Being Alien (19 page)

I turned away from the Institute the way we’d come in the night before and headed for the third river. This was to the northwest of where I’d lived when I was first in Karst City, learning Karst from a family of bear-stock creatures. Now the buildings were transparent glass, small rooms that one could see into or stacks of open spaces framed by chromed poles, inhabited by the olive birds.

“Does everyone live in a species neighborhood?” Reeann asked. “And they don’t need privacy?”

“No, they’ve got feathers. Some species live together. Most Gwyngs do, but Black Amber says we’ve got Gwyng neighbors in our building.”

On farther, the neighborhood was mixed, several styles of buildings. Marianne said, “It’s like Berkeley here.”

The buildings were foamed metal and foamed plastics, deep-space products where you whip the metal or plastic up and cast it in a null-grav environment. Some of them had bays, though. Other than that, I couldn’t see even the vaguest resemblance. “How like Berkeley?”

“Multi-ethnic.”

A Barcon officer stopped us and checked our IDs on his wrist computer. He told me, “Be careful she doesn’t panic and run away.”

“I don’t think she will.”

“She doesn’t know the language yet.”

“She won’t do anything stupid. She’s from an Institute of Linguistics on my planet.”

“What are you saying?” Reeann asked.

“He just wanted to see our passes,”

“Passes?”

“Humans, well, the Tibetans are a bit crude, so the Federation only lets selected ones of them live in Karst City. They, and I, carry IDs at all times.”

She said, “There’d better be good reason for restricting human access to the city.”

“They’re primitives.”

“Shit, are we talking pass law here, like in South Africa?”

“Reeann, we’re talking over one hundred different species of sapients, sometimes a bit anxious about each other, okay. I’ll take you to see some xenophobia movies sometime.”

“Xenophobia movies?”

“Like Earth horror movies, only we don’t need special effects.”

“I wish you hadn’t told me about this right now.”

“Sorry, I tend not to think too much about my early days here. I had to trust them, and I’m not dead.”

“Terrific. Let’s ride just to the river you were telling me about and go back…home. Home?”

We rode to the river and down a bit along a paved cart path. “It looks just like a river,” she said.

Another bicycle came by, maybe a Yauntry riding it. “And that looks just like a bicycle,” I said to her.

She watched the rider pedal down the path. “I’m not hallucinating. He’s got cam cranks.”

“Parallel evolution,” I said, meaning both the humanoid appearance and the machine.

“I will need a new language for this, I’m sure.”

When we got back to the apartment, all the others were watching movies on a flat screen. “What’s it like out there?” Sam asked Marianne.

“Sort of okay. We got stopped by a furry giant thing who asked to see our passes, though.” She walked back to a bedroom, stripping off her jersey as she went.

We ate dinner together in our apartment, Travertine gulping whole dead rabbit-sized mammals, fur and all, the Berkeley humans rolling forks around in a pasta dish heavy with Gwyng-made Jersey butter. I felt like I needed meat, so I skinned and broiled half of one of Travertine’s mammals.

After dinner, Travertine regurgitated his grinding stones into his scaley fist and went into the visitor’s bathroom by the elevator.

“Can he eat any other way?” Sam said.

“Ask him,” I said.

Marianne moved her pasta around on her plate a bit more and said, “I bet it’s rude to criticize someone’s eating habits here.”

“But is it going to store its dead animals in our refrigerator?” Molly asked.

“I was cruel to one of his kind once,” I said, “so don’t nag him.”

Travertine came back, his stones wrapped up in a white cloth. He pulled out a drawer and put them in, then said, “If you’d prefer, I could cut my meat up.”

“No, eat the best way for you. I suspect it’s hard on you being alone with us,” I said.

“I must understand humans, then Rhyodolite’s Gwyngs, then the Yauntries.” My fellow humans didn’t understand the context, but I did. He was the same species as Xenon. And Xenon panicked under Yauntry guns—no friends around him at all, just aliens, a Gwyng and a human, both cold and remote to him. The Yauntries killed Xenon, thinking he was about to attack them. Misunderstandings all around.

