Human to Human (7 page)

“Curious,” Chi’ursemisa said.

“No hurt,” Hrif said. He rolled so that his hind feet were under his belly, forepaws in front. He raised his head when Chi’ursemisa opened Marianne’s mouth and ran a finger over her teeth, then he dropped his head to his forelegs when Chi’ursemisa pulled her fingers out.

Hurdai asked something. Marianne, now that Chi’ursemisa was feeling her neck, said, “He wants to feel you.”

Thridai spoke Sharwanisa to Hurdai, then said to me, “Be careful.”

Hrif said, “Only one,” and rose to his feet. Chi’ursemisa moved away from Marianne. I said to Hrif, “Now this me.” Hurdai quickly felt my head, his fingers moist against my skin. He bent his fingers and caught my beard stubble with his nails. Then Hurdai began probing my joints, testing for tendon insertions when he could.

“Whoa,” I said, remembering a Barcon examination that determined my physical exercises. Hurdai looked at me; Hrif growled. Thridai spoke Sharwanisa again, and Hurdai made the thrummed rubber hand sound in his throat. Then his fingertips shrank, leaving slight wrinkles behind. The wrinkles seemed firm, their equivalent of our fingerprints, a biological friction grip.

Thridai said, in Karst One, “Hurdai wanted to see how your body might fight.”

“Yes, I knew.” I wondered if we ought to stop this. They began talking in yet another language. That upset Thridai. He tried to interrupt them in Sharwanisa, but they talked even faster.

Then Chi’ursemisa asked me in Wrengu, “Joints different. Same species?”

“Yes,” I said. “Different sex.”

They made the rubber band sounds again. Hrif said, “Stop,” He stretched, back arched, front claws digging into the floor, tail bent forward over
his back, then came up to Marianne and butted her with his head. “Touch me.”

Marianne began rubbing him around his ears. I saw Chi’ursemisa’s fingers swell, then wrinkle again. Thridai began picking up the dinner dishes and taking them over to the sink.

I felt weird, as if I’d been sexually handled, not just measured for range of motion, tendon insertions, and general muscle strength. Those tumescent fingertips. And I realized that before this night, I hadn’t seen the Sharwani as themselves, but rather as more human than they were, more dangerous than alien. Marianne looked at me—sexual eyeballing—and smiled slightly. She said in English, “
I hadn’t really seen them well earlier
.”

I asked back in the same language, “
When do we get to the point where we don’t carry human templates around in our heads?
” I remembered Mica, the Gwyng I dragged out of a fire and saved for a while, drawing me with human features exaggerated toward the Gwyng norm.

Marianne said, again in English, “
Maybe we always have to work on it?”

And, I thought, if you don’t revise your mental templates, the Universe will confuse you. I wondered if the Sharwani wanted to make the universe over by their templates and subordinate anyone who didn’t fit.

Chi’ursemisa got up and began feeling her way through the kitchen equipment, looking over at us and then at Hrif, who growled slightly. Thridai said to us, “She’s teasing you. Look at her fingertips.”

They were wrinkled, not puffed.

“Can we put them in their room now?” Marianne asked.

Thridai’s eyelids puffed slightly, but he spoke to his conspecifics. Hrif rose and padded over toward them, his thick tail held at an angle to his back. I smelled a musky smell, not really unpleasant, just greasing the air.

Daiur said to his mother in Karst One, “Back to the room, please.” Then he said, “I’ll play with Karl and the others tomorrow.”

Hurdai said something to Thridai and then spread his hands as if imitating a shrug. Who else shrugs like humans? I tried to remember. Chi’ursemisa’s eyelid veins knotted, but she turned and went toward the hall. Hurdai spoke to Thridai, then picked up Daiur and followed her. Hrif, his tail still bent to the side, padded behind them, then Marianne and I went behind him until they went through the clear door. We shut it and locked it.

In the kitchen, Thridai was cleaning up, his shoulders twitching. He turned to us and one eyelid vessel had ruptured. Marianne said, “We try not to be cruel.”

Thridai said, “Are you afraid of me, too?”

I said, “No.” Marianne looked at Hrif, then raised her hand, fingers cupped, and brought it down fast.

“I know the Federation is right. I came to its cause. But seeing my own caged is shocking,” Thridai said. He began wiping the dishes with paper towels, rotary wrist movements, the fingers gripping the paper.

“Soon, we must be…never the same, but…”

“In communication? Not fighting?” Marianne suggested.

“The Universe will swallow us if we try to swallow it,” Thridai said. I figured the plate was dry by now and took it from him, but gently.

