Human to Human (14 page)

“Not officially,” the Barcon said. “Red Clay, I think understand humans do, or did in the past, but cruelly.”

“Marianne would be better able to say.” I remembered about headhunters eating their foes’ hearts for the courage they’d had, but that wouldn’t put humans in a good light. I said to Drusah, “But it looks like someone put your eye out, then replaced it with a new one.”

“Yes.” Drusah didn’t explain. His shoulders seemed crooked, I noticed, as he drew them up, squaring his body—a usually defensive posture.

“We would do more surgery,” one of the Barcons said, “but he says no.”

“The new eye I could use,” Drusah said. He shuddered slightly as he looked at each of us again.

Then two more Barcons led in a human—no, not quite a human. If I’d seen him on Earth, I would have thought him slightly deformed and not looked further. But he resembled me as if my face had been broken and rebuilt slightly off.

Granite’s head feathers raised slightly, and he stared at it, then at me. I remembered the Sharwan who challenged us for Ersh’s planet had seen other species of us, too. Could they have copied Granite Grit, or one of the completely furred people? The Barcons holding my Sharwani copy said, “We recognized a human and stopped to see if he had a city permit.”

I said, “It looks vaguely like me.” Granite hunkered down on his legs, shuffling from one side to another as he sat down. He hid his palms flat on the floor.

The Barcon in charge said, “We think this one or another like him killed Thridai. We captured him when he approached the baby Daiur. We will be checking IDs and skull computers in the city.”

Drusah spoke to the other Sharwan in a language that I hadn’t heard before, then in another language yet. The Sharwan tried to get away from the Barcons, but they lifted him to his toes by his upper arms. Drusah bared his teeth and flicked his tongue over them, then said, “‘There are others.”

I asked, “What will you do with him?”

“Rebuild him to Sharwani shape,” the Barcon said.

“All of you, don’t let anyone near your Sharwani unless you test the individual.”

Drusah spoke again to the other Sharwan, and he began wailing. Drusah said. “He doesn’t believe you will fully restore him.”

“We’ll do a better job than his people could do,” the Barcon Control officer said. One of the other Barcons reached in his pocket, pulled an injector-box out and hit a dose through the imitation of my neck.

“Get him changed back quickly,” I said.

“Did he really kill Thridai?” Ersh said.

The Sharwani said something short, almost melodious. The other Sharwan, my imitation, said in mangled Karst One, “I you kill.” He swayed on his feet.

Drusah said, “I think not.”

Couldn’t Thridai distinguish me from this thing? What about Daiur? “Drusah, does this Sharwan look like me to you?”

“I can tell the difference. I’m good at identifying individual animals from a distance.”

Ersh said, “He was an animal ethnographer.”

Drusah said, “I’m still an animal ethnographer.”

Thridai thought I killed him. Control believed that I could be so dangerous. I felt sick.

When I got home from the Institute of Control, Marianne was standing in front of the elevator. Her right arm held Karl beside her. She said, “Molly and Rhyodolite are visiting. Molly brought a loom. Maybe she has Chi’ursemisa tamed.”

Back behind us in Molly’s old room, I heard Chi’ursemisa giggling like a rubber band banjo and Molly’s voice murmuring about pique looms.

It seemed vaguely absurd, but not as brutally absurd as what I’d seen earlier. I said, “The Sharwani made an imitation of me. I can’t believe anyone thought it really looked like me.”

Marianne waited as if I had more to explain, as I did. “The fake me approached Daiur.”

“What about Daiur?” Karl asked.

“That’s how the Barcons caught it,” I finished.

“Karl, can you ask Daiur what the person who looked like me wanted him to do?”

“Now?” Karl asked.

“Yes, now,” I said.

Karl started out, but Marianne said, “Karl, I don’t want you near Hurdai or Chi’ursemisa alone.”

“But I can’t understand how anyone, anything, could have thought it was me.” It struck me then how alien the others were, how we didn’t all see alike.

“Don’t forget that the species are different,” Marianne said, “even if official Federation propaganda says to ignore the differences. I think we ought to get a weanling Quara.”

Karl said, “It’s all right being different.”

“Why don’t we get Karl a real puppy?” I said. “A pit bull-Rhodesian ridgeback cross.”

Rhyodolite came out then in just a tunic top slit to expose his armpit webs. The webs were slightly damp, smelling of alcohol, and his wrinkles under his nostril slits sagged more than usual. At the tip of his pointed chin was a tiny bald spot as if he’d rubbed the hair away there.

Did Gwyngs see me as an unformed Gwyng with only incipient nostril and mouth grooves, bald faced, white? Did human skin do anything to polarized light? Rhyodolite said, “Threads boring, (both) females smell,” and signed to Karl, who shook his head in our human
no.

“He doesn’t know sign,” I said.

“And can’t hear Karst Two (brain limits).”

“What do I look like to you?” I asked Rhyodolite.

He found a pencil and printer paper, drew me in the rapid photographically real Gwyng style, as if he were tracing a mental image. He’d only slightly distorted me to the Gwyng form.

