Human to Human (24 page)

“The fur, the slick black facial skin.”

“Don’t be snide. What faction does she support?”

“The Institute of Analytics and Tactics tends to be conservative, but smart.”

“Like us.” Meaning, I realized, the Central Intelligence Agency. “Tom, did I tell you the Sharwani contacted us?”

“No.”

“It’s all right. They’re going to join the Federation. I gather that no one trusts them.”

“The Sharwani are not a single entity. I mistrusted one I shouldn’t have.”

“And trusted the one you killed?”

“So, you found Lisanmarl charming?” I wanted to be cruel and tell him more about Jerek steriles, how they were sexual instructors of the young on the Jerek home planet, and how now many of them were sexual entertainers to those who found total body fur a turn-on.

He said, “Yes,” in such a simple fashion that I felt crude.

After three more weeks, I felt myself shrinking into the prisoner I’d been at seventeen. Who was there to say otherwise? Just me, in Karst One, Wreng, Yauntro, but my English more and more betrayed me, slipping back into my old dialect, even with
khs, ks,
dental
ts
and alveolar
ts
mangled sharp and distinct by speech organ operations. Would I ever be free again? Many nights I dreamed myself back to Lucid Moment District. Too often, Marianne and Karl weren’t home.

Then one morning I woke up to see Codresque in my room, looking sad, packing my clothes except for the suit he’d laid out across the foot of my bed. He said, “Mr. Angleton wants you to go to Berkeley with him, to help debrief Alex.”

I had no choice, so I got out of bed and dressed while Codresque stripped the bed. I remembered the section in my etiquette books on tipping servants and said, trying very hard to speak proper English, “I am sorry all I can do is thank you with words.”

He turned his head and made a strange face, mugging almost, lips turned way down, and then said, “No one has quite known how to manage me in America. In Paris and London, people knew.” He pressed his lips together.

“Sorry,” I said. Maybe prisoners weren’t supposed to tip?

He smiled and took my suitcase and said, “We’ve arranged a gate in the exercise room, so you won’t be inconvenienced by an air flight.”

And I would never be exactly sure of where I was, either. I followed him through parts of the house I hadn’t seen before and into a large room with double doors, weight training equipment pushed back against the walls, a Karst-issue transport pod sitting on gate cables in the middle of the room. “I’m glad I have no transportation stocks,” Codresque said.

“Where is this?” I asked.

“Charlotte, North Carolina,” he said, smiling slightly. I wasn’t sure whether he lied or not.

I got into the pod—just a seat, no internal hatch screws. I heard Codresque’s hands tighten the external iron bolts. For about three minutes, I went paranoid.
Am I getting gassed, not transported?
My mind babbled dialect terrors, dabs of reading about convicts staring at the endless Atlantic, in chains, bought for farm help in Virginia. Indentured to the Federation and thrown clean away. Then I heard Angleton talking while he undid the exterior bolts. “Tom told us you used counterfeit money.”

Alex stood about ten feet from me, cuffed with disposable plastic cuffs. Friese stood next to him. Alex said, “Tom, you little shit.” He looked at Friese and continued, “As a stray animal, I suppose I’m a ward of the county.”

Friese said, “As of twelve tonight, all creatures recognized as sapient by your Federation will be legally considered human here.”

I said, “Karriaagzh got us good terms on Yauntra, no retroactive—”

Alex interrupted me. “Can I call my friends?”

“We’d like a list of everyone who knew you were an alien. They should be very helpful when we go public with this,” Angleton said.

“I’m going back to get my crest replaced, then I’ll be back here. I like humans, most of them.”

Friese said, “Why should we let you back?”

Angleton said, “If you give me a list, Alex, I’ll call the people who don’t know you are not our species, and you can call the ones who do know.”

“Jerry Carstairs is the only one who knew,” Alex said. “Are you going to tell everyone else?”

Friese said, “You want to return with a skull crest?”

Alex closed his eyes tight and sighed, then looked at me and said, “Well, Tom, here we are, officially.”

Angleton’s lips thinned and stretched backward at the comers. He said, “I’ll be in touch with your friends who were agitating for your release. We have a petition. All of you want to throw a release party? Where do you want to celebrate?”