I realized I was thinking in English—a sign in me of being anxious. Slip it back into Karst One, that’s a better map for these sorts of situations, I told myself.

Thridai said, “I have to go.”

Marianne asked, “Should we go with you?”

“No, I can find my way. Can I use the strangers facilities? I saw the space in your front room.”

We walked with him to the front, and he disappeared for ten minutes into the multi-form toilet and cleaner by the elevator. When he came out, I saw that he’d put masking cream under his eyes. He asked, “May I come back?”

I looked at Marianne to let her answer. She said, “Yes, our code is
R-E-R-E
one-zero-two
A
and
I
,” giving him the Karst One equivalents to the first letters of out Academy and Institute names, our home floor designation. “Leave us a message if we’re not on terminal.”

He pulled out a small keypad and jotted it down.

I said, “Are you sure you’ll be all right going back?”

“Yes, I like to be out under such a bright sky. Like an hour after sun disappearance all night long.”

“But you’re not crepuscular, are you?” I asked, wondering if we had the Sharwani under too-harsh lights.

“Leave them with that illumination,” he said, almost in a monotone. He patted his tunic top and pants as if checking to see if he’d left anything, then pulled out his stone cigarette box and lit the last half of the thing he’d been smoking earlier. He made the plucked rubber band sound again, but it was higher pitched than before. “But I personally hate having so many details thrust at me.” He pressed the button for the elevator.

Marianne said, “And we wouldn’t be social companions, would we?”

He looked straight at her and said, “No.” The elevator door slid down; he stepped inside and pushed the ground-floor button.

Hrif came in and asked, “Gone? Sleep?”

Marianne said, “Yes.”

He looked around the front room and padded up to the sofa, put his paws on it, and moved almost delicately onto it. I was about to protest, but he stared me down.

Marianne said, “Come on, Tom.”

We went into Marianne’s room on the south hall, farther from the Sharwani and Hrif, and talked about human organs that felt better when they filled with blood, then tested them, giggling half the time.

Lips become fantastically sensitive when the blood’s in them. Marianne pulled hers away from me and said, “Poor bastards.”

Later, she said, “I was so nervous.”

“Still?”

“Not as much. They’re more ordinarily alien. Does that make any sense?”

I said, half-asleep, “Yeah. Ones like humans you really have to worry about.”

The next morning, I tried to fix plates for the Sharwani the way Thridai did. When I slipped them through the food slot, Chi’ursemisa said, “Hearing is touch. You and female…last night.” She stopped as if what we’d done was weird, more incomprehensible than vulgar.

Hearing is touch? I thought about the pressure of sound waves against membranes. Inside the jellied oils of my inner ear, tiny fibers bending caused impulses to travel up the auditory nerve. Touch? Sort of, I supposed. I said, “What we did is normal for us.”

Marianne came out and overheard that. She said something in Chi’ursemisa’s language, then said to me, “They’ve got very sensitive hearing, but they can de-tune.”

“You’re always sex?” Chi’ursemisa cleaned her plate with her fingers, licked them with her thin tongue, then said in halting Karst One, “Will study Karst One language. If we can come out.”

Marianne said, “One at a time.”

Hurdai asked Chi’ursemisa something and, when she replied, made the rubber band bo’ing sound in his throat. Daiur said, “Start with me.”

“You can play with the children anytime,” Marianne said.

“Two at a time if one is Daiur,” I told Chi’ursemisa in Wrengu. Marianne signaled yes with her cupped hand.

Chi’ursemisa said, “I’ll be first.”

Hurdai said something slowly to Marianne, who translated, “He wants to have some company in
there.” I said to Chi’ursemisa in Wrengu, “I wish I could send you three back.”

She said, “I’d never be trusted.”

I said, “Let’s make the best of it, then,” and unlocked the door. In English, I said to Marianne, “Why don’t we let all of them out?”

Marianne said, “As long as you and Hrif are here,” then said something in Sharwanisa. Hurdai pushed his fingers through the fur over his high cheekbones and shambled out. We went into the front room. Funny how more tired and less dramatic they looked under natural light. Chi’ursemisa went to a window and looked out, stretching. Hrif settled his head down on his paws again.

The elevator door opened. We all turned around. Hrif rose to his feet, tense, eyes on the Sharwani. Karl stepped off the elevator, looked around. Daiur ran up to him and hugged, saying, “Friends now.”

Chi’ursemisa’s eyelid veins swelled slightly, then she nibbled at a finger and sat down on the couch. We didn’t say anything. Karl said to Daiur, “That’s great. What’s your name?”

“Daiur.”

“When you grow up, the Federation will call you after a rock.” Karl didn’t seem enthusiastic about the prospect.

