Human to Human (23 page)

Everyone smiled slightly except for Friese, who said, “He is not cooperating.”

“That’s not like Alex,” I said. “The Barcons observing with him thought he’d gone native.”

“Why are all the Federation contacts with such marginal humans?” the Russian asked, then he muttered to himself,
“Konyesno, pochemuto.”

“Probably because us marginal types are more open to a variety of experiences.”

“Marginal types won’t automatically go to the authorities,” Angleton said. “And won’t be missed if they disappear.”

I was about to say,
Marginal types don’t get believed when they
do
go to the authorities,
but decided that would be a bit too defensive. “Alex had a lot of friends in Berkeley. Not all of them were marginal.”

“All of Berkeley is marginal,” Angleton said.

“He was missed when he disappeared. You should have picked up a pair of the Barcons.”

“He went against your Federation, I think,” Angleton said.

Friese said, “He arranged for a lawyer to serve us with a writ of habeas corpus.”

I said, “And you can’t kill him and turn him over to his friends?”

“You really think we’re that cruel and stupid?”

Suddenly, I felt terror at my own situation. Nobody was filing a writ of habeas corpus on me. “What did he do, set up a Free Alex committee to start proceedings if you picked him up?”

They all stopped talking. That’s absolutely what Alex did, I thought. Angleton said, “Codresque, would you arrange to bring us lunch?”

I said, “Does the Free Alex committee know he’s alien?”

Nobody answered. I remembered my Berkeley wife organizing the humans on Karst. “Why did you admit to having him?”

“He got word out before we realized he was an alien,” Friese said. “We thought he was a traitor like you.”

I felt scared again, but said, “We’re not at war with you. We’ve invited you to join us.”

“You are a human being, a citizen of the United States of America. They are not human beings,” the Russian said.

“Some of us are,” I said as one of the soldiers put a place setting in front of me. Lots of forks. The multiple fork custom, Black Amber explained, implied that one’s taste was so acute that smears of another food would spoil the dish one was eating, so one used a clean fork for each thing. What mattered wasn’t the order of the forks, but the use of the fresh one, except for salad and fish forks. I checked again—no fish fork.

We began with an oyster bisque, then the man serving us brought around something deep fried I thought at first was french fried potatoes. Deep-fried eggplant goes weird in a mouth expecting a potato’s resistance. The meat was chicken slices covered with a green-onion sauce.

After lunch, we went out into the library and Codresque served us coffee in small cups. Angleton said, “So all Virginians have some sense of manners.”

“My sponsor insisted that I learn both proper English and proper manners.”

“You have an alien accent,” the Russian said.

“The Barcons rebuilt my speech organs so I could speak perfect Karst One.”

“Is there snobbery toward those who don’t speak perfect Karst One?” Angleton asked.

“The language operations give us the best chance at learning the language. A species that can’t learn Karst One even with the language operations isn’t considered sapient.”

“No sherry, Codresque,” Angleton said. “We must get back to work.”

“The table is cleared,” Codresque said. “I’ll bring tea in at four.”

We walked back into the debriefing room. My organizational chart was gone. I sat down. Cromwell said, “Perhaps if you began at the beginning.”

Two weeks later in a blur of multiple forks, gallons of coffee by the demitasse, and hot tea without sugar, I’d briefly outlined the most significant things that had happened to me.

On the fifteenth day, before the waiter served us breakfast, Codresque rolled in a cart piled with tissue biopsy trocars in plastic wrap and stainless steel tissue bottles. He stopped in front of me first and said, “Take off your jacket and roll up your sleeve.”

I looked at the others at the table; Angleton was sweating slightly, and the Russian looked queasy. They want to make sure I’m human I realized. After I’d gotten the cloth out
of the way, Codresque swabbed my forearm with red antiseptic, and stabbed me with the huge needle. He twisted something at the top of the syringe, then pulled out the needle and put a pressure bandage around my forearm. As Codresque put my
flesh sample in one of the stainless steel bottles, Angleton took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeve. As Codresque bent over him, I asked, “Who tests you, Codresque?”

“Angleton, if he’s still Angleton.”

“I could spot even a Barcon reconstruction,” I said.

The damn trocar hole was a deep ache.

“But would you tell us?
”
Cromwell said. He took off his uniform jacket and rolled his sleeve up exposing a muscular brown arm. Codresque pulled the second tissue sample needle out of Angleton, then tore the plastic on the set he would use on Cromwell. Cromwell stared at the needle, maybe wondering if we’d done some weird alien hyper-science on him and turned him into an alien without his knowing about it.

“Colonel, don’t look at it,” the Russian said. Codresque seemed a bit gentler with Cromwell than he’d been with me, didn’t shove the needle in quite so deep.

I said, “Friese, maybe you’re an alien and don’t know it.”

Friese said, “I have been tested earlier, and I assure you I am one hundred percent human.”

Cromwell said, “Gentry, don’t play that game.”

“Sorry, but you all seem so paranoid, and it’s annoying.”

Angleton said, “Your Federation, like all large institutions, is amoral and wants most to preserve itself. We need to know how we, perhaps just as amoral, can best fit into it if we do join it.”

“The Federation is more beneficial than not,” I said.

Angleton said, “You were sent out as bait for the Yauntries.”

“They educated me. Gave me new cognitive maps.” I began transmuting the conversation into Karst One in my head and realized I’d been thinking in English for the past two weeks.

“I would not be surprised if your DNA fails to test out human,” the Russian said. “You seem more alien now. Perhaps from being caught by the trocar?”

“I’m thinking in Karst One,” I said. What did I look like when I thought in Karst One? How many expressions had I, the sapient ape, borrowed from other cultures?

