by Rebecca Ore
Her son came to the door and leaned against it, stroking his stomach, web veins slightly distended although he hadn’t spread out his arms. She spoke to him, then said, “He wants to touch you.”
When I knelt he came up, fingered my head hair with tiny long fingers that looked almost brittle, and spoke Gwyng to her.
“Yes you’re perceptive,” she said in Karst Two. “He cut it short as our head hair.”
“What can I call him?” I asked her.
“He won’t understand you. Amber-son, if you have to name him something.”
Amber-son leaned against me as she explained, in Karst Two, that I’d be calling him various weird sounds. “He does understand Karst Two, then.”
“A little,” she said. “I spoke Karst to not exclude.”
“Red Clay,” Amber-son said, almost ultrasonically.
I cupped my hand and brought it down in the Federation signal for agreement. He squealed and koo’ed in a fit of Gwyng giggles, then curled up on my bed, not touching me, his head propped up on his left hand, web stretched and pressed against the mat covers.
“Is he going to stay here all night?” I asked Amber.
“Problem?” she asked, thumbs curling out slightly as the glands at their bases engorged with blood or anger juice precursors. I looked away quickly before she could notice me watching her hands.
“Well, will he be comfortable with an alien?”
“If you let him, it will relieve his fear.”
I thought about her fear of Karriaagzh and said, “Then it is good not to be afraid of aliens, Black Amber?”
“Of mammals,” she said smoothly before speaking Gwyng at him. She smiled at me as if she’d been waiting years to demand this of me. “Sleep with my true child and you can go to your planet afterward.
Black Amber had other pouch children, but Mica, stranded on Earth, killed there, was, had been, her only other true child. He’d scared me the first time he tried to sleep with me—odd, now I realized how he’d felt, alone among aliens. He must have complained about my coldness in journals Black Amber read after he died and the aliens found me. Well, I decided, Amber-son is small; it will be like sleeping with a big dog. I reached over to him and stroked his side.
Black Amber took my head in her long fingers and kissed me on the nose. Then she left, body rocking slightly over the bowed Gwyng legs.
Bats—they’re excessively complicated flightless bats. Amber-son trembled slightly when I thought this, empathetic to the tension in my own body. Poor baby.
He whispered, “Red Clay, be good/kind (anxiety).”
I nodded my cupped hand slightly, then stretched my fingers toward him. He scooted over and curled up beside me before I could change into my Earth-style pajamas. Oh, well; the tunic and pants are loose fitting enough. I eased my hand down for the covers—he sat up with a start, then must have remembered Amber explaining this strange alien custom and wiggled in beside me again. I took off my tunic top and he twisted his little fingers through my chest hair and sighed. “Need more (sleepers),” he whispered to me.
“Um,” I said, suspicious.
“Can you-sleep-if-not-willing, not-Gwyng?”
“You know more Karst Two than Black Amber let on.” He still couldn’t understand Karst One, though, and stared up at me, then touched my unwebbed armpit. He’s just a little kid, I thought, rubbing his back. Fortunately, I was tired and fell asleep quickly, didn’t insult him or Mama Black Amber with restlessness.
During the night, though, he woke me, whimpering in his sleep, hands locked around my wrist. I hummed, remembering how two Gwyngs once awakened me, and he opened his eyes and said, “Won’t push me out?”
I shook my head, then signaled no. As I stroked him along his side with the backs of my knuckles, the way Gwyngs like it, I wondered what a four-year-old Gwyng could have nightmares about. Maybe me?
But he cuddled closer, fingers still tight around my arm, and went back to sleep. I managed to fall back asleep and dreamed of when Mica was with me on Earth, of Black Amber’s anguish over losing him, her hostility toward humans.
In the dream after Mica died, gut shot by my brother, I turned to Amber and said, “Even if Warren is nasty and crazy, he’s my brother.”
In the morning the adult Gwyngs of the house hummed us awake and Amber-son laughed, koo’ed.
“Did he have uncomfortable dreams?” Black Amber asked.
