Human to Human (22 page)

Hypertext
New York Times—
I
wondered if the UCal Libraries were now on computer this way as I went through all the conflicts involving more than two people, then through the physics news, then through aliens. Not a byte on me; my body more than my brain reacted first, coiling up the belly muscles, running an adrenaline test on the nerves and blood vessels. My mind cycled and recycled. The body’s fight or flight proposition was useless.

When Codresque brought me tennis clothes, he asked, “Read enough?”

“So, nobody except the government knows I’m here.”

“Perhaps that isn’t all of the
New York Times.”

“Are you afraid the general population would panic? That’s one reason Karst didn’t want to make contact earlier—all the xenophobia movies about alien invaders.”

“We did make
The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

I laughed, remembering the Barcons laughing when I proposed that very movie as a defense of human attitudes about aliens. “People out there aren’t gods or invaders. And you’re not just a servant.”

“We are all servants here,” Codresque said. His fleshy eyelids hooded his eyes, and his lips pulled in, coarse skin around them shifting. I wondered if his stocky body was more muscle than fat. He was shorter than me.

I bobbed my head slightly. Codresque left me then. I dressed in tennis clothes and went downstairs. One of the guards, dressed in a white tunic, was dusting. He looked up and said, “I’ll take you out to the tennis court.”

“Thanks,” I said and followed him through the kitchen, which was huge and a bit shabby, paint flaking off the upper cabinets.

“You’re going to learn an odd game,” Angleton said when he saw us. “The court is clay.” He held two rackets in his left hand and balls in his right.

I vaguely remembered having seen asphalt courts and shrugged as if I didn’t care. I’d probably never play tennis again. As we walked out, he handed me one of the rackets, handle damp from his sweat. I remembered exercise bars in the Karst gym clammy with cold alien sweat. Somehow, feeling Angleton’s sweat on the leather grip made him more a fellow creature to me. I said, 
“We play with Frisbees and other flying discs on Karst. That’s probably the nearest I’ve come to this.”

“Frisbees?”

“The Gwyngs copied them or had something similar.”

He adjusted my thumb on the grip and said, “Well, you don’t grab; you hit.”

“I’ve seen it on television,” I said, “when we were observing.”

“Did you like our television?”

“It’s gotten better.” We were at the court now, and I saw the artificial playing machine, white enameled metal the size of a freezer. Arrays of photoelectric cells and sensors glittered as it rolled forward and then backed up to the baseline, squatting on smooth plastic tracks and multi-directional roller balls.

“When are you going to begin debriefing me?” I asked.

“Gee, I don’t know,” Angleton said as though I was rude to ask. He threw a ball up in the air and hit it. The machine on the other side of the net scooted up, inhaled the ball, and blew it back toward us.

I watched carefully to see exactly how Angleton hit the ball, then swung my racket to see how it felt. Okay. Angleton handed me three balls and said, “Serve them. Toss them up and hit them over the net. Keep your wrist bent like this.”

First racing bikes, now this. I missed the first ball, hit the second, but out of the court, then got the third one just right. The machine hurled it back to me before I could think. I slashed out and the ball slewed off to the side.

“You want the racket at right angles to ball travel,” Angleton said.

So I was a klutz with the racket. I was faster on my feet than Angleton expected.

“You move well,” he said after I rushed the net and lobbed one over and straight down into the machine’s ball intake, then rushed backwards, jumped and connected, but failed to get the ball in the court.

“It comes from playing at Tenleaving,” I said.

“I’m not debriefing you. I’ll rally with you a bit.”

Angleton went to the machine and switched something.

It rolled back, then around to the net, stopping and shifting arrays so that it had clear views of both the near and far lines.

We hit the ball back and forth, first with lots of misses on my part, then I began to get better, and this made Angleton seem less intimidating. I realized then that he had been intimidating me.

“Um,” he said, “better not do too much of this the first day. You’ll be sore.”

“Could we go out? I haven’t seen a shopping center since Boston.”

“Not yet,” he said. He put the head of his racket in a cover and zipped it up. “Why you?”

“You mean why did they take me to educate?” He nodded. I said, “They knew that nobody would miss me. Mica, the Gwyng who was stranded here, wrote a good report on me. I wasn’t a xenophobe compared to other humans, I suppose.”

“Was he really stranded?”

“Two others died. Gwyngs don’t set out to die even when they try to be braver than anyone else.”

He came over and took my racket and zipped a cover on it, too, sighing as he did. I said, “I’m sorry if you got the wrong impression about the Federation because of what I did as a teenager. I was trying to help Mica.”

“You continued to work for your brother after he killed the alien, didn’t you?”

“You sound like the judge asking me why I didn’t turn Warren in. I’m sorry. My first lover said I didn’t ask enough questions.”

“We will ask enough questions. Your first lover?”

“Yangchenla, a human descended from Tibetan villagers.”

Angleton closed his eyes and shook his head. “Your Federation and the trash they picked up”

I said, “Would you have rather they took you?”

“Why did you ask me that?”

“There’s an Institute for Analytics and Tactics. I’m not part of that, but you’d get along with them.”

“Alex.” He didn’t say more.

“If we’d wanted to conquer you, we’d have done it decades earlier.”

“You are human.”

“It’s embarrassing sometimes,” I said.

He smiled and said, “Perhaps now your Federation is embarrassed by you.”

Shit. Trash person, refugee.
Angleton had got me. “I have a wife, a child.”

“The Berkeley radical sisters Schweigman, the oldest a doctoral candidate dropout, the youngest a hippie weaver on foodstamps. Heiresses both, though the great-grandparents were the last in the family to actually work.”

