Triptych (15 page)

He opens his bottle and drinks.

When the silent conversation is complete, Gwen and Basil return to their positions at the table, and they all three resume work. At the end of the day, Kalp’s neck is still sore, but less than before, and he feels the warm glow of belonging settling under his skin. He still longs for a chance at the cleaning cubicle, but the humans’ secretions are somehow less offensive today.

Gwen touches his shoulder in parting, as she and Basil head in one direction across the Institute’s parking lot towards the conveyance that they share. Kalp goes in the other, to the larger one that his kind takes back to their building.

There is a smile on Kalp’s face and he does not remember putting it there.

***

Back at the Sleeping Place, Kalp returns to his cot from the cleaning cubicles with water droplets still clinging to his fur. He misses the soft sponges and the meagre buckets of water that his own people use, but the “shower” is soothing in its own way, the water sluicing cool across his bare skin, a blissful pitter patter down his flesh. He drops his shoes under his bed and nudges them out of sight with his toes. He is very pleased to remember that he does not have to wear them ever again, at least, not to work. He has been given permission from equal-status teammates, and even Derx cannot order him to wear them now.

Let Derx and the other High Statuses scrambling for acceptance half-deafen themselves for it. Kalp is accepted already. His team regards him with affection and is concerned for his well-being and comfort. To them, this is more vital than his proper Integration, and Kalp feels a little surge of pleasure at the thought that learning to be accepted by Earthlings may not be as taxing as he’d originally feared.

Kalp is aware that his pride is perhaps ill-founded and too quick. Today, after all, was his first real full day at “the office,” and perhaps they were acting especially nice because of the novelty of his presence. Kalp fears that this might be the case, but he is fairly certain that it is not. Gwen and Basil are just as easy with him as with each other, and their mutual affection seems natural and unforced.

They are simply kind people.

And truthfully, after so many months in the escape ship, followed by hours, weeks in military installations and medical centres, and then still more months in classrooms and teaching halls interspersed with so many stuffy, formal functions and welcome parties, after having lost…

After. Just after.

Well, Kalp is understandably a bit skin-starved. Just to be touched, touched with purpose and warmth, even if it is with moist, scent-marking hands, is a little bit of a wonder.

He lies down on his cot. The time when the lights are removed is far off yet — Kalp has not yet gone down to the other building for his evening repast — but he feels languorous and revels in the silence of having the Sleeping Place almost entirely to himself. He stretches his hands far above his head, touching the wall behind him, and stretches his toes as far as they will go in the other direction, and lays indecently sprawled in his clean clothing, enjoying the closest thing to silence that the electricity-laced walls can offer.

The sounds from the park around them — the chitter and flap of the native fauna, the flying animals that so astounded Kalp when he first saw them — is rather soothing. It cancels out the zip in the wires, and Kalp decides that he likes birds. Their quick little hearts and their hollow bones and their flittering wings wash excitement across his body, so he lies still and enjoys it. He inhales and exhales slowly and deliberately, holding onto the oxygen. He practices his “sighs.”

The moment of respite is broken by an exclamation in the corner closest to the door. When Kalp came in, there was a knot of Lower Statuses sitting on a cot, peering intently at some form of Earth literature. Kalp did not so much ignore them — he is not as arrogant as Derx — as leave them to their own pursuits. They had all returned earlier than he; they are younger and as such are attending the local “University,” which keeps shorter hours in deference to the extra work the young ones must complete at home.

Kalp likes that word: university. A city in which the universe is found. Or founded.

The others who had returned from the Institute that afternoon with Kalp have gone their own way, seeking a meal or entertainment, or things that Kalp did not long for. So he had parted ways with them to take advantage of the relative privacy of the cleaning cubicles and to think.

Only, he cannot think now, because the young ones are shouting.

“It is on the outside!” says one, and his companions gesture for him to keep his voice low and respectful. Were Kalp not in the room, they surely would not care. The speaker’s voice drops to barely a whisper, but Kalp swivels an ear in their direction, intrigued. Besides, it is nice to hear his own language after so many hours struggling to find the correct words in English.