Amber-son looked over at me, breathing through his mouth. I shook my head, then said, “Is that, why you made him sleep with me? Because he has bad dreams?”
“Know his non-sound symbol,” Amber-son said in Karst Two. “Shakes head no. No. No-bad-dreams-no.”
Black Amber told him, “Shook head because he didn’t like/feared the question.” She said to Wy’um’s sister, “You’ve been teaching him Karst language (troubled).”
“He lives on this planet, not Gwyng Home,” Ghring’urn said.
“I thought he was having terror dreams over me,” I said, anxious about my own dreams.
Amber wrapped her long arms around her thin body and hooked her hands behind her neck, thumbs bent, veins pulsing in the webs stretched over her chest. Then she stretched her hands toward her son, but didn’t touch him, just held her long fingers near his face. They opened and closed like a hypnotist’s. She asked, “Would you rather be back in the pouch?”
Amber-son watched her thumbs and, wiggling slightly, didn’t say anything. Wy’um crouched slightly as though Amber had scolded him. Then they talked Gwyng, excluding me.
Finally, Black Amber spoke to Amber-son and then said to me, “Take him for a walk among the herds. We have some of your planet’s food animals. Then find your food in the stale food room.
“Do you have a cow?”
“Horned milk oil animal from Sherrsee? Yes. And some egglayers,” she said.
“What about a flat iron pan to fry eggs in?”
“Walk him now,” she told me. When I began to move, she nibbled her thumb glands to suck out the anger juice.
Amber-son folded his own little arms around himself and huffed out his breath slightly at her. They stared at each other—challenge eyes. He was a tough four-year-old. I held out my hand to him. He sniffed and said, “You have funny web odor.”
“Yeah, so I’ve been told.” I realized this was a one way conversation and signaled yes.
“Outside?” he asked.
Yes.
“Good, Red Clay, I can show you (no Karst word for her). I call her something you don’t understand." He looked at me as if expecting a reply, then wiggled his shoulders. We went by the food storage room, that stale food room for foods already taken from the animals, where I poured myself a glass of skim milk, the Gwyngs having taken the cream.
“Better warm,” Amber-son told me, sucking air slightly, the muscle between his chin and his throat bouncing.
My hand, fingers loosely curled, was going to get tired, bobbing yes all the time, but he knew the head shake for no. I jerked my chin toward the door, and he ran out, clumsily like all Gwyngs, body rolling, arms as long as a spider monkey’s spread for balance.
Other little Gwyngs rushed out of the stable, babbling in Gwyng and Karst Two “Where have you been? Why did the big ones take you away? You smell funny?”
“They wanted me,” he said, his eyes suddenly more oily than ever. “I’m too important. This is Red Clay, my friend.”
“Smells funny," one of the Gwyng babies said.
“Maybe if I talk to…” Another one-way conversation.
One of the brood beasts came out from the stable and lowed, then loped up to Amber-son and stopped. A little Gwyng hopped out of the pouch and hugged Amber-son sideways, then the brood beast nudged them both back toward her tail with her blunt black-and-white-mottled head.
I decided to leave him, go back to the house and tell Black Amber, Wy’um, and Ghring’um—all of them, mad thumbs or not—that Amber-son needed more time with the other baby Gwyngs.
Black Amber met me coming back from the stable, stopped, arms folded across her chest, fingers tugging at her body hair.
“Why did you take him away from the pouch host so soon?”
“Mica… We want him to be extraordinary for male Gwyng (like Mica/pain). Grow-need-grow-fast.”
“He’s not Mica, Black Amber.”
She took me up against her hairy side. Her eyes looked down slightly into mine. “No, you are Mica/replacement. The bird will destroy my other pouch kin in dangerous missions (now happening).”
“What about going to Earth? I need to be better with my own kind.”
She ran her finger down my nose bridge as though she’d never seen it before. “What about your people in the undeveloped area and in Karst City? Learn to be good/better with them.”
“I want my own time, and Americans.”
“Can’t return to your culture area.”
“But if you people, even surgically rearranged, can hide in Berkeley without being noticed, then I should fit right in. When I was in prison, I met a guy who planned to go to Berkeley as soon as they set him free.”
