He sighed.

I looked up sharply, having not heard a Barcon sigh like that. “What is the problem?”

“We will try to keep him as human as possible, but stopping the drug involvement is most critical, right?"

I remembered where he was living, in a cold room with a Jerek sterile. “Can you do anything for the Jerek he’s living with?”

“Her cell signature isn’t on the drugs sold there. Since she’s also not Academy or Institute, she can do what she wishes, which includes dying of pernicious anemia. Or of drug toxicity. Do you want that for your brother?”

A little slip of skin, sweat—Warren tagged each cap he handled as his product. And dying of drugs, several of Warren’s old Earthside connections managed that without precisely overdosing—couple of murders, couple of suicides, a car crash. I said, “He never used badly, he’d always detox on his own every couple months, before Mica came. Before
v’r
…this.”

“You don’t think this Karst, this Federation, isn’t stressful to me. Barcons go to the Northeast Quadrant, too.”

“And what do you do to them?”

“Re-build them and send them home.”

“Oh, could you please do that. Back home.” Getting Warren back to Earth now would be as difficult as extracting the Sharwan from the Wrengee planet, but I was going to force myself to be a little optimistic here.

“We must see how the reconstruction works,” the Barcon said. “Have you given us your permission?”

I felt like I was too exhausted to do otherwise. “Yes.”

The Barcon stood up. “We will tend to your regrets if that proves necessary."

“Only if I allow you to,” I said, almost ready to retract my decision, wondering if I could.

The next day, Bir from Marianne’s birth group came to watch Karl while Marianne and I went to a First Contact Party. One of my cadets, a Yauntry from Frosted Granite Corporation, had been aboard an observation station when their charge species gated out.

We went through the strange tunnel entrance at the Rector’s Lodge— “like a womb, we all get reborn here,” Marianne said and came in late to the large lodge room filled with all the seating instruments. A Barcon was already filling drug orders for some of the cadets. I spotted my cadet, Simla Doth, who had small northern Yauntry teeth and snow white hair, but brown eyes, not green or grey.

“Sorry I’m late.”

He fingered his sash. Beside him was a representative of the people he’d contacted vaguely Gwyng-like, but with smooth bare-skinned faces. They both seemed to smile at each other, then Simla took me aside.

“I wondered why you made us cadets first, not people of the Institutes. Now, quickly, we’ve been on both sides—first contact and first contacting.”

“It’s like an initiation.”

His face crinkled up in a Yauntry smile, almost like mine. “Great fun, though’.”

“If it goes smoothly,” I said.

“Topaz is most experienced.”

I remembered her from my own First Contact Party, the tri-colored almost human looking woman, so serious. “Yes. Hers are good teams to be on.” I looked around and saw Marianne talking to Karriaagzh.His throat organ throbbed once. I felt vaguely like he’d made a pass at her and went over.

Marianne smiled and said, “Tom’s worried about his brother."

Karriaagzh’s inner third eyelids flicked—why did this upset him—and he said, “Drugs are terrible.”

“Even supervised like this?” Marianne asked, waving her hand at the Barcon on the drug dispenser.

“I have many pleasures,” Karriaagzh said. “Perhaps you mammals will snoop later?” He stalked off, hocks flexing high, feathers quivering.

Marianne asked, “What was that about?

“He, I guess, he masturbated, or something, by throwing up, no, regurgitating in a toilet that’s decorated like a baby bird.”

“And you watched him?”“ Marianne sounded more shocked that I’d watched than he’d done it.

“Rhyodolite made me.”

“Karriaagzh needs friends,” she said.

I went up to the drug box thinking about smoking dope one last time with Warren. With Warren, not here in front of my cadets. Not in front of in my wife either.

The Barcon on the box said, “Red Clay, we don’t think you should take drugs now!”

“I’d like to smoke one of my home planet drugs with my brother.” I wrote tetrahydrocannabinol on the drug box scribe pad. “This, but in the plant.”

“One last time?”

“The Institute of Medicine is going to fix him right. Make it where he can’t stand drugs, purge his memories.”

The Barcon talked into a communicator, then said, “One last time,” as he keyed the dispenser to disgorge a small metal box. I slipped it into a pocket in my tunic, under my dress sash.

When I turned around, Ersh was standing there watching me. Someone had ripped three jewelry rings out of his scales. He looked exhausted. “I’m a refugee.” He used the Karst One term for that word, with all its connotations, and sighed as if he knew them all now.

“I’m having a rough time with some of my con-specifics,” I said, “and my wife had a baby three weeks ago, so I’m sorry if I’m less than completely polite by your standards.”