Human to Human (12 page)

I wondered if they were with the Institute of Analytics and Tactics, our alien CIA. I asked, in Karst One, “What does anyone know about Thridai’s murder?”

The Jerek female, Gouge Rock, said, “Several Sharwani told us they’ve been contacted by a disguised Sharwani, given messages in something like your blindcode,
braillee?”

Travertine looked from them to me as if he’d been the Terran specialist who’d discovered humans used blindcode.
“Braille,”
I pronounced correctly. “Were either Hurdai or Chi’ursemisa contacted?”

“They said they weren’t,” Slipzone said, “but do we trust them?”

Marianne said, “Are you asking us, as neighbors not to bring them back here?” She sat the boiling pot down and looked around at everyone. The Gwyng shopkeeper, Awingthin, her brow hair flaring, went to the window with her males and stared out. The others looked at each other. Granite Grit said, “No, unless you feel…”

Gouge Rock lowered her nose at him.

I said, “We felt like we were making progress with them.”

Slipzone closed his eyes, the skin over the eyes just as shiny as his eyeballs, and said, “Perhaps they really weren’t contacted. And we don’t know how good the surgical disguises are.”

Karl said, “I like Daiur. I was more afraid of Hrif.”

Awingthin, without turning from the window, said in Karst Two, “(Perhaps) Support should have no say?”

Granite Grit and Feldspar hunkered down on their hocks. Alchir-singra said, in the same language, “Perhaps Gwyngs are afraid.”

“Hush, Alchir,” Granite said. He grabbed Alchir’s scaly wrist and pulled him down.

The Gwyng shopkeeper said, “I feed you. True, doing that supports me as well (but…apprehension). (Anxiety) I won’t fuss (more).” She walked away from the window and got in the elevator, her pouch kin trailing behind her. She pushed for her shop floor and, as the doors closed, said, “No insult/back with foods.”

No one said anything for a second, then Travertine said, “I understand why she might be nervous, but Red Clay and Ree the Linguist are most likely to have problems.”

“Dealing with xenophobia is our profession,” Gouge Rock said.

Granite Grit said, “Tom, the Institute of Control gave Feldspar and me lessons in fighting Sharwani. Our bio­structure gives us good leverage over them.”

Plus the fact that he is over seven feet tall, I thought, and can open a creature’s belly with his bare toes.

I said, “I should have invited you over more, Granite.” Did it embarrass me that Granite and Feldspar had witnessed my fights with Yangchenla? Yes. Then maybe I reminded him too much of his own freak-out time when we were cadet roommates? But he was a bird; mental states that didn’t lead to action tended to be as forgotten, for birds, as unrealized dreams.

Then I wondered if Gwyngs remembered everything—all language logged to
time embedded in it.

Marianne, thinking more of the present than I was, said, “Thank you all. Perhaps we should have neighborhood parties more often.”

The Gwyng shopkeeper and her pouch kin came back with food carts. Everyone chatted at us as though we were going off on a dangerous mission.

Silver took me aside and told me, “The Institute of Control has implanted Hurdai and Chi’ursemisa with stun devices much like control bracelets. You and the Linguist Ree can control them.”

I remembered Chi’ursemisa’s fingers splayed over the polycarb and wondered how deep the Sharwani tactile sense might go, if they’d feel the implants. I shook my head slightly, thinking about plastic temporal bones that housed skull computers. But they wouldn’t have that, now—just the biochemical reversal of some language-center cells to the childhood condition. And stun implants.

The computer housing under my skin and scalp muscles, under my left ear, balanced perfectly with the real bone on the other side. Or else I’d forgotten what real bone there felt like.

Karl came up to me and said, “I’m glad you’re teaching me English.”

“Yeah,”
I said to him in that language. The Sharwani would know Karst too well now for us to talk privately in that language.