“Only when — ” another starts, but stops. “Oh, no, there it is before. That’s…rather revolting.”

“Well, no one says
you
must perform intercourse with any.”

Now Kalp sits up.

“What are you reading?” he asks, and they all immediately turn to him, raise their palms and drop their ears. The literature lays spread open on the cover of the cot.

Kalp stands. He is concerned about their overt interest in copulation because he is older, because he is an adult and they are not…yes, he is only interested out of concern. Kalp almost believes his own lie. In truth, he is just as intrigued as the young ones about the mechanics of human reproduction. It is not a topic that has been openly discussed in any of his classrooms to date.

Do they, like his people, engage in the act for pleasure as well as to conceive? From the looks of the glossy, thin book lying open on the bed, it seems they do. They also, like his kind, produce pornography in order to stimulate sexual pleasure in a reader.

Do they have orgasms?
he wonders.
Are they capable?

Kalp walks over and looks down at the book, and the young ones’ fingers all tremble.

“Oh, do stop,” he says and they drop their hands as one. “I am not here to chastise you — in honesty, I am as curious as you. From where did you obtain this book?”

One of the young ones, whose name Kalp does not know, says, “My classmate. I think she…the term is ‘crushes me.’”

Kalp touches his nose. “Sounds unpleasant.”

“No, it is slang. It means ‘to wish to have intercourse with.’”

Yes, Kalp is very familiar with the problems of Earth jargon. He avoids the instinctual nervous gesture of tugging on his ear at the memory of “cheers,” and instead puts his hands on his hips, mimicking the pose of stern, concerned parent he has seen the humans use.

“And she gave you this book in order that you would be informed in the manner in which this is accomplished?”

The young one nods like a human.

“Do you intend to follow through?”

The young one lifts his shoulders and drops them again, a shrug. Kalp thinks he is bad for picking up the humans’ gesture tics, but the young ones are worse. The humans’ physical communication methods are starting to overshadow his own people’s, and Kalp wonders if he should be concerned about preserving his native culture. Well, there are others whose first concern is that, anthropologists and the like from both races. Let them worry. Kalp will do as he feels comfortable doing; he will do what is needed to be understood.

“I thought perhaps I would investigate it first,” the young one admits.

“We are not genetically compatible,” Kalp reminds them, “so there is no danger of impregnation, but they have different sexually transmitted diseases. Use prophylactics,” he adds in deference to his elder status. Parents and adults are meant to be sources of opinionated imperatives.

But the curiosity is pulling hard, and Kalp cannot take his eyes from the book, from the page that it fell open on. “May I take this?” he requests. He could demand it, but Kalp has never been one to demand anything. Few people do follow the old strictures of the hierarchy — even at home they were nothing more than a way to shuffle the world into logical organization. It is only the arrogant ones like Derx that
demand
.

The young ones seem unhappy at the loss of the literature, and Kalp promises, “I shall return it when I have finished my perusal.”

They share a glance and agree, uncomfortable with denying a Higher Status at any rate, and disperse to go play a game of “hoops” with the human soldiers who live in a Sleeping Place of their own on the far side of the park.

Kalp picks up the book and, feeling ridiculously salacious, returns to his cot with it. He opens it to the first page, skipping the graphic photographs in favour of reading the accompanying text, practicing his English first, building his vocabulary. It is an exercise in maturity and self restraint. It also builds a slow, anxious, but delicious sort of anticipation. As he reads, he tries very hard not to envision the faces of Maru and Trus.

When he finally does allow his eyes to turn to the images, he somehow cannot imagine that under their clothing Gwen and Basil look like that, glistening pink and splayed out and vulnerable.

***

Kalp is having an understandably hard time concentrating on work.

