Human to Human (4 page)

“Don’t accuse me of being a racist, Molly. There were black and white marriages in the mountains early on.
” I was thinking in my mountain dialect again, translating “early on” into Karst as best I could. “And he has a human relationship now.” What was she after? I looked at her again, and her knees moved apart, thighs loosened. “Molly?”

She closed her knees. “I don’t want a human sex partner. I just need more human contact. I want to see my nephew.”

“He’s here now.”

“But you don’t like me.” She lay back down on the mat, feet sliding to the floor, and smoked her cigarette.

“So it’s been tense here?”

Molly’s body wiggled, but she didn’t say anything until she’d smoked the cigarette down to the filter. She stubbed the filter out and said, “We weren’t sure she’d come out of her latest coma. When she came out, she wanted you here. She’s been studying Karriaagzh’s language, the one her brain will process. I can’t imagine why. No, I’m afraid I can imagine why.” Molly pulled herself back into a setting position, and I saw tears spill out of her eyes. “I’m different now, as if being around Gwyngs pulled things out of me, but…”

I knew what she was talking about; each different species of sapient drew out from each other emotional and mental things we couldn’t get to through our con-specifics. “I tried to live without my own kind, too.”

“The Tibetans think I’m horrid. They accept you, even after you dumped Yangchenla; they love Sam; I’m…what do the Tibetans call me?” She giggled. Neither of us knew what Tibetans called her, really, but surely they had some fierce little expletive.

I said, “Yangchenla called me a pouch-hole licker when she thought I was having an affair with Black Amber.”

“I thought maybe that’s why Black Amber asked for you. Wy’um’s senile and the Gwyngs abandoned him. One of his sisters stole Amber-son.”

“No, I never slept with her. Wy’um? Amber-son? Oh.”

“Why didn’t you? Too stinky for Gwyng sex?”

“I’m not going to answer that. Come visit. Bring Rhyodolite.” I told myself that Molly was, after all, my wife’s sister, and more family than Sam and Yangchenla and their daughter. “Why did Black Amber build such a large house if she has so few other Gwyngs around her?”

Molly said, “Display. It’s mostly outer shell.”

Black Amber, Karl, and Rhyodolite came in with four other Gwyng males, all whinging in Gwyng language too complex for Federation computers. The new Gwyngs looked slightly rumpled, as if they’d raised their fur recently and hadn’t smoothed it after the fuss was over.

I hung in through a half hour of their social mobbing. Rather than party until I dropped among them, I found Black Amber’s servant and had him show Karl and me to our room. We walked through two huge empty halls—shells just as Molly had said, steel, beams showing in the walls, a synthetic floor.

“All hollow,” Karl said just before the little bear opened a door into a medium-size bedroom.

The room was set with two sleeping mats. Karl looked at me as if being in the same room with Daddy but not Mommy was a bit intense. He pulled out his reader and his radio-controlled puppet—four-legged and of no determinate species—set them on a stool by his bed, and asked, “Can we go home tomorrow?”

Karl and I ate breakfast in the food storage room, trying to ignore the Gwyngs who came in and sipped various liquids, talking away in Gwyng and watching us closely. Black Amber picked up more company this morning, two females in Gwyng shifts that consisted only of a neck band, a strap over the pouch hole, and a short skirt over the hips. The males we’d-seen the night before came in, still looking rumpled, and rummaged through all the coolers and cabinets before heading outside.

Then Rhyodolite came in with a modified tossing disc, alien cousin to a Frisbee, and held it out to Karl.

Karl said, “I don’t really want to.”

Rhyodolite said to me, “Tell him I have to take care of him while you talk with Black Amber.”

“Karl, maybe we can go home as soon as I talk with Black Amber.”

Rhyodolite bobbed his head—annoyed—but said nothing more. Karl looked from Rhyodolite to me and then said, “Marianne the Linguist wants us to come home. We’ve left her with dangerous people. I didn’t want to.”

Rhyodolite said, “Tell him that wasn’t my doing.”

“Karl, Rhyodolite says he didn’t do it.”

My son slowly finished his milk and took the glass to the sink. When I saw that he was about to wash it, even more slowly, I said, “Go on with Rhyodolite. I’ll wash up.” He grinned and took Rhyodolite’s long-fingered hand. Rhyodolite looked back over his shoulder at me and pursed his lips into a Gwyng smile.

I washed our glasses and plates and put them with the other glasses in what looked just like a dish drainer on Earth, except for the broad oval Gwyng straws, wider than a human thumb.

