Human to Human (20 page)

I didn’t feel human; I felt
too
human. “Sir, I…my social security number is…”The false one from Berkeley? The real number from Virginia, on my driver’s license? I gave him the real one and said, “I was on probation when the Federation found me.”

“On probation from what?” Cromwell said.

“Drug charges. I was helping my brother.”

“Is he on Earth?”

“No, sir, he’s dead. Suicide. We tried to help him.” My lips felt stiff.

Cromwell jotted down my social security number and wrote a bit more. Then he held the paper out to me and said, “I’d prefer to take your prints on glass or plastic, but this will have to do.”

Wool said, “
I’ll get you plastic, Colonel, and he’s a secretor, so a saliva sample—”

“Prints on plastic will do.”

I felt…not quite betrayed. Isolated. Wool got out the plastic sheet, holding it with a piece of cloth. He handed it to Cromwell, who put his own prints on it and then beckoned me over. I laid my hand on the plastic as if it were a biologic lock, but this print could lock me in, not open doors and computer systems for me.

Cromwell put his report and the plastic in the message pod and asked me, “How old were you?”

“Seventeen. They tried me as an adult.”

He looked away, then back at me, and said, “Why?”

Travertine said, “Normally, if a man skips probation and stays out of trouble for three years, the Commonwealth of Virginia drops his case.”

Cromwell and I looked at each other and smiled faintly. Didn’t Travertine know mine wasn’t a normal case? “Do you have other family?” Cromwell asked me.

“Scattered,” I said. “Parents died when I was thirteen. Car wreck. My brother raised me, except for a while when he was at the Veteran’s right after my folks died.” I wondered if he’d see me as poor white trash then.

Cromwell said, “I grew up in Vermont, small, town. My parents moved there as kids in the fifties. My father was a pharmacist. Does it bother you that black men could be pharmacists and colonels?”

“No.” His people had done better than mine. “Where were your people from originally?”

“Near Spartanburg, South Carolina. Grandfather worked in the Norfolk shipyards, commuted from South Carolina to save money to buy a metalworking shop in Vermont. ‘Got clean away,’ he used to tell me.”

“That’s what I tried to do,” I said, but an accident, more than my ambitions, had gotten me to Karst.

“He wanted to see his children just be people,” Cromwell said.

“My ex-brother-in-law is like that, too,” I said. “Now he’s married to a Tibetan woman on Karst and plays human music for aliens. He was black, too. Is black, but on Karst, that’s just a skin color.”

Cromwell’s right eyebrow arched and his face muscles stiffened. He said, “Will you submit to a debriefing?”

Wool said, “He will. We brought him here to give him to you.”

I said, “I need to get away now,” and, to my embarrassment, stumbled when I’d gotten halfway to the door. No one followed me, which made me feel worse alone. I put on the hologram of New York City and wondered why Granite didn’t come in to check up on me. I felt not quite human, not quite not human.

Jackie the Barcon finally came in and asked, “Maybe some sedation?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Don’t be bitter,” she said, injecting me at the same time. “We could be surrendered, too, and it will be much more difficult for us if your humans aren’t understanding.”

“They aren’t
my
humans,” I said.

“Your genotype tells lies, then,” she said, watching my eyelids grow heavy.

“What should I tell them?”

“Be honest always,” she said. “You’re not trained to lie successfully.”

The drug pulled down my eyelids. I dreamed of Karriaagzh and Black Amber arguing over me, scenes in white rooms with views that shifted between Black Amber’s beach and a spruce-analog forest.

Humans spoke out beyond my door. I woke up. As I was pulling on my uniform pants, Jackie came in and said, “Fifty-three humans—Marines and linguists—arrived last night.”

When I saw the five young Marines pulling the toilet basins up and down, my first thought was that their uniforms were much spiffier than ours. But had I ever been so gawky? Jackie wriggled her nose and said to one, “You wish to guard him.”

“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant, a beefy redhead, said. I tried to remember how Marine rank went—what was a lieutenant? Why was a lieutenant here?

“Am I leaving soon?” I said.

“Yes,” the lieutenant said.

“I’d like to say good-bye to my friends.”

The lieutenant’s face went rigid. Jackie said, “Granite Grit is this way,” and led us through another station door as if the lieutenant had agreed.

I stopped in the doorway, watching. Granite seemed unperturbed, teaching four linguists the rudiments of Karst One, screens and terminals scattered around the various knees, elbows, and hocks as they sprawled on the floor between two holowalls of alien steppe, a loop with Granite’s kind fighting in the foreground.

“Granite,” I said in Karst One, “I’m leaving soon. Tell Marianne I’ll miss her.”

“Tom,” he said, “will they want you to tell them your whole life?”

“Probably. Take care. We’re xeno flipflops.”

“You exaggerate. These people are very interested.” In Karst One,
interest
as a verb had strong overtones of involvement, emotional attachment—more so than English. I hoped the humans would become even more interested.

We went on. In a large room that hadn’t been used until now, smelling vaguely of ozone and stale grease, Travertine and Wool answered questions in English and Chinese. A Russian sat in the back talking into a small recorder. He looked back at me and scowled as if I should have discovered Russians in space, not Tibetans.

