Human to Human (16 page)

Rhyodolite, from inside his tube couch, said, “Collaborator (reasonable one) is coming to talk.”

I said, “Drusah?”

Marianne nodded.

Chi’ursemisa said, “It’s a domestic matter.”

I felt sorry for them if it was. Hurdai touched his ear, drew back a dry finger, and threw the cloth on the table. He said, “We need to find Daiur, quickly.”

Chi’ursemisa said something in what sounded like a language I hadn’t heard before. Hurdai touched his ear again, sniffed the finger, and answered Chi’ursemisa with an alien word almost like a grunt.

The elevator chimed and I asked, “Who is it?”

“Drusah and Barcons,” a Barcon voice said.

Marianne said, “Let Granite check them.”

Rhyodolite said, from deep in his sofa, “I can smell the difference.”

I opened the door. Rhyodolite wriggled up until his shoulders were out of the tube sofa, then he pushed himself the rest of the way out with his hands. His uniform was a wrinkled mess. The two Barcons and Drusah stared at him as he sniffed around them and said, “They are who they say they are.”

The very slightly smaller Barcon said, “And you have to be a Gwyng.”

Drusah and the two other Sharwani began talking rapidly in a Sharwani language we couldn’t follow. Drusah stopped and said to us, “There’s been another glider landing, but Control found the ship and is intercepting it.”

More imitations of me? My skin hairs went up.

Hurdai said, “They have Daiur. Drusah, you’re dead if the others see you. We know what you are.”

The larger Barcon, a hair broader at the hips, less than an inch higher, pulled out a small terminal and plugged it into one of our leads. She scribbled down something with a data pen, then said, “We’ve sent for a Control Squad.”

Hurdai said, “But they’ll be gone by then.”

Granite said, “Someone would have to stay with Marianne and Chi’ursemisa.”

Marianne said, “I can manage Chi’ursemisa.”

Chi’ursemisa said, “Wait for Control. And, Marianne, I am not the problem.”

Hurdai touched his ear again and made a sound in his throat halfway between a laugh and a hum.

“What about Drusah?” the larger Barcon said.

“I can come with you,” he said. “I’ve fought against my people before.”

“No, no deaths,” the larger Barcon said. “I can issue stun sticks.” She pulled out two things like cattle prods and gave them to Granite Grit and me. “Tom, also bring the controller. Chi’ursemisa, Drusah, if you’re in range, the controller will bring you down, too, but we will make you comfortable.”

I wished then for a gun that shot lead bullets, big fat ones.

Marianne said, “Tom, I could go instead of you.”

I looked at Chi’ursemisa, then at Marianne. “No, you stay with her. You’ll be all right.”

The Barcon who’d given us the stun sticks said, “A Control Squad will be here soon. We should wait.”

“We’re wasting time,” Hurdai said. “Daiur’s life.”

Chi’ursemisa said, “Wait for Control.” She bared her teeth; I saw a fragment of Hurdai’s ear embedded between two of them. Whatever we did, we needed to get Hurdai away from her.

Rhyodolite said, “Let’s go then (now),” and that seemed to make up our minds. Granite raised his feathers until they stood on end and shook them, then jerked them flat, clasped down tight.

The smaller Barcon said, “Control will follow us. They can trace. Drusah will stay here.”

We looked around at each other—not at all the comprehending eyeball bounce around of a group coming home from successful negotiations. When I looked into the big female Barcon’s eyes, I felt that we were exchanging glances as a stalling technique.

Rhyodolite said, “We could have been gone by now (the elevator response time is quicker than this looking).”

I went over and pushed the elevator call button. The door opened without chiming, empty, and we all got in without speaking. Hurdai, standing next to me, smelling vaguely of wet ashes, raised his eyes and gave me a most alien stare, the muscles in the face tense and immobile.

Rhyodolite said, “You have a distinctive smell.” As he had no word developed for
Sharwani
yet, he spoke a sonar code that my computer transformed into an image of Hurdai.

Hurdai, not having the skull computer, asked, “What did he say?”

