Human to Human (31 page)

“You will have another house soon,” the male said as the doors closed. “Will the Sharwani couple stay?”

“I don’t know.” I didn’t even know if we’d keep the floor in this building, too, or if I’d completely move out to a Rector’s Person’s farm.

We all got out at the ground floor and took the same bus out of Lucid Moment District through the open floors of birds, then I stopped watching and began thinking about Karriaagzh, my wife, her sister, Rhyodolite, Angleton, and Lisanmarl. Maybe it was abnormal not to want to fuck aliens? Maybe some of us were as hard-wired to sleep with strangers as others of us seemed to be to eat as much sugar as we could? Molly said we’d all die out because eventually we’d all find our perfect aliens. I wasn’t sexually tempted, much, by non-humans, but intellectually, man, they strung me out a million miles.

And I couldn’t beat Karriaagzh up. Even if he was light for his size, he still weighed over three hundred pounds and could kick like a Clydesdale.

All my thoughts chained together: alien sex; intellectual curiosity/beating up Karriaagzh/being beaten up by Karriaagzh; Marianne’s blouse wet with her milk. Finally, the bus stopped in front of the Academy main gate, and I got out and walked toward the Rector’s Lodge on its hill.

A Gwyng female showed me up to one of the high semi-circular rooms overlooking the Academy grounds. The room was empty except for a steam table, a chair for me, a swing chair for Cadmium, its counterweights resting on the floor, and a suede-covered pad with a black wood armrest for Karriaagzh. I went over to the steam table and lifted one of the metal lids. Blood cakes.

The door opened. I dropped the lid as if I’d been caught spying. Cadmium said, “Red Clay, relax (if…).”

Karriaagzh was in color!
Partly in color, I realized as he came in, the new feathers chestnut and black, the old places still matted and gray, no tunic over them now. “Karriaagzh?”

“Red Clay,” he said, accentless. He slumped on his hocks and waited until Cadmium adjusted the counter-weights and got the swing chair up to about six feet. Then Karriaagzh came over to the steam table, right beside me, and took a plate and spatula. He said, “I’d like to get the blood cakes.” I moved over and watched him put three of them on a plate. He said, “There are eggs under that one,” pointing to the first dish.

I served myself while Karriaagzh took the blood cakes to Cadmium. Then Karriaagzh went over to his mat, stretched, roused all his feathers, the old gray ones, the new chestnut and black ones, and sat down, his eyelids closing from the bottom. When he’d settled down against the suede, he sighed, all the air rushing through his hollow bones. Poor old Karriaagzh again. I felt both manipulated and impressed.

“What are you going to do next?” I asked him.

Cadmium said, “Red Clay,” like I’d been impolite. Karriaagzh opened his eyes. The muscles controlling his nictitating membranes bunched, then relaxed. “I’m sorry. I was terribly lonely and your mate could speak my language.” The haw muscles bunched again. Cadmium brought the swing down, laid his plate on the floor, then hauled himself up toward the ceiling.

“Accept it,” Cadmium said to me. I looked to see if his thumbs were curling back from the anger glands. Slightly. He was Rector now; I was the Rector’s Man. Karriaagzh closed his eyes and waited. I looked back at Cadmium, then said, “Karriaagzh, I accept your apology, but why did you tell everyone?”

“I forgot what species I was dealing with,” Karriaagzh said. Having said what he’d brought me in to hear, he got up and dusted off his renovated feathers. “After Cadmium takes full control, I’m going back to my own people. Then, perhaps, liaison work.”

Cadmium said, “What do you think about a man you met on your planet?” He looked at Karriaagzh.

“Codresque,” Karriaagzh said. “Tomas Codresque.”

“He’s with the CIA.” Karriaagzh translated CIA
to Cadmium for me.

Cadmium nodded and said, “It’s all right. You’ll have nothing to hide, Red Clay.”

“Me? What does this have to do with me?”

