Human to Human (28 page)

“Tom, you’ve changed. You sound like a foreigner now.”

“Alien, perhaps.” I was straining for that educated English with alien overtone effect. “That kid?”

“Not another version of yourself, Tom. He killed his ex-girlfriend. We’ll send him out for psych-evaluation tomorrow.”

“Oh. You think I should have come forward when I was having trouble with Warren, then?”

“Tom, it’s like this. Your life was a swing thing. Could have gone good. Could have gone bad. What’s a deputy, some schoolteachers, to do?”

“You could have tried.”

“One of the schoolteachers did, didn’t he?”

“I thought he liked me being a colorful outlaw.”

“We know you wanted to be a good kid. But one of those aliens died because…”

“Because I was stupid and scared and because Mica didn’t have enough sense to not point a shotgun at Warren. But he didn’t want to be officially found out.”

“Better that than dead,” Cromwell said.

The sheriff’s eyebrows slid toward each other, rumpling the skin over his nose. “Tom, lots of Floyd people, before and after your time, have had to go elsewhere to make good. You just seemed to have gone a bit further than most.”

“Yes.”

“Remember we are proud of you.”

“Did you really try to keep them from trying me, as an adult?”

“Yes.”
 His, accent faded, a funny hissing
yes,
then returned, “But I was only a junior deputy then, Tom, and the principal wasn’t a friend of the Gentry boys. Heard about Warren, sorry.”

“I wish I’d left him here.”

“He tried suicide in the halfway house, too. With drugs, not a man’s way of being serious about it.”

“He did it with drugs on Karst,” I said, faintly comforted that the sheriff had told me this, pissed that he’d implied Warren wasn’t man enough to use a gun.

“So, what do you do for your aliens?” the sheriff asked.

“I help coordinate contacts with new species, work with cadets, help negotiate trade agreements.”

“Whatever they are, they’ve been good for you.”

“I think so, too,” I said, wishing I was away from this man who made me feel like I was a teenager craving adult approval.

“Going back to Roanoke tonight?”

“Not quite yet. I’m going by the school.”

The sheriff looked at the deputies standing around and then shrugged slightly. Cromwell’s face seemed forced into impassivity.

The woman working on the computer looked up at me and said, “We’re happy for you, Tom, but don’t go on rubbing our noses in how we misjudged you.”

“Now, Helen,” the sheriff said, but he was more agreeing with her than not. I heard Cromwell’s teeth click together.

“Thanks, Helen,” I said, and I left that place. Cromwell stepped on out after me. It was beginning to clear off.

“Sorry, Gentry,” Cromwell said.

“I’m glad someone was honest.”

“How do you know she spoke for many people here?”

“They looked relieved after she said it. Let’s go back to Roanoke, back to Karst. What am I trying to prove here? I don’t know what you would have done to Mica if I had driven him up to Washington. We can sit here all day hearing ‘we woulda, we woulda.’”

“Gentry, you owe us something as fellow human beings.”

“No. Bullshit. I owe us all going back to Karst and continuing to be the good officiator there. That makes humans look good.”

“Haven’t you screwed up with that?”

I gripped my knees and took a deep breath, feeling my fingers digging in as they dug into Hurdai’s throat. “I trusted Hurdai. I trusted the neural disruptor to work.”

“I have no problem with what you did. Gentry, if you can’t defend your friends, it’s not that perfect out there.”

“Colonel, I’m still learning how to be an officiator and working with you is pushing me more than killing Hurdai did.”

He stopped talking and drove me back toward Roanoke. I said, “Let’s take the Parkway.”

More umbilicaria lichen grew on the rocks than before—the planet cooling, perhaps, to let those black and gray symbiotic shriveled plates spread. Or the road cuts were finally weathered enough. Or I hadn’t noticed before. But otherwise, the Parkway seemed the same, except for more houses out beyond the azaleas and rhododendrons.

“Skunk cabbage,” Cromwell said. “Didn’t realize it grew so far south.”