The small male Barcon said, “He said he can identify your species by its odor.”

“Seems animalistic to sense air molecules,” Hurdai said.

Rhyodolite’s shoulder fur bristled; I heard it rustle under his clothes. The elevator opened on the ground floor, and we got out, Hurdai surrounded by the rest of us, all of us not too close together. Rhyodolite walked in front.

Hurdai said, “About three cross-streets away.”

We walked down the street—a street broad enough for buses, electric cars, and pedestrians, with no barriers between us. On either side were apartment buildings
—living floors
was English’s closest translation to the Karst One term—mostly closed with mirrored windows tinted bronze, green, silver, set in stone or concrete facades, and some smaller buildings of carved wood.

Two electric cars, with plastic egg-shaped bodies and three thin wheels, came toward us as we walked inland. A bus, transparent on top, opaque black below, pulled away from the curb and turned down the first side street. Another car and a bicycle with a bullet-like Vector covering turned left across from us at the second street and went out, passing the two cars at the third street. All of them went as if that third street, where the hostiles waited, was insignificant.

I looked up and saw high cirrus clouds, mare’s tails­ so much like Earth’s, that sky, except for the visible stars. One star cluster almost merged now with the cirrus whisps. The sky was a lighter blue, all the star clusters in the astronomical neighborhood backlighting it. I wondered if I was so aware of all these sky facts because I’d been on Earth not that long ago, or because…

…because these were aliens who couldn’t tell me from a Sharwani copy, because we were going out to find Sharwani disguised as me, as Jereks, as… And because of all this, my senses, beyond my consciousness, keened themselves up. Glands sluiced my body with adrenaline, muscle fibers cocked themselves in a wave of slight tics crossing my body, rippling down my arms, relaxing.

My eyes turned to each of my companion aliens. I tried to break down my visual maps of these people, tried to see in them their peculiarly individual traits. Granite looked at me as if he were doing the same thing. We should be able to recognize each other in all situations, I thought, because we’d been roommates from cadet days when we were both stripped of hair and feathers. I tried to memorize the color pattern of his feathers before looking at the Barcons; Barcons were always Barcons, never giving names, and these were in full fur, the semi-human faces hidden.

The female Barcon, guessing why I stared so, said, “You’ve just met us, so there’s no disgrace in non-absolute recognition. Identification by skull implant is safer.”

Hurdai said, “They’re waiting for me there.”

I squeezed the control box without activating it and said, “Who are they trying to look like?”

Rhyodolite said, “Tell the one-eared to go first.”

The male Barcon said, “They’re waiting for you?”

Hurdai stood there, arms slightly akimbo, finger curled, knees and back slightly bent. The physics of the posture are trans-specific. His head went up and down slightly, gauging distances. I felt my own body sink slightly. My fingers squirmed up over the control box’s activator button. Then my hand tightened, still not pushing the button, but firmly on it.

Granite said, “Go first, Hurdai.” Granite’s short femurs, normally parallel to the ground, jerked, ruffing his body feathers, then the femurs bent below their usual parallel as he crouched, bending hips and knees, then the hock joints that I thought of as his knees, really his ankles.
Get your reality maps straight, Red Clay.

My mental voice sounded like Karriaagzh.

Hurdai walked forward a few steps, then looked over his shoulder at us. The fur on his cheekbones ruffled; he pressed his lips even thinner. Then he went through the passage between a small wooden building about four floors and a twenty-story building with no windows.

I looked over at the wooden” building on my left and saw silhouettes against windows with wire screens, no glass. I was relieved that whatever they were, they could hear us, then wondered if they were the bad guys, watching, listening.

We couldn’t see Hurdai when he said, “Come on.”

The male Barcon said, “He talked to others in his language.” He patched through a recording to Control, then said, “There’s a basement under the wooden building, rock foundation.”

His mate said, “Who’s in the wooden building?”

Big Barcon fingers moved over the communication device, then he said, “Ape stock, not Ahrams, bigger than Red Clay.”

