Alien Tongues (32 page)

The singer was delighted to see the stir she had created. The club was finally waking up and the line dance was the coolest thing, now these Asian girls had shown the others how to do it right.  She signaled to the band that she wanted to take it from the top again.

Hey, Brother, can't you see I'm fed up with this cage?

It seems I've been commutin' since the Trans-Galactic Age.

Suburban life is feeling' like no kinda life at all,

So be bad, or knock my brains out on the Cosmic Boundary Wall!

Now I'm trying to make my choice between two bad-girl ways of livin',

The first is playing croses till you make the bastards give in.

The second's driving trucks across the empty Stellar Highway,

Lonely with my pet mal but I know I'm headed My Way!

Daughters of the Dust Belt, I'll find my way to heal,

Daughters of the Dust Belt, can you talk my creole?

Daughters of the Dust Belt, don't forget my roots,

Daughters of the Dust Belt, the dust sticks to my boots…

Chapter 1

I believe, I truly believe with all my heart, that one day human life will be abundant and thriving on Earth.  It is to those human beings that I address my words now, because I have enough faith that my book will be found and, in the fullness of time, decoded and read.

Unfortunately, my Dear Earthlings, by that time you will be unable ever to reach my world or find any trace of it.  As you will some day discover for yourselves, the Universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, and the speed of light is the maximum speed of energy.  So although I am able to send my book to your planet today, by the time you read it, it is simply physically impossible for either of us to receive a communication from the other.  Like a helium balloon which slips from a child's hands and races skyward, our parting is forever, and in a way that is beyond our comprehension.

Though I will never know you, I really feel love for you.  In a very important sense you were my creation.  I know I started work as just a simple, fem trucker, not tall and not beautiful, with an education focused almost entirely on transport engineering.  But it was my own, personal love which made your existence possible.  Many other clever people did the biology, but the project would never have started without the revolution created by my love.  Maybe you have found books which tell you different.  This is my one chance to tell you the truth as I know and understand it.

Thoughts keep tumbling out of me as I write – it's so difficult to know how to explain everything to people whose lifestyle I can't imagine.  But perhaps I should start with what I know will be the critical difference between Earth humans and our humans, at least until you develop enough biology to have a choice and decide to change.  We have designed you to be either male or female – just two sexes, as we'll call them.  The female grows the offspring, and the male supplies additional genetic material which is the key to your diversity and evolution.  Those are the mechanics, which are no different from all lower animals.  But here is the critical thing.  How you
feel
about your life – for example, whether you are happy or sad, feel a success or a failure – will depend upon your relationship with one or more members of the other sex.

Yes, yes, I know, you are going to want to give me a thousand exceptions.  Same-sex relationships, religious types like priests, army buddies, women's emotional bonding together.  We have all these and more, I can assure you.  But please think of ninety percent of people you know, and how they live their lives.  Then think of this other ten percent of so-called exceptions.  Are they not just doing something similar, except something was wired a bit differently inside them?  If men and women are the Ying and the Yang which must be combined to create the Whole, aren't these other relationships also Ying and Yang, except they happen to be found in an unusual body?

OK, I don't want to argue so early in my book!  To help you understand, let me explain to you my own life, and hopefully you will see how different it is from the life we have planned for you.  I do hope you will thank us for that.  I was driven to give you what was denied to me.

I told you I am a fem, which is very similar to your woman. They tell me your women will not be as physically strong as fems because evolution will not require it.  But we both grow offspring inside us, and we both feed them after birth from our breast.  Of the different sexes, our faces tend to retain more of the features of childhood – roundness, softness, thicker lips and smaller noses.  Most of us worry about our physical attractiveness, even though we know this is silly and superficial.  After all, we are only human.

About half of all humanity is made up of fems.  To explain the rest and, well, how we all fit in together, I think it would be best to describe to you what I might call "the first day of the rest of my life."  The day it all started; the turning point of my life.  By the way, of course when I say "day" I do not mean one rotation of your planet, but these are small details I will not dwell on.  Just consider it a unit of time between deep sleeps.  On that day, my body should have been crushed to something less than the size of an atom.  The amazing event that saved me is the reason for this book.