Alex said, “Thistle and Shamrock.”

I wondered how the guys who’d threatened the Barcons in Negro disguise were going to take hearing Alex wasn’t human. I said, “No.”

“You’re a bigot toward your own kind, Tom.”

Angleton said, “Oh, I think he’s behaved fairly well, considering how brutal he expected us to be. We won’t even hold him on parole violations.”

I said, “You won’t?”

Friese said, “Alex said you asked for valid funds when you were here and didn’t break any local laws.”

“Thanks, Alex,” I said.

Alex didn’t speak, just pushed his hands into his pockets, fists balled…rocked on his feet, eyes looking to the left of the transport, not focused on anything.

Angleton’s mouth made a
tk
sound as if he’d opened it while dry, maybe to speak, but deciding not to. Friese opened the building door. A dark blue Oldsmobile waited for us, the driver starting the engine as we walked out.

I looked back at the building and saw that it was the same warehouse that we’d used almost a decade ago, and noticed for the first time how shabby it had gotten in those nine years.

Angleton said, “The public announcement will stress the difficulty of interstellar travel. Your trips were rare events, almost impossible. Large masses can’t be moved through the gates.”

Lying to the public. Warren told me when the government denied bombing Cambodia, only the enemy wasn’t fooled. Alex said, “So you think Tom is right. Humans are xenophobes.”

Angleton looked at him, almost as if he were speculating as to whether or not he could handle Alex in a fight, before saying, “Let’s see how your friends react when we tell them you’re not human.”

Alex said, “My friends are tremendously tolerant people.”

I said, “Everyone will be surprised, I’m sure.”

The Thistle and Shamrock was the same bar: paint over paint on the outside wood, gravel in the parking lot, Guinness signs and neon shamrocks in the windows. I saw Dr. Anne Baseman, in profile, lit by one of the shamrocks that buzzed and spit white light at the stem end. A black guy was with her, dressed in a suit. I remembered a black teenager that Alex had brought to Dr. Baseman’s sushi academic party and wondered if he’d grown up into that. Wallie, that had been his name.

Alex got out of the car and said, “I rescued him.”

“Wallie?”

“Right. You didn’t have to leave Earth to be rescued.”

Angleton said, “We thank you so very much.”

“Dr. Wallace Vaughn does government consulting,” Alex said. “So you should thank me more sincerely.”

“I knew some Vaughns in Arlington, from the Tidewater. Perhaps he’s related to them, in some way,” Angleton said.

We walked in. Alex’s friends had tied a banner through the rafters of the bar, over the pool tables. One of the pool table lights was tied to shine up on it: Welcome Out, Alex Murphy.

Murphy’s Law. Gresham’s Law. I saw Jerry Carstairs flinch when he saw Friese, then grin helplessly at me. I went up to him and said, “Did they give you a hard time?”

“Tom Gresham?”

“I’m really Tom Gentry.”

Jerry was wearing a user/grower badge. He said, “Yes, a crystal-block hard time. I explained if I’d told them Alex was an alien, they would have committed me. Tom, why did Alex do this to me?”

“What?”

“When I knew it was possible and I couldn’t figure it out first, oh, man, that killed me.”

“You thought Alex would give you clues?”

“Couldn’t he have gotten me clues? Even if he didn’t have the training himself? Please, I didn’t do this to myself, did I, slack off waiting for Alex to help me?”

I almost said,
my wife could have helped,
but remembered that she thought Carstairs was jailbait. “Jerry, I’m sorry, but he was in too much trouble to risk it.”

“Alex, yes, that makes sense. I’ve spent the last two weeks trying like crazy to catch up. I wasn’t even…fuck Alex.” He looked through the crowd and saw Alex. “Fuck you, Alex, you alien mind-fucker.”

Alex swayed, then looked away from us. Friese and Angleton darted their eyes toward each other and smiled. Anne Baseman and Wallie began pushing through to us.

Wallie’s face and body had filled out; his eyes seemed smaller, tucked back into his face. “Dr. Vaughn, I met you once,” I said.

“Yeah.” Trace of street still in his speech. He turned to Carstairs and said, “Why are you giving Alex a hard time?”