They grew odd muscles in their throat at the base of their tongues. Looking at the straws now, one in silver, the others in glass or plastic, I remembered what the muscles had looked like when my brother cut into a dead Gwyng.

Black Amber came in and picked up the silver straw. Before she said anything to me, she poured out a glass of pure cream and drained it, the lump between her jawbones bouncing. Then she said, “Your linguist/mate called. Karriaagzh has turned her into a prison keeper (displeases/pleases).”

“Displeases and pleases who?”

She didn’t answer, but said, “We could turn inward and strengthen the relationships we have. Perhaps bring in those who rejected us the first time, but no more.”

“We need to get to people before the Sharwani do.” I realized I wasn’t being diplomatic, but she had called me away from Marianne.

Her hands dropped, elbows bent, and her thumbs curled back, pushed back by the anger glands at their bases. I froze and watched her hands as she stepped toward me. Her left hand seemed to float up, the gland hole glistening.

“Black Amber, I’m sorry.”

“You’re afraid of me?”

“Black Amber, I’m sorry I was rude.”

She nibbled her right gland, swallowing the secretion, but her left hand stayed up, swollen just above the wrist. Just as I thought she was going to drop that hand, it darted toward me and smeared the peppery juice down both sides of my cheeks. Then she ran the gland hole down my nose. Now I was angry.

“So you support Karriaagzh? He wants to contact your people, give them gate technology. Perhaps the Universe is destroyed and recreated with each gate leap (history failing to be a sensible continuum of gradual advances).”

“Are you serious?”

“Would contact with your species be bad for you?”

“I don’t know. Marianne would approve.”

“So she should be left with the dangerous ones—good training for expanded human contact (sapient killers, babies dangerous to mothers being a bad start).”

Black Amber seemed to believe that evolution was intentional. I thought she was smart enough to know better. I said, “Birth must be rough on children, too.”

She sucked her left hand noisily, then said, “Better to have nymphs.”

I almost said something about the number of Gwyng nymphs that died, but realized that Black Amber’s nymphs all died now that she’d used up her birth permits. “You asked me here to talk?”

“For company for the Weaver.” She oo’ed and rubbed her belly up to the pouch hole. My own belly muscles tightened and my shoulders went up, arms half bent. Why did Black Amber want me to sleep with Molly, cheat on Marianne?

“I’m married to her sister.”

“Marianne is with Karriaagzh now,” Black Amber said. “He draws no species lines. His sex objects don’t even have to be alive.”

One of the other Gwyngs stuck his head in the door and sniffed once before backing off. She said to me, “Disruptor spray in the top doorside cabinet. Break my molecules.”

Gwyngs were incredibly sensitive to the anger juice odor, but the Federation medics invented a molecular disruptor to break the odor up. Gwyngs didn’t kill or so Gwyngs claimed. They just bruised and bloodied. I sprayed as I wondered about the evolutionary reasons for angry Gwyngs to warn off other Gwyngs.

“Couldn’t you come visit us? We’ve got another spare bedroom.”

“Don’t you approve of my house here?”

“Very nice, Black Amber.”

“I invested in hydrogen crews from Gwyng Home. Tap gas giants for volatiles.” She looked pleased with herself. I wondered if she’d used her Sub-Rectorship or her friends on the History Committee to wangle possession of a non-habitable gas-giant system.

Cynical of me to wonder. I said, “Congratulations.”

“The Federation is useful, as a trade body.”

I was wondering how we could get away from this conversation when Rhyodolite, Molly, and Karl came in, sweating, flushing blood through webs, radiating exercise heat. Karl threw open cooler doors until he found juice, then sat down on top of a counter to drain most of the bottle. Molly found a beer while Rhyodolite held ice chunks against his webs. Molly and Rhyo chattered about how good a catcher Karl was getting to be.

Karl looked over the bottle and said, “Thanks, I know.”

Rhyodolite koo’ed over that and said, “Tell him, Weaver, we remember when a thrown disc toppled him off his feet.”

Karl finished the bottle and said, “Now we go home.”

Black Amber spread her long fingers over his face and neck and wiggled them as if trying to massage out the negative language. Karl opened his mouth as if he planned to bite. As
I shook my head, Black Amber jerked her hands away and said, “Red-Clay’s son, you should bite captive bad-sapients for us.”

He said, “You don’t scare me, you old—”

“Karl,” Molly said.

