Human to Human (3 page)

On the da
y Karl and I were to leave for Black Amber’s new house, Marianne woke up early and went to the security room. I found her there, staring through the clear wall at the Sharwani. The female Sharwan asked in Wrengu that sounded tremendously rehearsed, “Why am I here?”

“We’re studying you,” I said. “Others of you, too.”

She asked again as if she hadn’t understood my own Wrengu, “Why am I here?”

Marianne said, “Karriaagzh is sendisng over someone who knows their language.”

“Are you sure you’ll be all right?” I asked, touching her on the shoulder.

“Fine,” she said. “You must go see your sponsor.”

Karl and I went downstairs to catch a city bus to the transfer point for the coastal buses. He wasn’t sure he liked Black Amber, but he liked some of the other Gwyngs, even if he couldn’t understand what they said, his skull bones still growing, not ready yet for the temporal bone to be replaced with a skull computer.

The bus ran on an elevated road over the north side slums. Karl spotted Tibetans below us and said, “I don’t want to play with the country humans again.”

“Karl, they’re relatives, too.” I saw the building where my brother Warren killed himself—his ultimate drug deal. We’d tried to save him, but the brain rebuilding, he thought, was an alien invasion. Why had I bothered to get him off Earth? Something in me died with him. I never was sure whether that part of me needed to die or even precisely what I’d lost.

Karl and I transferred to the coastal bus at the North Gate. After we adjusted the seats to fit us, Karl pulled out his reader, put a data card in the slot, and began reading. I looked over and saw pictures. A computerized picture book—he wasn’t that different than I was at the same age, even if his best friends weren’t human.

Then we were out in the country, a sandy coastal plain that Marianne said looked like south Mississippi. On one side of the road, mechanized plows cut across the field like giant shuttles; on the other side, two people of indeterminate species waded out on the flats with tongs and baskets, so primitive a food-gathering system I knew they had to be high officials escaping their terminals.

I could skip the primitive. “Karl, do you like this?”

Karl looked down at his reader, shrugged, and said, “If Rhyodolite isn’t there, I’ll be bored. Look, we’re close.” He pointed at Gwyng herds, the large two-ton marsupials that hosted their young, the smaller blood beasts with ropy neck veins, and the latest Gwyng craze, cloned Jersey cows for milk, one-quarter cream.

About an hour and a half later, the land began to rise, more rocky, more like California or the north coast of Black Amber’s Gwyng Home island, which was foggy and had diurnal bats and near-sapient seal-things. But here wasn’t really foggy, just cloudier than Karst City. “I thought we were close,” Karl said. He looked back at his reader and changed cards.

“She’s moved,” I said.

The bus driver said, “Officiator Red Clay, we’re approaching your destination.” I looked ahead and saw Black Amber’s new house. She’d built in stone, not of planks woven together like a giant basket, light coming in at every plank crossing. I’d seen one stone house on Gwyng Home—very superior Gwyngs there.

The bus seemed to zoom in on the house, which got bigger and bigger. My eyes fooled me, or the relative clarity of the air where I’d expected fog. The huge house rose almost as raw as the bedrock under it, no true right angles—as if right angles belonged to the poor Gwyngs’ plank and plastic building traditions.

Finally, as the bus began to climb up to the entrance, I saw Black Amber standing under a stone arch entrance, long arms spread, furred knuckles pressing either side of the arch. The stone around her looked both ponderous and unsteady. Black Amber wore a green Gwyng shift, armholes cut out to the waist.

The bus stopped and Karl and I got off, a flight of steps below her. Lichen everywhere. How, I wondered, did she get the lichen established so quickly? Her face was impassive, wrinkles sagging slightly, folded along her mouth, along her nostril slits, which moved in and out slightly like furred gills.

“Red-Clay and child,” she said in Karst Two that my computer transformed out of sonar-pattern language into sequential tones I could hang meaning on. For a second, I regressed to the stage where her speaking was meaningless noise until the computer whispered in my brain. Karl moved closer to me, then, as if he’d caught himself being afraid, stepped toward Black Amber.