“You figure out much, awkward-with-own-kind.”
“And, you had some people you wanted me to meet.”
She fingered her side where she’d been shot on Earth. “Some (I am forced to admit) were kind. One woman will follow the sound of your voice. Go back, be intimidated (or possibly not), return to me (not to Karriaagzh).”
Berkeley was nothing, I was sure, compared to Karst City. But Berkeley wasn’t rural Virginia. She saw my face go rigid and rounded her thin lips slightly.
I thought about Yangchenla as I flew from Ghring’um’s island, Black Amber coming with me. Black Amber looked over at me and said, “I have so much to worry about.”
“You’ve been a bad girl by Gwyng terms, haven’t you?”
“Don’t be stuffy/prig/moral dwarp. The Federation doesn’t care as long as I do my job.” She narrowed her eyes and twitched a foot as if Karriaagzh was before her, subconsciously kicking him off as though she were a small bat being attacked by a hunting bird. “And you saw the two other males.”
“I ought to get my own place,” I said, wondering if the two other males had had any chance with her, or were there just for show, to prove Black Amber’s matings were open, honest by Gwyng terms.
“You needed company right after Yangchoochoo left.” She never pronounced Yangchenla’s name right, despite her ability to memorize what to a Gwyng were nonsense sounds. She pulled off her Gwyng rig and pulled on the Sub-Rector’s uniform, full-length tunic and pants, twisting away from me so I didn’t see her front, but still acting rather post-heat, humming and brushing up against me as we left the plane. I felt embarrassed, as usual. She knew. Being Gwyng, she liked to tease.
Before I left, Black Amber sent me a message on my computer terminal: THREE GOALS. TWO OBLIGATORY, ONE OPTIONAL. RESEARCH JAPAN, GO TO DINNER WITH TWO HUMANS, FIND A WIFE. KARRIAAGZH AND I AGREE.
I leaned away from the screen and worried. Everyone told me that humans were weird. Even I wasn’t allowed to spend more than sixteen hours on duty without taking sleep time. Federation rule for fragile species, near xenophobes. Now I was going to have to face millions of my weird fellow creatures again. I was desperate to go back and scared, too. Shit, I thought in English, no sooner than I adjust to here…
2
Berkeley
Space gates eat angular momentum and the space-time we skip between departure and arrival. Outside at intersect was nothing, not even time, much less a stray hydrogen atom. Granite Grit, who studied astronavigation, explained that we intersected through vibrating multi-dimensional hypercubes, but Gwyng mystics claim we destroy and re-create the universe with every jump.
At a Karst orbital station, I wedged myself into a round transport pod and sealed the hatch from the inside with six four-inch wing bolts, tightening them good with both hands. The in-transit light, one of a pair of little diodes over the hatch, went on a minute or so later.
The pod lurched like some giant was playing tennis with it, whirled a few times, stopped for ten minutes, then dropped and rocked forward gently. Before I got really claustrophobic, the arrival light flashed. I undid the hatch and pushed it until the seal peeled off.
As the hatch swung free, a blond Ahram about thirty years old, his head real blocky without the usual skull top crest, raised it to the catch position. He was lighter skinned than the Ahrams I’d seen before—my shade—and seemed to be shaved down in the face. As I climbed out with my bag, he backed away as if he didn’t know what to expect, getting a human delivered to him when Earth had billions of other humans around outside.
“You grow a beard?” I asked him in English.
“We’re various, too. Call me Alex. Here’s your passport and driver’s license. If anyone asks about your accent, you’ve been in Asia.” He spoke perfect English—the Federation had fixed his vocal organs just as I’d been surgically rearranged to speak good Karst.
I swung the hatch down on the pod and tightened the external dogs. The air turned blue around the pod a second before it skipped out of this space-time. I looked around the room—no windows, metal double garage door, gyp board walls—and saw two dehaired Barcons, looking like alien caricatures of Negro wrestlers. Dressed in jeans and UCal sweatshirts, they squatted by the wall, arms folded across their chests, a perfect match for size. Barcons made me nervous. They were generally Federation medics, remote in their treatment of our alien illnesses, but sometimes they used their medical knowledge to rebuild brains. They could kill for the Federation, but that was very rare.