Black Amber seemed defeated by that one temporal morpheme, left dangling. “Go home.”

I said, “Karl, you’re going to have to bear with us.”

Black Amber said, “No, take him home. We can talk in Karst City (fear Bird spies, though).”

“If you need to talk to me about something, Karl can wait a few minutes.”

“I need you/your support.”

“No, I can’t wait a few minutes,” Karl said.

“Just relax, Karl.”

Karl turned pale. I thought he might cry, but he looked away from us, then got up and went out.

Rhyodolite said, “Go with him.”

I followed him to our room and saw him playing with the puppet, getting it to jump up on him with its forelegs as if it were a dog. Without looking at me, he said, “Black Amber is mean. She hates my mother. Are we bad?”

“No, just different.” I wasn’t really sure, though.

Karl said, “Why are we called the refuse-people?” The slang Karst One word
refugee
had its roots in something equivalent to the English for
refuse.

“It’s nasty to call you that. You were born here, and the kids who use that word are just being stupid. Only a few people of any species are smart enough to discover gate technology and the math. Most people aren’t any brighter or better than you.”

“Are humans too stupid to make gates?”

“No, not basically.” I couldn’t tell him about Yangchenla’s uncle, who’d figured out the system secretly, but reinvention didn’t count, anyway, and Karl was smart enough to understand that.

He knew I was concealing things from him and sent the robot running toward me so fast that I flinched. Victory over Daddy. He set his jaw muscles and began packing. I packed my own bags and then cuddled him against me. “You’re a good kid to be so patient with us.”

“Yeah,” he said, “and you’re stupid to leave Mom alone with the Sharwani, even if they can’t get her, really. And even if Karriaagzh helps her.”

But she seems so tough,
I was about to say, but I got the bus schedule in Karst One instead. We had about a half hour to wait.

Karl ran out of the elevator to greet his mother but stopped so abruptly his shoes squeaked. When I got out, I saw Karriaagzh sitting on the floor against Marianne’s knees, the pupils of his yellow eyes contracted. His Rector’s uniform lay folded on the coffee table.

I smelled the glue before I saw the feather splints and the falconry book opened beside Marianne. She’d sloppily mended his grey feathers where his usual clothes had broken them. Karriaagzh slid his nictitating membranes slightly out of his eye comers. “Good afternoon, Rector,” I said, looking at Marianne, like
why?
Had Black Amber been telling me Marianne was having an affair with Karriaagzh? The glue smell would cover up any other smells.

She said, “Karriaagzh knows Sharwanisa, but they didn’t want to talk, so he sent out for the falconry books and feather repair tools.”

“Did they try to tear down the polycarb?” Karl asked.

“No,” Karriaagzh said, sounding even more hoarse than usual. “You must play with the young one.” He stood up, unfolding his bent back knees and rising to his eight feet of height. Karl frowned slightly. Karriaagzh bent his knees slightly and looked around the front room as if he’d misplaced something.

One membrane didn’t retract into the inside eye corner. It looked scratched and bloodshot. He saw me looking at it and said, “I went inside to talk to the Sharwani. The female attacked, again. Psychologically, perhaps the Sharwani need to be able to hurt us, at least individuals of us.”

“How are they?” I asked.

Karriaagzh’s crest flicked. “I refrained from breaking her other wrist.”

I went back to the room where the Sharwani were. The female came up to the door and said in mediocre Wrengu, much less grammatical than her earlier question, “Keep giant feathered sex-scale-ripper away.”
Sex-scale-ripper
was an odd curse for her to use, but Wrengu came from non-furbearers, without an attitude toward
assholes.

“We all wanted to bring sample Sharwani here for a talk,” I told her in the same language.

“You non-understand how complex situation is,” she said. Veins swelled up around her eyes. I didn’t know if that meant anger, or frustration, or what.

“My mate is learning your language.”

“How do you know which language among many is ours?”

“The sex-scale-ripper told us which language,”

The veins shrank back. The Sharwani child came up and said something in their language. She picked him up and cuddled him against her, turning away from me. The male looked up at me and either bared his teeth or smiled.

I went back to the front room. Karriaagzh said, in Karst One, so Karl couldn’t follow, “We (you and Marianne personally) might/could leak information to the human governments. I know a bird-kind who speaks English.” Karriaagzh’s brain could grasp both the sequential call-derived Karst One and the sonar-based Karst One. I wondered if he could learn Gwyng languages as Black Amber was learning one of his.