“Black Amber,” I said, coming up to her, stopping a step below. Her shift had gold threads woven in it, almost duplicating the gold in Karriaagzh’s Rector’s Uniform. I put my bag down. She folded her arms around her, hooking her thumbs behind her neck, looking much like a giant bat with her elbows at waist level, the webs collapsed at her sides. I brushed her with my left arm, then she unfolded her arms and took me up against her left side, the web slightly clammy against me. Karl’s jaw muscles clinched as he watched us.

“You seem/are anxious (about what: several guesses),” she said, my computer layering the meanings with little pauses.

“Marianne, my Linguist Mate, is with the people from those who fight us. Why didn’t you want her to come?” Black Amber probably could understand the noise I made for
Marianne,
but I doubted she could attach a meaning to
Sharwani.

“You didn’t ask the Rector bird for them. She did. She deserves to be alone with them.” Black Amber looked at my bag as if wondering what to do with it, then her small Karst One-speaking fuzzy servant came out and took the bag. She twitched her nostril slits in her muzzle and rubbed her sharp chin, then said, “Do you like my new house better?”

“It’s impressive,” I said. Did she simply invite me here to make Marianne uncomfortable?

Her brow hairs flared slightly as if what she heard carried the implication of “trying to impress,” or she’d sensed my irritation, then she simply said, “Yes,” and led us inside.

The floor was basket-woven, very awkward underfoot for a flat-footed ape, like walking on a lumber pile. Through the weave, I saw steel joists. Along the stone walls were brushed-steel platforms at knee level. On the platforms were Gwyng tube sofas like open cocoons and feather-filled mats covered with something like coarse linen, handwoven no doubt, and so terribly expensive unless Marianne’s sister Molly cut a deal with her Gwyng lover’s adoptive mother.

But where were the other Gwyngs? Karl looked up at me and said, “Where are Rhyodolite and Amber-son?”

I wished I’d brought one of his friends along. “Have you been ill?” I asked Black Amber. Gwyngs were group creatures, constantly in physical contact with each other. Instinctively, they isolated the sick.

“No, I have not been ill.” She went over to a table covered with translucent plastic globs—all colors—and picked up a blue glob like dribbled wax about five inches tall. Staring into it, she turned it in her hands and didn’t speak for a while.

Karl whispered, “Can I play with those, too?” I knew that Gwyngs saw polarized light patterns and wondered if the plastic globs were patterned in a Gwyng-meaningful way. The room had a brutal elegance except for all that tacky plastic, not like Black Amber’s first beach house at all.

I asked Black Amber, “If you haven’t been ill, why are you alone then?”

“The Weaver and Rhyodolite are here. Cadmium is longer.” For a horrible moment, I thought she meant dead, but she continued, “Gone from my social life, but he breathes.” She continued to stare into the plastic.

“Rhyodolite and Molly are here,” I told Karl, then I asked Black Amber, “Can you read the plastic?”

“Art objects for not-limited brains,” she replied. “The Rector Bird…” She didn’t finish her statement, but I saw blood engorge her web veins slightly. “Your food is here, eat first alone/talk first with me, you decide.”

Karl and I had to eat our disgusting vegetables out of her presence. Karl said, “I’m hungry. Where’s the food?”

She said, “Follow,” her rolling stride and short, bowed legs working well on the plank-basket floor. The rooms flowed into each other, no set purpose to any other than the food room. When we got there, I saw that she’d gotten a table and chairs for us. Gwyngs just ate when they were hungry, from a vein or udder, in the field, from a bottle in the house, microwaved warm or not.

I opened the chest coolers until I found the non­freezing one with some cheese and raw fruit in it. “Do you have baked yeasted wheat paste?” I asked, meaning bread. There was a Karst One term for bread, but for some reason the computers in Gwyng skulls conflated it with the concept for beer, the same “yeasted” root, I guess.

She opened a cabinet and pulled down a warm loaf. I took it and it cut like fresh bread, squashed slightly by the knife. Black Amber oo’ed when I swallowed my saliva hard, her lips pursed as if to kiss. “Yes, new baked. I knew the bus schedule,” she said, “I leave you to your un-beer and seed pulp. Enjoy and come back to the first room.”

