Human to Human (32 page)

I said, “Do you want to leave me?”

“I don’t want you to bully me.”

“I’m not trying to bully you. I’m afraid you’ll leave me now. You can go home. Maybe I’m not—”

“Tom, can’t you get over being a scapegoated child?”

I sat back in the seat, my heart pounding. “Marianne.”

“Anne told me that guys who were faithful were rare.”

I looked over at her without speaking. She looked haggard, hairs out of the restraining bandana plastered to her face, eyes swollen. “Marianne, you said you were sorry, didn’t you?”

She nodded and pulled out some paper tissues to wipe her eyes. I'd noticed earlier that the car’d been equipped with them and felt angry now that we were such obviously emotional creatures. “Karriaagzh is getting his color back.”

“His sister was so shocked. We’d socially and physically deformed him.”

“What’s the most important, Marianne, our lives before Karst or our lives here?”

“Are you trying to bu—”

“Marianne, I’m really asking. Me, you, both of us.”

“I feel like a phony sometimes.”

“Me too. Like jail was more real than Lucid Moment District.”

“Really, it’s not true. Tom, I don’t want to flounder all my life.”

I began to sing the old Yalie song Cadmium and Rhyodolite had sung to me when I’d come back from Yauntra:

Gentlemen songsters out on a spree,

Lost from here to eternity.

Lord, have mercy on such as we, ba, ba, ba.

Marianne covered her face with her hands. 

I said, “I don’t mean to bully you.” 

She laughed slightly and said, “We have more in common than we realized.”

I said, “Were you afraid I’d stay on Earth?”

“Yeah.” She shivered.

“Maybe I’m glad Cadmium put pressure on us.”

“I’ve seen human friends do as much,” she said, wiping her face again.

“Does it feel like a first date in some ways?”

She said, “First date of two divorced people.”

Be careful, I told myself. “Let’s go find a beach.”

We drove until we could see a semicircle of sand between rocks, parked the car, and walked down through briars and scrambled down a rubble slope to get to the beach. Marianne said, “It reminds me of California here.”

“But wetter.”

“Yes. Actually, I can’t think of any place on Earth that looks just like it.”

“But does it get too hot in the summertime?”

“Tom, we’re only a hundred and fifty miles south of Karst City. It can’t get too hot.”

It was warmer than Karst City usually is, though. I said, “Do you want to be here with me? It would keep away Jereks.”

Marianne looked at me in an
are you serious?
way, then said, “Do we have to be on this continent?”

“I like being relatively close to the city, and it doesn’t remind me of anything I don’t want to remember.”

“The hills look choppy. It’s probably a multiple fault zone.”

“We can ask. When we get back to Karst, let’s see if we could get a Rector’s People’s House here.”

We spread a blanket and sat on it looking at each other. Sex? Too soon. She handed me a bottle of sunscreen, then after we’d smeared ourselves with that, she lay her head on my arm and went to sleep. A killer and an adulteress. I gently moved around until I was comfortable and tried to sleep myself.

It was dusk when we woke up, with the sun dipping down into the hills behind us. Marianne’s head had put my arm to sleep. We got up and stretched, then I said, “We’d better start back.”

“We’ve got a tent under the seat.”

I was about to say,
Karl will worry about us,
when I realized that we had a radio. We could tell Codresque we’d be late. Karl had friends in the building he could stay with.

We called in. Codresque answered, “Rector’s People Gentry.”

“Codresque, Tom here. We’re staying overnight.”

“I was briefed that you might. Can Karl stay with Granite Grit and Feldspar?”

“They’re back? Sure. Is Black Amber all right?”

“She’s alive. The other aliens are sitting with her. Sir, don’t worry.”

I’d feel guilty if Black Amber died when I was away, but I needed to be away. “It’s all right,” I said to Marianne. She pulled the tent out from under the seat and pulled out two air mattresses and a picnic basket.

I took the tent and the picnic basket and began setting it up on the driest sand.
Slowly, go slowly.
After the tent was up, we sat on the air mattresses outside it eating villag and tomato sandwiches. “Whose ideas were these?” I asked.

“Karl’s.”

“How has he been taking all of this? He seems almost to be avoiding me.”

“He doesn’t understand.”

