Being Alien (40 page)
Authors: Rebecca Ore
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Space Opera, #astrobiology--fiction, #aliens--science fiction
“Accident. The universe commits them daily.”
I watched all the creatures we were passing. Were we all just accidents once made now trying to sustain ourselves? Accidents every day denied they were accidents, trying to justify their existence, their rightness, forgetting the nightmare of centuries of fish dying in evaporating tide pools before some accidental lungs made life on dry land possible. Life was horrified of seeing itself clearly.
Then I saw a Domiecan like Bir cuddling her small child so much like a bipedal dog and thought of Marianne nursing our son, so helpless he needed two parents. I said, “It can’t be just an accident.”
Cadmium said, “With my mind I can see this as both.” He waved one hand, then put it back on the wheel when he turned a corner.
Life was both—accident and design. I could see, that, too, even with my brain. In front of us, Warren was dead, by design and accident. A small muscle in my eyelid twitched, bunched, and twitched again. “He wrote on the wall that he was obliterating us.”
“Us/himself/those not himself.”
We were passing by open girder houses of the olive bird people now. I remembered seeing country houses at night with the shades open—the sense of house as hollow container. That sense made people seem fragile out on the surface of a world. These people seemed even more fragile, in their spaces that didn’t contain them, open to the weather, just layers and layers of surfaces. And Warren was beyond all of it now—obliterated or whatever, I didn’t know what to believe—his corpse traveling back to my apartment in an alien hearse. I said, “We need a lacquered wooden box to bury him in. And formal clothes for his body.”
Cadmium picked up a phone and Gwyng-talked into it, then asked, “What shape box?”
“Slightly wider than he was, slightly longer.”
Cadmium talked again and then we were home, driving into the basement
“Don’t bring his body up,” I said to a Barcon standing by the hearse, not wanting Marianne to suddenly face that, not while nursing, not unless she wanted to.
“It’s cooler down here, the Barcon in charge said. He stayed with the body while another Barcon came out of the hearse, with Moolan in front of him, her arms pinned behind her in his right hand while his left hand was holding the scruff of her neck. I thought that was a bit rough, then noticed his cheek was tom, red scratches through the black skin.
“I refuse to see other Jereks,” Moolan said.
I said, “Why don’t you get them together away from us? We humans have our own grief.”
“I thought your brother would stay through my death. He cheated me,” she said.
I tensed, ready to tear her into little shreds, when Cadmium touched me lightly and said, “You’d regret it.”
The Barcons held her downstairs while Cadmium and I rode up on the elevator. When the doors opened at my apartment, I saw Dorge Karmapa and three other Tibetan men. “May we support you in ceremony,” Dorge said.
Behind him, Marianne, holding Karl, nodded slightly to urge me to agree.
“Yes,” I said. “Can you perform a burial service?”
“Burning has been our custom, but he was your brother.”
Cremation, good. We could take his ashes back to Earth, someday. Cadmium gave my elbow a quick squeeze and went into the visitor’s bathroom. Then I saw Agate, Chalk, and Lisanmarl. “Moolan is downstairs. I can only take so much.”
Lisanmarl said, “We’re both deformed, but her way shames all steriles.”
“She wanted Warren to be with her when she died.”
The Jereks all gasped, then took the elevator down. I said to the Tibetans, “Warren’s corpse is also downstairs."
“Bears are building a box for the corpse as is your custom,” Dorge said. “My brothers will wash and dress it. We regret that your people and mine have not been close.”
“Tom, have the Barcons bring the body up,” Marianne said. “We can lay him out in his bedroom. Didn’t your people hold wakes at the house?”
“
Funeral
home in my day,” I said, slightly insulted, but there was no funeral home here. “Bedroom will do.” Marianne told the Barcons over the intercom to bring Warren’s corpse up.
“You’ve seen him,” Dorge said, “you don’t need to see more.” He led me back to my own room. Marianne followed, then Agate and Chalk came in without Lisanmarl.
“What will happen to Moolan?” I asked.
“Lisanmarl fought her to agree to accept help. She will not die without tunnel,” Chalk said. Agate handed him their tiny baby, so much smaller than Karl had been as a newborn. Chalk pulled up his tunic and put his son to his breast, both hands covering the tiny body, keeping him warm.
I imagined the two small Jerek steriles rolling on the ground, fur dropping off in clots, Moolan so weak, Lisanmarl so tough, sure of herself.