Ersh, my first Wreng contact, and I met as we walked toward the Walls for Thridai’s memorial service. The feathers around his ear holes were matted, as though he’d been twirling them the way a girl will play with her hair with her fingers. He was wearing blue with a green cord—officiator for the Rector now. Big belly scales rustled against the tunic when he saw me. I wondered if his eyelids were still tattooed, but he didn’t flick those at me. He said, “Red Clay, Tom,” as though not sure whether to use my Federation name or my species name at funerals.

“Ersh.” I remembered when we’d met Thridai, our informant, smoking his herbal cigarettes.

“I feel awkward.”

“Did you talk much with Thridai?”

“No.”

An Ahram stonemason, big and sweating in a leather apron, came up with a handheld chisel and hammer—a primitive custom, to memorialize on walls, done with primitive tools. A bear-stock creature with grey and black fur held the gold-leaf book and an adhesive pot on a tray. All the alien plants trembled around us as the Ahram chiseled out Thridai’s name on the latest granite slab. Sweat ran down his skull crest, down by his ears and along his massive jaw. I looked around; not many of us were here for Thridai—his Institute of Analytics handler, a couple of olive birds, Ersh, me. Then the bear type, who held the gold and adhesive pot, swiveled his ears under his head fur. Karriaagzh came stepping up, feathers covered by the Rector’s green that glittered with gold threads, alone as always, his beak chipped as though he’d been biting metal.

“Ersh, Tom, good,” Karriaagzh said as he settled down, thighs on lower legs, hocks splayed behind him. I looked at Ersh’s cord again, wondering if he were in training to be a Rector’s Person. A bit jealous, yes, I was, if Ersh was going to be trained for that. Karriaagzh looked at me and said, “Ersh works for my office now as a researcher.” I felt foolish, caught being out-of-line ambitious.

The Ahram wire-brushed the chiseled-out name and began laying in the gold. We stayed until he’d burnished it. Gold wasn’t terribly valuable here, just something that didn’t tarnish in the stone grooves.

Having thought my thoughts about Thridai, I waited until someone would leave first. The work crew started out, then Karriaagzh stood up and stretched, reaching his arms up so straight that the tunic sleeves fell down below the scales on his forearms. The tissue around the yellow eyes seemed puffy.

The polycarbonate wall stayed up, but Marianne bought cloth, rings, wooden rods, and carved brackets. We couldn’t nail the brackets to the polycarb, so I glued them up while Marianne sewed curtains.

“It’s very nice cloth for tactile people,” she said. “And I want to give them some privacy.”

Two Barcons brought our Sharwani family back to us. Hurdai came out of the elevator first, the fur bristly on his skull behind the ear where the Barcon medics had shaved it for surgery. The scar of the scalp cut was a white welt bordered by pink. A Barcon followed, its arm bent, palm shadowing Hurdai’s movements. Daiur came out and ran to Karl. Chi’ursemisa and the other Barcon walked out side by side, not touching, not looking at each other. Chi’ursemisa’s fur looked matted, with a cloth patch where Hurdai had his scar.

“All the others watched us come in,” Chi’ursemisa said. “Why weren’t you also in the lobby?” She had no accent now, but the phrasing seemed a bit awkward.

“We didn’t want to embarrass you,” I said.

“Back behind the clear plastic?” Hurdai asked. He stopped; the Barcon lowered his hand and looked once at me, once at Marianne.

Marianne said, “We put up cloth, draperies, over the polycarbonate.”

Hurdai repeated the Karst chemical-shorthand word that I’m translating as
polycarbonate.
We all went down together to their room.

Chi’ursemisa asked, “Will it be locked?” Fingers splayed, she leaned against the polycarbonate from the outside this time, staring into the brocaded curtain fabric.

“Not as long as you’re cooperative,” the Barcon who’d followed Hurdai out of the elevator said. Hurdai rubbed his forearm, nails making sounds against the skin and hair.

Chi’ursemisa looked back over her shoulder at him, her blond facial hair along the cheekbones slightly matted as though she’d been sleeping on that side. She pushed away from the polycarb with her fingers and said, “We’d like to go there now, with the cloth…draperies closed.”

Karl said, “Don’t you want something to eat first?”

Daiur looked from Karl to his mother. “Can Karl and I eat together?” he asked her.

