Human to Human (9 page)

I said, “I thought I’d take Karl on the Freedom Trail this afternoon or tomorrow.”

“We’ve got to get a television set for Travertine,” she said.

I took the television to Travertine by myself. He’d tapped a TV cable earlier and now plugged everything in and turned the channel selector until he found a news show. The announcer, an Oriental woman, said, “The nude body of an unidentified teenage woman was discovered in the pond at the Common this evening.”

Travertine asked, “Naked is important?” and turned to a wrestling program. Two huge women in bikinis, up to their calves in clear jelly, struggled to throw each other. “Good light-transmitting qualities in the gel,” Travertine said before he flipped to a more regular sports station. Football.

I asked, “Travertine, will you be all right here?” I didn’t want to hear what he had to say about football.

“If anyone discovers the space, I’ll leave before I’m seen.” He nodded at the transport pod that we’d arrived in. “Look, Officiator Red Clay,” he said, using my official Federation name, “many species’ popular entertainments are embarrassing to the intelligentsia.”

The Karst One word he used for
intelligentsia
had the same fussy overtones as the English one.

I asked, “What is Marianne planning to do here?”

“Take a vacation,” he said, the nictitating membranes flicking in his eye comers.

I took Karl on the Freedom Trail, starting in Beacon Hill, telling him about Louisa May Alcott, whom I’d never read until I got to Karst. We saw Paul Revere’s house and the Old North Church, both buried in sky-scrapers’ shadows.

Karl asked, “Why did you leave?”

I said, “I came from a different part of this country.”

“Mother wants to come back more often.”

I wondered if I should stop her from leaking secrets.
Oh, Marianne, don’t expose me.

“Yes, she likes humans now that she’s escaped from them.”

“Teach me English. What is the term for traffic-way?”

“Karst One uses a shorter sound for the generality.
Street, road, highway.
Depends on what’s on it. Airplanes don’t have traffic-ways; trains have
railroads.”

Karl said, “Oh.” He looked at me out of the corner of his eye, then looked at the cemetery we were passing.

“They have funny sculpture.”

“They’re memorial stones. Some of us bury our dead.”

“Not burnt?”

“Some humans burn their dead. You know that, though.”

“So, you don’t want Mother to help the humans here?”

“I didn’t say that.” How could I turn her in? Travertine must know what Marianne was doing. I could go to Berkeley, but Alex, the only alien I could find easily, thought I was a bigot about humans.

All I could do was argue with Marianne. We took a bus back to the Commons and walked through the brilliant fallen maple leaves. I thought about getting Karl a puppy and a real Frisbee here, taking them back to Karst if Marianne didn’t screw up and get us all captured.

I did think about getting captured, but I was less terrified of it than I was back in Berkeley eight years earlier. When we got to the apartment, Marianne was gone.

I turned on the television, found a cartoon station, and began translating English for Karl.

Marianne came back about four o’clock and said, “The bastard didn’t want to see me. He’s busy. He’s giving midterms tomorrow.”

What bastard, I did and didn’t want to ask. Argue with her? I’d just remind her she’d married a jailbird, a redneck hillbilly. Karl said, in English, “Did you see the streets?”

Marianne looked at him and asked, “How much English do you understand, honey?”

I asked in Karst One, “What about third meal?” If the FBI was tapping this place, they’d be going crazy. A language is better than a code any day for noncontextual sheer incomprehensibility.

“I ate at Brennan’s when I was here for a linguistics conference,” Marianne said.

I felt a twinge of cognitive dissonance; I’d forgotten she’d had a human life on Earth until she was in her late twenties. Early thirties? I’d never asked Marianne how old she was, always knew she was older than me, but not how much. “Is it formal dress?” I asked

“Not at all,” she said.

We went into a place that had old waitresses who reminded me of country women until they opened their Boston accented mouths. Karl sat, eyes glistening, watching everyone so intently he almost didn’t eat. Marianne ate without saying much. Then, as she folded her potato skin into a messy square, she said, “The man I talked to at MIT is very close. And he was an anthro undergrad. Maybe if you and Karl came with me, we could all talk to him.”

“John Amber would kill me,” I said. “I don’t think this is a good idea.” Boy, I had to admire her for bringing up her little plot in such a public place that I couldn’t rave at her.

“I was told not to mention the Sharwani.”

I thought, this must sound really bizarre to anyone overhearing us. “Why not?”

“We might be thought to be the oppressors. You know psychology. Big corporation against small innovators. But the Sharwani are why they want us in now.” We sounded, I decided, like industrial spies. “I want to stay out of it,” I said. “Wait.”

“Tom, you think you’d be in trouble again. You’d be able to do anything you wanted if we made the contact.”

“Like me, John Amber has rank one place, but not among his home folks.” I liked being the highest-ranking human, even if we weren’t regular Federation members and were sometimes snubbed because of our low-tech status. If humans came in as regular members, I wouldn’t be special anymore. And I did break parole. I’d only been…aw, I’d always used my youth as an excuse. Sitting in Brennan’s, I realized for the first time, I’d been a coward, too afraid to leave my brother. Aliens had to take me away.

When Marianne began covering the potato skin square with scraps of aluminum foil, I began realizing how anxious she was. I said, “Let me think about it.”

Karl reached over with his fork, raked the foil aside, speared the skin square, and said, in English, “I eat.”

The waitress gave us a pitying glance for our retarded son as she gave us the bill. We walked back in the dark cold, surrounded by our own species. When we passed a group of kids Karl’s age, he gripped my hand harder.

Oh, don’t be a coward like your daddy, please.
Probably, a Barcon pair watched us from the crowd, but I refused to look for them. Somewhere, underground, Travertine watched television and mocked us in English.