I realized how stoned Carstairs was then. He shuddered and swayed on his feet, then pushed his glasses back with one finger in that gesture I remembered from years before. If the lights were brighter, I wondered, would tiny lines and cracks show in his skin? I remembered Warren’s face before he died and felt my fingers tingle. Carstairs said, “I didn’t turn him in. He…”

Wallie said, “He helped me.”

Carstairs seemed to forget what more he was going to say and that seemed to make him even more angry. Wallie looked at me, the kid he had been showing through his PhD polish. I remembered him saying,
all the language I know are street, street.
In a mean second, I wondered what use the government found with his command of ghetto languages.

Jerry finally said, “Alex is a brain-fucker.”

I clenched my teeth and threw my head back slightly, before I could say, “Jerry, he genuinely likes you. Really.”
Maybe.

Wallie looked down at his suit as if he wondered if all his graduate school years had been an alien illusion. I’d had similar feeling back on Earth this time, wondering if I’d wake up seventeen again and in jail. Wallie asked me as if he didn’t know if he wanted the truth or not, “Was, is he really an extraterrestrial?”

“Yes,” I said.

“He doesn’t even look like that really,” Carstairs said. “He’s got tentacles, green skin, a beak.”

“No,” I said. “Alex has just got a skull crest bone, here.” I drew my fingers from the back of my head toward my front hairline. “He’s bald there and the bone has muscles attached to it, skin over the top of it.”

“He’s been getting kids out of the flats, how…. Anne said he picks underprivileged people better than…”

“Sometimes, non-humans see-us better than we see ourselves,” I said.

“No,” Carstairs said, “Alex likes to prove humans wrong in their judgments about things,” I looked for Alex and saw Anne Baseman looking up at him, talking and touching his shoulder gently from time to time. From here, I couldn’t tell if he was crying or not.

Then she took a microphone from one of the waiters and spoke. “Alex, whatever you are, we’re happy to see you free. You’ve helped some of us by our blind spots about our fellow humans. And you’ve been—can I use the word
human?—
humane
enough to seem more like us, fallible, trying, so that I don’t think humanity will be seduced into seeing you and others like you as gods come to deliver us.”

Alex was crying. I saw the human guy with the razor scar across his knuckles, the one who’d threatened the Barcons with a pool cue when he thought they were Blacks. He looked bewildered now, getting angry. I went up to Friese—not Angleton, Angleton was too smirky—and said, “Let’s talk to that guy, now.”

For an instant Friese looked at me as if he wanted a fracas, then he nodded and fell into step with me, pushing through the crowd.

“Remember me?” I said to the man. “Alex’s kind helped me.”

“You human?”

“Yeah, I’m human. From the Virginia mountains.”

“My dad was from Appalachia. I don’t know.”

Friese asked, “Do you think Alex was using you?”

The man started to get angry again. I said, “Being around humans was…is exciting for him. He must have liked you—he didn’t like everyone or every species.”

“What is this going to do to us?” he said.

“We don’t know yet,” Friese said.

“Gonna be like container ships and Korean cars, only worse?”

God, I thought, what will this do to the Japanese? Another major adaptation to deal with in less than two hundred years. “Maybe you can work out in space, getting hydrocarbons from gas giants?”

He almost said something, then looked at Friese. “You official?”

“FBI.”

“We supposed to know about this?”

“Actual physical contact is difficult to bring about.”

The man shook his head very slightly, then turned away from us. Alex’s supporters seemed divided, half touching him gently and congratulating him, the others talking among themselves. Alex pushed through the crowd to Carstairs, took Jerry’s head in his massive hands and pushed the crown of Jerry’s head against his
chest—thud, thud
—in some Ahram gesture I’d never seen before. Then Alex looked at the bar and said, “I need beer.”

One bartender shook his head; the other served him. Wallie wandered back over to us and said, “All my life, I thought I knew what was going on.”

The man with the scarred knuckles said to Wallie, “He help you and not me?” He looked at us all and moved away, into the crowd, then disappeared. I wanted to tell him how I’d been helped, but realized it didn’t matter how many of us the aliens helped if one he liked missed helping him. I wondered then what he did. Work around the dock repairing ship containers? Those scars across the knuckles might be honest work scars.