Agate and Chalk sat with me, then Cadmium came in, ducking his head slightly to them. I smelled alcohol. His armpit webs were damp. When Gwyngs died suddenly while young it was a great tragedy; when they lost their sanity, other Gwyngs felt they were socially dead and so the body might as well follow. I said, “Our grief must confuse you.”
“I try to care for my living human friends, not become human myself,” he said.
One of the Barcons who’d worked on Warren’s brain came in clutching her lower belly. She stared at me with those almost human eyes, jaw flexing at the inhuman joints, then said, “We at least made him less paranoid. We should have attacked the drug cravings first, but he was better before he began the drugs.”
I almost said, you messed him up, you left him a stranger in his own mind, but then realized a Barcon who had come to me for comfort must be very agitated. “Yes, he wasn’t xenophobic.”
The Barcon sighed and loosened her grasp on her lower belly. “We try not to invest so much, but saving others is our pride.”
And, I realized, he wasn’t just obliterating me, my attempts to save him, but the Barcons and their pride in what they did, Moolan and her wish to have company when she died, everyone who’d hassled him, wanted something from him. I said to the Barcon woman, “Suicide’s selfish.”
Cadmium said, “Ersh wants to know if he can share your death release ceremony.”
“Yes “I said, almost saying no.
Cadmium went to my terminal and entered a cadet code, then the message, awkwardly picking out the Karst One characters as he mumbled to himself, “When should he come?” Cadmium asked when he’d gotten Ersh on-line.
“Whenever,” I said.
Cadmium typed a time two hours from now, then said, “We will have the former alive in the wooden box by then.”
While we waited for the coffin, I told them stories about Warren that I realized were my personal myths, creating with words the Warren I wanted to remember.
At the crematorium, Rimpoche Dorge Karmapa stood on a dais the Tibetans had brought with them, an embroidered cloth image behind him that seemed to be of a sapient in general, not human, Gwyng, or bird, although there was a suggestion of feathers stitched in with fresh thread. Warren’s coffin was open. I went up to see him, and he wasn’t the wax works Warren that an American mortician would have presented to us, but the muscles of the face had been massaged loose and he was in a European suit. I listened while Dorge talked to Warren as though he were alive and very sick. "All components of being are transitory, therefore being is transitory.“ He rang a bell over Warren, then began chanting a Tibetan I could only grasp vague words from: white light, demons.
For an instant, I was outraged that Dorge was cremating Warren with a pagan ritual, but Warren wouldn’t have been more pleased to be buried Baptist. Dorge handed me a flower and said, “Tell him that life regrets his absence.”
I threaded the flower between his fingers and said, “Life missed you, Warren.”
Other Tibetans began softly to beat drums. Grouped together in the back of the service room, Cadmium, Ersh, and the other non-humans watched us.
Dorge said, “Warren Gentry has moved from a physical state to a mental state. He lives now within the minds of those who knew him while his corpse goes to the fire. No one can claim a complete knowledge of him. He was, as we all are, attached to Eternity."
I looked behind me as a conveyor belt took Warren’s corpse to the fires. Karriaagzh was standing in the doorway. When the coffin disappeared behind two bronze fire doors, Dorge bowed to me and I to him, then he came down off the dais and cautiously embraced me as if fearing a rebuff. I gripped his back as if we were saving each other from drowning.
Author Biography
Rebecca Ore was born in Louisville, KY, out of people from Kentucky and Virginia, Irish Catholic and French Protestant turned Southern Baptist on her mother’s side and Welsh and Borderer on her father’s. She grew up in South Carolina and fell in love with New York City from a distance, moved there in 1968 and lived on the Upper West Side and Lower East Side for seven years. Somehow, she also attended Columbia University School of General Studies while spending most of her energy in the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. In 1975, she moved to San Francisco for almost a year, then moved to Virginia, back and forth several places for several years, finished a Masters in English, then moved to rural Virginia for ten years, writing sf novels and living in her grandparent’s house after they died. Next came homeownership of a small house in Philadelphia with a walled garden, one wall stone and brick, one wall stone against a hill, and the west wall not there, since the neighbor and she shared the space.
She’s been mostly an academic gypsy and has been variously an editorial assistant for the Science Fiction Book Club, a reporter/photographer for the Patrick County
Enterprise
, and a assistant landscape gardener. She left Philadelphia after 12 years and ended up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, for a time. She is currently retired and living in Nicaragua after working for government sub-contractors for over a year.
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