by Rebecca Ore
The Barcons looked around the parking lot, then began discussing the situation in Barcon. “All right, you humans know,” the male Barcon who hadn’t ridden with Reeann and me said. “But it’s worthless knowledge.”
Carstairs looked at Alex as if Alex was his connection for maximum head candy. Alex shrugged slightly, then we went in, by black and white couples and singles, to an empty back room. We all sat down in a booth.
“You used drugs,” the littlest female, the one who’d been scared in the bar, told Carstairs. “And you resigned your job. Why?"
Carstairs hunched over a beer in a frost-rimmed mug.
“You are…” He didn’t sound straight, and he didn’t finish.
“Alex,” her mate said, “why?”
Alex sighed and reached for a pecan in a bowl set on our table, cracked it with his teeth, smiled at Carstairs as he tongued the meat separate from the shells, spit the shells out onto his fingertips. Finally, he answered, “I think the bird is right.” Meaning Karriaagzh. “We should expand contacts, give these people gate systems.”
“No,” the littlest female said, “the wait magnifies your terror of jail, so you’d like them to know now. You may have to be rotated out before the contact.”
“Why?” Carstairs asked.
“Because of you,” the chief male said.
“I resigned. I suspected.”
“Alex told you?”
“No. I got a sweat sample. It wasn’t conclusive.”
Alex looked up at Carstairs and picked up another nut.
“Tell Alex about jail, Tom,” the smallest female Barcon said. She looked just like a big black man slumped over a beer and stirring it with a swizzle stick. Alex flinched.
I said, “Federal prisons wouldn’t be quite like the state prison camp I was in.”
“But they give such time to spies,” the female Barcon said to Alex. “Very cruel to disguised outsiders, no?”
Reeann said, “Let Tom and me leave. I’m not part of this.”
“I’ll take you all God dammit down,” Alex said.
Reeann began laughing. Is she hysterical, I wondered. Carstairs giggled for two seconds, then said, “You befriended me because of my weapons work, Alex?”
Alex said, “No.” Veins in his eyes seemed to be enlarging. Then I saw a tear roll out of his eye, larger than a human tear. Maybe his skin had a different surface tension? “Someday, you’ll find a way into space, and the Federation will turn me over to the FBI as a peace gesture. The more I’m with you, the less I want you to see me as an alien.”
“Oh, Alex,” Carstairs said.
Alex said, “Jerry, my wife was with me here for two years. She died, a trivial accident, on Karst. I’m alone here except for humans. These are no company.” He swung a hand at the Barcons.
The other female Barcon, silent up until now, said softly, “He wouldn’t re-mate.”
Carstairs looked nervous—hey, what are the implications, Carstairs baby. Then he asked, “You aren’t going to hurt me?”
“No,” the chief male said, "as long as you don’t betray him ahead of time."
Carstairs began to smile then he frowned and asked “Time dilation?”
Meaning, did you get here by flying at near light speeds?
“Time doesn’t play a part in it,” Alex said.
“I knew the accents were odd,” Reeann said. “You’re not recombinant DNA experiments. You’re not humans.”
“I went camping with you, for two days,” Carstairs said softly to Alex.
“Prisons here could hold us all, I think,” the chief male Barcon said, leaning on his elbows, his hands shredding napkins on the table.
Alex lurched up and said, “I have to go to the bathroom.” One of the Barcon males followed him. I told Reeann, “I’d go back to prison, if the State of Virginia found out. I broke parole.”
She shook her head slightly, real fast, as though a bee’d buzzed her. “You, then, are human?”
“Yeah.” I felt ashamed,
“And you’ve been in jail, for drugs, and aliens took you away and did what with you?” Her voice got edgy; she heard her own hysteria rising and grimaced.
“They trained me to make contacts with other sapients,” I said. “I’m good at that.” But I fuck up with my own species. I remembered Yangchenla’s harangues on how I never questioned what was done to me.