Colonel Cromwell hailed over the loud speaker, “Tom Gentry, report to the transporter room.” I guessed that he meant the gate room. “Good-bye, Wool, Travertine,” I called out in English.

One of the Marines touched my elbow. I said, “I’m coming.”

They boxed me in as if I planned to run out into vacuum, but needed Jackie and me to show them where to go.

“We’ve loaned them a larger transport,” Jackie said in Karst One when we all got in the gate room. The transport waiting for us looked like a thirty-foot-long blue egg with white wingbolts outlining the hatch edges. The wings on the bolts were outscale, too, maybe a foot across, two inches thick, slightly ablated from transgeometry wrack.

“Talk English,” the red-haired Marine said.

“She said the Federation loaned you the transport pod.”

“We’re cooperating,” Jackie said. “Tom will cooperate. We call him Red Clay, so if someone refers to him by that, we’re being formal.” She put her fingers over her nose. Were we making her hysterical? She’d lost it once when challenged by Alameda County racists. “Don’t worry about me, Red Clay,” she said.

“Stuck inside of human space,” the lieutenant said, almost as if he were quoting something, “with the human blues again.” Misquoting Bob Dylan?

Colonel Cromwell came in then and looked at the transport’s hatch. The Marines saluted him, and he looked up and saluted them back, sloppily with the thumb wriggling. He said to the gate technician, one of the small bears, as if the bear understood English, “You can’t put them down underwater?”

Jackie translated from English to Karst One, listened to the bear, then translated back, “The mathematics of water are more fractal than the mathematics of air, just as atmosphere is more complex than low-hydrogen count space. We’re surrendering to you our facilities in Berkeley so you’ll arrive there first.”

I feared I’d be moved to an underwater station for years of debriefing, a second-to-second replay of my past life. I’d go crazy.

Cromwell said, “If we move him underwater, you can’t track him.”

“We can track him through his skull computer, but I’ll turn it off for you,” Jackie said “Come here, Tom.” She held out one of the skull-form plates and a jar of conducting grease.

“Can we take it out?” Cromwell said.

“It’s major surgery, and do you have a replacement temporal skull plate ready?”

“No.” He didn’t sound happy about trusting her to turn my computer off.

I went up to her and leaned my head to the right while she smeared on the grease and laid the plate over the bone. I wasn’t aware that anything happened, but I couldn’t check unless someone spoke to me in Karst Two. I asked, “Are we leaving now?”

“Yes,” Cromwell said. “Dr. Weiss and Academician Wu are staying.”

“Is she American Chinese?”

“No, Chinese Christian.” Cromwell didn’t seem to want to say more. I opened the wing bolts on the transport and opened the hatch. Fresh sealant gleamed on the hatch rim.

“Joint Chinese-American experiments,” the Marine said, his back stiff.

“Let’s load up,” Colonel Cromwell said. Even though the hatch was large enough to walk through erect, I ducked my head as I left. The Marine lieutenant and Jackie talked briefly, not so loud that I could make out the words, then he came in tailing his squad and dogged down the internal bolts. My job, normally, I thought. In three and a half minutes the transport lurched into Berkeley.

When the Marines opened the hatch, I saw the FBI agent Peter Friese, his hair graying but his black shoes just as polished as when he’d come in with another agent to talk to me in Berkeley nine years earlier. He held his computerized attaché case, and his suit jacket swung­ back enough to expose his handgun.

“We’ve arrested Alex,” he said.

“Did the Federation tell you about him?”

“Were they planning on telling us they’d infiltrated the Berkeley physics department, now, Tom?”

“Yes. How did you find out if they didn’t tell you?” I felt very off-balance, flustered, precisely the way Friese wanted me to feel.

“I’ve been watching him for years. I knew he was some kind of illegal.”

I looked at Friese more closely. He looked to be about fifty. All these years, he’d stayed in Berkeley, never promoted beyond field agent. He’d spotted a real alien, maybe always knew what he’d uncovered, but couldn’t speak for fear of being branded crazy. I said, “How’s Alex taking it?”

“He’s talking a lot,” Friese said. I smiled, familiar with this routine from my first bust. Friese frowned and said, “We’re taking suicide precautions.”

Like a jab to my guts. Cromwell and the Marine lieutenant both looked at me, then at Friese. I said, “He likes humans. He’d always defend them to me.”

“Then you aren’t human either,” Friese said.

“No, I am.”

“We’ll run DNA checks,” Friese said. “That’s what we did to Alex. What is his real name?”

I said, “I just knew, know him as Alex.” Let’s not speak of him in the past tense, I told myself. Then I realized why Friese wanted Alex’s real name. I was slow picking that up. I was glad I didn’t give Friese this little verbal lever against Alex, but then the Federation was going to turn him over to the human authorities, abandon him to us. “We thought he was turning native.”

“And what the fuck did you turn?” Friese asked. He opened his briefcase and faxed my prints out, then said, “Load him, gentlemen.” He pulled out the phone jack cable and the attaché case snapped shut.