“Talk about your killing of the Sharwani male in Karst One,” Angleton said. “We’ll set up a tape recorder. Colonel Cromwell will continue afternoon interrogations in English. I’ll be away for a few days.”

“We are interested in the blockade of Yauntra,” Cromwell said.

Codresque finished up with the tissue samples. Angleton went out with him.

After several hours of talking in Karst One to a machine, I felt almost as if I were a holographic projection in a feedback loop. During the afternoons of that week, Colonel Cromwell asked me about the Yauntra blockade, about the time between the average first contact and Federation treaty signings.

Then one rainy morning, Colonel Cromwell took me to a back room with a video player and pushed a disc in. It was a Karst semi-illegal xenophobia movie on human media. Digital, not live, because I was the monster, distorted to ten feet high, killing little Travertines.

“Did you know about this?”

“No. They must have done computer transforms of my image. Karriaagzh acted in live shots when he was younger. See if you can get his xenophobia movie.” I talked fairly casually, but was shocked and hurt. At least, the digital maker hadn’t done me killing Sharwani.

“Why is the Federation smuggling these in to Los Angeles?”

“Should you have told me that? How widely are they distributed?”

He shrugged. “They haven’t broken in over the air with them. What is the point of them?”

“Okay, there are tensions, xenophobia. Xenophobia movies are a way to make fun of them.”

“It’s a pretty confrontive way to let us know that humans make them nervous.”

“Isn’t it really a funny way?”

“So, who do you think is making these?”

“Xenophobia movies are semi-illegal, so I don’t think anyone will confess to it.” Sam and Yangchenla walked on, digitalized to giantness, and began arguing with me.
Marianne and Yangchenla did this to me.
Sam and Yangchenla helped the olive birds lay a trap for me.

In the end, Sam and Yangchenla tied me up so Travertine could feed me by hand. Sam said in English, “Not all humans ran amok.”

“It’s lack of pigment and excess testosterone,” Yangchenla’s image said in English better than she could really speak. “Sun and maleness drove him insane.”

I said, “I’ve been sent a message by an ex-lover.”

Cromwell said, “At least, they didn’t use the black guy as the villain.”

“Most of the Universe is dark skinned.”

Cromwell said, “White skin is a cold adaptation.”

“Yeah, your folks ran my folks into the glaciers about forty thousand years ago and we came back really nasty. That’s why the Federation doesn’t attack people. They can hide off in the Universe and come back really nasty forty thousand years later.”

“But they’re making you out to be the bad guy.”

“Come on, I’m a bit miffed, but don’t you think it is funny?”

“It’s not funny that someone can smuggle these discs in.”

“Whoever’s doing it, it’s semi-illegal. The History Committee would frown at this.”

“I can just imagine getting frowned on by a hunch of weird folks.”

“You almost sounded like a Southern black.” Cromwell shut up and put in a disc showing the famous Karriaagzh-beating-Jereks movie. He watched until Karriaagzh crunched a skull in his beak, then stopped the movie and said, “It’s chaotic out there, isn’t it? No discipline in your Federation. Anything can happen, regardless of what you promise.”

I said, “That’s the Universe. Nobody can comprehend it all. Some of us don’t understand others of us bare minded.”

Cromwell started the flick again and watched until Karriaagzh burned at the end. “How did they do that?”

“The flames were alcohol and they used flame retardant on the feathers, too. Karriaagzh is an incredible guy.”

“This wasn’t a computer image?”

“I heard he did it live. The birds are less species-bound than us others. I don’t think he ever understands xenophobia. It’s just cruelty as far as he’s concerned.”

“Are all the birds like that?”

“Less xenophobic? I think so.”

Cromwell put both discs up and turned off the disc player, then pushed a call button. When Codresque came in, Cromwell said, “Take him out, put him on the tennis court, do something with him until lunch.”

“I thought you were supposed to be the good guy to Angleton’s bad guy,” I said.

Cromwell shrugged slightly. The young man who came to help escort me to the tennis machine saluted Cromwell, even though he wasn’t in uniform. Cromwell stiffened for a moment, then saluted back and said, “Officially, the uniform salutes the uniform.”

Codresque said, “Everyone tested out human, by the way.”

When Angleton got back, he called me into the debriefing room alone. He looked excited, face slightly flushed, collar points not lying flat on his collar bones, tie knot off center. I chided myself for being hillbillyish-mean about his collar, and remembered that the
Oxford English Dictionary
gave “fighting companion” as one derivation for the
billy
part of that label. Then thought
too human.

“The United Nations is going to talk to your people. The Security Council countries decided that we needed to know more. How can we escape over a hundred thirty different species? We can sit back here interrogating you, but you’re obviously biased and don’t really know that much. I’m going to be liaison between the UN and the Institute of Analytics and Tactics.”

“Are you going to let me go home?”

“To your wife and your semi-upscale apartment? Yes, they’re thinking of promoting you, since we swore that you didn’t attack any of us.”

I laughed, almost out of being hurt. “Sometimes, they don’t really understand. They aren’t humans, after all.”

“I think…thank you, Tom.”

“For what?”

“For new career opportunities. So, what can you tell me about Lisanmarl, other than she’s named for an Israeli rock formation?”

I hesitated. Angleton’s face was flushed, and I had trouble not letting my eyes drift down to see if he had more blood than usual elsewhere. “She’s a Jerek sterile. Her parents are my present Rector’s People, more like counselors than supervisors, controls.”

“Lisanmarl is my contact at the Institute of Analytics and Tactics. She reminds me of a woman I saw as a boy in a Hanes hosiery ad, the long nose, the eyes.”