She said, reaching for my hand, “Is it difficult, being back?”
“Yes, but the Federation wants me to be as good with my own kind as I am with others.”
The Barcons were watching Reeann and me intently Carstairs seemed bored, writing something on his napkin. When Alex and the second Barcon male came back, Carstairs shoved the napkin at Alex who said, “I don’t know.”
“Or can’t tell me,” Carstairs replied.
The Barcon chief picked up the napkin, looked at it, and said, “You’re thinking along the right lines, but I suspect you have been all along, or Alex wouldn’t have been so interested in you. Perhaps we can tell you when you’re right. So better to keep showing us your theories, stay away from the FBI. Does that help?”
“How close? Could we make contact with you next year if I tried this?” Carstairs took the napkin back, scribbled on it, and shoved it back at the Barcon.
“Not that way either, but…”
Carstairs carefully folded his napkin and put it in his wallet.
Alex stared at a waitress until she swung by the table. “Four pitchers of beer,” he ordered. She brought them promptly and he swallowed two mugs-full in about three breaths, deliberately trying for a drunk. Then he leaned back from the table and shuddered.
“They don’t kill you for breaking cover?” Carstairs asked. His glasses were askew again; his face looked pasty, as though the skin was loaded with sweat about to bead through his pores.
“You think we lied about not hurting you. You wonder if they’ll kill you for finding out?” I asked. The sweat slickened on Carstairs’ face.
“You can’t prove a damn thing,” the chief Barcon said. “You’re a notorious drug user. You want an exclusive on the physics. Why should you betray us?”
“What about me?” Reeann asked. I felt her body shift, shoulders squared, as though she’d die fighting if the answer was wrong.
“Will you mate with Tom?” the smaller female asked.
For a second, there was no sound, no air. Then Reeann’s eyes seemed to spin. “Mars wants women,” she said before collapsing on spilt beer, choking on the laughter, legs thrashing under the table.
She settled down breathing hard, tears in her eyes, then looked over at me.
“I said something wrong,” the female said, jaw flexing.
Reeann fled to the ladies room. Carstairs looked at us and bit into his hand, teeth really in the flesh, sparkling eyes surrounded by the black-rimmed glasses. The waitress came by and mopped up the beer, face utterly impassive with curiosity.
“I guess I’ll never be good with humans,” I said. “You’re fuck-ups,” Carstairs said. “Not machine-brained invaders of superior ruthlessness.”
“It’s a hardship post,” the female told him.
3
Alien Landscape With Woman
Marianne—I dared not walk by her house after that night in the bar. The Barcon couples left the bar quarreling between pairs, solidarity in marriage as I’ve never seen in humans. One real black whispered to his lady, “Must be Africans.”
Again, I hit the books, saw an old video of an almost kamakazi sales school, read all Harvard Magazine had to say on Japanese, discovered obscure articles about nuclear reactors in Zaire and on the Navajo reservation. All my friends were aliens and on another planet. I didn’t have friends here, human or otherwise, I kept thinking to myself as I booked down with Japanese data.
Then, three days later, Marianne came by, smelling of warm skin and gardenia perfume, in shorts as if the weather were warm, with a rugged hippie shoulder bag dangling below her elbow. I o
pened the door and was terrified that she’d burst out laughing again. She said instead, “Roger Strigate wants you to pick up your bike.”
That was another life, Reeann, but I said, “Okay.”
“Then we can go riding, out,” she said in a small voice, “away from the city.” She looked at the walls near the door as though searching for bugs.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I want to know about John Amber” she said. “He was odd.”
“Odder than you think,” I said as I got my shoes on.
In the drive, her car, another eco mobile, sat on fat dune tires, su burnt fiberglass and chrome bike racks.
“I’m sorry I laughed,” she said.
I didn’t reply then but as we got closer to the bike shop, I said, “I hate having my women arranged for me.”
