Human to Human (27 page)

I sat up rigid, almost about to throw up. Warren clung to me, then, the way I’d clung to Warren, kidnapping him off Earth. And people had tried to talk him into giving me up before we were busted. The announcer said to my teacher, “Didn’t the principal advise that he be tried as an adult?”

“He…I don’t know if it’s fair to discuss this, since the man is dead. Yes, both Warren and Tom scared him.” I closed my eyes, remembering the principal, scared of knives, teenage boys, and drugs. I used to bring in little broken bits of sharpened steel too small to really call knives, just to bug him. Now, I realize what a little jerk I’d been. The world hadn’t simply abandoned me to Warren.

Sheriff Deitz said, “I’d like Tom to know that I would like to shake his hand if he’s been able to work honest and make a family among aliens. It’d have to be a really balanced man to live among so many different, alien ways.”

Lisanmarl leaned back and whistled. I remembered Carbon-jet’s whistle like that.

That program tailed off,

 and Lisanmarl switched the sound to another picture completely unrelated to aliens or our arrival. Angleton started to reach for the remote control, but she lowered her nose again.

I didn’t care. Discovering I’d had a secret life I’d never known about stunned me. I said, “I want to go back to Floyd.”

Angleton said, “I was planning to show Lisanmarl more caverns.”

“Carlsbad,” Lisanmarl said, watching an image of herself, no sound, just her gestures, round shoulders revolving, hands stroking the air, nose circling, eyelids almost clicking open and shut.

“Can’t I go to Floyd by myself?”

Lisanmarl looked at Angleton then, her nose half-down, her lower jaw twitching. He smiled at her and said, “No.”

“No?”

“Gentry, why drag up that old business?”

“I thought everyone was abandoning me.”

“Maybe the sheriff is rerigging his memories so he doesn’t look like a nasty redneck on national television.”

“I want to find out.”

Lisanmarl said, “Everyone might lie. Some might tell this; others tell that.”

If the sheriff told the truth I hadn’t been the target of everyone’s disdain, but was myself touched with paranoia, that human vice. I felt hideous, Hurdai’s killer, suspicious of Chi’ursemisa, rude to Xenon when he was a colleague, a prick to Yangchenla—years of pretending that I wasn’t human in the worst ways.

Lisanmarl said, “He should go by himself.”

“I need to know the truth.”

Angleton got up and took the remote control from her. He turned all the sets off. “What is the truth? Colonel Cromwell goes with him.”

“I want to go alone,” but as I said that, I realized that I wasn’t sure.

Lisanmarl sat, her belly above the leathers’ band going in and out slightly, the hair on her shoulders slightly puffed. Then she said, “Tom, take Colonel Cromwell. It will get us all to Karst sooner.”

“A military jet will have you both in Roanoke by four this afternoon,” Angleton said.

“Are you going, too, Angleton?” I asked.

“No, not to Roanoke.”

“But to Karst,” Lisanmarl said.

“Oh.”

“James is a professional.”

Angleton’s face jerked toward her. I realized they were each other’s greatest professional challenge. Their mutual love of spying made naked skin erotic to the Jerek and a furry belly arousing to the man. And I was outclassed. “I’ll go to Floyd with Cromwell, then.”

Lisanmarl took the remote control
from Angleton and clicked all the sets on again. The screens swirled
with our images—human, alien, human, human to human to alien to alien—Lisanmarl, Angleton, me, and now drawings of Gwyngs who favored Jereks, and Granite Grit.

“Is Granite here?” I asked.

“In Washington,” Angleton said.

“Could he come to Floyd,
too?” I asked.

“No,” Lisanmarl said as much to Angleton as to me.

Colonel
Cromwell smiled
at me bleakly
as we carried our own bags off the plane. The government stopped the media for us in Roanoke—no press to greet us, no official car. In the terminal, I spotted Secret Service, FBI, types, black
eyeglass frames, ears wired. Cromwell shrugged slightly and found a porter to take our bags and hail a cab. We couldn’t have raced for a gray car bristling with aerials; the press would
have reacted.

The taxi came; the driver said, “Dispatcher had word to send me.” He flashed an ID at Cromwell.

“Hotel Roanoke,” Cromwell said as the porter put our bags in the trunk of the taxi. All
around us, the dark hills glittered with car and house lights. We went downtown where the tracks had been.

“What happened to the trains?” I asked.

“Underground,” the taxi driver said.

“In twenty years?”

“There’s the new terminal,” he said, pointing at a huge black and gray building about two blocks
square.

“They haven’t done as much with the airport,” I said.

“Mountains are too expensive to move. We’ve got a maglev connection with Greensboro, anyway, for freight.”

“I never expected Roanoke to be so changed.”

“Wait till you see Floyd,” the driver said. We pulled up in front of the Hotel Roanoke, and I looked across the city toward Mill Mountain. The Star wasn’t the same, built now of huge gas tube lights, not the incandescents of my childhood. The tubes changed color green, blue, red, yellow, white in waves.

As we rode the elevator up to our floor, Cromwell asked, “Have you read Thomas Wolfe?”

“About Asheville and how you can’t go home again? But I know I’ve changed.”

“When my father was in his sixties, he went back to his little town in South Carolina. Everyone was so proud, then, of him, and of me.” We got out and walked down the green velvet halls looking for Suite 1120.

“Of you?”

“Yes. I flew shuttles.”

“Oh.”

“That’s why I went with Weiss’s gate team. I dreamed about space since I was a baby.”

I almost said, it should have been you and not me, because I’d never thought about space until I found Mica. Space was for the kids with engineering degrees. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. You can help us.”