Poor Karl, I thought. I killed his playmate’s father and quarreled with his mother. “It was hard for me to be among people who saw me as a criminal. I’m sorry if I overreacted.” So what if I felt I was betrayed; life here was more difficult than we let ourselves realize.

“We can get away if we need to and just be people now.”

I said, “What’s simply human?”

She stared out at the water a while, then said, “Anne said that if having a faithful wife meant more to you than I got from not being faithful, that I should do what was most important.”

“She and her husband have an open marriage, don’t they?”

“It’s not as much fun as she thought it would be, but it’s the way their marriage works.”

“Marriage is more than the sex.”

“Yes, Tom.”

The sky got darker, cloudy. After sunset the ocean gleamed in streaks where fish or dolphins cut through phosphorescent plankton. Marianne asked, “Did they stock any dangerous animals here?”

“Just sapients.”

She took off her clothes and ran down to the water that cupped light around her body. I thought it would be too much if the clouds parted when she came out and starlight gleamed off her. She came out like a shadow and sat down naked beside me, nipples twisted, chill bumps on her arms.

“It’s colder than it looks,” She said, looking out at the water. Then she looked at me, her eyes still red, and I pulled my clothes off and pulled her close.

We seemed very skilled and awkward at the same time. Working through the awkwardness seemed crucial.

During Black Amber’s last days, Drusah and Chi’ursemisa helped Marianne and me. At the very end, we drove Black Amber down to the site for our Rector’s People’s House on a point overlooking the ocean near the beach where Marianne and I had worked out the beginnings of our reconciliation.

I wasn’t sure whether Black Amber still could understand speech, but Drusah and I carried her on a stretcher to the spot where Support crews in bulldozers were leveling my house site. We tilted the stretcher so that she was facing the site. “I’ll be a Rector’s Man, here,” I told her.

She called out with her ultrasonic voice, turning her head, mapping the place with sound. “Good,” she said. “I/Mica picked well.”

“Are you pleased with me?”

“You with you?”

I wasn’t sure she knew what sense she was making, but yes, I was beginning to be pleased with me. “Yes.”

She painted me with her ultrasonic voice and then fixed her blind eyes on mine, more alert than she’d been in weeks. “Take me to the water and sit with me,” she said. “Roll me into the waves.”

We all carried her down through the thorn to the beach. Drusah said, “We should touch her constantly now.”

She was dying. We rolled her out on the sand and Drusah got water from the ocean in a bucket and put some shells in it. He guided her hand into it and she koo’ed, tried to flick water at him, but her fingers were too weak.

Then we all sat around her, legs and hands touching her body until she died. I went up the hill to the workers and said, “Black Amber is dead. To whom do we report it?”

A small Gwyng said, “Consider it reported. The corpse is for the water.”

I went back and saw Marianne crying against Chi’ursemisa’s shoulder. Drusah was still stroking Black Amber’s coarse shoulder fur, his fingers swollen.

I said, “We can bury her at sea.”

Drusah said, “Cadmium said corpses discomfort Gwyngs.”

We all four guided Black Amber’s body through the water, wading as far as we could, then swimming until we felt a current tugging at us. We let her body tumble into it and struggled out ourselves.

When we got back to the beach, we looked at each other in our Karst-issue bathing trunks, Marianne with her white bra covering her breasts, we others bare chested, hairy, Drusah scarred by his own people. Marianne said, “I realize now that she cared tremendously about the Federation, even though…”

I remembered Black Amber crying oily Gwyng tears from a fake human face, the plastic bandages wrapping her when the Barcons put her back in Gwyng shape. I said, “She wasn’t a bad guy.”

Chi’ursemisa said, “Before Karriaagzh brought me here, I wanted to be pro-Federation. But that’s not as simple as I thought it would be.”

Marianne said, “When I first saw Alex, I knew the Federation wasn’t simple.”

I looked up and saw Cadmium come trudging through the sand toward us. He asked, “Is Black Amber truly gone?”

Drusah said, “Completely.”

He came up to us and sat down, leaning back against his arms. His webs seemed dry, the skin on them flaking. We looked at each other. “Do you mind that we took care of her?” I asked him.

“It wasn’t utterly abnormal,” he said. “I could want the same thing myself someday.”

The services, I thought, that conspecifics can’t manage. I said, “Thanks for what you did for me, for us.”