She didn’t speak herself until I paid Strigate the rest of the $3000 for the bike, riding clothes, funny shoes with slotted plastic biscuits on the soles. Then she said, “Let’s pretend none of this weird stuff is going on.”
“Yeah, I’m researching Japan to help an African country develop without getting economically in hock to the West.”
“An honorable profession,” she said “Better than being an out-of-work linguist who won’t do government work.”
“What I’m doing is government work.”
“CIA, USA. My parents’ bad guys.” We loaded my bike on the rooftop bike rack beside hers, then put the other stuff behind the front seat. “The government that put you in jail for drugs."
“I wish had turned my brother in. No, I don’t… Reann, he was tabbing Quaaludes, making speed, using. But he was crazy, too, and my brother.”
We drove though modern suburbs planted on western movie set type hills, then out farther. “Tom, you don’t have to be back soon, do you?
“Hell, they’re, giving me an opportunity to slip back into human culture if I want to hide forever under a phony name.”
“Do you want to go back?”
“Shit, yes. I don’t want to get stuck here.”
“Does Earth seem provincial to you now?”
“Yes and no.”
She found a park by water she called a slew, “spelled ‘slough.”
“Slow,” she said as she began getting the bikes off the rack. “I thought we’d ride about twenty miles in flat country.”
“Twenty miles!”
“Sure, you’re in basically good shape. I’ve seen you running around the campus ParCourse.”
“You’ve been watching me?”
“Yes,” she said with a little, very unsouthern hiss. I turned from her as I felt heat rise in my face and reached for my bike. She moved closer to me, hip to hip, and unhooked what I’d just learned to call a quick release, a cam-operated squeeze bolt loosened and tightened with a chrome-plated lever. The front wheels were in the car with more quick releases skewered through their hubs.
Silently, she showed me how to put the wheel in the front fork and adjust the quick release to clamp the wheel firmly, then she said, “I thought about telling someone there were aliens in Berkeley, but too many people in Berkeley claim to have met aliens already. And I found out lots of fringe academics know Alex, a popular fellow.”
“He’s manipulative,” I said.
“No kidding. What about the fake blacks?”
“They’re hard to get to know”
We leaned the bikes against the car and pulled on our fingerless gloves, strapped the helmets tight. I swung one leg over the bike and stood straddling it while I watched her put one cleated shoe in her left pedal, wiggle it until the cleat slot went down over the pedal bar. She pulled up and tightened the strap. “Leave one strap loose, so you can yank that foot out. Make it a habit to leave the left or right loose—just one side all the time.”
Could you give me some books on this?” I felt weird taking instructions from a woman, especially one I was sexually attracted to.
“Tom,” she said like both she was sorry and I was a jerk. She pushed a stray hair under her helmet strap and looked at me with her gloved right hand knuckles against her left cheekbone, elegant inside her weird clothes. I did as she said and felt trapped on the bike, pulled the strap yight and then lifted my foot. She pushed down on her raised pedal and swung her foot up into the other toe clip. I tried to imitate her but ended up with my foot on the wrong side of the pedal, the clip dangling underneath.
“Keep pedaling. When you build up momentum, flip it with your toe”
I pedaled like a crippled man, flailing at the pedal with my toe. Finally, I slid my foot in the clip, and began pedaling furiously. The bike went smoother the faster I went.
“Fun, isn’t it?" Marianne said from beside me, her bike going without little jerks from side to side.
We began giggling. Like normal teenagers, I thought, having never had normal teen times. All the languages I knew zinged through my mind making up epitaphs for her—karrer zullila, op wul, lost bossy bitch, frantul”—I decided. I wanted her as all of them. She took me away from my fear of being trapped as the parole breaker, alien sympathizer. We were just two kids on bikes, anonymously zinging by suburban yards now, too fast for our ages to show. Still giggling. Then she said, breathing hard between, phrases, “Alex…really terrified of jail? You sent here…to urge him to be more discreet.”