People who didn’t care about the temperature, I thought. And in the other building without windows, people who preferred light mixed differently than from Karst’s sun.

I thought, I’ll kill Hurdai if this is a trap. We began walking in. Rhyodolite went first, a Gwyng forcing himself to be the bravest.

Hurdai was with seven Jereks—no, they weren’t Jereks, their shoulders were flat like mine, like Hurdai’s. Battles with aliens are supposed to happen in deep space, I thought as I dived away, rolling, from the gun pointed at me. I pushed the controller; Hurdai stayed on his feet. One of the Barcons grabbed me, and we ran, bobbing and weaving to the basement of the wooden house.

Rhyodolite and Granite were standing on the wrong side of Hurdai. I kept pushing the controller box button.

Hurdai pointed. Two Sharwani aimed. Rhyodolite threw himself in front of Granite, and his head exploded. Granite hounded forward, twelve feet up and at least that forward, hit the fake Jerek with his stun stick and took the weapon, threw it to us. Then he grabbed the creature who had killed Rhyodolite and tried to pull it apart, arms in one scaly fist, one leg in the other. Everyone else froze—Jereks, us—and Granite bounded sideways, throwing the Sharwan at the others. Then another bound and Granite was with us, staring out of the slits in the basement wall.

“It has to be a suicide team,” the female Barcon said. She sounded as though her observation meant nothing to us.

They were crazy, coming in toward us, skins jerking where the Sharwani would normally raise hair, not lowering the nose in the Jerek threat face. Granite said, “They had flat shoulders.”

I said, “Yeah, they still have flat shoulders. And the control box doesn’t work on Hurdai.”

The male Barcon said, “Hurdai told them to kill Rhyodolite because he knew Gwyngs could smell. But we can smell the difference, too. Ashes, not musk.”

Granite clamped his feathers down tightly and shuddered. He picked up the Sharwani gun and said, “Can we kill them?” His hand didn’t fit in the trigger guard, though, and he threw it down and we watched it turn red.

As smoke rose from the burning gun, the Sharwani rushed us, Hurdai behind. Granite stunned two of them, then I knocked Hurdai down, his throat in my hands. And I was just wringing his neck, screaming in English, “Motherfucker, pig, son of a bitch, fucked up the control box, used your own son, tricked us.”

And he died and went limp. More aliens rushed in. I sat up and screamed. Then I realized their shoulders were round and they were our Jereks, Institute of Control. I put my hands over my face and cried. They pulled my hands down and put plastic cuffs on, as though I were a wild animal myself.

The Barcons bent over Hurdai, thrusting trocars up his neck veins and arteries, but one of the Jereks clicked a stopwatch and said, “Brain death, stop.” I saw Cadmium come up, wearing a Rector’s Office patch on his uniform. He looked at Rhyodolite lying there, face down, and said to the Barcons, “Save him. Brain reconstruct.”

The male Barcon turned Rhyodolite over, and we saw the bloody hollow where his eyes and brain had been. Cadmium slowly sank to the ground. The Barcons tried to rouse him, but he was going into protective coma, chilling down, so they loaded him on a stretcher.

One of the Jereks came up to me and checked my skull computer, then asked, “Is it easy for you to
kill?”

I said, “He set us up. I tried to stun him, but the box didn’t work. Chi’ursemisa…” Chi’ursemisa probably tore the control implant out of him—the ear was a sham. I lost it so badly I tried to wiggle out of the cuffs, then realized I looked like a fool.

The Jerek stepped back until I got myself calmed down somewhat. He said, “You can’t judge them as you judge your own kind. I think they were very frightened, or they would have aimed better and killed all of you. And you had a stun stick.”

“Frightened?” I trembled. “Take off the cuffs, please. I’m not a Sharwan.”

He laid a testing device against my skull and said, “The Sharwani duplicate blood heat patterns fairly well. How do you know we’re not Sharwani ourselves?”

“You have round shoulders and you smell like Jereks.”

He lowered his nose. I almost laughed, but didn’t.