He is in Basil’s chair again, because the desk and chair that Gwen requisitioned have not yet arrived. He is supposed to be concentrating on the schematics before him, but all he can seem to look at is the small shadow of flesh at the top of Basil’s chest. His top shirt button has worked loose and the vee of lightly furred skin is far more intriguing than it ought to be. Kalp looks at Gwen, busy laying out an assortment of delicacies that she apparently baked the night before, arranging them temptingly on the edge of her desk. She too has her top button undone, but he can only see the dip in her collar bones, and no further.

Discreetly, Kalp undoes his own top button. It seems the done thing.

He wonders at the fashion trend that makes a whole pairing of fasteners obsolete, when they are obviously there to be fastened, but then he puts that thought aside. He has seen stranger on his own world.

Kalp had finished looking at the pornographic book before anyone else returned to the Sleeping Place, and, as promised, left it on the younger one’s cot. He spent the rest of the evening, however, thinking about Maru and Trus and how much he misses his family. He misses frantic, heated intercourse for no other reason than for the sheer pleasure of revelling in each other’s bodies, in the sweetly gasping responses and arousing little sounds. He misses comfortable quiet domestic compatibility. He misses performing kind gestures for no other reason than to evoke pleasure in another. He misses cherishing and being cherished. He misses falling asleep wrapped in his nest and around his Aglunated.

He only allowed himself the usual mourning period; he could not stand to dwell any more than that. It had just been so fast, all of it, and sometimes it still feels like it never happened, that he may wake up any moment, rise up out of his unconscious phase and find it all to have been an illusion of the mind while he slept. Maru and Trus will be there, and the sky will be the soft green of his childhood.

He performed the Ceremony and still feels incomplete — not that he had been alone in performing it on the refugee ships.

Their mutual loss is what is holding those who are left together.

Some had escaped with family — parents, siblings, children — some with Aglunates, some with whole Units. And some, like Kalp, utterly and absolutely alone. Kalp has no one.

Kalp is widowed and touch-starved and, yes, he admits it, empty-feeling. He feels left behind, like maybe he really did die with Maru in the smoke field or Trus in the panic, and he is not on Earth, placed among — between — two of these strange, squishy creatures and trying vainly to adapt. To Integrate.

And humans
are
squishy. Perhaps solely because they are nearly sixty percent water, they leak, ooze, secrete, and shed all over the place. It is a wonder that they do not leave puddles in their wake. While fornicating, the blood inside them flows all down in men and all up in women. Women make natural lubrication, but men do not, and yes, as the young ones found so revolting, all of the men’s sexual organs are at all times on the outside of the body.

Kalp has to make an effort not to stare at the area of Basil’s pants that hide his genitalia as the human passes by in front of the drafting table to fetch more tea. Beyond a small tell-tale wrinkle, he looks perfectly flat in front, like Gwen and Kalp himself. Do men tuck themselves into contraptions to flatten their crotches, Kalp wonders, just as women tuck their fully inflated breasts into lingerie to buoy them up, to enhance their visibility and put their fertility on display?

Kalp will not deny that “bras” are flattering, and add to the attractiveness of a woman, but it is strange to him that their breasts are inflated at all times, and not just when they are prepared to create and nourish a child. It is a strange evolutionary signal and Kalp is eager to investigate medical literature to further understand it. For the same reason he wonders why the penis and the precious sacs in which seminal fluid is created are placed in such an unprotected area. Kalp’s genitalia are safely tucked under his rib cage, where no stray jarring or accidental injury could endanger his chances of procreating. It seems only logical.

Kalp is roaming amongst his thoughts when Gwen moves to stand before him and wave her hand in front of his eyes. The gentle buffet of sound that the movement creates brings Kalp back to the present. He fears Gwen will be angry with his distractedness, the way he has ceased to work, but she is smiling.

“Earth to Kalp,” she says. “Where were you?”

Kalp has heard this idiom before. He replies, “I was lost in thought,” and says nothing about the nature of his thoughts.

“About what?”

Kalp lowers his head and feels his ears droop. Gwen can read his body language well enough, it seems, not to press the issue. Instead she proffers a clear plastic container filled with delicious smelling sweets.