Being Alien (31 page)

“Get me out of this cage.”

“Promise no punching,” the Barcon said.

“Yes, unless you…
shit,
yes.” Warren still used English expletives. The Barcon came up to the cage door and keyed the combination on a number pad. Warren didn’t look at the Barcon as he slouched out. I followed Warren, seeing how his shoulders slumped, how grey and bald he was getting, his neck coarse-skinned behind. What was he going to do here if they
could
fix him up? We walked into the brain-mapping room where three more Barcons surrounded a chair with a needled helmet like the one I’d been tested with before I came to Karst.

“The needles are so little they don’t hurt,” I told Warren. He looked at me like
you fuck
and at the Barcons, as if speculating on their muscle insertions, the body leverage they had over him Finally, he sat in the chair, gripping the armrests hard enough to push the blood from his fingers. His left eyelid twitched.

The Barcon who’d walked down from the cages with us cranked the helmet down, pushed a button, cranked the helmet down farther, then said, “Mapping the brain is a bit more complex than minimally testing it.”

I held Warren’s shoulders as they injected him with something that gave him slow breathing, rigid flexibility. Whatever it was, it didn’t stop his sweating, “Can he hear me?” I asked the Barcons, my hand dropping on his wrist.

“Feel the pulse,” one of the three other Barcons said.

I did; it was racing. “Warren, it’s all right.”

The four Barcons began strapping Warren in the chair, immobilizing his head inside the helmet. “While a little needle motion isn’t too harmful,” the largest Barcon explained, “you want his brain map to be accurate, don’t you?”

I nodded, not quite sure. A Barcon mopped out Warren’s mouth with a wet swab, then fastened the helmet’s chin strap. They left Warren and began to stand around a holotank and multi-keyed computer muttering to each other in Barq, their backs to us.

Warren blinked slowly, with automated blinks. I kept saying, “Warren, I want you to be completely okay,” rubbing his fingers.

Then one Barcon came back to lower a shield over Warren’s eyes. Urine began seeping through Warren’s pants. The Barcon said, “‘Warren, we’re beginning repairs, like the language operations, setting up brain growth.”

When the Barcons finally lifted the eye shield, Warren’s blinks were as regularly timed as ever, but Warren’s pulse ran fast, then slow. Odd feeling him through the skin without him being able to tell me how he felt.

They injected a counter-drug to the one that had left him paralyzed. His eye-blinks became erratic. A Barcon unfastened the chin strap. Warren gasped, flexed his tongue, and said,
“Bastards.”

“Everything must stay in place. We need you to talk.”

Warren’s face seemed to age, wrinkles deeper, eyes filmed, not quite frowning, not quite. I said to the Barcons, “You’re making it a confrontation.”

“We’re helping him,” the Barcon who’d brought us into the room said. “We’ve done brain reconstructions on our own people after parasite-removal.”

“I’m cold,” Warren said. One of them loosened the straps holding down his thighs, then wrapped him with a paper-felt blanket. Warren rolled his eyes at the Barcon and said, “What do you need me to say? Poor stupid human craves interstellar master?”

“Close your eyes,” the Barcon who’d put the blanket on him said. Warren squenched his eyelids tight. One of the other Barcons at the computer spoke in Barq.

The Barcon beside Warren said, “Tell us what you see.”

“It’s a small bird,” Warren said.

“Are the beats regular?”

“Wing flaps regular. And it’s going up to the right. Is that important?”

“Regularly, or in jerks.”

“Jerked down.”

“Here?”

“Bird flew backward and jerked.”

“Discontinuity mapped,” the Barcon at the computer said. “We’ll rebuild the axons and dendrites in that area.”

“Nifty,” Warren said, “but what am I missing?”

“Fine discrimination,” the Barcon said, “in threat evaluation. That’s why you lost control of your bladder sphincter when we shielded your vision.”

Warren turned brick red. I wished I wasn’t here. They asked, “Are you ready to continue mapping?”

