Human to Human (29 page)

“Too embarrassing for them. You can come in and tell them about being totally isolated among aliens as Karriaagzh did to Granite.”

I asked, “Can I put it on now?”

Wool laid his hand against my jaw as if he were trying to blind-read my facial muscles. Then he said, “Wait, be obscure during the trip for Cromwell’s sake.”

“Where’s Angleton?”

“Two days ahead of us. He’s doing very well. Tom?” He seemed to want to ask me something, then he said, “Your males are not always monogamous, are they?”

“No?”

“The females, are they that much different?”

“Has Marianne cheated on me?”

“This discussion is just theoretical.”

“Wool, I hope so.” He left me alone then. I grabbed the green uniform and crushed the fabric with both hands, rocking back and forth, remembering the impermanence of those silly vows—for as long as the relationship was convenient.
Now that there were other humans—oh, lord.

After a while, Ice came in, scale rings fluttering, two beers in her hands. “Hello, Rector’s Man Red Clay.”

I asked, “Who did my wife share sex with?”

She handed me a beer and said, “Karriaagzh claims he did. Wool felt it would be kinder to deceive you. Perhaps Karriaagzh lied to hurt Black Amber through you.”

“Marianne’s sister fucks aliens, so maybe I should have expected this.”

“You haven’t experienced Karriaagzh’s own sister.”

“What?”

“Black Amber will explain some of this. Karriaagzh will have to step down as Rector. His people are joining the Federation.”

“Ice, what did Black Amber have to do with that?”

“She arranged further meetings.”

I couldn’t imagine how she could dive through her terror, her xenophobia, to contact Karriaagzh’s kind. Ice handed me the beer and asked, “May I sit down?”

“Please. Black Amber contacted Karriaagzh’s kind?”

“Hate overrides xenophobia sometimes,” Ice said. She popped her beer can open and wiped the can against a large unringed scale on her upper arm.

“She’s hated him for years.”

“But, now she’s too old a Gwyng to become Rector.”

Poor bitch, I thought. We both opened our beers and sat drinking them in silence. I remembered Karriaagzh’s throat spasming over Marianne, couldn’t place the time for an instant, then remembered he’d done it when Karl was just newly born. I wondered if Ice were offering me a chance to commit my own out-of-species adultery. I wouldn’t give anyone the satisfaction.

The next day, I asked Wool, “Did Marianne do it so Karriaagzh would give me this?” I held out the green tunic with a stiff arm.

“Karriaagzh? Cadmium said he needed you.”

“Cadmium?”

He’s going to be the new Rector. And why are you avoiding Cromwell?”

“You told me to leave him alone.”

“Sorry, I meant give him some privacy with us.”

I was avoiding Cromwell.

Cromwell came up to me when we were passing the ice moon that was supposed to be lucky to see and said, “Ever heard of win-win games?”

“Yes. I’m not afraid you new humans will supplant me. I’ve had bad news about my family.”

“Oh.”

“Nothing I want to talk about.” I wondered how one got divorced on Karst, then whether I was making too big a deal over it. Maybe Marianne thought I was going back to jail for good? And maybe it hadn’t really happened? “Are you getting along okay?”

“I wish we’d finally get there.”

I wondered if gating directly to the surface was truly impossible or if we’d taken the space-time way for psychological reasons. “Space is time-consuming. Just as the Federation consumes information.”

He stared out at the ice-covered moon with starlight glinting off it. Some stars were so close we could see their colors. Finally, he asked, “Did they make that planet or is it natural?”

“It’s ice they didn’t need for Karst’s oceans.”

“Lord have mercy.” He might not speak like most Southern blacks, but he had at least one Southern dialect speaker for close kin. “The very concept.”

“Building Karst helped their economies while they stopped killing each other.”

“Who were
they?”

“The five original species: Ahrams, one that’s extinct now, the shiny black people, I think Wool’s kind, but he never talks about species, and one of the bears.”

“Not even that different from each other.”

“No, not compared to Ewits, Gwyngs, the bird kinds, and the Wrengee.”

“We’re just nothing compared to all this.”

“All individual species are nothing compared to this. The Federation is like an informational black hole. You can get into it, but never out, and it becomes even denser when a new species adds to it.”

“An informational sink. And the information any one species tries to extract from it gives information on that species. Which…”

I pictured an infinity of mainframes all compiling information from our skull computers: drug usage monitored by vein taps we weren’t told about; our varying blood pressures recorded against the comparative pressures of our companions; the language we used, the languages we heard. And skull computers were just one information source; others were all the questions we asked at our terminals, all the books and records feeding in from millions of years of hundreds of species’ histories, all inside the planet Karst in binary electrical configurations. “Yes, lots of information,” I said, sounding empty to my own ears as though I’d been stripped of data.

“You did well there.”

“What, other than dying, could I have done?”

“I’m sure not everyone gets promoted to Rector’s Man.”

“I don’t know. It’s probably like being Colonel.”

“One step below General, and I’m still waiting for the full bird.”

The ice planet began to slip away from us now. Why anyone thought seeing it was lucky I couldn’t figure out. Black Amber saw it after losing Mica; now, here I was seeing it after hearing that my wife cheated on me with my inhuman boss. Former boss. Maybe cheated. Would I believe her if she said she didn’t do it?

Did she feel pity for him and if so, was I
a pity fuck, too?

“Want to talk about it?” Cromwell asked. “I’ve been through a lot with my own family.”

“Adultery?”

“Yours? Hers?”

“Either.”

“If you can’t rebuild the trust, you might as well throw her out. Or yourself, whichever.”

“Did you rebuild it?”

“When we’re together, we’re together. And when we’re apart, we make sure the base can’t gossip.”