But dehaired or in molt, they could pass for human—if you didn’t notice the jaws with too many angles between chin and earlobe.
The air felt muggy, but cool, full of traffic gas. I was in the Bay Area near a freeway. One Barcon said, “We’d better fix his fingerprints now.”
The other Barcon, wider at the hips, probably the female, said, “Be sure to tell him how to get his papers replaced if he gets mugged."
“We inserted the right data into the computer," the Ahram, Alex, said, “so you’re street legal."
“After we change your fingerprints. Temporary, so don’t abrade them. We’ll redo the tips in a month. Lucky your law doesn’t take retina prints."
“What about my skull computer?” I’d just left Karst fifteen minutes earlier. Being here so suddenly was weird, not that I hadn’t traveled as fast before to really alien planets.
“If they find that,” the male Barcon said, “you’d be made as experimental KGB, and we haven’t given you an address."
“Alex? Can I get in touch with you?”
“We’ll be in touch with you,” Alex said.
I didn’t like that; it reminded me of major drug investors who sent out thugs in untraceable junker cars with muddy plates, the guys who forced my brother Warren to make drugs for them, back in Virginia before Karst rescued me from that life. “I’m loyal to Karst,” I said.
Alex said, gesturing at one of the Barcons, “Jack here was mugged.”
I got embarrassed for humans all over again. Of course, they couldn’t trust me—I was from a long line of xenophobic/philic flip-flops who believed aliens would eat them or save them.
The Barcons wiggled their noses. Amused, the bastards. Alex said, “Tom, sit down. I’ll try to get you oriented while the guys work on your fingers.”
I sat on a metal stool while the Barcon sprayed both my hands with nerve deadener spray from a bogus Windex can. Alex sat cross-legged on the cement floor near my feet. “We’ll put you on the San Pablo bus when we finish.”
The only human city I’d ever been much in was Roanoke. “I could get lost.”
Alex unfolded a map while the Barcons peeled off my finger skin. “Here. The main bus connections are at Shattuck and University. We’ve rented a place for you just off Shattuck on Milvia, so you can walk to the university and the co-ops. Black Amber rented an apartment in the same bui
lding.”
“Near people she wants me to meet?”
The male Barcon grumbled Barcon language about Gwy-on-ngs and Black-re-Amber.
“And you’re going to leave me by myself, so I’ll get lonely enough to call on them.” Black Amber gave me the woman’s address just before I left Karst.
“Tom, you’re acting suspicious, just like a human.”
“Alex, he is right, though,” the female Barcon said.
“We will leave him alone to make contact.”
I half wanted to spit in their eyes and go back to Karst. “So I have an apartment already. Do I have a bank account?”
“You’ve got to set one up. You’ve been in Asia, remember. You know Yangchenla’s language."
“Shit, if anyone knows real modern Tibetan…”
“You learned an obscure dialect. Asia’s very fragmented, even for a human territory."
I studied the map, found the university sprawled over a huge chunk of it. “I’ve got to do research on Japan while I’m here.”
“You’ll get a library card for about twenty dollars as a Berkeley resident,” Alex said. “The library’s okay, but you’ll still have to carry out bound books, though—no terminal texts for non-students."
“Oh.” I was so used to accessing texts through the computer that I'd forgotten about checking books out.
“Setup an account with the Bank of America near the Co-op. Electric money is waiting for you.”
“Fake credit?” They’d make me an outlaw again, data junking the Bank of America.
Alex said, “Don’t be so touchy."
“It’s his planet,” the female Barcon said, bent over my right thumb, carefully rolling down the fake skin.
“I’m nervous; I broke parole when I left Virginia.”
Alex looked at me as if he’d just realized I was not simply another rude human. “Okay, we’re nervous too. You’re the first human refugee ever to get a home pass.”
“I’m nervous about other humans here.”
