Human to Human (8 page)

Karriaagzh moved up close to Chi’ursemisa, on the side with her free arm. She touched his face; he protruded his tongue slightly.

“All right,” she said.

Marianne said in English, “And we’re going to Boston. Karl, too. We’re getting leave time at home.”

I asked in the same language, “Does he know enough English to enjoy it?”

Karl looked at us and said, “I know
going.
I’m
going.”

Tracy said, “Me, too.” I thought about two seven-year-olds without a word more of English than “going” between them, both in Boston… Marianne said, “No, Tracy. You need to be with Yangchenla and your aunts more.”

As Karriaagzh went over to the elevator and pushed the button, Hrif rose and padded to block Chi’ursemisa from the elevator, bouncing slightly as if calculating the jump necessary to stop her.

“Why Boston?” I asked Marianne.

Karriaagzh turned around and said in English, “
Because
.”

Marianne and Karriaagzh hadn’t arranged a little private vacation. I didn’t want contact—we had enough for genetic diversity; the degenerative effects of inbreeding are overrated. We were all fringe people. Why should we leak secrets to Earth? Contact would bring in officials. American officials would put me back in jail. Chinese officials might extradite Yangchenla and her people for their ancestors’ crime of helping alien warriors.

The elevator took Karriaagzh away. As soon as Hrif relaxed, Chi’ursemisa began pacing.

Marianne, Karl, and I had to take the high-wire car out from Karst to the shuttle, like an elevator cable doing the Indian rope trick, with us riding the cable up in a sealed cabin. The high wires had been raised only recently—all the surface gates were closed now, the gate-space dimensions around Karst mechanically distorted to block Sharwani gates. Yangchenla’s brother, Kagyu, who’d become an officer, and two Barcons went with us to crew the intrasystem shuttle.

The cabin stopped at an airlock. We scrambled through into a freight-sized transfer pod that had been refitted with about five hours’ worth of life support, a viewport, and some peroxide steering jets. I dogged down the hatch bolts extra tight as though hard vacuum was more dangerous than the extradimensional spaces we usually gated through. A magnetic accelerator pushed us off toward an intersystem shuttle, which was mostly huge tanks of helium-3 with a tiny crew space dangling below the tanks, too fragile to land on a planet.

I asked Kagyu, “Let me see if I remember how to steer the pod to it.”

It was like pedaling an aerial bicycle to bring the pod inside the shuttle. We keyed the airlock doors closed from inside and checked the gauges through the viewport.

As we climbed out and wriggled up into the living quarters, Karl asked, “How long?”

“In a little bit, honey. A few days.”

“I’m bored already,” he said.

The shuttle living space felt cramped and distorted, round floors fitted with furniture for acceleration and braking, the wall surface a cylinder with free-fall slings and handholds.

“Primitive, isn’t it?” Kagyu said.

I said, “Yes, but I don’t think Earth does this well.”

“I’m sorry I can’t go with you. I’m due for observation time. Did they make you go to bed after sixteen hours awake?”

“Yes.”

“When we’re only watching, that rule doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe we irritate other people?” I also resented the rule when I did watches.

The shuttle’s helium drives and fuel storage accelerated us to a constant one G. We held that for a day, then the warning horns beeped, and we moved from one floor up the handholds to prepare for retrothrust, braking.

“What’s happening?” Karl asked.

I said, “We’re going to start slowing down.”

“How long?”

“As long as we’ve been moving.”

“This is stupid.”

“No friction in space,” Kagyu said as we settled down against the new floor.

“Space is stupid,” Karl said. He glared at us and added, “When are we going to get there?”

“I used to ask when we would arrive when we rode in yak carts,” Yangchenla’s brother said.

“I bet it wasn’t so boring,” Karl said. We were flying above the ecliptic, and except for the slowly drifting star clusters, the space around us was empty. The trip was faster than the time I came in from an outstation with Black Amber, back when I was only twenty, twenty-one, but definitely more boring. Maybe we should have brought a Gwyng or three?

The gravity slacked off. Karl ran up to a wall, jumped, and hitting his feet against it did a flip. The male Barcon of our pair asked, “Is he too young for beers?”

“Yes,” Marianne said.

“Sedation?”

“Do you want to be sedated, Karl?” I said, trying to put as much menace in the words as could.

“Like what they did to Chi’ursemisa and Hurdai? Drugged? No.” He stopped popping off the wall and found a book chip, began reading it, flicking the screen on and off at first, then really reading.

Kagyu said, “One couldn’t read in a yak cart.” Surely Karl was going to get lost in Boston, a city thick with child-muggers and rapists. I wished we’d taught him more English. I said, “We love you, Karl.”

He looked up and said, “So this trip is dangerous.”

Marianne said, “We’ll get you toys on Earth that you can bring to play with on the trip back.”

“Do we have to go back this slow?”

The Barcon said, “We seriously recommend sedation.”

Karl said, “Barcon, if you try to give me anything, I’m going to…kiss you. On the mouth.” He looked up, satisfied that he’d figured out what would upset a Barcon who feared orally transmitted sapient brain parasites that took over Barcon bodies.

This Barcon was tough, aware that Barcon parasites died in human bodies and human diseases died in Barcons.

“And I will spank on your…naked bottom.”

A red flush rose up Marianne’s neck into her face. She opened her mouth; I laid my hand on her shoulder.

She pushed my hand off and closed her teeth with an audible click, then laughed.

Karl slammed another chip into his reader and said, “Grown-ups suck gut ends.”

“Hey, Karl, you wanted to go.”

“You didn’t tell me it would be so boring.”