“Do you know how ridiculous it would be to smuggle in a bird to earth, find a scientist who’d listen, and get any people involved in this?”

“You still don’t trust yourself?” Karriaagzh asked.

“It’s most other humans I don’t trust. Karriaagzh, isn’t premature contact against Federation policy?” I said, wondering if Marianne, with her old Red saving-the-Universe fervor, had already gotten involved.

Karriaagzh’s bill flew open, but before it snapped together, he stuck his fingers in at the mandible hinges.

“Black Amber corrupts (you/everything),” he said.

“Marianne, aren’t you sick of being played between the two of them,” I said. Karl wriggled back against an armchair and then went rigid, trying to be invisible, wanting to hear what grown-ups fought about.

“I want to see more humans,” she said. “And you’re being played between Black Amber and Karriaagzh, not I.”

“Molly was at Black Amber’s.”

Marianne handed Karriaagzh his Clothes as she said, “I’d like to see Anne Baseman again; my other Berkeley professors.”

I said, “We met a mathematician in Berkeley who was working on something like gate theory.”

Karriaagzh pulled on his tunic, then his pants, one hand down inside them smoothing his feathers. He said, “Carstairs stopped working/thinks aliens will feed him the information.”

I said, “The aliens we met don’t know anything.”

Karriaagzh said, “We have physically disguised contacts in other places than Berkeley…”

“So, let them leak—”

“…but they are more obedient to the Institute of Analytics and Tactics than Alex in Berkeley.”

I remembered Alex the Ahram, scarred head where his skull crest bone and overlying muscles had been removed. Now looking like a human blond with an unusual baldness pattern and a rather massive jaw, he snuck around Berkeley smoking high-potency marijuana and telling everyone he was an alien. Marijuana had an inhuman effect on him.

I said, “I don’t want to go back.”

Marianne said, “Karriaagzh, let’s wait a little. I don’t want to be from an unequal species if our guys can figure it out themselves. What are the chances?”

“Ten years to fifteen years,” Karriaagzh said. “What if the Sharwani find your people? The History Committee is forcing us to guard the Federation’s planets first.”

“I’m not in a hurry to meet officials from Earth,” I said, remembering jail, congealed Lysol in the cell corners thick as jam.

Karriaagzh said, “Your people would be happy to work with you. You’ve been law-abiding ever since moving here.”

As if I’d been a bad guy before the aliens reformed me. “Humans abandoned me.”

“
Come on, Tom
,” Marianne said in English.

Karriaagzh settled down on his hocks again, his face feathers twitching. He picked up Marianne’s tone, or knew that much English. He said, “You abandoned yourself, perhaps.”

My head rocked back on my neck. “Let us try to get the Sharwani tamed. That’s enough for me and Marianne to do.”

Marianne and Karriaagzh looked at each other. He rose, then she handed him the box of feather-mending equipment and the falconry book stolen from a Terran library by a shape-shifted creature who probably got drunk in human bars and wept from loneliness.

Marianne said, “I don’t like being a jailor, Tom.”

“You volunteered us for this,” I said. “You want to let the Sharwani run around the house?”

Karriaagzh said, “I’ll go now,” and stalked to the elevator, lifting his hocks high behind him.

As soon as the elevator doors closed around him, Karl spilled out the contents of his suitcase, found the robot, and adjusted the controls so that it walked with knees bent backward. “Poor bird,” he said. “He needs a few people like him.”

Marianne said, “Maybe we could go to Earth for just a visit, not run Karriaagzh’s operation.”

“You wanted us to take in the Sharwani family, now you want to go to Earth. First we’ve got to deal with the Sharwani,” I said, slipping out of my shoes and then heading for the back room. I needed at least one beer.

Beer, in the Federation, came in squatty little cans that took up less space than any shape other than a sphere. Spheres rolled; squatty little cans stacked. I put twelve in the flash chiller.

Marianne came in and rubbed my neck and shoulders. “
Did that bitch feed you guys
?” she asked in English, breasts pushing against my back.

“
I could stand to eat
,” I said.

Karl came in, his robot following him still walking like Karriaagzh. He said, “I’m hungry, too.” 

Marianne said, “Let’s feed our prisoners first so I don’t feel guilty.” She looked through our foodcooler, a chest model with hand-revolved bins—energy efficient—and brought out Sharwani analogs to beans and carrots. The cut-up roots were almost beet red.