Karriaagzh said. “He’s been recommended as a person who can help you with protocol.” The word for
protocol
in Karst One also meant social flexibility and grace, authority of attitudes. Basically, it was a loosely constructed word, semantically speaking. I didn’t like it.

“What about Marianne?” I said.

“We suggest that you and she stay mated,” Cadmium said. “Once we learn more about your institutions, we will hire humans to counsel you.”

“Yes, Rector,” I said.

Cadmium brought the swing seat down to the floor and said, “Red Clay, Red Clay, she means more to you than you realize.” He embraced me sideways, forcing it.

Karriaagzh said in Karst Two, “Hostile to authority (difficulties/deceptions in the past).”

Cadmium said, “Red-Clay, Red-Clay, not…don’t. Be a friend.”

“You’re my superior,” I said.

“Stiff neck,” he said. My neck was literally, rigid.

Karriaagzh came up to me now, all eight feet of him, up to within a yard of me, and raised his crest. He said in English, “Don’t be a fool.”

My stomach squeezed; his nictitating membranes flashed over his eyes, drew back into the eyecorners. He backed up from me and then turned and left the room.

As soon as he was gone, Cadmium said, “Red-Clay, the agency person, Coodlescoo, we hired him for you.”

“Cadmium, or should I say Rector?” I felt exposed, misunderstood.

“Cadmium, please.”

“Codresque is a spy.”

“Yes, but you need a caretaker at your Rector’s People’s house. We need to be reassuring. He can learn Karst One without surgery (mistrusts brainwork). And he is not from your social group.”

I remembered Codresque saying,
No American knows how to deal with me.
I would love him if he saw no difference between Angleton and me. “All right, Cadmium.”

“And send the Weaver home.”

“Why?”

He didn’t answer, but his wrinkles deepened, and his eyes grew oilier. She reminds him of all the dead, I realized.

“I will visit you and the Linguist. You are not reconciled?”

“I don’t know. She helps me with Black Amber.”

Cadmium shuddered. I realized then how difficult these times had been for him, how he’d had to push himself beyond the usual Gwyng limits. He sighed and walked in his rolling way over to the steam table. “Living dead,” he murmured, almost to himself, but if he’d not wanted me to understand he could have used a Gwyng language.

“She’s comfortable,” I said.

“Thank you, I suppose, but no more.” He served himself more blood cakes, then said, “I’m bringing your shopkeeper and her friends in as adopted pouch kin (kind people/no ambitions).”

“Cadmium.”

He looked up at me.

“How did you get this job?”

“A mild concession to the Gwyngs. After a strong Rector, a usable Rector.” His lips twitched into a circle, then pulled tight around his muzzle again. Analytics and Tactics probably listened to us. I doubted he intended to be weak.

“When I first met you, I thought you were a prig.”

“I try to balance all the moralities,” he said. Gwyng moralities, Federation moralities, Karst moralities—what a load, I realized. He said, “Adopt forgiveness as a morality.”

“With Marianne?”

“We all have imperfect senses.”

“No one species, much less one individual, can know the entire Universe. I remembered Karriaagzh saying something like that to me years ago.”

Cadmium didn’t answer that. He said, “You and Marianne need to pick your landscape for your country place. I will talk to her next.”

When I saw Codresque again, he reminded me vaguely of a fat Gwyng, slightly bowlegged, wrinkled face. He came to see me in my apartment while Marianne went to the Rector’s lodge. Cadmium assured me that Karriaagzh would be at the Institute of Medicine getting his feather follicles reworked.

“Rector’s Man Gentry, I understand that you might have reservations against me, but I think the Rector wants you to be more sure of yourself among your own kind.”

“I think you’re CIA, but Cadmium says that I won’t have anything to hide.”

Codresque’s wrinkles deepened; how Gwyngish. I wondered what Cadmium was saying right now to Marianne. And Codresque didn’t say anything, didn’t deny being CIA, just stood there slightly hunched over.

I said, “Cadmium wants me to take Marianne back. He wants me to hire you as a servant.”