“Maybe we needed another environment?”

His eyes unfocused. He touched his ear and said, “I’ve been told to tell you we suspect this is a test—how we handle you. Nice people, your Federation types. Let’s go back to the house.”

We started walking. “There were wars in the past. Some of the Control Barcons wear things like that in their ears.” I couldn’t see any sign of a transmitter plug in his ear, but I recognized the gesture.

When we got inside, Angleton dropped the tennis rackets on the kitchen table and said, “Go up to your room and shower, then ring for Codresque.”

I felt watched as I took the elevator up. In my room, briefs, a shirt, and an Earth-style suit lay across the bed, with shoes and socks on the floor by the nightstand. I showered and dried off, but still felt clammy as I pulled the clothes on. I didn’t know if I wanted an undershirt or not. Would the interrogation be under hot lights?

The tie was under the suit. I tried to remember exactly how to tie it—I’d been schooled in this by Tesseract during the Proper English dialect lessons. The first time, it didn’t look right. I suspected everyone was behind the mirror laughing at me, but I pulled the knot apart and retied it, getting it done neatly this time.

My kind of aliens. Why hadn’t I realized in the past how complicated First Contacts were? How preposterous to expect newly contacted cultures to simply accept the Federation.

You’ll be even more useful to the Federation,
I told myself,
if the humans don’t keep you prisoner.
But maybe the Federation considered me expendable. Alex had told me that he was.

I rang for Codresque, who seemed to have been waiting just outside the door. He nodded, not speaking, and just as silently, I went with him down the stairs to the first floor, and followed him to a room with a huge mahogany table surrounded by office chairs on rolling castors. Under the windows was a sideboard, and the whole wall on the other side of the room was a giant china cupboard with ten cut-glass doors.

Angleton, Friese, and Colonel Cromwell came in, then a young lieutenant pushing a cart with a recording machine, a VCR, and a monitor.

“Have a seat at the end,” Angleton said. They all sat at the other end, Angleton facing me. Another man came in, looked sharply at Codresque, and sat down. He looked a bit like Codresque, with nearly Asian eyes, but was taller and almost blond. He and Angleton spoke in some foreign language—Russian, I thought—then everyone looked at me.

“I was told to be completely candid.”

“Why did you not make contact with officials when you were back on Earth at Berkeley,” the Russian said. 

“I felt like I’d been abandoned by people here, so my loyalties were to Karst. To the Federation.”

“There’s a distinction?” Angleton asked.

“Karst is a planet with a multi-species culture that houses the Federation offices.”

“To whom are you loyal? Karst or the Federation?”

I hesitated. “Karst, I think, what the different Federation people have made there. Home planet officials can be a bit suspicious, contemptuous. They rotate people out, or have arm’s-length relationships with their conspecifics representing them to the Federation.”

Cromwell looked down at his finger. Angleton looked over at him and smiled slightly. The Russian said, “We can have an arm’s length relationship with the Federation?”

“M…A…D,” Angleton said, letter by letter. The Russian looked over at him sharply.

I remembered that the letters stood for
Mutually Assured Destruction.
“Not really, but when a species has all the Universe to hide in, attempting to destroy it is dangerous.”

“The Chinese expressed some surprise that the Federation adopted Tibetans,” Angleton said to the Russian as if that were a private joke.

Cromwell asked, “What do you know about the Institute of Control?”

“Military, but a bit more restrained than human armies,” I said. “We think of the Federation as being like a zoo where we’re all each other’s keepers. Any species who attacks others, we see them as malignant, but innocent.”

“So, we are to be put into a zoo,” the Russian said.

“Not just that. We’ll help keep order, too. The Federation is trying to bring another species to terms. The Sharwani. They try to conquer other species—”

“Isn’t that what the Federation does?”

“No. The Federation is of all the species. The Sharwani bomb and kill.”

Angleton and the Russian spoke to each other in Russian again, then the Russian said, “We should ask the Sharwani for their side of the story.”

“I killed a Sharwani in what I thought was self-defense, justifiable…” I couldn’t say
homicide.
I felt so awkward. “Part of the punishment was they sent me to you. He led us into an ambush, but…that’s how the Federation is.”

“So they come in sexes out there,” the Russian said. “Did you think he’d turned?”

“But I was supposed to try my utmost to control, not kill, even if I wasn’t trained precisely in that. He killed a friend of mine, a Gwyng.”

“Are there Sharwani who did turn?” Angleton said.

“Yes.”

Cromwell asked, “Have you contained them well enough that we wouldn’t be buying dangerous enemies in joining your Federation?”

Angleton said, “Tom, I don’t believe you know enough to give us an answer to that.”

I felt about ant high. “No, I’m not sure I do. I work out trade and training contracts, help cadets, teach some behavior classes. I’m not in Control or the History Committee.”

“Can you draw up an organizational chart?”

I smiled, remembering when Rhyodolite and I faked one trying to impress the Yauntries who’d caught us in their space. A fun memory, yeah? Yauntries killed Xenon, Travertine’s conspecific. I stopped smiling. “Bring me a big sheet of paper,” I said.

“You’re just a little bureaucrat,” Angleton said.

“My family’s well respected on Karst.”

“Okay, a middle-management bureaucrat,” Angleton said.

Codresque smiled at me, as if tipping me off to Angleton’s own status. I said, “So you’re a high-level interrogator. How’s that not a bureaucratic position?”

The Russian said something to Angleton. He sighed and didn’t answer me or the Russian. Codresque laid out a piece of posterboard in front of me and put a box of pencils and erasers at my right elbow.

Friese was just listening. After I’d worked awhile, I looked up and asked, “How’s Alex?”