While Hrif and I watched the Sharwani, Marianne went back to her room for a lap terminal and microphone. She plugged in the terminal to the core cable and said to the microphone, “Give me the learner series Sharwanisa and Karst One phonemic and morphemics workups parallels and disjunctions.”

The terminal said, “One, two, three, four,” showing one ball, two balls, three balls, finally four on the screen. It then counted the balls in Sharwanisa.

Daiur tried to touch the screen, then counted the balls. Chi’ursemisa said, “One, two, three, four,” pointing to the adults.

Karl said the Sharwanisa word for “two.”

Marianne said, “Karl, we’re teaching them
our
language.”

Hurdai said, “One, two,” pointing to the children. Marianne pointed to the sofa and gave the word for that, with its root in
seating instrument
and its bound morpheme for horizontally long. Then she pointed to the chair and gave the word for that. Chi’ursemisa used both words correctly, murmuring the sofa word’s terminal morpheme separately.

After an hour, I began to get bored and went to get my own portable terminal to check on what my cadets were doing. Hurdai looked up at me when I came back and plugged into another fiber-optic cable, my terminal configured with a keyboard. He came over to see what I was doing, his fingers resting on my right shoulder.

Instead of calling up cadet records, I had the screen show a map of our neighborhood, and rotated it, then abstracted out the floor plan of our building. He reached for one of the knobs and turned it this way and that, from more abstract schematics to graphics as detailed as fine-grain color photos.

“Here,” he said, pointing to the room we were in. Chi’ursemisa came up and looked, too.

I rolled the scale so that we seemed to be zooming away from the neighborhood, away from the city, off the planet. Then I paused, afraid I’d be giving away military information.

Marianne said, “More work,” and they’d both learned that much Karst already. Chi’ursemisa curled her leg under her as she sat, fingers spread on the chair arm, and Hurdai squatted, holding his knees. They looked over and blinked at me, both pairs of eyelids falling simultaneously, as if their minds were linked.

Once Hurdai learned enough Karst One to phrase the thought, he asked, “Why not language operations? Thridai had them.”

Why not, indeed? For about a month, the Federation task group in charge of the Karst-bound Sharwani debated whether or not to put the Sharwani captives through the operation. The various Sharwani couples, having heard about the language operations from Thridai, seemed to hope this would be done to them en masse, thus giving them time together.

After the fifth task-group meeting, Thridai came back with me to my apartment. Smoking his herbal cigarettes, he told Chi’ursemisa, “No Sharwani government will accept any of us back.”

Chi’ursemisa said, “We thought as much.” She leaned over, took one of his cigarettes, and lit it, her head hair flared slightly.

So much for the Federation’s plans to use some of the captive Sharwani in prisoner trades. Did the Sharwani torture their captives? Or simply kill us as animals? I visualized a bird sapient gut-shot, flopping around in null-gravity, blood vivid red balls.

Thridai said, “We need the language operations.” Hurdai made the thrumming rubber band sound down in his throat, very softly.

We went on living together, trusting Thridai and Chi’ursemisa a bit more each day. One day, Marianne said, “Could you take Karl and Tracy swimming? I’ll be fine with them. Thridai’s coming over.”

I said, “Don’t they have nursery group today?” Tracy was Sam and Yangchenla’s daughter. I saw Karl freeze when I looked at him. He’d been sneaking toward the harpsichord Sam left behind. He tried to play it, but would get excited and start banging, which broke the quills over the bass strings.

“Karl and Tracy need to practice human flirting.” That sounded ultraliberal to me, but I said, “Okay.”

Yangchenla, in a trench coat and shiny boots copied from a smuggled-off-Earth fashion magazine, brought Tracy over. Tracy, hair ironed smooth, skin the color of the bottom of a biscuit, didn’t really want to leave Yangchenla, but swimming was bribe enough. She was a lovely little girl with round black eyes shaded by a trace of epicanthic fold. Again, I thought about having another child, my option this time. Not quite yet.

Karl came out of his room with his gym bag and said, “Why can’t Daiur go?”

Daiur came out and said, “I swim, too. Please?”

Yangchenla stared out our windows as if challenging me to make the right decision. She looked both prosperous and slightly absurd in her Western clothes. Marianne just grinned at us. I felt a weird sexual tension building and said, “if it’s okay with Yangchenla.”

Yangchenla said to Daiur, “If you promise to be good.”

Daiur said, “I won’t duck and bite.”

Tracy looked at me and said, “Will you swim, too?” I nodded at her Western human style, and went quickly to my room for my suit. We’d swim outside on such a beautiful day, in the pond by the gym. When I came back out, Yangchenla had gone, so recently I could hear the elevator moving.

