Human to Human (19 page)

“We’ve derived your languages from your television broadcasts.”

“Bullshit,” the American voice said.

“Please meet us. Let us explain what we represent,” Wool said.

We heard some other language murmured—Wool and Travertine stared at each other—not any of their languages? Then the American said, “You’ve trapped us.”

Wool said, “Our net kept you from gating into the Sun.”

Travertine’s beak opened; his face feathers flared; but he didn’t contradict Wool verbally. Wool looked over at Travertine and grimaced.

My fingers mechanically oiled Granite’s feathers. His beak was open, tongue moving up and down with his breaths.

“May we bring weapons?”

“Sure,” Travertine said. He rolled his head on his neck, eyeballs fixed on the radio, then shuddered. “One of my kind was killed by something that looked like you.”

“How… yes, you’ve been watching our television. What do you look like?”

“You should first see us live, so we can move our postures to decrease tensions if necessary, make supplicating noises.” Travertine rolled his head again, and Wool reached over and touched him. Pulse put his hands in his lap and stared at his fingers as if thinking about weapons.

Wool said, “We can lay an airlock over your hatches, but we’ll let you do the maneuvering in.”

I heard an Oriental language being spoken, a man, then a woman. The woman spoke in Chinese-accented English, “Can one of you come through first? In just a suit?”

Pulse and Wool looked at each other, then Wool said, “No, it’s better if we all meet you. We have representatives from several planets, including a refugee from yours.”

My head went back as I heard that—
okay, I’m not going to hide
.

Pulse looked over at another screen and said, “They’ve sent out a laser pulse, coded, but it’s obvious what they’re saying.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Wool said to the humans in their transport, “Do you want to know a little about us before we meet?”

“No,” the Chinese woman said. I imagined her as looking somewhat like Yangchenla, small and tough, but with a longer, more delicate face. Despite my fears, my cock stirred slightly in my pants; then I was embarrassed.

“We’re turning your transport door toward the airlock.” Wool told them, his hands working on the grapplers’ controls, his eyes on the overhead screens showing the grapplers from five different angles. The airlock tunnel snaked out from the bottom of the middle screen, then showed on all the screens. Sealant gel oozed around the lock’s soft plastic rim, then froze as Wool ran a current through the electromorphic gel.

“Okay, now. Bring weapons if you want,” Pulse said, scratching the fur over his eyes. Some shed on his fingers, and he stared at the blond fuzz for a second before wiping it away on his seat. To us, in Karst One, he said, “Everyone sit down.”

I realized, hearing those words, that I had begun to think in English. Stress affected me that way.

The first one through was a big American black man, wearing a uniform. Travertine’s feathers jerked up, then he looked at me. I didn’t say anything. The man said, with the voice we had heard earlier, “Who speaks English?” He had fewer traces of Black English in his speech than Sam did—none: a pure military accent with a tang of West Virginia.

Travertine said, “Wool and I do. Travertine and Wool are our Federation work names. Red Clay, Tom, of course, speaks it, too, and two others, but they’re asleep now.” Travertine’s feathers were standing at right angles to his body, quivering as though a wind ruffled them.

Wool said, also in English, “Relax, Travertine.”

“I’m Colonel James Cromwell.” He looked at me and asked, “Are you human?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Red Clay, Tom? The refugee?”

“Yes, sir. My real name is Tom Gentry, my Federation work name is Red Clay.”

“Poor boy, I’d guess. What did they do to get you?” 

I fought myself back into Standard English. “They educated me.”

Colonel Cromwell said, “Send in Chris.”

Chris was the Oriental woman. Then I heard another human come through. Joseph Weiss. Cromwell said, “You shouldn’t risk—”

“So you are here,” Weiss said to me.

“You’ve met this man before?” Cromwell said. “And the bird with all his feathers standing on end, I think.”

Travertine jerked them flat and said, “So, Dr. Weiss, you changed your mind.”

Cromwell raised one eyebrow, then looked at Wool, whose de-haired face showed muscles twitching under his cheekbones. Wool said in Karst One, “Red Clay, secret prior information leaks cause one to forfeit contact shares.” The Karst phrasing was more direct, but even more formal.

I said, in English, “
I’d feel mean making money off my kind
.” Accent and rhythms straight from the hills—so dumb-ass a sound brought heat to my face.

Cromwell sat down on one of our chairs and stared us all into silence. Weiss slowly turned red, another display of human vascular lability. “Joseph, you said you discovered how to do this all on your own?” The Colonel wasn’t exactly asking. His own brown skin was turning a dark rose. Human facial circulatory systems began to disgust me.

“They tried to…yes, I knew I was on
the right track or they wouldn’t have shown me it could be done.”

Travertine said, “Will you be all right if I stand? I need to—I think your word for it is
slice
or
mute,
in reference to hawks or falcons shitting.” He sounded insane. As he spoke, he rose up slowly. Cromwell smiled, then his eyes lost focus, drifted around in their sockets as if the Colonel was trying to figure out who to have arrested. I watched Travertine walk stiffly out of the room. Granite stayed seated.

Wool said, “So Dr. Weiss, you’ve already met Travertine and Tom Gentry. Let me introduce you to Granite Grit and Pulse. Tom, what is a Colonel?”

“Lieutenant Colonel, actually,” Cromwell said. He suddenly seemed more nervous than he had when he first came in. Weiss began walking around looking at things, his face drooping, his shoulders hunched. He sighed from time to time.

“He’s a military leader, more than of a squad, not quite of an Institute,” I said.

“We need to make this contact official,” Wool said.

“Can you help us?”

“Who is this ‘we’?” Cromwell said.

“A multi-species Federation of one hundred thirty-four species,” Wool said. Travertine came back in now, eyes looking a bit glazed.