Codresque said, in Karst One, “I can serve you well.”

I said in English, “You didn’t have the language operation?”

He answered in stilted, technical Karst One, “No, we wondered if juvenile cell redevelopment and neural restructuring might make the individual more trusting than would be advantageous.”

Okay, he
was
a spy, but Cadmium wanted me to hire him as a servant.

“Sir?” he asked.

“Yes, Codresque.” I began to feel how one might enjoy having a servant.

“Could the uniform be tailored more?”

“It has to cover the middle leg joint and the upper arms.” I remembered then having seen some uniforms that fitted better, more like topcoats than the usual baggy things. “We could do something with it.”

He smiled at me, happy I was beginning to get the hang of how to use him. In English, he said, “I know of a shop in Paris that isn’t convention-bound. If you don’t have the time for fittings, I can take measurements and have uniforms made to measure.”

No time to go to Paris. Cadmium wanted Marianne and me to reconcile quickly and then get to work. We had to select a house, then begin work with Sharwani and Wreng cadets who’d started squabbling. “Made to measure would be fine.” I’d see if I could find out precisely what that meant.

“We could send one of your better-fitting present uniforms as the muslin,” Codresque said. He looked me in the eyes and suddenly seemed as formidable as when he had me strip at the big house in the South.

Marianne came home, then, and I tried to remember how the introductions were done. “Marianne, this is Tomas Codresque, who’ll be helping us.”

Codresque bowed slightly. Marianne said, “Cadmium told me about him.” Codresque’s face remained impassive. Marianne continued, “Cadmium said he wanted us to take a drive. He loaned me a car and showed me how to drive it. It’s Black Amber’s old car.”

“I can drive it,” I said.

“If you would show me how, I can tend the sick Gwyng,” Codresque said.

I got behind the wheel, noticing the radio and the box of paper tissues attached to the dash. Marianne said, “I’m not sure I like Codresque, but we will need some help. And you’ve been using Black Amber to avoid dealing with me.”

“I haven’t dealt with you, have I?” We pulled out of the basement into the city traffic. I set up the automatic system and leaned back. We were headed to the South Gate, going out a way I hadn’t been before.

“I didn’t know Karst had roads outside the city,” Marianne finally said as we approached the industrial zone.

“Well, I guess they do. We’ve got a map.” This was uncomfortably reminding me of Yauntra, of Filla, the Yauntra girl spy. Who, I had to admit, I would have fucked if she hadn’t been so terrified. Maybe Cadmium had thought about that?

The Barcon guards at the checkpoint were in the shed phase, dark skin glistening over their oddly angled jaws. The one who checked our passes said, “Good trip, Rector’s People.”

As we drove away, I said in English, “I’ve never been south here before.”

“How do you know Karst City is in the north?” Marianne asked.

I shrugged and said in Karst One, “I’d always translated this direction as
south.”

“I think it’s psychological.”

“Come on, Marianne.”

“On Earth, the
northern
hemisphere is politically more powerful, now. But why do you translate into Terran coordinates here?”

I had the unpleasant feeling that she was also trying to make a point about moral coordinates. “Sorry,” I said.

We drove into some hills covered with trees with bark like poplar trees, even more so, and long curved leaves. The road stayed level on stilts over the low places.

Marianne said, “Eucalyptus.”

“Really?”

“Not really. Parallel development.”

The countryside was funny here, bouncy with little creeks, small hills, and plants growing along tree limbs as we went further and further toward the equator, but still relatively near the coast.

“So, Tom, do you want me to leave?”

Don’t say it so bluntly, I thought. “We’ve been ordered to reconcile.”

“Tom, how hard do I have to say I’m sorry? You want me to slit a wrist?”

I obliterate all you fuckers
…this relationship…Hurdai’s dead. I began crying. Marianne said, “You sound awful,” and began crying herself. I pulled the car over to the side of the road when we came off the bridge. We just sat crying for a while.