“You don’t see it down the mountain,” I said. “Don’t punish the woman at the jail for being honest. I really don’t think anyone was trying to save me for Earth back when I was a teenager.”

“You think she committed a breach of security by telling you that you embarrassed them by getting aliens to adopt you? You think we’d go at you that hard? And you think your Federation people are going to trust you after you get back, Tom?”

“Why shouldn’t they?” I said.

Back in Roanoke, Colonel Cromwell kept the cab waiting while he made a phone call. I stood in the lobby with my hands in my pockets, wondering when I’d be recognized. Cromwell came back and told me, “Our bags are already down.” A porter was trolleying them from the elevator. When he reached us, Cromwell and I began walking along beside him, back to the taxi.

To the airport, of course. A jet waited for us, pilot standing beside it, drinking coffee in a Styrofoam cup.

“Are we going t Washington?” I asked.

“No,” Cromwell said. “We’re all going back to Karst. Orders. My new duty station, Angleton’s also.”

“Codresque?”

“I don’t know about the Romanian.” We climbed up behind the pilot, and the canopy slid over us.

“Granite Grit?”

“The gaudy parrot on the negotiating team? He’s staying here, negotiating. We didn’t think you needed to help him.”

“Okay, okay.”

The pilot began mumbling and shifting his hands over the control display, then the engines ignited, and we whirled around and began to move down the runway. I put the earphones on and taped the mike to my throat.

Through the electronics, over the sound of the engine, Cromwell said, “You know how to put on the gear?”

“We’re trained in comparative systems,” I said. “Any sapient who doesn’t force things can generally figure out how to work simple systems.”

“Okay, okay to you, too, Mr. Gentry. Why did Granite Grit bring his wife and child?”

“How dangerous is negotiating with humans, anyway? I keep telling them it’s damn near lethal, but obviously, Granite thinks I’m prejudiced.”

“Shit, you’re angry.”

“Yes, I was practically told to leave town because I didn’t turn out as badly as the whole county expected. You don’t let me see Granite Grit. We’re sitting here headed up at almost ninety degrees and bitching about my attitude.”

Cromwell said, “You think I’m happy about leaving my wife and kids to go off to some alien planet?”

“Colonel, bring them with you. My kid has lots of friends from his birth group…be good to expose them to the way the Universe is going to be.”

“Maybe.” Cromwell didn’t say anything more after that. The plane leveled after a long climb into an almost black sky. I watched the mountains turn to long ridges, then disappear into rolling hills, the Mississippi and St. Louis’s arches glinting at the horizon, then closer, over St. Louis at an angle, St. Louis gone, so high the Earth’s curve showed.

Then Cromwell spoke. “Granite Grit said he’s learned how to tell humans apart. That mean something to you?”

“Yes,” said. “It’s just learning to observe more closely, learning what are significant variables within a species and what are general variables.”

“You ever have trouble telling us black people apart?”

“No. Jereks, though…I have trouble with Jereks.”

“Xenophobia? Is it really ingrained?”

“You feel nervous around Granite Grit?”

“We outnumber him here.”

“The closest thing to something that really evokes hard-wired human responses out there are Wrengee, and they’re nice once you get to know them.”

“Could I see pictures?”

“Photos don’t try to make it easy on you.”

“I’m a flyer. I’m not afraid of any human being going, but…”

“You’re afraid you’ll be afraid?”

“I wish I could order you to help me deal with this. I think there’s something in us that can explode…and I don’t trust you. I think you’ve all exploded once there’s some terrible initiation. Granite Grit said something about the initial terror.”

“They depilate or de-feather all the new cadets.”

“That sounds freakish.”

“It makes us all alien to ourselves as well as to the others.” A muscle between my shoulder blades jumped as if his eyeballs pierced me. “It’s hard to talk to you when I can’t see you and you’re right behind me.”

“I’m not going as a cadet. I’m going as a guest.”

“They’ll give you a brown uniform, then.”