“No shit,” Cromwell said. “Who’s your ranking officer here?”

“I am,” Wool said, “but we could also translate what we are as officiators, facilitators.”

Pulse asked Wool to translate, then cupped his hand and gestured yes. Cromwell looked from Weiss to Granite to Travertine, then said, “How is this arranged?”

Wool smiled, an expression not natural to his face muscles, which seemed to slip out of place, tendons not grounded on the same bone points. “I leave it to your judgment, but normally, we invite a team of your people here to learn our trade language.”

I said, “We don’t force contact, but if you don’t join the Federation, we bar certain gate geometries. It’s like a trading union.”

Travertine said in Karst One, “Why don’t you tell them we’ll protect them from the Sharwani?”

Wool’s features collapsed into one of his true expressions, nostrils flared and tongue slightly protruding. Granite’s feathers stirred on his head. Now wasn’t the time to threaten my conspecifics with Sharwani. Also, a quick description would sound too melodramatic.

Colonel Cromwell began laughing. The Barcons looked in quickly, and Cromwell stopped laughing and said, “You have more aboard here than you’ve introduced.”

“They’re Barcons,” I said. “They look somewhat like black people when they’re de-haired.”

Cromwell said, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

S’wam said, “If you aren’t in hysterics, Lieutenant Colonel Cromwell, you don’t need us.”

Weiss said, “I know enough about linguistics not to buy that ‘learned your languages from television’ line.” The Barcon who called herself Jackie said, “Tibetan was the Rosetta stone.”

“Most of the humans we know are descended from Tibetans,” Wool said.

The Chinese woman smiled. Cromwell looked at her, his trained left eyebrow jerking but not going up in the fine disdainful arch it was educated to make.

Weiss said, “Tibetans don’t call themselves that. And how did they manage in an alien culture?”

Before I could answer, Wool said, “Some of them are in the Federation Academy now; one is in the Institute of Linguistics; another, I suspect, will be drafted into the Institute of Physics. Others are Free Traders; still others live in ways only half-modified from the life they lived in the Himalayas.”

Cromwell said something in Chinese to the woman. Wool said something in Chinese himself and explained in English, “Chinese was one of the first non-Tibetan languages we learned.”

“We’d like to go back,” Cromwell said.

“Why don’t you stay?” Wool said. “You’re so calm for a human.”

“Joe knew you. It makes you seem safer.” Cromwell stopped talking as if thinking out more fully the implications of aliens who went around on Earth. “Can we go?”

“Bring everyone in here and wait for an answer to your message. Send more messages. We have plenty of room here. Tom can show you around,” Wool said.

“I….”

“We can bring in other humans,” Travertine said. “The Tibetans are very nice now.”

Cromwell shrugged and sat down.

Pulse said, “Of course, if you think you’re being held against your will, we would prefer that you leave.”

Weiss asked, “Tom, how are your Berkeley wife and little boy?”

I started, not thinking about Marianne just then, and especially not about Karl. “They’re fine. Karl’s in a multi-species play group.”

Cromwell said, “Multi-species play group?”

I shrugged, suddenly aware of how different all my life among the non-humans had been compared to the imaginings about it in human fiction. Yuppie aliens, the feel of a very civilized zoo where we were, as Tesseract explained, each other’s keepers.
Am I…was I a bad keeper for my brother?
“I have a lot to explain.”

Cromwell stared at me a long minute and then said, “I can imagine you must.”

My mental concepts clashed—I was Federation, I was human. I was with these people—no, with these others. My body trembled slightly, then I sat down.

“We’ll stay,” Cromwell said, “if you have room for five more.”

Pulse said in Karst One, “I could gate my people out.”

Cromwell rubbed his thighs through his uniform and said, “Who’ll outnumber who?”

“You will. It’s your solar system,” Wool said. “You could kill us all and we’d just block you from the established geometries, no more.”

“But we’d be out here always,” Granite said. Cromwell said, “We need to send messages.”

Wool said, “We can give you a message pod and put it down at the White House, Peking, wherever.”

Travertine said in Karst One, “They get suspicious if you try too hard to put them at their ease.”

“Oh, Travertine,” I said in English, but Cromwell looked like he was indeed becoming more suspicious.

Weiss said, “If they wanted to have stopped us, they would have done something to mislead me.”

Chris—how did a Chinese woman get that name?—said, “Gentry, who would have smuggled data to Beijing?” Weiss seemed surprised; I suspected Marianne and Trung, Yangchenla’s uncle, but didn’t say anything.

“Weiss would have discovered everything independently,” Travertine said. “Even Carstairs could have, but he thought Alex knew and kept waiting for answers.”

Wool found a message pod. “We can settle all the complexities later,” he said. “Now, Lieutenant Colonel Cromwell, you might send whatever message you want.”

“I won’t know for hours if it arrived.”

“We could gate any reply back. We won’t decode it.” Cromwell began to write. Pulse went out then, and the station lights dimmed as the gates drew current to send the Control Squad away. “Bringing in reinforcement?” Cromwell asked, looking up, his skin darker than it had been, slick with sweat, as if describing the situation in writing made the situation more dramatic than when he first saw us.

“No, sending them away,” Wool said.

“How many planets again?” Cromwell put his pen down and looked up at Wool when he said that.

“One hundred thirty-four.”

“How many didn’t join the Federation when you contacted them?”

“About seventeen, and some of those may yet. We’re in unofficial contact with about five of them,” Wool said.

Cromwell shook his writing hand and clenched and unclenched the fingers, then picked up his pen and wrote more. Then he asked, “Gentry, what is your social security number?”

I felt as if he’d hit me in the stomach.

“You weren’t spirited away as a baby,” he said. “Or
are
you human?”