Well. Probably. “Nothing…is done…on Karst…for just one…species’s…reasons.” I noticed there was more air gulping between my phrases than hers. Suddenly I felt what had to be my liver, metabolizing lactic acid that burned back. “Slower.”
She tightened her lips and sat up on her bike, coasting. I said, when my lungs settled down, “I hate talking about jail. My brother got me into drug making.”
"Where’s he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Shouldn’t you find him?”
“I couldn’t, but maybe someone else could.”
“Is he dangerous?”
“Not to a woman.” I guessed that was a safe answer.
“You were pushing the pace, Tom,” she said. “Is this more comfortable?”
“Yeah.” Yeah.
“What do you do for your…Federation, is it?”
“I arrange trade contracts, watch non-contacted sapients’ television programs. I’ve learned two non-contacted languages as best we could extrapolate them. I study contacted sapients behavior and history. If two species are quarreling, a lot of times a third species can figure out how to solve the problem.”
About a mile down the highway, we passed other bike riders going back toward the parking lot. They waved at her, she at them. Then, just as I’d decided she wasn’t going to respond, she said, “I wish I could do that. I’m a linguist, but primitive tribes are so glicky. Really, fleas, leeches…do I sound bigoted?”
“Leeches are…glicky?” I’d never heard that word before.
“I’m never going to do shit on a bike.” She bent down and loosened her toe straps “And I’m whining again. Don’t kidnap me. I’d miss my sister.”
“She could go, too.”
Marianne’s bike swerved. “And Sam?”
“Yeah, they want a human social group.”
“And your brother. We’re all wasted on Earth, no?”
“Yeah.” I didn’t tell her she’d be Support, not Officiator.
“Is there something horrible up there that you’re not telling me about?”
“Other humans. From Tibet, about 500 years ago They helped a ship during a contact war. I think there were two Federations then, but the computer’s got nothing on that.”
“Umm, well, Tibetans. I guess I can’t escape them.”
“They do have fleas. And the women tape down their breasts and run little shops in the city, some of them. City Tibetans don’t have fleas, just the Preserve ones.”
“Well, we won’t be the only humans there, then?”
“Not hardly. About 200 of them, maybe fifty or sixty in the city.”
“Just one cit
y?
“The planet’s artificial. It gets to you sometimes—every plant is imported. The geology is faked. The vr'ech—that’s Karst for sapients or aliens—wanted the Federation held out in space off from inhabited planets.”
“Vr'ech, what’s the singular?”
“Ech, but it’s considered too alienating.”
“Why?”
“Like you’re real and the other guy isn’t. We aren’t really supposed to speak of other sapients as vr'ech, but rather uhyalla, creatures, both sapient and nonsapient, us and them. Uh, the inclusive plural prefix."
“Unofficially, then, there’s bigotry?”
“Some of the uhyalla are very ech. We have to know the differences, really, even when we try to smooth them over.”
“Would you want to stay here?”
“I have obligations.”
“Also, you skipped parole. But you could buy false papers so easily.”
I didn’t answer her. A line of skinny guys on bikes like ours came whizzing up, amazingly silent for things going over twenty-five miles an hour. Chattering among each other, they began to pass us. Marianne looked up and said, “Mike.”
“Marianne, jump on back.”
She said “I’m just cruising.”
“We won’t make you take a pull. Just suck wheel.”
“She doesn’t want to,” I said.
The guy laughed and stood up to stomp his pedals and catch up with the others. He pulled in so close I thought he’d run into the other bike rider’s back wheel but hung in at three inches, drafting like a race car.
I said, “They wouldn’t hunt me down if I left but I couldn’t do anything here as interesting as what I’ve been doing. And I’d miss the other species. It’s like living in a zoo where the exhibits explain themselves, or listen to your theories about how they evolved socially.”
“Super neat.”
“Did you wanted to ride with them?”