“Well.” I said to Marianne, “Which Sharwan should I check on first?”

“Did you get me a controller?” Marianne asked.

“Here,” I said.

“It’s too serious now,” Marianne said as she took the box, small enough to wear under clothes or on a necklace. “Go see Chi’ursemisa first. Hurdai and Daiur are in the room. I locked the door.” She seemed a bit ashamed, then shrugged.

I went down the other hall, the women’s side, and stood at Molly’s door a moment. Molly worked at a table loom, rather more complex-looking than it seemed to need to be, while Chi’ursemisa lolled on the floor and fingered two lace strips, first one, then another. She said, “A continuous fiber in the first, made with one end worked around thread loops. The second is plant fiber, several strands. In our culture, these things are typical of presynthetic touch toys.”

Molly, without stopping her weaving, hand automatically going to switch levers and pulling the beater against the made cloth, looked up at me and nodded, then said, “Right. In our culture, we had to invent faster spinning methods and more efficient plowing systems before we made
lace.”
She used the English word
lace.
“When we could make these things quickly with machines, nobody craved
lace
anymore.” Molly’s right hand cranked at the front roller to bring threads off the rollers at the back of the loom. Then she patted each plane of threads with her left palm, adjusting each roller with her right.

Chi’ursemisa lay down on her back, playing with the lace. She murmured, “I crave touch toys.”

“I think of lace as an eyeball toy,” Molly said. 

Chi’ursemisa looked over at me, her head flat on the floor, sharp furred cheekbone pressed against the carpet. “Red Clay Tom, I don’t want to talk to you yet.”

“Chi’ursemisa, how do you recognize me?”

“The chopped face hair. I think.”

I couldn’t tell if she were joking or not. “And you like our lace?”

Molly said, “She’s very tactile.”

Chi’ursemisa slowly sat up and said, “I need touch toys if
I’m to be happy here.” One hand, fingertips swollen tight, wobbled up and brushed through her head hair.

Okay, drunk on lace. So where did I go from here? Molly said, “Human women are fairly tactile, too. The difference between the human sexes is tense muscles in the male and sensitive touch in the girl.”

Chi’ursemisa said, “How sad. Red Clay Tom is crippled by my standards.”

I felt as awkward with these two as I had when I came in on Marianne and some of her birth group—but more pissed. I seemed to remember women with thimbles who thumped boy children on the head with them. “Chi’ursemisa, we’ve got a problem. I do need to talk to you about it, if you…”

“I sympathize,” she said. She sat up and looked at me, trembling slightly. “But make it easier on me. Not right now, the talking.”

I came up to look closer at the table loom Molly was weaving on and asked, “Piqu
é
 loom?”

“For the very, very tactile,” Molly said, frowning at the threads. She adjusted another roller, then wove in a metal rod, then two regular threads, then alternated rods with pairs of threads for a while. “And this is velvet,” she said, running a device like a specialty wood plane over the rods. A blade in the device cut the rods free.

Chi’ursemisa stood up, her fur and clothes covered with short bits of thread, and came over. We both reached out and touched the cut pile.

“Interesting,” Chi’ursemisa said. “Can I…how can I get some?”

“It’s expensive, but I’ll give you a bit of this. I was just fooling around,” Molly said.

Chi’ursemisa touched my hand gently and said, “How can I become more self-financed?”

Molly stopped weaving and said, “If she supports the Federation, who could sponsor her as a cadet?”

Molly, did you get this creature to defect with your Stupid piqu
é
 loom?
“Chi’ursemisa, is that what you want?” I said. I’d have thought Hurdai would have been more willing to take the Federation side.

She touched the velvet again as if she hadn’t heard. Not ready to talk yet, as she’d told me already.

I left them and went to the kitchen to fix two teapots, one for the Sharwani and one for us. Rhyodolite came in just as I was wondering what he’d want, and folded his arms so that the webs pulled across his chest. He looked tired, wrinkles drooping, nostril slits moving in and out as he breathed. “Does my face look/seem flabby?” he asked me.

Yes, but I wasn’t going to say so.
“Not particularly.”

“Liar, Clay Dung.”

“A little.”

He oo’ed and said, “The Weaver tries/tires me.”

“She said she still loves you. Do you love her?”

“Much easier to get along with (most times) than Gwyng female.” My skull computer sighed in my auditory centers—that must have also been coded in his Karst Two.

I bumped up against him sideways for old time’s sake and pity, then gave him the human teapot saying, “Could you take it to Marianne?”

He opened the pot and sniffed. “For Gwyng, this would be (near) lethal. What’s for me?”

“I need to talk to Hurdai now. You want to watch us, see if you pick up anything I don’t?”

“Bomb-lizards people kill-mode in Karst City.” He muttered so that my computer barely gave me linguistic coordinates, but I figured he meant the Sharwani were killing people on the street.

“Really?”

“Not just other bomb-lizards people, either,” he said. “Need me to scare them honest?”