After she’d left, I found a glass and poured Karl some milk, hoping it was Jersey, not mixed with marsupial. The cream line looked authentically Terran.

Karl drank some and said, “At least, I can play with Rhyodolite.” I nodded, thinking that I could speak English to Molly if I wanted to. Was Sam’s ex-Berkeley wife still Rhyodolite’s lover, I wondered, or was he less erotic now that she could understand him better? I felt odd about feeling so hard toward Molly. Coming to Karst was Marianne’s idea; Molly and Sam struggled to make places for themselves as craft weaver and musician.

I finished my cheese and bread quickly. This house of Amber’s gave me the creeps. Maybe she’d been very angry lately and smeared the juice from her thumb glands over the entrance way stones, warding off the other Gwyngs? Her last son wasn’t here—hers out of her own womb and pouch. Maybe she had been sick and was lying? Wy’um of the History Committee, her favorite mate, where was he?

When Karl and I got back to the main room, Rhyodolite and Molly were huddled by Black Amber on one of the steel platforms. Funny, Molly took more space than they did, a social distance. And, as usual, I’d forgotten how small Rhyodolite was, not having seen him in several months. He was only about five feet tall on his true legs, a bit shorter than when I’d seen him first, disguised as a human with extended thigh bones.

Karl ran up to him and embraced him sideways, rocking his body against the Gwyng. Rhyodolite could understand Karl, and Karl knew some hand signs

“Red-Clay, help us defrost Black Amber,” he said.

She’d been in a cool-down torpor then, a Gwyng social stress escape. “Should I heat some oil?”

Molly said, in English, “Gwyng Home thought this house was pretentious for one who won’t outlive a certain bird.”

I wondered how Black Amber paid for the house, but only said, “Oh.”

Molly asked, in Karst One, “Is Marianne all right alone with them?”

“They’re behind reinforced polycarbonate, and she’s got someone who speaks their language with her.”

Rhyodolite looked at me and, in a slow ripple, squeezed one nostril shut, on the off-side from Black Amber.

Black Amber said, “We will expand my social group soon.”

Rhyodolite looked at her, his eyes rolling to white beneath the skull eyeshield. I noticed then that Black Amber looked age-wrinkled. The wrinkle folds under the fine velvet fur were thinner, not as plump and regular as Rhyodolite’s.

She seemed annoyed by our silence and said, “We will (insistent/predictive) have more company.”

Molly went “
Sheesh,
”
and
lay down on the cushions, shifting her legs to plant her feet on the floor. She put her forearm over her eyebrows. Black Amber got up and walked away. Rhyodolite said, “Yes, Sub-Rector Black Amber.”

Molly asked, in English, “
Seen Yangchenla lately
?”

“At a music club in the city just this week.” I said, also in the same language.

“I saw her at the beach wearing a bathing suit copied out of
Vogue.
All the Tibetans want to wear modem human clothes. They look like jerks. Act like them, too.”

“They’re bored with each other,” I said. We still spoke English. “One of the Support guys was coming on to Marianne.”

“Stop talking English,” Karl said. “Rhyodolite, they’re telling secrets.”

Molly fished around in a bag she had slung over her shoulder, a cloth bag that blended in with her handspun clothes, and took out a cigarette. Rhyodolite lit it for her—odd to see him trained in male human manners that compensated for our general male dominance. Human male manners reduced him to pet status. I said, this time in Karst One, “Sam was looking good.”

She sat up and blew smoke at me.

Rhyodolite signed to Karl and they both got up and walked toward the door Black Amber had gone through earlier. I said, before they passed through the doorway, “Ask Black Amber what she wanted me to come here for?”

“Company for the Weaverfish,” Rhyodolite said before disappearing around a corner.

I looked at Molly. She sat up, hunched over, arms and knees covering her body. “I still love Rhyodolite,” she said, “but I need humans, too.”

“We didn’t run you out.”

“You loathed seeing me with Sam, to begin with.”