“Angleton said fucking the Jerek makes this all seem more real, and you…those aliens more…”

“Accessible? I didn’t think it was love between them.”
Vulnerable
was the word he really wanted to use. “But who’s going to get wounded? They’re both pros.”

“Angleton started out in Tibet when the Dalai Lama tried to go back. He’s a rough enough boy.”

“Thanks for telling me. I’ll pass it along. And what kind of wars were you in?”

“Nothing eyeball-to-eyeball.” He cut off the microphone, disconnected in the middle of a sigh.

We began to go down as the Pacific Ocean rolled into view. Bay Area, always in and out of Berkeley. Cromwell turned on his mike and said, “We set up a permanent station on the Farallons.”

I remembered seeing, years ago, granite chunks jutting out of the Pacific—weird things. “What about the gate in the warehouse?”

“Closed it down.”

We landed and taxied up to a helicopter. Military guys grabbed us and our luggage and threw us in, belted us to the seats. The jet pilot waved at the helicopter pilot, then we took off over San Francisco, the sunset back in Nevada as we’d beaten the planet roll speed.

Then the chopper hovered and bounced like crazy over a landing pad, caught in updrafts. Finally, it settled and a crew ran out to wire the chopper down.

“It’s the fringe of the possible for gates, I’m told,” Cromwell said as we ducked under the blades and ran to the building.

“It’s rather paranoid,” said. “Don’t you have gate guard satellites up now?”

“Don’t know.” We were shivering by the time we got in the building—damp California air comes from beyond Farallons. “The Audubon Society hates us for taking this stupid rock. The Farallons supposed to be a bird sanctuary.”

I looked out the window. It reminded me of the northern part of Gwyng Home: rocks, fogs, wings flapping through. “Are we going now?”

Now, right now. A gate transport with external recessed bolts, fitted to hex keys, waited. I’d have preferred controlling the closures myself, but got in with Cromwell and sat lurching through seven transitions, three minutes each, then out…

…at a Karst outer space freight station. The bear team who unfastened the bolts looked rumpled, anxious.

“Still practicing security?” I asked in Karst One.

Cromwell sat impassive, staring from me to the bear who answered, “Trying to slow down unauthorized re-contacts. Karriaagzh discovered his own people were more alien than…”

Another creature—Wool, I realized—interrupted with a word that must have been
hush
in a bear language.

He said, in English, “Colonel Cromwell?”

“Yes?”

“We’ve met before. I’m called Wool.” Wool’s face was still shaved to expose his expressions. “We’ll fly through the planetary system to Karst. We’re limiting gate access to Karst surface.”

“Security problems?”

Wool didn’t respond to Cromwell’s question. “You and the other senior-humans are scheduled for language operations, unless you’d prefer to learn the language unaugmented.”

Cromwell looked at me and asked, “Gentry, did they put you through this?”

“Yes, and my wife and the rest of the family.”

He looked at me as if he’d just loved to have panicked if it weren’t so unmilitary. “So. Here I am. How long does it take?”

Wool answered, “Seventy or eighty rotations to begin really speaking the language. Days, rotations are about the same.”

One of the bears brought in squatty Federation pop-top cans, still slightly frosty. Wool offered one to Cromwell, who sniffed after he popped it open and shuddered.

“Doesn’t it smell like his planetary beer?” the creature who brought them in asked in Karst One. Cromwell grimaced at the language he couldn’t understand.

I said, “That’s the problem!”

“If he likes things to be really alien like so many of you humans, he’ll love Karriaagzh’s sister.”

“Karriaagzh’s sister?”

Wool snapped his teeth, and then took a long drink of beer. ”Red Clay, get your conspecific ready to fly in. Perhaps we should sedate him now.”

I asked in English, “Colonel Cromwell, perhaps you’d like a mild tranquilizer?”

“No,” he said. He tasted the beer and put it aside. “I want to remember all of this.”

Wool hummed slightly, then said in English, “The trip takes five days. I hope you don’t suffer from claustrophobia.”