“I don’t want to…” I realized saying
I don’t want to live like that
would tell him my wife cheated on me. “I don’t know what I want. I don’t even know for sure that it really happened.”

“Obviously, aliens don’t save us from human problems.”

“They’ve got their own problems: no pouch for the nymph, sterile children, malfunctioning supplemental lights, brain developmental problems from not learning the right languages in time.”

He nodded.

Karst Planet popped out from the bright stars as a half disc, still tiny. Cromwell watched it and read Federation books that Travertine and Tesseract had translated into English. He looked at me and said, “Wool told me we’d be landing on dayside in twelve hours.”

The planet filled the horizon as it swung us around to orbit over the Karst City lights.

I said, “I came in this way the first time, too.”

Cromwell said, “I thought the trip was for psychological reasons as much as security.” The others came in then, and he moved easily among them. Wool was growing his facial hair back and scratched it along the jawbone.

I realized we’d be coming in on the day side and Karst City was in the night. “Who’s going to meet us? Where are we landing?”

“Black Amber wants to talk to you,” Ice said. Her scales rippled her tunic, rings muffled by the cloth.

“Dress for it,” Wool said.

I went into my room to change into the Rector’s Man’s tunic and found a green sash with all my contact and service badges transferred to it, and a new badge for the work I’d just done with my own kind. I switched a wall hologram to the room cameras and stood watching myself, spun myself around so I could see, in slightly delayed pictels, the whole image. I looked like a man of about thirty-five, a real grownup. I watched myself a while before joining the others. Here I was in my life. And the uniform wasn’t something my wife had sleazed for me. I wondered if I’d have felt worse or better if she’d had a human lover.

Five minutes beyond Karst City, we came into daylight over empty artificial terrain. Where in all that would my own Rector’s Man’s place be?

Wool said, “Pull the shells around, everyone,” and showed us how to reach back and pull form-fitting shells from behind the seats, a new detail. Inside the general body-shape shells was foam that molded to our contours, moved with breathing. “The foam freezes if you jerk,” Wool said, “so breathe easy.” The head shell was open at the face and jointed so that it moved like a helmet, but slowly.

Cromwell said, “Seems fine.”

“Okay, we’re going down.”

Air thickened around the ship, lifting it in a long glide down to what was now afternoon. We turned and landed on a runway near the ocean, water glinting between the sea islands. I remembered this now, near the Gwyng History committeeman Wy’um’s—no, rather his sister’s place. Poor bastard, dead now and never more than a male Gwyng. Only aliens gave him positions and houses.

“How long will it take to get to the hospital?” Cromwell asked. His skin looked a bit glossy.

“Too hot?” Wool asked. “The shells can be adjusted.”

“No, how long?”

“The atmospheric flight to Karst will take about two-tenths day, that’s about four hours, a little more,” Wool said. “It’s night there now. You’ll arrive pretty late.”

“Will I be drugged?”

“The language operations are a bit disconcerting.”

“So were the centrifuge tests.” Cromwell took a deep breath, watching Wool’s hands on the controls as we approached the runway, the sea glittering on beyond us, flat sandy land, like Florida, maybe. I’d only seen photographs of Florida.

And down, a
whump
of braking parachute behind us, wheels squealing, foam tightening around us, then we were taxiing up to the reception building. Ice raised her seat front shell and flicked her scales. “The foam almost sprained my scale muscles,” she said in Karst One.

Cromwell said, “It looks like South Carolina. Just like South Carolina.” I remembered the cheated feeling I’d had when I saw green grass and blue sky.

“Why not?” Wool said.

“South Carolina doesn’t relax me any.”

“Oh, it’s not really like South Carolina,” I said. “You’ll see.”

Ice got out of her seat while the shuttle was still rolling toward the exit tubes. She arched her back and rubbed at the base of her scales, catching a fingernail in one of the scale rings. Cromwell looked at her as if he wanted to tell her to stay seated until the plane stopped at the terminal. She wriggled her fingernail free and stared at it as if inspecting her polish. Her nails were like human nails, except they were black. When the shuttle lurched, she grabbed her seat and laughed. I knew it was a laugh, that fat-frying sound, but Cromwell, who still had his shell fastened over him, turned his head away, slowly, impeded by the joint connecting the head portion to the rest of the shell.

Wool swung his shell up and said, “Come on, pull the tab under the seat rests.”

I did, and the shell swung up and over me. Cromwell sighed and did the same. Wool came up and shook him by the shoulder, like a quarterback to the kicker, then said to me, “Tom, you’ve got people waiting for you. Go out first.”

I went out, stumbling when I saw Marianne with Black Amber. If this had been Virginia, would I have blasted her down? I remembered my fingers hurting the day after I killed Hurdai and stood there, body rocking with my heartbeats. Marianne looked frightened of me. She finally asked, “Tom?”

My heels sank down, and I realized I’d been poised on the balls of my feet. Black Amber said, “Perhaps he’s heard Karriaagzh’s boasts.”

Marianne said, “He’s a bastard for telling everyone. It wasn’t really like sex for me.”

“You did it, then? I’d hoped he was lying.”

“He…well, it’s over. He was just so persistent and I had no idea. It wasn’t…Tom, I am sorry. Can you accept that?”

Black Amber had her thumbs hooked behind her neck, just wearing pants, her pouch hole uncovered, head hair matted. She said, in Karst Two, “Non-monogamous is/equals non-monogamous.”

I said, “I’ve never cheated on you, Marianne.”

Marianne said, “But our relationship isn’t just sexual, Tom, no more than Amber’s relationship with Wy’um was.”

I said, “Let’s get out of here.”

Black Amber embraced me, rocked me side to side, then said, “My mind/my aging (agony).”