The particular day occurred about half way during a long-haul delivery of high-grade ore from Station Iron to Carbon Point, right down the middle lane of the Blue Highway.  The distance is about as far as light would travel in the time it takes your planet to rotate through ninety degrees. Yes, it's a very long way and I suspect that, when you first have the technology to read this book, traveling such distances will still be science fiction to you.  The trip normally takes about half of one percent of my life expectancy.  Few fems are prepared to truck such distances.  I do it because it means I can pilot a Gold Wing.  It is literally the biggest truck in the Galaxy.  I doubt your people will ever see such a truck close up because they are too big to land safely on a planet the size of Earth.  I'm not sure why I like GWs so much, but piloting them is a unique pleasure to me.  Let me say here something which will sound very strange, particularly coming so early in this book.  But the loneliness of piloting a GW down the Blue Highway (the emptiest highway in the whole Inner Perimeter) is an exquisite combination of pain and ecstasy to which I am a hopeless addict.  Yes, crazy, incomprehensible me!

Bizarre fem that I am, I nevertheless have two croses as suitors.  Al lives on the Light side of the Highway, towards the Center, and Jo lives on the Dark side, right on the first ring of the Cloud.  I think where they live are not bad metaphors for their personalities, both of which I enjoy in different ways.  Al is the bright, extrovert one, full of fun and jokes, and will just keep talking-talking until you tell him to shut up, sometimes with tears of laughter down your face.  Jo is the cool type, always careful in everything he says, and can be trusted to find something negative in every ray of sunshine.  That could be depressing, of course, if it wasn't for his wicked dry sense of humor and ability to make all the bad stuff seem like just a fascinating problem to solve.

Ah, you say, what's a cros?  I used "he" and "him" so these are the men, right?  To which I respond, define a man!  Ho, ho.  Earth Girls, maybe you know some men who are like croses but I doubt it will be too many, and they make up about forty percent of our humanity. 

It's true that croses do not grow offspring inside them, and cannot feed them by breast.  Their faces also change more as they grow up, becoming sharper featured and narrower-eyed.  But I am not sure you would associate any of their other differences with what you call men.  To begin with, they tend to be shorter and lighter than fems.  For example, my hands and feet are larger than those of most croses I know.  Their skin is pure white, as opposed to a fem's more honey color, and
it is completely hairless
.  I am not just talking about a pure white scalp.  We fems have a soft, downy layer of white hair you can see all over our skin if you look carefully.  By comparison, croses are like shiny porcelain.  Or like white rubber, as one fem joked to me years ago.  Another difference is that all croses have this somewhat unattractive pot-belly, a bit like a pregnant fem.  I understand it's their special stomach and intestines which allow them to eat certain grasses, leaves and tree-bark that would simply make us fems throw up.

I know you are wondering about reproduction, and I agree that is the most important topic as it determines the survival of the species.  But it's a bit complicated to explain just now, and it will be much easier if I let it emerge with the rest of my story.  Please be patient!

At least I hope I've explained why we can't relate croses and fems directly to your own men and women.  You might say that a cros is a higher form of evolution, in certain senses – I think few fems would resent that characterization.  They are certainly much more intellectual, doing all the scientific research, university teaching, drafting of laws and galactic planning.  They are much more organized in every way, and are better than us fems at controlling their emotions.  To a fem they offer stability, dependability and a good source of sound advice.  They are good friends – often more stable than fem friends with whom I often get into fights.  But it's fair to say that croses tend not to be adventurous and prefer a physically soft life.  I don't think either Al or Jo have ever been to wilder side of the Galaxy like my home region, the Dust Belt, or ever will.  And I personally just didn't like the idea of being tied down to one cros for the rest of my life.  Or at least that was my feeling on that particular day, and every day that had preceded it.

