Being Alien

by Rebecca Ore

  About noon, I cut up Hearst toward the campus, walked through a redwood grove, and continued on, just looking at things—the old university buildings, brick, and the new ones, pastel metal and glass. The students looked like any alien students with backpacks and pocket computers, maybe weirder face hair, agitated like Gwyngs. A provincial university, I thought in Karst I. Nah, it’s bigger’n Tech, a Virginia educated lobe of my brain replied in low English.

  Suddenly I only noticed women—guys faded into the bricks—and got a hard on for all the human women, visible and invisible. My cock would explode if I walked farther.

  I thought about Yangchenla’s nastiest crack about me and Black Amber. No, Yangchenla, I never slept with an alien. The blood backed out of my cock. I asked a girl in a long blowing white dress “Where do I get a library card?”

  Her face did a subtle freeze shift—oh, he’s not a student. She pointed to a huge, obvious building about a hundred yards away and walked off.

  “Thanks anyhow,” Bitches, human women.

  The library crew fingerprinted me again, with clear jelly that only made prints on treated paper, and took a mug shot for the ID card. Then after their computer checked me for outstanding fines, they gave me a booklet that explained the various libraries all over campus on all the subjects that I could use. I asked about computer compatibility with the library’s software.

  “Go to Computer Mart,” a woman said, “and tell them you want UCal compatibility. It’ll be seventy five dollars a month for modem linkup. Call in when you’ve got your system.”

  I looked at my fingertips to see if the graft lines were visible. Nope, the Barcons had done good work. Why hadn’t the bank printed me, I wondered until I realized they’d had my money.

  After I’d dealt with the library, I was really hungry and so crossed Sproul Plaza, headed toward Telegraph Avenue. First thing, I ran into a bicycle-truck selling tempeh sandwiches. What the hell? I asked, “Can I see some?”

  The guy handed me a strip of tempeh. I sniffed it—smelled like paint—then looked down Telegraph and saw a Shabazz Soul Food sign. My brother Warren had told me about a Black Muslim place called the Shabazz Bakery. Shit, Black Muslim food had to be better than tempeh “Thanks,” I said to the tempeh dealer, handing him back his little strip of moldy beans.

  They can’t be racists here, I told myself. It’s California. The door didn’t look threatening—beveled glass in bluepainted wood. I looked inside, saw that I wouldn’t be the only white boy, and smelled the cornbread.

  Hope I’m not drooling. I sat down in a booth. A black woman in a long dress, head covered with a kerchief, came up and said, “Yow.”

  “I’d like pinto beans and cornbread. Glass of buttermilk if you have it.”

  “Cornbread with jalapenos, ginger, or plain.”

  “Plain cornbread.”

  “Home food?” She smiled at me.

  “Yeah, originally. I’ve been away.”

  “Glad you aren’t a Voudonist. We hate Voudonist here, especially druggy white Voudonist.” She went off to get the food while I looked further at the menu. They had tempeh here, too, and I read the fine print on the beans, no pork, flavored with beef or spices, depending on the cook’s mood.

  Funny, I could eat anything compatible to my proteins if it was labeled alien. But on Earth, I wanted familiar food. Tempeh wasn’t too different from Yauntro villig—that’s what was so bad about it.

  But I’d never seen all the variations of any planet, just city blocks and country acres here and there—and now I was being provincial about the west side of my own continent. Planets are huge, thrust into variations of space. The universe suddenly expanded exponentially around that Terran soul food restaurant, and the edges of all the variations overlapped.

  “You been thinking?” the waitress said to me as she set down my buttermilk.

  “I have,” I said in my most formal English.

  “Enjoy the food. The cook was in a good mood today, white boy.” She put the cornbread and beans down, then poured some water. “Beef in those beans.”

  I was just a tiny truculent creature moving through immense space, invisible at any reasonable scale, bitching about the food. Scale can’t be fixed; got to work on that truculence, I told myself in English, digging into the beans. Not homestyle, but good.