“I’ve spent five months in an L-5 station, a month setting up the mag shuttle return from the moon.”

“Ah, yes,” Wool said, trying to put Cromwell at ease, “and at the L-5 station, your people worked out the basics of a space platform rail gun.”

Cromwell said, “So do we look like dumb jerks playing with baby toys?”

“No, a space rail gun with non-metallic projectiles got through our defenses to destroy a Wreng city.”

I said, “We’re starting to fall back into our animals. Cromwell, Wool’s only trying to put you at ease.”

Cromwell said, “We are not a nasty, brutal species.”

Wool said, “I didn’t say that.”

I said, “I’d like to get home, already, you guys.”

Cromwell said, “Where did you get that accent?”

“From my wife, the Berkeley radical.”

Wool said, “I apologize if I’ve broken any cultural taboos. Please relax, Colonel.”

“Man, what
don’t
you know about us?”

Wool said, “If we hadn’t respected your species, we would not have tried to gather so much data. Please.” He gestured that we should follow, and began walking through a tube into the straight space-time ship.

Cromwell passed in front
of me to follow directly behind Wool. Travertine was second crew on the ship and third was one of Ersh’s people. Cromwell asked, “Wrengee?”

“Wreng,” Wool said. “Just one. Female.”

The Wreng flared scales and jangled rings under her uniform tunic. I remembered her. She’d come to us as a refugee about two years after Ersh. Now, neither Wrengee nor humans would be refugees. I said, “Colonel, don’t make her nervous. It’s not polite to stare at species differences.”

The Wreng said in Karst One, “I’m Ice of Physics, and tell him I won’t be able to understand him until later. He’s scheduled for the language operation with one of my fellows.”

Cromwell said, “She doesn’t speak English?”

Wool said, “No, but you’re scheduled for the language operation with one of her conspecifics.”

“Tom, you made her kind sound scarier.”

I said, “Better to be relieved than startled.”

“You patronizing little bastard.”

“I’ve been with the Federation since I was nineteen, Colonel.”

Cromwell didn’t say anything, just sat down in one of the acceleration chairs and stared at Wool, who was setting up the computer. Then he said, “Daddy told me what I was doing couldn’t be that much rougher than moving from South Carolina to Vermont.”

Ice said, “It’s nicer if you bring your family.”

Cromwell said, “Lucy’s like your wife, Tom, Jewish if you go by her mother.” He smiled as if at some private joke. “Her father was military, and black.”

I wondered how much more like Molly her mother might have been, then felt guilty, then weird as if I’d always seen Jewish people as radical even though I wasn’t sure Marianne was Jewish—certainly not by religion—and here a Jewish girl married a military man. I said, “Every time I commit a stereotype, I get busted. I thought all Jewish girls were radical.”

Cromwell laughed. Wool said, “Stereotypes are entropic.”

“Flesh fights entropy and we’re all flesh,” Wool said. “Tom, come with me, please.”

I followed him to a room behind the main observation deck. He said, “Cromwell may need to admit to fear, so let us have some time alone with him. You are too apt with us.”

I felt hurt. Wool’s face muscles shifted, then stiffened, then shifted again, sliding over each other just over the jawbone. He had less fat on his face than a human. “We won’t isolate you,” he finally said.

“I’ve always wanted to be good at something. Cromwell was successful on Earth.”

“Red Clay, Cromwell won’t take your aptness away.”

“I’m scared, but not of you guys. Of my guys. And not just physically.”

“What you were…no, I won’t let you do that to yourself. So what? You matured into a different language, different culture. We have something for you.” He went to a cabinet and pulled out…

…a Rector’s Person’s uniform. I stood rocking on the balls of my feet as my fingers seemed to float through the air to touch the green fabric. I said, “Oh.”

“Granite and Feldspar will be the humans’ Rector’s People. You and Marianne won’t work with your own kind.”

I looked around for a seating instrument, saw a hassock and sat down. “Thanks, but maybe I can work with humans, really.”