The flash chiller beeped, and I took out a beer still tingling from the sonics that kept it from freezing around the edge of the can. While Marianne heated the Sharwani’s food, I popped the beer open and sipped. Warren said once that when you really want a beer, you’re generally so thirsty that cold piss would taste good. Warren wasn’t much on alcohol, I thought, hoping I wasn’t going to get depressed—from thinking about him again.

My mind flashed letters: I OBLITERATE ALL YOU FUCKERS. Warren’s suicide note, big as a billboard on the wall over his body. I
shuddered as I swallowed the beer. Neither my son nor my wife noticed. For half a second I was pissed that they hadn’t seen, then thought, just as well.

“Do you really want to go back?” I said to Marianne.

Karl said, “I want to meet more humans, too.”

Marianne said, “Karl, you couldn’t go.”

I said, “It wouldn’t be dangerous for him. He’s a minor.”

Karl said, “Mother, you and Dad feed the people out
there. I can fix our food.”

Marianne said, “Great, Karl, you’re getting to be quite the adult,” as she put the Sharwani food on three plates. They used soft plastic wafers the size of tea saucers to eat with; I found a speck of dried food on one and scraped it off before folding them and sticking them into the food.

When we got to the Sharwani room, the male was in the toilet and the female was pacing the floor, her fingers going through her head hair, picking at the fur over her cheekbones. The child began wailing when he saw us. I unlocked the small door and slid the plates in.

The male came out of the toilet, both eyes bruised. The female shouted over her child’s wails, in Wrengu, “Divide us.”

“Tonight, we can sedate you,” I shouted back. “Barrier tomorrow.”

The two Sharwani looked at each other and made odd whistling sounds almost like warning cries—maybe their laughter, maybe not. Their child stopped wailing and began mouthing his wristbone, knobbier than the equivalent human bone. All three of them froze, looking like geometric sculptures, the male’s facial and head hair down, the female’s flaring, then the female kicked her plate across the floor. It clattered on the back wall.

“We’re as much stuck with you as you are with us,” I said, wondering how much Wrengu she knew.

The Sharwani woman sank to the floor, fingers over her eyes. Blood began to seep down below her palm.

I sealed the food door and started to pull a lever to gas them unconscious, but she looked up at me and said, 
“Veins break when upset.”

The male pointed to his left eye and said, “Natural.” He said something to his mate, and she threw her head back, blood leaking from the vessels around her eyes, and said something harsh back to him.

He didn’t turn his back on her as he got the plate for his son and himself. She finally got up and, not looking us in the eyes, asked, “Can be more food if I…?” Lacking the Wrengu word for
clean up,
she began picking up the plate and food that had fallen off it.

Marianne sighed and went back to the kitchen. I heard Karl talking to her, neither voice audible enough to carry signal.

The female said, “If I do you order, what?”

“See other Sharwani we hold.”

“Surrendered Sharwani?”

“Some surrendered, some captured,” I
said, wondering if I’d promised something I couldn’t deliver.

“For that, I’ll…work with,” she said. She went into the toilet box and came out with her eyes looking as bruised as her mate’s. Marianne brought in a new plate and some paper towels. The female Shawan shoved the plate with the dirty food out, and took the towels and the new food. She squatted down by the door and scooped up the food with the plastic wafer.

“You know, have…people telling about me?”

“I don’t know why you were brought here,” I said.

Marianne reached toward her as if she wanted to pat her through the polycarb.

Karl came in quietly and said, “Night meal is ready.”

Marianne said, “Thank you, Karl,” and we followed him back to the kitchen. He’d fixed strips of Yauntry
villag
—something like a translucent bean curd, only chewy—and a salad with strips of cheese cut up over it and a plate of sliced cow tongue.

“You ate this when they captured you?” Karl asked, smiling so hard I wondered if he’d heard about me saying, “Piss on their cheese,” when the Yauntries first televised my capture.

“Yes, Karl, they had cheese, too,” Marianne said.

Karl looked at me and giggled. We ate the salad while he sliced off a few pieces of Jersey tongue for himself. I thought he had weird eating tastes for a seven-year-old.

“Dad,” he asked me, tucking a strip of tongue in with his hand that held the knife. When we both scowled at his manners, he chewed, swallowed, and then said, “Can you always end up liking people after you get to know them?”

Marianne said, “You can’t like whole species, really. You like individuals, or not.”

“Dad, do you like the Yauntry now?”

“Some of them, yes, very much.”

“After they killed people?”

“They were scared,” I said.

“But the Sharwani aren’t scared. Are they going to be bad people?”