“I felt tremendously guilty later,” I told Travertine, “and Rhyodolite has tried hard, for a Gwyng, to become used to birds. Rhyodolite felt guilty, too, when he got to know Granite Grit.” Travertine’s tending us was another multi-agenda Federation deal.

“Granite Grit is not my kind. If I haven’t made you too uncomfortable,” Travertine said, “then might we go out to the music?”

“Sure,” Sam said. He whistled Doo, Dee, Da, Du, the notes from
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Travertine swept his eyes clean with his vertical inner eyelids, less transparent than Granite’s or Karriaagzh’s nictitating membranes, and said, “Music may connect more than semiotic systems do.”

We took a red bus filled with bald cadets in black tunics and pants. “I was like that four years ago,” I told my fellow humans.

“Will they do that to me?” Marianne asked.

“
Not
in the Institute of Linguistics,” Travertine answered. Our bird guide nodded slightly at me when the cadets got out at the xenophobia movie house. Out on the street, the species differences were blurred by harsh overhead lights.

“Looks like a street,” Sam finally said.
“
Alive.”

We got off the bus and went up an outside flight of stairs by a white wall covered with thousands of alien graffitos in maybe one hundred different scripts. Sam traced a big red Gwyng glyph with his index finger and looked at Molly, who handed him a pen. He scrawled, “Sam brings music.”

Inside the club, two Ahrams on a dais played blue-glazed clay flutes while, down in a pit, a gold-furred Jerek danced in a tooled leather loincloth, front and back panels hanging down to the floor. The naked T of skin across her eyes and down her nose was pink, not the usual black. As she swayed on her short legs, the black leather panels blurred in the shadows at her feet. Among the other aliens, I saw two of Granite Grit’s bird kind, watching, sitting down like nestlings, their heads bobbing to the music.

Sam said, “My God, she’s got little tittles down near the hip band.” Then he asked, breathing it out, “Can I see what they’re playing.”

Travertine got up and talked to someone standing behind a curtain, made of short wood slats. He came back with a small drum. Sam tapped it. The sound was like an apple dropping into a rain barrel. He rested his palms on the rim and looked at the Ahrams. One of them cupped a hand and brought it down. Before I could tell Sam that meant yes, he drummed, the Ahrams played under his drumbeats, and the Jerek’s feet moved with Sam’s right hand, while his left hand fingers tapped out rain tones.

Molly said, “The dancer’s hands go with the flutes.” And I looked and it was so. Sam’s drumming sped up, slowed, caught the Jerek’s pulse. The beat was inhuman. She began wailing high tones that might have been a language, gold fur swaying, darkening with sweat that rolled down from her hip band and chin.

Marianne leaned against me, body tense and swaying across the music, syncopated. I put my arm, around her shoulder, then noticed Molly. She was crouched forward, her hands gripping her knees, head cocked slightly, lips slightly parted so I could see that her teeth were on edge.

I bent toward her and whispered, “Do you like it?”

“Do they fuck across species lines?”

“Yes, but mostly males whose females breed in season.”

She leaned back and closed her mouth.

“Beers, people?” Travertine asked. “Made from Tibetan barley, in fact.” He set down squat blue cans with pop-tops not entirely in the Terran mode.

Finally, Karriaagzh and Black Amber decided to give all the humans the Karst One language operation. I went with them to the same hospital where I’d had my own language operation. In one of the patient rooms, I kissed Marianne good-bye and hugged Molly. Warren was sedated, in an adjoining room with Sam.

“We’ll keep him on Prolixin for the present,” a Barcon told me. “His brain is warped in the ventricles.”

“What can you do?” I asked.

“Re-build and insert pre-programmed sections, if you insist on keeping a consistent identity.”