“Do you like seeing all these other humans?” I asked Karl in the morning.

He looked up from the cereal he was eating—one he’d seen advertised on television—and said, “Sometimes.”

I thought about leaving Karl with Travertine while we went to MIT to talk to the physics researcher the Earth watch team marked as the man most likely to reinvent gate technology. But I wasn’t sure Travertine had patience enough to manage a bored seven-year-old human, so Karl, dressed in his little business suit, came with us. We got on the magnetic train and floated over the Charles River into a tunnel and then took the escalators up to the MIT station.

Karl said, “Do we have to walk?”

I looked around and saw the buildings—grey prestressed concrete, glass framed by brushed steel, cantilevered decks—and said, “Not far.”

Marianne saw me looking and said, “Bauhaus.” We began walking toward a building with a second-story deck, the student union. While I bought Karl a Coke, Marianne called the guy again and said, “So, when can I see you? I’m very curious about the article you did in
Physical Review.”

She listened for a minute, then said, “Yes, so I’m an amateur physics student. I do have a PhD in linguistics. My husband has studied physics, too.”

The guy spoke. Marianne kept nodding her head, then she hung up and said, “He’s going to let us buy him lunch. He’s busy, but he is very fond of his
Physical Review
article.”

I said, “Where?”

“Here. He’ll be over in fifteen minutes.”

“Marianne, I don’t know anything about his article.”

She handed me a copy; it was all in Terran-convention mathematics. I looked at it and tried to remember how my first roommate in the Academy explained the gate dimensions and how we—not we, sucker,
they—
worked ways to create artificial wormholes. Something about energy problems, related to informational density. . . shit. I began to feel like one of the poor slobs flunked out of this campus. I told Marianne, “It’s in Terr an math, and besides, I forgot.”

She held the paper in front of me
and pointed to a plain English passage that I hadn’t noticed in skimming. “He says, theoretically one could extract at least ninety percent of the energy when the wormhole distortions are released. The Institute of Physics is fascinated by that.”

“Can you explain it?”

She shook her head. “No, Travertine is going to talk to him. All we have to do is get him in the closet and gate him through.”

I said, “Why didn’t some Barcons just kidnap him?” She smiled and looked at a big man walking briskly toward us. He wore gold-rimmed glasses tinted bronze and a calculator watch, and like a football jock, had his arms pushed off his sides by hyperdeveloped chest muscles. Any aliens who tried to kidnap this guy wouldn’t be able to deal with him easily. He’d shoot or bruise his fists on them if he were a non-gun-bearing Yankee.

“Hi, are you Marianne and Tom Gentry?”

“Yes,” Marianne said, “and you’re Professor Joseph Weiss, right. Our son is Karl David.”

Karl said, “Hi,” in a small, almost distorted voice.

I said, “And how did you get into anthropology?”

He said, “My dad was in Honduras, married a Miskito refugee, my mother. I grew up hearing a lot about them, spoke three languages. Also met Afghan rebels—Dad had them around the house a lot.”

I smiled at Marianne, who grimaced back. Yeah, and how were we Reds going to get this guy into our closet? I said, “Couldn’t you have stayed in anthro, worked for the CIA?”

He said, “Physics. Much more interesting. We can eat in the faculty cafeteria. I thought you were students.”

He had an electric car, much like the ones used on Karst if you didn’t mind the shape being different, sexier. We drove across campus to a new building that still had construction scaffolding along one side. He asked Karl, “And are you planning to study physics?”

Marianne closed her eyes for a second, squeezing the lids shut, then said, “He doesn’t speak English.”

“What does he speak?”

“An artificial language,” I said. Then I said to Karl in Karst One, “Tell the man something.”

Karl said, “You remind me of Karriaagzh, even if you are a human.”

“Hum. You all have strange accents.” He suddenly seemed suspicious of us. I saw his hand pat his leg—knife or gun—and he caught me looking.

“We’d like to talk to you about your paper in the
Physical Review,”
Marianne said. “It sounds like you’re on to something very important.”

“To which government?” Weiss said. “I’m just a theoretical physicist, but if the idea has energy applications…” He stopped on the stairs going into the building. “What is this about?”

Marianne said, “You’re inventing a space drive.”

“I don’t have time to deal with kooks.”

I said, “Do you know Jerry Carstairs in Berkeley?”

“Carstairs, the idiot. Smokes drugs, hangs out with losers. Stopped doing decent work five years ago.”

“What if you could find a practical application for your work,” Marianne said.

“I’d work with the federal government and not talk to loons like UFO people.”

“What if we had a friend who could give you more information?”

He showed the woman at the door his ID, and we all went in. “Short orders on the left,” he said, steering us that way. “You figured all this out from the
Physical Review
article?”

“My friend said it could work as a space gate”

“And where did your friend get his degree in physics?”

Marianne said, “He wants to move to Boston, but… You don’t have any biases against foreigners, do you?” Joseph Weiss started taking us seriously then.

“You’re Russians? Chinese?”

Marianne looked at me and smiled. Karl whispered in my ear, “I am hungry. Now.”

I said, “We’d rather not say, but we’re sure of our man’s knowledge of physics.”

“We’d like you to meet him,” Marianne said. 
“If you could come over to our apartment.”

“Where?” Weiss asked.

Marianne named the building on Commonwealth. He said, “At least you’ve got money behind you.”

Karl said, in English, “Food. McDonald’s.”

We ordered hamburgers and ate them. Weiss kept looking up from his at us, his eyes tracking from Karl to Marianne to me, back to Marianne, and then to his own hamburger for a few more bites. Karl bit the end off a plastic tube of ketchup and squeezed the stuff into his mouth. When I grabbed his, wrist, he asked, in Karst One, “So, how was I supposed to eat it?”