We went inside the suite on top of the hotel. Cromwell pulled back the drapes, and we stared out toward Floyd. A glow surrounded Bent Mountains like a small city was hiding behind it. Nothing like that had been in the Floyd I knew as a kid.

I pulled the drapes closed and said, “I miss my mate and child.” I hadn’t realized I was going to say that until I did. The loneliness that rushed through me with the words startled and appalled me.

Cromwell sighed and said, “What did you say?”

I’d spoken Karst One without realizing it. “I miss my wife and son. Maybe we ought to skip going to Floyd? Maybe?”

“You aren’t afraid of those people, are you?”

“Somewhat. And besides, it’s changed.”

“You’ve changed, too, but…” Cromwell stopped, walked back to the suitcases and began unpacking, hanging a fresh uniform and a civilian suit.

“I’m not as good with humans as I am with others.”

“I’m none too fond of self-pity.” He looked up from the drawer where he was putting his socks, jaw muscles locking down.

“What if I really could have saved Mica?”

Cromwell looked like he was going to say something quite harsh, then he said, “I wasn’t there.”

“No, you weren’t.”

“You’re human. That seems pretty inescapable. Do you need to have that be a problem?”

“Sapients…” I was going to tell him something I’d learned on Karst, about how flexible all sapients were, how that was the point of developing intelligence. “What is intelligence for, do you think?”

“It makes us better competitors.”

“Or more able to come up with win-win games.”

“Gentry, if your Federation doesn’t play win-win games, I’m personally coming after you. This is unofficial, of course.”

I was about to tell him, the Universe is very complex, but decided what would happen would happen. I’d go to Floyd; the human race would go to space; we’d all die with the future holding our grandchildren hostage. “I’ll go to Floyd, but I was wondering if the CIA or you guys prompted the sheriff to say what he did.”

“You’d like to believe that, wouldn’t you?”

I asked, “Would you know if Angleton had rigged it?”

“I don’t care. I don’t like seeing my kind reduced to outnumbered primitives in a system that doesn’t have to
be in the least bit considerate of us. What could the Sharwani do to stop you? Become bullies themselves? We can’t refuse to join your Federation, but what will it do to us?”

“What will you be willing to sell off cheap to get dear?” I remembered the Gwyngs constantly building plastic hotels and runways, recycling light degraded plastics into food, waste products into more plastic, always losing something so that Gwyng crews share-cropped gas giants all over the Federation. “The thing is too big to be moral or immoral. I believe we try to work things out so that more creatures gain than lose, but then, the Federation has been good to me.”

“So you could overlook what the same Federation did to the Tibetans?”

“It’s not as simple as that.” Or was it?

“Let’s go to sleep.”

But as Cromwell turned out the lights, he said, “If Angleton were here, he’d ask if you missed your wife’s personality or sex? He told me if it came up, but…” He clicked his tongue off his velar ridge behind his upper front teeth.

I dreamed Karl aimed a pistol at me.

The next day was cold for May: ice-cored rain, sleet fragments melting on the hired car’s windshield. Cromwell went to Route 419 by the half-abandoned mall that was the mall when I was a teenager, too poor and too busy to hang out there myself. Then we turned onto Route 221, going up Bent Mountain beside a light rail line that connected Roanoke to the glow I saw behind the ridge last night.

“Do you know what that’s for?”

“I’m not from around here, but it looks like a maglev.”

“Yeah, guess something’s built on top of the mountain.”

The train—no, one car—came gliding down. The car had no windows. “Must be from an Ess-cee-eff?”

“SCF?”

“Self-contained factory—shopping center, residences, schools, jobs, all in one. That was a freight car.”

“Oh.”

“Government sponsored them in areas with high unemployment, lack of job skills.”

“Backassward places like Floyd County.” I saw some buildings off through the trees, looked like the SCF was about as big as the whole town of Floyd in the late 1980s, maybe about a thousand people.

“We’ve got seven in Vermont, one in the upper part of the state that’s enclosed.”

“Where did the energy come from?”

“We haven’t been ‘backassward’ since you left, Tom. We’ve been tapping some of the minor Jovian satellites.”

“I’m not an engineer.” What was I good at anyway? Alien small talk?

“Don’t underrate your own kind.”

“We’re the most quarrelsome brachiators in the Galaxy.”

“Gentry, you’ve got a chromium steel attitude problem.”

“I’m nervous.”

“Well, let’s turn around and go back then. I hate driving in this fog.”

“No, I’d always wonder.”

Cromwell didn’t say anything more, just drove by the fog-obscured flame azaleas and mountain magnolias. Then we passed a quarter mile of greenhouses, three of them multi-story helical units like I’d seen on Karst for growing vegetables unable to take raw Karst light and air. Then no greenhouses, suddenly, as if the quarter mile had been projected onto the usual Floyd landscape of cow pastures and handbuilt houses.

“Things have really changed.”

“They always do,” Cromwell said.

Floyd had grown, and on the outskirts were four streets of foam-metal apartment buildings, like ones I’d seen the first time in Berkeley. “Pressure space casting,” Cromwell said. “The bubbles strengthen the slabs as well as make it lighter.”

“I saw them in California nine years ago.”

“Those were cast on the planet, not quite as solidly foamed.”

At least, I thought, downtown Floyd was the same, but then I saw that half of the older buildings looked as if they’d been dipped in plastic. The courthouse, 1930s modern, had scaffolding up one side, and the steel Confederate soldier, who’d worn granny glasses for three weeks back in 1988, was lying face up in the grass by his pedestal. Behind the courthouse, where the parking lot had been, was a new building: stone with bronze glass windows. On top was a solar collector.

I went in to the old jail with Cromwell. The sheriff was waiting for us, smiling, while deputies hustled out some freshly arrested kid who was crying like a mad man. I said, “I heard you on television when I was in California.”