Daiur said, “We have to wait for the cab to return.”

Tracy looked over at him and said, “You’re pretty.”

I pushed for the elevator, then embraced Marianne as though I wouldn’t be back soon. She smoothed my hair back and looked at me as if she wanted to say something, but didn’t.

Chi’ursemisa came out then and said, “Daiur, so then you get to go?”

“Yes,” he said.

She raised her eyebrow hair, the Sharwani gesture parallel to a single lifted human eyebrow. Then she went over to a table between two chairs, opened a drawer and brought out herbal cigarettes and a gnarly but polished jade slab. As she sat down, her thumb rubbed the stone.

Daiur looked at his mother and dropped his head down, his arms away from his side. He whined and Chi’ursemisa looked up at him but didn’t move. As we got on the elevator, both Tracy and Karl poked at Daiur, then back at Chi’ursemisa, stroking her stone, then Karl said, “Mom, come too.”

Marianne said, “I can’t. Karriaagzh and Thridai are coming.”

Daiur said, “Karriaagzh broke my mother’s wrist. She’s still stupid in that hand.”

We took a bus down to the Academy. I worried about Daiur, but his little throat bo’inged every time we passed young aliens or a particularly ornate building. I asked, “Are you enjoying this, Daiur?”

“Oh, yes.” Being kidnapped and taken out to a strange planet had happened to him young enough for it to seem normal. “Do you like the nursery group?” I asked him.

He lifted his little hand and signaled
yes,
the fingertips swollen as though he wanted to touch everything.

Karl grabbed his left hand and nibbled gently, a game familiar to both of them, it seemed. Tracy sat like a demure steel spring, her legs crossed at the ankles, her eyes forward, moving as she read the street signs and the route sheet over the driver’s head. She turned her head only very slightly, not showing the boys much attention. I smiled and she shrugged. Yangchenla’s daughter for sure.

Daiur rose up on the seat, fingers splayed over the windows, and said, “Wow, look at that one!”

“It’s a Wreng,” Karl said.

“I never got to see them when we were there,” Daiur said. “They’re weird. Think about feeling the scales.”

Tracy said, softly, “It might be rude.”

Daiur said, “We let them feel us.”

“I suspect fur is as odd to them,” Karl said, shaking his head at Tracy, “as scales and bristles are to us.”

Tracy pulled out a reading tablet and began skimming. I noticed tiny loops through her earlobes when she pushed her hair back and began twisting it around her finger.

We got off the bus at the main gate. Daiur didn’t want to walk, so I carried him on my shoulders, his hands gripping my head right over my ears. As we went into the gym to change, Karl and Tracy walked around each other as if in attractant/repellent orbits, finally splitting up at the women’s changing room. I took Karl and Daiur into the men’s changing room.

Daiur wouldn’t let us see him naked and changed in a privacy cubicle. Karl whispered to me, “It doesn’t hang out. He really didn’t want to see yours. I told him it could get as big as Hrif’s tail.”

“Karl!”

“I haven’t spied. I called up human biology.”

I was about to ask if the nursery group showed each other the various organs, but suspected that I really didn’t need or want to know.

When Daiur came out, he held a towel over his chest.

We waited for Tracy outside the female changing room.

Then she came out, her little non-existent breasts covered, Daiur said, “Can I have that kind of bathing suit?” When he got to the pond, he dropped the towel, and I saw that he had four nipples, two lower ones very much smaller than the first pair up near his armpits. I remembered a guy in our high school who had extra chest buttons and felt a wave of sympathy, for both Daiur and the human I hadn’t seen in over a decade. Daiur saw me looking and said, “Most of us don’t have four.”

Karl said, “Nobody cares how many you have, or where, or how they work. I told you that.”

Daiur said, dropping his chest under water, “Karst people aren’t real people. Most real people only have two.”

Tracy said, “We can all talk, so we’re all real people. That’s the Federation law even when the Federation doesn’t offer full citizenship to everyone who can talk.”

She walked out into the pond until she was chest deep, then slid smoothly into a butterfly stroke, head above water all the time:

Daiur swam out and dived under. He came up, laughing, with a fish in his hands. Suddenly, the fish belly squirted silvery babies. He screamed and dropped it.

“They’re alien fish,” I told him.

“Do they bite?” he asked, treading water, his hair wet and ruddy.

“Only small things, like fingers,” Karl said. “How did you catch it?”

Daiur raised the hand that had caught the fish and looked at it. “They bite fingers?”

“Not hard,” Tracy said, with her hair still dry.