She raised her hand, fingers cupped, and brought it down heavily, almost a sign of surrender.

Marianne went toward the kitchen, leaving me with them. I wished then, for a second, that I’d gotten Hrif back, felt bad about that, then remembered that some Sharwan had murdered Thridai. Maybe it hadn’t been a Sharwan after all? But Sharwani reported getting messages in tactile code from someone disguised among us aliens.

Chi’ursemisa went into her room and closed the drapes. I heard her hands on them. Then she came out and asked, “Will you lock us in?”

“Will you try to hurt us?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” Hurdai said. “Your people still attack our ships.”

“You want to submerge us in your Federation,” Chi’ursemisa said. “Lock us in. More honest.”

“Maybe at night,” I said, visualizing the control box for their neural disruptors. It was in the kitchen, second drawer under the counter to the left of the sink and dishwasher.

Chi’ursemisa put her hand to her head where the Barcons had opened her brains to change her language centers. We locked eyes for more than a second—hers inhuman, yellow with brown rays, no whites. Her pupils contracted as if she wanted to see less. “Let’s go in and eat,” I said.

Hurdai said, “The last time we had a meal together, you sent us away for surgery.”

“Now we can understand each other better,” I said.

“But it’s your structure of understanding,” he replied as we started down the hall.

I remembered the Gwyngs complaining about being restricted in their thinking, even in their brain development, by Karst Two, their artificial Federation language. Karst One liberated me, but one of the other refugees wanted to die, caught in Karst’s linguistic net.

I said, “We feel that those who can’t master Karst One or Two aren’t really sapient.”

“No language explains the Universe,” Hurdai said. We were in the kitchen by now. Karl and Daiur were eating at a small table while Marianne was cutting up mushrooms.

Marianne must have caught some of our conversation, because she looked up and smiled. Hurdai and Chi’ursemisa began getting their food out of the refrigerator, talking to each other in their own language in bursts of sound. Maybe they thought we’d force them to speak Karst One now that they knew it. Marianne said to me in English, “
Relax, they’re just talking about the food
.”

Chi’ursemisa looked at the stove, solid topped with red lines around the electric burners, and asked, “How do you cook something in a vegetable oil?” Her nose crinkled up slightly.

Marianne got out a frying pan and some synthetic olive oil. Chi’ursemisa dipped her finger into the bottle and tasted it, then poured about a quarter-inch layer of it into the pan. My wife turned a burner on to about medium heat, and Chi’ursemisa put the pan on it. Hurdai began cutting up meat. Marianne laughed and looked at me
—see they don’t have sexual roles the way you seem to want to sometimes.

I said, in English, “
Well, we are a long way from Virginia
.” Her lips twitched, and she handed me the oil and some vinegar. While Hurdai fried the meat, Chi’ursemisa fixed vegetable plates.

Hurdai tasted the meat and asked, “Where did you get this from?”

“Downstairs,” Marianne said.

“From where?” Chi’ursemisa asked.

“Why do you ask?” I said.

“It’s from a food animal on our planet,” Hurdai said.

“Probably is,” I said. “The Barcons cloned milk animals from my planet for the Gwyngs.”

“You travel disguised on other planets?” Chi’ursemisa frowned, her wrinkle rolls thicker than on a frowning human. Hurdai said something in their language.

“Hurdai, don’t tell her to shut up,” Marianne said. Hurdai ducked his head and began scooping the meat out of the oil. We all fixed our own plates. Karl heated flat bread that the Sharwani preferred to the plastic wafer scoops and handed a basket of it to Chi’ursemisa. 

“We don’t sit legs dangling,” she told me. “I saw a low table we could use in your other large room.” I signed assent and we left Marianne and Hurdai with the children and carried the big coffee table back into the kitchen. She was very able to hold the table in balance between us—that enhanced tactile awareness, I thought.

She looked at me with her brown-rayed irises and said, “Your family are refugees,” using the slang word with its root in the Karst One for “castoff.”

“Yes, and we’re unstable in our relationships with others, as you are.”