“Are they scared of you?”

He opened the cooler and found our milk, drained a bottle, then said, “I’ll terrorize them by chilling into coma, waxy inflexible insane alien. Piss me off, hostile attitudes.”

I said, “Why don’t you take the tea in to Marianne instead?”

He shrugged, an imitation of Molly’s and Marianne’s Berkeley shrugs, a huge sloughing off of responsibilities, and took the tea out. I thought about Chi’ursemisa’s safety, wondered if Hurdai knew she was becoming more sympathetic to us. Or maybe she was teasing? I trusted Hurdai to be more honest, but…it was an odd problem.

Hurdai and Daiur were watching a xenophobia movie with Gwyngs. I tried to figure out whether the Gwyngs were the terror objects or the terrified, then realized it was a new
avant
ambiguous one. Hurdai looked up and said, “This one is more realistic than usual.”

“In the ambiguity?”

“Yes. Do you know that when Sharwani lie, we shiver?”

Chi’ursemisa had been trembling.

“Are you interested in helping us?”

“No, but I am the honest one.”

Really? Had Chi’ursemisa given herself away earlier, arguing with him in one of the Sharwani languages we didn’t know yet? “Are you afraid of Rhyodolite?”

“Not fear—disgust.”

Daiur looked up from the movie when Hurdai said that, hair erect on his body. I wasn’t sure what that meant and wanted to take him up in my lap and cuddle him. “Maybe Daiur is afraid?” I said, wishing I could get Hurdai out, but his arm reached out, fingers wrapped around Daiur’s wrist. Daiur said, “I don’t want to kill anyone. My friends say it’s nasty.”

Hurdai said, “Only grownups are allowed to kill.”

I put the tea down and went back to Chi’ursemisa and Molly. Chi’ursemisa sprawled on the bed, her left foot on her right knee, fingering a piece of lace almost compulsively, a faint odor like burnt ashes in the air. I told her, “Hurdai said when Sharwani lie, they shiver.”

“It’s emotional to shiver. Keep me away from him.”

She looked at me, pupils dilated as if she’d just been in the dark. They shrank down to pinpoints, then expanded again slightly.

Molly, still weaving, said, “And lower the lights in their rooms. They’re crepuscular.” She added in English, “Unless you’re being deliberately annoying.”

“Thridai said…How did you find that out?”

Chi’ursemisa said, “I asked her if the brightness was deliberate. To break us.”

“Thridai said to leave the lights as we had them. I didn’t quite understand.” I wondered why Daiur hadn’t complained to Karl, say, or why Chi’ursemisa hadn’t told Marianne or me. “I’m sorry. Would you like separate rooms?” I asked. “Where would Daiur be?”

“I want him with me, but…” Her fingers fumbled on the lace. It dropped on her chest, and she shivered, then picked it up and laid it aside.

“
Split up a family, the Federation did
,” Molly said in English. She stopped weaving and picked up a needle, then sewed along the end of the cloth.

“
Maybe
,” I said in the same language, wondering if Karl had taught Daiur English, and if he’d taught that language to Hurdai or Chi’ursemisa. I almost backed out of the room and went to the front. Marianne was drinking tea; Rhyodolite was playing tic-tac-toe with Karl. I told Marianne, “Get another Quara if you want. Or maybe we can get a real puppy.”

Marianne said, “Or both.”

I used to talk rough enough and country enough for dog fight invites. Could I go home and pick up a pit bull after all these cultural changes? “Are Molly and Rhyodolite staying?”

“Yes, unless you mind terribly.”

“Can Chi’ursemisa stay in
their room with them? She wants to be separated from Hurdai.”

Marianne said, “I’d rather lock her up and let Hurdai out, but Molly seems to get along with her well enough.”

“If she hurts them, I’ll kill her,” I said.

“We’re not supposed to use lethal defense,” Marianne said. “I asked already. It’s like with circus animals—too valuable to kill if they do maul someone. We’ve got the stunners.”

I said, “Maybe we could just stick them back behind the polycarb.”

“A big old bitchy Ahram said that they had to turn us loose and trust us, so we have to turn them loose—and hope for the best.”

As far as I knew, I didn’t have a neural disruptor wired to my nervous system. Or did I? Maybe I should go beat on someone and see.

Chi’ursemisa stayed in Molly’s room. We put a Gwyng tube sofa for Rhyodolite in the front room, but Chi’ursemisa dragged it back and slept in it when she wasn’t reading Karst One texts.

“Where’s Rhyodolite?” I asked Molly a few days later. She’d brought in a floor loom and was weaving in the front-room, a Bach cantata playing, VCR playing Terran movies.

“Not here,” she said, feet moving on the treadles.

“Well, that’s obvious.”

“He’s downstairs with your Gwyng shopkeeper.” She jerked the bobbin out of the shuttle and put another one on the rod, then snapped the rod down and sucked the thread through the side slot. “Rhyo and I only do so much for each other. You like that?”