“I do insist,” I said and went home alone to my new apartment. Black Amber arrived a moment after I did. She was dressed in Gwyng rig, neck collar with a narrow cloth attached that draped down her chest and over the pouch slit and genitals. Over her shoulder she carried a zippered sling purse. I let her in and went to stand by the window, eyes half focused down at the street, all the
uhyalla, vr’ech,
whatever, just ovals and ellipses of heads and shoulders. She asked, “Need help with packing again/so soon? Ready for Gwyng Home.”

“I can manage.” I packed my most human clothes. She threw my blue officer’s uniform on top of that.

In the elevator, she leaned against me, wrinkles brushing my cheek. “Karriaagzh paid for all the language operations. Is your kin threat to me?”

“The Barcons can take care of him.”

She parted her lips and put her mouth up against my ear, then gnashed her teeth together to sharpen them.

“Don’t let him hurt a least one of us (threat).”

We got out in the basement where she’d left her plastic-hulled electric car and drove through the bright night. Karst nights are never darker than dusk—I’d have to get used to that again, She turned into a driveway leading to a gate station by the third river, a giant masonry building all windowless white. She drove the car through the building’s double doors and up a ramp into the gate transport. A bear and Gwyng crew fastened the car down, then Black Amber pushed a button and the hatch closed. “We end and begin,” she said as the gate transition light went on.

A minute of slight wobbles, two and a half minutes of stillness, and the arrival light flashed. Gwyng Home.

“Priority, so fast,” she said, leaning on the hatch door switch. When the seal broke and the hatch swung up, we drove into a building that looked dusty, unused. Six or seven Gwyngs watched, nostrils twitching slightly. Black Amber stopped, and one with a tiny plastic ring clipped through the bottom of his left nostril slot came up talking in a Gwyng language. My computer squealed and babbled, trying to transform his speech by Karst Two rules.

“Show him your identity slip,” Black Amber told me. I gave it to him. He stuck it inside a small cube with an eyepiece and examined it. When he took my Federation ID out, a plate of wavy plastic came out of a slot in the cube. “Take the plastic and show it the next time anyone with a nose ring stops you.”

I took it and slipped it in my wallet. The Gwyng touched my armpits and babbled again. Black Amber oo’ed slightly.

She was going to take a nymph out of her pouch and then go into heat. I wasn’t sure who’d be the one to help with that. “I packed human-style deodorant,” I told her.

“I have heat suppressants this time. Cadmium is here/on Gwyng Home/not near. We will stay in this urban area tonight, join with him (both traveling to meet at third location).” Cadmium was the fourth live alien I’d met, back in Virginia, a serious little cuss.

We got back in the car and drove by stacks of plastic round apartments, other buildings with smokestacks like factories, heaps of plastic scraps, then other trash mounds of paper and cardboard. Black Amber’s was the only private car on the unpaved shell road that ran along beside a rail line. The trees here looked stunted compared to strap-leaf trees on the Karst Gwyng islands, and the air had a metallic tang to it. The landscape didn’t look slick the way Karst City, outside the slums, was. “We synthesize food for most of our people, oils, proteins. Herds are for the wealthy.”

“What about pouch hosts?”

“Enough wealthy to breed too many Gwyngs,” Black Amber said. The computer transformed that with odd flatness.

“What do you get from the Federation?”

“We eat alien hydrocarbons.”

I saw two ruins—granite building walls that looked fused. Nuclear war here? “Is this the poorest part?”

She didn’t answer, but rolled her huge eyes so far under the bone protrusions protecting them that I saw only a murky yellow brown, her
 
sclera.

“You use plastic for everything?” I asked, touching the hotel room’s woven plastic walls. They were stiff, like celluloid. “Then the Gwyng houses on Karst are primitive?”

“Not primitive, extravagant,” she said. “This hotel is (almost) poverty, recycled into food after we use it.”

The plastic in the living-room ceiling glowed—no switches—and the single bedroom was dark, just one mat. I looked at her and she said, “You, I, and bought sleepers will share that.”