“Sure,” Warren said like he was going to kill them when they loosened the straps. They continued with grids that distorted across injured parts of Warren’s brain, w
ashes of colors that shifted where neurotransmitters were inadequate or in excess.

Finally, they seemed to be playing with him, and I, wondering about my own paranoia, asked when they’d be finished with him.

They stopped and talked Barq, then said, “If he won’t hit us when we loosen the straps, we won’t play him out.”

“Warren?” Pale and, sweaty, his face looked as much younger from the sweat as it had looked older from tense muscles earlier. He nodded to me. I said, “Let him up.”

“I’ve got to take a shower,” he said.

I went out to a waiting room, then one of the Barcons brought me back to him. They’d put him in a regular Kart hospital bed, paper-felt sheets up to his chin. Beard stubs coarsened his skin. I’d refused to be depilated, but on his face, beard stubbles looked threatening.

“I can’t remake my life just because
vr’ech
re-build my brain,” Warren said, his head turned to the side, eyes blinking. His Karst was perfect now, as though the human accent earlier had been contrived. “I have a past.”

“We can change your memories of that,” one of the Barcons said, “and you have a slightly longer future now.”

Warren rolled over to completely face the wall, the sheet slipping off his hairy shoulder. For a second, I was as intimidated by him as I’d been as a child, wondering if a completely repaired Warren would be my superior. An ugly surge of jealousy—I should feel happy for Warren.

He mumbled to the wall, “If you change my memories, you kill me. See you
bastards.”

The Barcon curled his nose to the side as if he knew what the English word “bastards” meant. I started out.

Warren rolled over and sat up in the bed, saying in English, almost joking,
“Tom, am I gonna have to have breakfast alone?”

“I’ve got to get back to Marianne.”

“Tom. Well, be that way.”

I felt quivery. The Barcon said, “He can stay overnight. Do you want him in this room?”

“Hell, no, he’d just talk all night trying to justify his space-bat friends. Let me see him in the morning.”

As we walked out and down the hall, I asked the Barcon, “What kind of job can he get here?”

“Laser weld checker, stone cutter-layer, machine driver. Not my problem, though.”

Warren and I met behind the hospital for breakfast out on a patio. Three-foot tall birds with thick legs and brutal claws scratched, no, gouged out tubers from the earth around. Warren came to the door and watched them before coming closer. One of them sniffed the air and began walking toward us, a forty-pound bird trying to sneak up on our breakfast.

The Barcon watching, Warren shooed the bird back among the plants it and its fellows were thinning.

“You eat those things?” Warren asked the Barcon.

“Some. They break garden soil for us,” the Barcon answered. “Vegetarians, most of the time.”

Warren sat down and looked at me so hard I wanted to say something, couldn’t quite think of what would suit. “Are you doing okay?” I finally asked.

Warren pulled off the dish covers: eggs, toast, grits, butter. He said, “Looks just like home. Fake eggs, I bet.”

“No,” I said. “They eat eggs here.”

Warren nodded at the earth-turning birds, “Those. Bet they’re bigger than a turkey’s egg. That’s okay for a man kidnapped by his own brother to a planet light-years from the halfway house that was going to let him out in six months.”

“Warren, I was trying to help you.”

“You can’t even get along with the other humans here.”

“I’m trying.”

Warren didn’t answer. He put eggs, toast, and grits on his plate, tasted them, then put butter on everything and stared at his food, waiting for the butter to melt. Finally, he said, “They have any jobs I can do here? I’m not going to live off you. Sam wasn’t going to leech off you either.”

“They said something about weld checker…”

Warren laughed. “Damn whole universe wants me in some shit assembly-line job.”

“Warren, Marianne wants to get together with Yangchenla and Sam, and the Tibetans in the city. We need to help the other humans, Yangchenla says.”

“You were a prick to the other humans, I heard.”

“You’re such a great example of human.”