  Back at my apartment, someone knocked while I was setting up the computer system the store clerk guaranteed would be compatible with the UCal system, plugging the phone jack into the modem. I jumped, wondering if the fingerprints hadn’t worked, then heard Alex say, plaintively, “Tom.”

  I unbolted and unchained the door. His face and bald scalp across the top of his head were sweating and pale, his eyelids puffy as though rows of mites had been chewing on the eyelashes. Puffy eyelids seem to be a pan-specific sign of debauchery or viral infection. He came in and peered at the modem, breath hissing through his big teeth. “Tom you and I need to walk in Tilden Park.”

  “I’ve walked already.”

  “Now. Right now” He hulked over me in his red nylon human jacket, caught in some bleak Ahram emotion. I realized he wanted to talk where no humans could over hear us.

  “Okay, Alex.”

  “Carstairs,” he said, “works in a classified section of Lawrence Laboratory. I didn’t find out when I first met him. He doesn’t talk about that at all. Someone else let it slip.” He touched the wall and his ear. The walls might have ears.

  Shit. Smoking dope with a weapons designer. We must already be under Federal surveillance.

  Alex drove an odd car, license plate X-KALAY. When Alex opened his car door, it flexed. I closed it carefully. The whole car looked homemade, seats from an old VW, round dialed instruments, lawnmower type gear shift, plastic and fiberglass body.

  “What kind of car?”

  “Berkeley eco-deco. Gets about seventy-five miles to the gallon, bums alcohol.”

  “Okay,”

  “Would you prefer pedaling a Vector?”

  “Not up hills like the ones we went up last night.”

  “I moved here after they passed restrictions on gasoline cars. More paperwork to get a gasoline permit than a marijuana user’s permit, that’s Berkeley.”

  The little car didn’t stink as did the gasoline burner we’d ridden in yesterday, but it threatened to balk in the hills.

  “It’s a real obvious car,” I told him, meaning he could be followed easily.

  “I didn’t drive it to pick you up yesterday, did I?” He sounded annoyed, like I’d challenged him in spy tradecraft. “Even these pollute some.”

  The oaks had shrunken leaves, small oaks—I was sure they were oaks, though, by the acorns. I didn’t speak, just looked at the weird vegetation. Alex parked in a lot with signs pointing to various hiking trails, giving their distances in kilometers.

  We began walking through sage plants, weird scrubs, things with twisted orange bark. Finally Alex plopped down on the ground and said, “Sit down.”

  “Are you going to smoke?”

  “Never smoke in chaparral during the summer. Fire hazard.”

  “Man, I don’t want to get busted here. Carstairs suspects something.”

  “He can’t prove anything. Not a thing.”

  “If he did a DNA type on you, he’d know you’re alien.”

  “He hasn’t.”

  “But he’s a fucking weapons engineer.”

  “He never talks about that. Just the theoretical stuff, the dimensions stuff, worm holes.” Alex sighed and nibbled at some sage. “Tom, I want to know when Earth makes gate contact. He’ll know. I’m not a security threat, really. He doesn’t even know where I live. You don’t either. And he’s exciting. Am I like other Ahrams?”

  “No, most of you guys are calmer.”

  “Being around humans did it, almost like neural re-wiring.”

  “If Earth made contact, would Karst hand you over to the Feds?”

  Alex looked disgusted, muscles rippled around the big jaw.
“I don’t want to be surprised. Jail is horrible, isn’t it?”

  “I’m Academy. I don’t like sneaking around. And you’re teasing Carstairs, some way, and putting me in danger.”

  “You’re a prissy little human. “ He got up.

  I scrambled to my feet fast, suddenly aware of how isolated this trail was today; how big he was. “Do the Barcons know about Carstairs?”

  “They’re lucky; they don’t need friends. Humans are enough like Ahrams to be…” He stopped talking and bit his lower lip.

  “You made friends with a weapons designer? The Feds know he’s got a big blond friend—you better believe it.”

  “Judging from the reports, I like humans better than you do.”

  “So I had terrible fights with the Tibetans.”

  We began walking down the trail toward his car. He asked, “And how is Black Amber?”

  “Fine, she and Wy’um had a son.”