We walked out of the warehouse in Berkeley, again. The fog obscured the details: trolleys and buses going by with their headlights on, dusk. A gray stretch limo, windows like mirrors, with three different antennas over the trunk, waited at the curb. Friese opened the door, and I saw that the same mirror windows blocked off the driver from the passenger compartment, which was huge, big enough for nine sitting on three bench seats in a U around a table. Behind those seats were a bar and a jump seat for the bartender. This was the automotive equivalent of Air Force One.

“Looks like a dealer’s car, doesn’t it?” Friese said as two Marines got in first, securing the limo’s perimeters.

He’d been briefed about Warren. I said, “Warren never had a car like this, and he was the only man I knew for a fact was a dealer.” I got in, feeling his hand almost touch my head in that cop “duck the suspect’s head” gesture.

Cromwell got in after us. He said to Friese, “Tom was told by his people to cooperate.”

Friese said, “They’ve had us infiltrated for years.”

I said, “Spoken like a man who now knows he wasn’t crazy.”

“Shut up,” Friese said.

“Come on, you’ve been vindicated. You’ve got an alien anthropologist to torture.”

Cromwell said, as we pulled onto an expressway, “Tom, you will have to tell us about Alex.”

And the Sharwani, I thought. I was no longer afraid of being shot, but of being interrogated for years, inquisitors probing every detail of my life twice, three times, double- and triple-checking inconsistencies, lapses of memory, the lies I desperately wanted to tell.

“Will you let me write my wife?”

“She’s a third-generation leftist,” Friese said. “And she’s a linguist.”

I wasn’t sure what being a linguist had to do with anything until I realized Marianne’s skills could be used for form codes, artificial languages. I wished that we had made up our private language now that we were together talking in it, away from these people. “I’ve got a son, Karl David. He’s eight.”

“What happened to the black musician?” Friese looked at Cromwell and smiled.

“Sapients love human music. He likes playing strictly human music without it being culturally black or white. He left Molly and married a woman named Yangchenla.”

“One of the Tibetans,” Cromwell said, clarifying things for Friese.

“The Chinese must be thrilled.”

Cromwell said, “About as thrilled, Friese, as we’d be if we’d found a bunch of Sea Island blacks out there.” Cromwell didn’t sound like he thought much of primitives, even of his own race. I was a little shocked, but remembered how the Tibetans had embarrassed me when Black Amber first exposed me to them.

I said, “A village helped a Federation crew once. The language they speak now is about as much Tibetan as French is Latin. Marianne recognized elements of a Buddhist trade language in what they speak. They weren’t that isolated or primitive even back five hundred years ago.”

Cromwell said, “The Russians are wishing they had taken Tibet back in the nineteenth century.”

I lost interest in their speculations and began worrying about myself as we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and headed up to Tiburon.

Friese pulled out a black cloth bag from his attaché case and pulled it over my head. Cromwell said, “Hey,” but I suspected he was playing the good cop as the bag stayed on until I was loaded in what for a moment I feared was a submarine. But the thing went up and not down.

We flew hours and hours. I remembered the drill for stopping body trembles—pull against yourself. What stance was I supposed to take? Jackie had told me not to lie. Would it be a lie to conceal a hatred of their cop attitudes and suspicions, their xenophobia? Marianne, I thought, would know better how to handle this, more diplomatic with her own kind, my own kind.

And would the cadets I’d been working with miss me?

“Take the hood off his head and let him read something,” Cromwell said. “It’s a long flight.”

Someone slid the hood off without taking any of my head hair with it. I shook my hair back and watched Friese fold the hood up neatly and put it back in his attaché case.

I expected that the plane wouldn’t have windows, but it did. Below us was a dark blank plain with a few lights, the glitter of car lights on trailers. We were flying low, twisting.

“Thanks,” I said.

Cromwell offered me a cigarette, but I didn’t smoke. One of the Marines came by with canned soft drinks and I took a Dr. Pepper. Funny, after so many years, to be drinking a Dr. Pepper. I tried to remember whether I’d been able to buy them in Berkeley. Cromwell said, “We’ve got magazines.”

I almost said,
we get some of them on Karst,
but didn’t think mentioning that would be appropriate now.

Clumps of lights passed underneath like the star clusters around Karst in reverse, grounded, not in the sky. Then as we flew into the dawn, I saw a pale, closer cluster behind the Appalachians. The plane turned downward toward a lake.

Friese said, “Weiss said lakes would work almost as well as oceans.”

Reality is a set of wave functions with liquid and solid matter being simply more complex: vibrations, brains being more complex vibrations cutting reality into standing waves. Yeah, none of this seemed quite real. My body buzzed as if I’d been doing drugs. I said, “Where are we?”

Cromwell said, “Oh, Tom, you aren’t supposed to know that.” He sounded terribly tired himself.

The pontoons hit the water. Friese pulled the hood out of his attaché case again.

I said, “I was told not to lie.”

The Colonel and the FBI man looked at each other and shrugged. Friese folded up the hood and put it away again.