Daiur went down under again and came up with a large thing that was either a small alligator analog or a very large near-salamander. His index finger was curled away from the thing, bleeding.

“That will bite,” Tracy said. “You oughtn’t pick things up off the bottom.”

“I know,” Daiur said, “but I couldn’t let it go.”

I swam out, took the creature from him, and tossed it out into the pond. “You don’t bother them, they won’t bother you, Daiur.”

His finger stopped bleeding as though he’d consciously constricted the veins. The beast could have bitten him harder than it did. I supposed the non-sapients in the pond got used to weird sapients dragging ’em out.

Daiur said, “But it bit me. It scared me. I’ve got to get it out and…”

Tracy said, “Must you? Is this urge inborn?”

“I’ll take you to the infirmary if you want,” said.

“I want to bite it back.”

Karl said, imitating Tracy’s voice, “Must you?”

Daiur’s eyelids puffed. He said, “You think…” The veins shrank back. “No, I can forget it. But who can we catch?”

Karl smiled and began swimming toward Tracy.

Daiur rolled under like a diving seal. Tracy went under, thrashing. Before I could swim out, she surfaced, sputtering.

Karl and Daiur bobbed up just out of reach. “Your hair’s wet, Tracy,” Karl said. “Now it’s going to get all curly.”

Daiur made the rubber band sound down in his throat, like a thin rubber band, not the broad thick ones his parents’ laugh sounded like.

I said, “Your hair looks nice curly, Tracy.”

She turned in the water and swam on her back, watching us. Then she sank and Karl went under.

He came up coughing and then said, “She bit me.”

Tracy said, “Not hard.”

“Tracy, the water here isn’t too clean, so don’t open your
mouth underwater, all right?”

Daiur swam up to me and said, “I don’t want to be grabbed.” He clung to me, his legs wrapped around my arm, and shivered.

“Are you cold?” I asked.

“I want my daddy,” he said. “Let’s go home now.”

“Why don’t we watch them swim?” I said. He pushed his torso away from me and stared as if suddenly realizing how alien I was. I wondered what sort of noises would soothe him. His body stiffened, then he began sobbing. I didn’t realize they cried.

Tracy and Karl stopped swimming and looked at us as I picked Daiur up and waded to shore. I remembered sitting here myself, so terribly lonely, under this tree. I had been almost afraid of the pie-sized leaves with vegetable muscles that rolled the leaves into tubes when the wind blew. I thought about blowing on one to show Daiur, but such alien leaves might be too much.

He sat down beside me, his body posture reflecting mine, staring at the leaves, then at me.

“Do those leaves bite?” he asked. As I began to worry about him, I heard the high pitched thrum in his throat.

“No, Daiur.”

“You were looking at them funny. Do they roll up in the wind?”

“Yes.”

He said, “We have trees like that.” From home, I thought. Somewhere on the Sharwani planet is a place with not much sun, lots of wind, and high humidity.

“Daiur?” Karl called.

“I’m tired,” Daiur said.

Tracy said, “I’m tired, too.” She swam up to waist level, put her feet down, and began wading out.

Karl said, “Well, I’m not tired. We’re not going home soon, are we, Dad? We just got here.”

Daiur rolled up in a towel, lay down with his head against my leg, fingered the coarse hair on it, and closed his eyes. He said, “I’m going to sleep.”

Tracy found her comb and tried to keep the frizz from drying in. I asked her, “Why do the curls bother you?”

“Mother doesn’t have them. Nobody here has them, not even Molly.” She looked at Daiur and said, “He’s got weird nipples. I’ve got weird hair. We’re better off with aliens.”

I said, “If you were on Earth, you’d see lots of people with hair like yours. And some humans have four nipples, just like Daiur.”

Daiur squeezed his eyes tighter shut. Tracy looked down at him and said, “Daiur is so impressed.”

When we got back to the house, Karriaagzh and a Barcon medic had Chi’ursemisa’s wrist in a portable scanner. The Barcon didn’t even look up when Daiur hissed. Hurdai made soothing noises and caught Daiur up in his arms.

Marianne asked, “Enjoy your swim?”

“Sure,” Karl said, almost, but not quite, giving his mother a kiss.

Tracy came in and sat down on the couch, her hair a black halo around her head. “Marianne, I need your iron.”

“Sweetheart, you look beautiful that way, an
Afro.”

“If any of you teases me, I’ll bite,” Tracy said.

I looked at Marianne; we both shrugged. Karriaagzh looked through the scanner and murmured in Barc. Chi’ursemisa squirmed in the examination chair, then asked “What will you do?”

“Ream the blood vessels and regenerate the nerves,” the Barcon said. “We can do it at the same time as the language operations.”