  “Behind every liberated Gwyng male is a truly ambitious pouch sister.”

  “That’s cynical.”

  “But true. The males are useless. I had to deal with the crisis over Mica. After Black Amber was wounded, Rhyodolite coma’ed out, the stupid bastard. Cadmium, I guess he wasn’t any more hysterical than usual.”

  “Yeah. What do you know about the people Black Amber wants me to meet?”

  “Nice girl. I’m glad I’ve been altered to speak perfect Midwestern English or she might have tried to analyze where I come from.”

  “Are you from the Ahram home planet or are you Karst-born?”

  “Karst-born.”

  “Are all the Karst-born weird for their kind?”

  “No weirder than you are for yours, Tom,” Alex said. We could see the car from the hill and began talking of other things, like manzanitas, black sage, oaks, and how most one-celled organisms had global ranges, lived in both fresh and salt water.

  “So disappointing to get water from the Pacific and see the same damn diatoms that I’d seen in spring water,” Alex said. “Even saw a Euplotes patella, looks almost like…”

  I said, “Physical constraints on possibilities?”

  “Or maybe all life is expressions of one mind?” Karriaagzh’s line. Alex said, “Relax, I was lonely today. Just lonely,” as we got in the car.

  When he let me out of the car at my place, I said, “Let me know next time you go drinking with Carstairs.”

  “Okay, maybe.”

  I didn’t see Alex again for days. The next day, I worried all morning, studying the computer printouts on the UCal Japanese studies library holdings. Most of them were in Japanese—I wondered about getting a translation program, but didn’t know if Earthlings had developed such things yet.

  By ten A.M., when I hadn’t been arrested due to being seen with an alien, I went to the Co-op and bought beans, pork backbones, and a loaf of bread. Then I called the computer store and asked if they had anything that could translate Japanese into English.

  “Are we talking technical data? Are you willing to screen out invisible idiots?” the clerk asked.

  “Technical data.”

  “Well, it’s going to take a sixth generation machine if you’re asking it to translate voice.”

  “I’ve got a KayPro XV. Bought it there day before yesterday. No voice, just text, printed texts.”

  “We can sell you just the program.”

  I decided to read what I could in English before machine translating Japanese to English, get a general picture.

  The next day, I stared at my glitter ceiling, then went out to buy a radio at the Co-op hardware store. While I was there, I got a few tools to make a garden: spading fork, mattock, shovel, and gloves to protect my fake prints. It wasn’t that I’d be here long enough to eat anything; I just wanted something familiar to do.

  I put the radio on a listener-sponsored station. In Floyd, we got three listener-sponsored stations, each one running the same PBS stuff. I’d listened enough to know who Bach was. But this radio station was playing fusion music—illegitimate daughter of heavy metal and calypso-oid music—and announcing programs that would debate second-generation space defense programs.

  I opened the door so I could hear the radio while I worked in the garden—then started clearing away some old boards in the little yard.

  Newts under those logs? In a city? Newts and deer—Berkeley began to seem like they’d just last week laid the city over wilderness and the animals hadn’t had time to leave. I threw the newts over the back fence and started grubbing out the ivy.

  A huge snail the size of a tennis ball wiggled its eye stalks at me. Shi-it. I’d never seen snails that big. I threw it over the fence after the newts and tried to lift a forkful of dirt.

  I bounced on that fork seven times before the black clay broke free. Another snail watched from where it was chomping down an oak. Okay, we’ll go back and ask the gardening freak what works with black clay.

  But instead of heading back to the Co-op, I walked down Milvia, just walked, checking out where I was now. A half-grown peacock ran across the road and behind one of the apartment buildings.

  Something clicked. I stopped comparing the hills to the Blue Ridge as though they were both built the same way. Brown summer grass here, fine. The temperature rose to about ninety for a minute while I was walking, then dropped to forty-five when the sun…when the earth I stood on rolled behind the terminator, behind its own shadow.

  Instead of expecting arrest as an alien spy, I began to worry about muggers, turned back home, walking on Shattuck, which I figured would be safer. There, I spotted the store where Alex had bought my Earth-style clothes.