“My brain was drug-distorted, so I’ve got an excuse for hating. Tom, they treat us like animals.”

“Not me.”

“Me, the people in the wasteland. Round us up, brand us, stick us with needles”

“Humans are xenophobic.”

“On, hell, Tom,”
he said in English.
“Maybe old humans get set in their ways if their brains aren’t…”
He shut up and ate his eggs.

“You’ll still be you,” I said to him.

He gave me one of his wartime stares, light-years deep.

I said, my voice not quite matching the certainty of the statement, “You’re my big brother. You’ll be fine.”

“Tom…” He almost said more but didn’t. One of the big birds raised up on claw tips to rake away my grits with a beak like a vulture’s, no bigger. I noticed then that it had little paws tucked up under the feathers, not short wings. Unevolved Karriaagzhes. Warren whacked at it with a dish cover. Eyes wobbling independently of each other, the bird jumped backward before Warren connected.

“Maybe this is all an hallucination, but if it isn’t, I’m in deep shit,” Warren said. “Your Gwyng friends are going to pick on me forever.”

“Black Amber didn’t do any damage to me.”

Warren laughed and scraped the rest of the food out for the big birds before the Barcons could complain.

“It won’t just be your baby,” I told her. "I don’t think. . .”

“You’re scared,” Marianne said.

“Yes, I am scared. My brother, what we face in first contacts. I don’t want to leave an orphan here.”

She sighed, eyes averted, hands rubbing her stomach, low where the ovaries waited. “Life is a risk, but…Tom, now’s the best time. I’m still studying.”

“Wait. A human baby here.”

“Yes,” Marianne said, “but only a little wait. Don’t you feel empty spaces aching to be filled with humans?”

Funny thing was yes, I did, and both those empty spaces and my desire to fill them scared me. What if the whole sapient universe wanted to fill those spaces, too?

Marianne paced our apartment floor as she and I waited for the rest of the humans, no, just some representative humans, to come to our meeting. She’d set out buttered tea modem Tibetan style and a barley dish I suspected some Tibetan Buddhist wife passed around Berkeley. Warren was in the back of the apartment, sulking.

“Do we have to serve food?” I asked, prodding in among the barley grains with a Karst knife-spoon.

“Tom, it’s pan-human hospitality, serving food. We eat only with those we trust.”

“Or pretend to trust,” I said, smoothing down the grains I’d ruffled.

We heard the elevator rise and unlocked the door. Yangchenla and Sam got out. She had on high-heeled shoes and a peach-colored sheath dress slit up the front to show her legs. Sam wore an electric green suit in glossy fabric I’d never seen before. Both of them wore big glasses, so dark I didn’t understand how they saw through them.

Sam smiled at me and took his off. The shading was one-way. “We’re showing them Terran style,” he said, sliding his glasses back on. Yangchenla looked as if she was born wearing twentieth-century American clothes. The shades made her face seem less flat.

“My uncle Trung, my parents, three other shopkeepers, and Rimpoche Dorge Karmapa will also come," Chenla told Marianne. “I even told Molly, if she is interested in human problems these days.”

Marianne looked more amused than hurt. She said, “Molly is still genetically human, isn’t she?”

Sam turned darker, his nostrils spread, then he laughed, almost like Warren, that laugh, a man against a whole culture. He said; “Just as long as the bat doesn’t come.” Yangchenla leaned against him and reached her hand down to stroke his leg. I felt instantly jealous, not that I wanted to give up Marianne.

Just then the elevator went down. Yangchenla walked to the table to inspect the tea and barley while the rest of us waited silently for the others to come up.

Yangchenla’s parents—funny how dignified they seemed here—in city tunics, he with his sparse grey beard trimmed. With them was a man in Tibetan clothes, padded shirt and pants, and his hair tied up with thick cords—an old leathery man with slit eyes, skin so loose over them that the glitter was almost obscured. He’d pinned his city entrance pass to his shirt: Dorge Karmapa.