At the far station, we transferred into another transport, a two-person oval gate capsule. Karl had to sit on Marianne’s lap so I could reach the plastic wing nuts on the right side. The inside of the capsule glowed a blue-green that reminded me of
  
dirty fishtanks. Then Karl sat down on my legs while Marianne tightened us down on the left.

I thought he’d complain about how crowded it was, but he trembled slightly and didn’t say anything. We made four transitions—fourteen minutes—and then the arrival diode over the hatch came on.

After the hatch seal popped loose I looked out and saw not some human-formed creature but Travertine, beaked, olive and black feathered, totally alien, but English-speaking.

“Hi,” he said.

“Travertine, how are you going to manage?” I got out of the transport and looked around. We seemed to be in a basement—cinderblocks, a refrigerator, bare fluorescent lights in shop fixtures, an electric heater, no windows, just a door.

“I’ve got enough food for your trip.”

I was about to ask why he was here, then realized Travertine could never be mistaken for an insane deformed human. If Karriaagzh and Marianne were going to leak gate technology to some human, Travertine could explain—he spoke English—but he was definitely alien. And we would never have to expose a surgically-changed Federation spy. I said, “That’s nice, Travertine.”

“I would like a television,” he said, “so I can keep up with your people.”

“Who’s he?” Karl asked in Karst One.

“A person who helped us get used to Karst when we first arrived,” Marianne said. “He speaks Karst One. Maybe you could stay down here?”

“No. I want to see
Earth
.” He managed to say
Earth
in close to English.

“You can’t speak Karst One when other people can hear you,” Marianne explained to him.

“And where is this?” I asked Travertine in English. 

“A little room off the transit line that I made for myself,” Travertine said. “There’s solid cement between here and the train tubes, so you’ll have to gate to your apartment. We installed a transit receiver there. Here’s my phone number for here. And you need coats.” He handed us each a jacket.

So the closet door was to a transit unit. Karl, Marianne, and I got in, dogged down the internal seals, and stepped out of another closet, lined now with our transit unit.

The apartment was huge: ceiling-to-floor windows, venetian blinds with real wood slats, burgundy carpets, and furniture in pale, mottled woods. We were in a fully furnished apartment, rented for us by some surgically-reformed alien we’d never meet. Marianne said, “We’d better sneak downstairs, then make sure they know we’ve arrived.”

Karl went to the windows and, after a little bit of fiddling, pulled up the venetian blinds. I looked out and said, in English, “
God, it’s fall
.”

We were about fifty or sixty stories up. This window overlooked the Charles River and Cambridge, bridges, boats, park trees with flaming red leaves. I opened the other corner window to the motley look of Greater Boston sprawled beneath us, three parts ultramodern glass and brushed steel and one part antique tiny houses.

“Beacon Hill,” Marianne said, pointing to the smaller houses almost at the base of our building.

“Who’s paying?” I asked.

We went up and then down. Marianne and Karl went to the manager and told him we’d arrived. When you pay lots of money, the man doesn’t check as much. She came back with the keycards, and we went out to buy our luggage. I stopped and sniffed the air, human air with petrochemicals and fall odors in it.

And chilly. Marianne asked, “Why doesn’t Karst use gates for surface transportation?”

I said, “Security and information density.”

She said, “Sounds fishy to me.”

“It’s harder in areas with lots of information. Someone had to put a lead into that closet.” I started looking around. Boston didn’t look that much different from what? It was different from anything else that I’d ever seen on Earth—Prudential Center, arcades up in the air over street level.

“
Here
,” Marianne said. Karl echoed her English word, and we went up an escalator to a set of shops inside a glassed-in ball with tropical plants growing under skylights. “They’ve done a lot for Boston lately.”

We had credit cards. I didn’t ask if the money was real and took them out to pay for leather suitcases, three of them that I didn’t plan to abandon on Earth. Then I took Karl into a boys store while Marianne went elsewhere.

Karl liked a small, vested suit that cost $495—a bit much for kids’ clothes, but I didn’t want to argue. The salesman asked Karl, “Hi, son, do you prefer right or left dress?”

Karl looked like he was almost about to talk. I said, “American style.”

The salesman seemed to understand that Karl wasn’t going to say much, and so just helped him with the fitting with an “Okay?” now and then to which Karl could answer “Yes” or “No.”

While the suit was being altered, we bought shoes, socks, and shirts, then went next door for some cheaper clothes for me. After I paid for all of it, Karl and I went down to the end of the mall for ice cream. The end of the arcade overlooked an ice-skating rink.

Karl whispered in Karst One, “I want to learn English. They are all like us. They speak it.”

I didn’t promise, just felt slightly guilty. Earth meant scrubby to me, low-rent, but Boston didn’t seem rundown. I said, “I’ll take you on the Freedom Trail later, before we go back.”

“Teach me English.”

“Your language says things better.” I looked around.

Nobody looked like they cared to figure out which language we were speaking.

Karl said, “I want to know what I am.”

“You’re not a what; you’re a who.”

“Dad, are you ashamed of being human?”

“No,” I said, a bit too quickly, a bit too loud.

“Travertine will teach me English when we get back,” Karl said as if saying that determined the matter.

Travertine doesn’t trust humans, I thought, because I snubbed one of his kind. And what further impressions of humans would Karl give Travertine? “Okay, Karl, you can learn English. Maybe my first Rector’s Person can teach you.”

“Dad, you teach me.” Imperative familiar mode, with a slight pleading tone.

I nodded. He’d learned that much of our body language and began licking his pink bubble gum ice cream more enthusiastically.

Marianne came out of a phone booth and waved at us, then disappeared into a woman’s shop. About five minutes later she came out with two boxes, the fastest human female shopper in the Galaxy.