  Still no sign of Alex the next day. I checked out a Lafcadio Hearn book at the insistence of an Asian library clerk and two books on Japanese industrial development.

  “Industrial development in Japan was very sudden,” she told me. “About the time of your Civil War. We had been insular before then.”

  “Was it better being insular?”

  “Read this.” She handed me some copied sheets.

  She was Japanese. I wanted to talk to her more, but I saw her face twist away from me and the eyes dart back toward me—a human sexual interest behavior that I’d studied from books and life on Karst, so I thanked her and left. No more Oriental women.

  You’re a prissy little human, Alex said from my memory. Alex was playing with a weapons designer who did dimensional physics on the side. Maybe he’s sneaking gate design information to Carstairs? Suddenly I didn’t want to even be in my apartment. I went to the Co-op bookstore and bought a Bay Area guidebook, called up the BART schedule on the computer, then went to San Francisco.

  Something odd about this train. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what, dangling from a strap surrounded by a human mob, then realized I’d never been on a train filled with just one species. Humans all of us. I stared at bearded and shaved men’s faces, then at women’s lips, all painted various shades of red and pink, cheeks chemically flushed, too. Wow, we are a weird species.

  Five people in yellow robes got on the train at the first San Francisco stop and began chanting, “Hari Krishna Krishna Rama, Rama Rama.”

  Yangchenla’s people, shit. The robes looked so much like the Karst Tibetans’ robes that I couldn’t watch, but instead stared at black hulks whizzing by the window until the train burst out into bright fog and multi-colored houses.

  San Francisco looked like a magic Roanoke that had been kept up and painted colors (my brain did some wish landscaping, but Roanoke was built when San Francisco was being re-built). Suddenly the houses disappeared as the train went into a tunnel. On the other side of the tunnel were metal and ferroconcrete apartment buildings.

  At Seal Rock, I saw the Pacific Ocean, big and chilly with real seals in it. One stared back at me from the rock—that creature to creature stare you only get from really intelligent animals or fellow sapients.

  Would the stars tonight be the same as the stars I saw in Floyd, I wondered.


  I didn’t feel like checking and headed back to the BART station. The train back wasn’t entirely mono-specific. I caught a glimpse of one Barcon getting on. A car behind me. I was relieved to see them. They must be tracking me through my skull computer.

  I walked home from the university station, catching one more glimpse of the Barcons. When I got home, the phone was ringing. I almost didn’t answer it, but thought that it might be Alex.

  “Tom, did Alex drop by today?” It was the male Barcon.

  “No. I saw you guys behind me, on the train.”

  “We didn’t have time to say hello.” He hung up.

  I fixed a late lunch, but I couldn’t feel the time in Berkeley. After lunch, I was bored, the boredom edged with tension. I couldn’t do anything about Alex—I didn’t feel like helping the Yauntries today. Fuck the research. I pulled out the address Black Amber had given me.

  Amber had traced the address from the journal she’d kept when she knew English, when she hunted in human shape for Mica, saying as she traced, “Humans, untrustworthy, except for this woman and you, Red Clay.”

  But Karriaagzh said if only a few were different, then humans didn’t have to be xeno-flips, I remembered as I found the street address on my Berkeley map.

  The woman lived on Cedar, between Milvia and Martin Luther King, not far from my apartment, in a house. Who’d be home during the day? I’d leave a note. Black Amber’s friend was the older sister, Marianne, the younger was Molly. The Schweigman sisters—but not from hill German folks like some of my kin. I wrote I’m a friend of John Amber’s and would like to talk to you. Tom Gresham, 1607 Milvia, 555-6641.

  As I walked out of my apartment and crossed Cedar, my sweat mingled with the chilly fog. My fingers rolled the paper back and forth, back and forth. By the time I got to the Schweigman door, the note looked like a crumpled joint.

  Voices inside the house paralyzed me. Knock, knock. Who’s there? Alien. Alien? I been alien for your love, Marianne.

  Hush, head, and let the hand up to knock. Finally obedient, my knuckles tapped the door, then I saw the door bell and pushed the button.