I had long conversations with both Al and Jo earlier that day.  It was not planned as a busy day for me, as the maps were showing clear black space ahead, and all my routine maintenance was done.  I was planning to catch up on some of my reading, but it's all too tempting to pass the time with my suitors who rarely seem too busy to share time with me.  Neither have very demanding jobs and they are both so damned clever that they get their work done in half the allotted time.  I think they like to use me to hone their persuasive skills – I make it a point of being a very difficult fem to persuade.

"Darling," I recall Al saying to me as he did so many times, "I just know you would love living on the Light Side.  You'd never get bored.  Think of all the parties I can take you to, all the bigwigs I can introduce you to. And you would be such a sensation to them.  They would sit aghast listening to your scary tales of deep-space exploration."

"Hah!" I replied, as I often did. "And inside they would be thinking, 'What a crazy, animal girl Al found for himself.  How often does she wash?  I bet she eats dead flesh.  Please don't leave us alone with her!'"

"Dear, so why do we care what they think?  Anyway, those are the pretty-pretty fems and the boring croses who marry them.  Wait until you meet our higher government folk.  You'll be amazed how much they understand you. How much they want to learn your point of view."

"Really?  The point of view of Meg Moon, GW Pilot First Class, from the Far Dust Belt?  I think they'll learn all they want to know in ten minutes, then gallantly find me another listener as they slip off into the cocktail crowd.  Al, I know my limitations.  I'm too much for the Pretties and just too little for Principals."

Al protested against this perspective a little while longer, but it was more of a ritual to keep his case technically undefeated for another day.  As soon as good form permitted, he started telling me of the latest gossip in his office. Though the individuals he talked about were not important to me, the amusement value was in his sheer story-telling ability.  It was better than any lunchtime drama series.

If I were a typical suburban fem, I'd have to admit that Al was a fairly good catch.  It was no idle boast that he could take me to parties with important people.  He was a government regulator of media broadcasting and that kept him in contact with both some influential executives and also some celebrities.  Admittedly Al already had one wife, but she was the stay-at-home type and he really needed someone to assist his social climbing.  He knew I could hold my own in any conversation, and I was also intriguing enough to city-types to get him noticed.  I was sure, if I showed enough interest, he would offer me an excellent marriage contract.

When I spoke to Jo later that day, he was also true to form by – in his case –
not
trying to sell me on the social side of a marriage.  Maybe he suspected he would just be providing joke material for Al, such as secret tips for staying awake at a dinner party in the Lower Cloud.  How does a Left Clouder light up a room?  He leaves it.  What's the difference between a Cloud greeting and a bucket of ice?  The bucket.  And so on.  What Al won't acknowledge is that some of the best political minds get their training in the Cloud, but I have to agree that it's not something I could survive well.   No, Jo sees the essence of our imagined marriage as strictly one-on-one.  Jo, an ivory-tower professor in political science, needs me to tell him how the fem-in-the-Dust-Belt thinks.

So my chat with Jo starts, as usual, with him teasing out my views on everything from Great Lane Rules to Background Warming.  He knows I devour the news and form an opinion on everything.  But I also have an uncanny knack of predicting how the average fem is going to feel about things, even if I (as is often the case) don't share the same opinion. 

"But Meg, that's not logical," would be his typical response, just as he remarked that day.  "If you want the government to slow Background Warming, you have to support a silicon tax."

"You'll never make the average fem see the connection," I explained.  "A silicon tax sounds like it will hit everything the average fem spends her money on.  The media have effectively killed the idea by sticking that name on it."

Jo's face on the screen looked resigned.  "Please, Doctor, cure me of this weight problem but none of that disgusting medicine you gave me last time.  I almost lost my appetite for dinner."

"I keep telling you, Jo.  Always delay the bad news as long as possible. "

Jo gave the smallest hint of a grin.  "OK, Meg, then I won't tell you the result of the Fem Dusters' game until tomorrow."

I threw a napkin at the screen.  Of course I knew the humiliating result for my home team against a bunch of Cloud beginners.  Croses had no interest in sport but Jo was smart enough to check things that mattered to me.  Despite the vast distance away, it made me feel connected with my roots.