by Rebecca Ore
“I don’t know what I want. Yeah, I want to know what would my status be if the other humans have fleas?”
We rode on by oaks with normal-sized leaves growing by the water, up hills covered with manzanita, those orange branches twisted so much they looked like they had muscles, sage, then past houses sunk in the earth with huge black solar panels covering their roofs.
I said, “Here looks as alien as any place else.”
She said, “I grew up here”
“They logged off the trees, so you’ve just got brush.”
“No, rainfall’s scanty.”
“Marianne, if you come back with me, we can find a place on Karst where the rainfall is scanty. They made the planet to suit all sorts of creatures."
“I feel so odd.”
We pulled over to a BP station, not a brand I’d seen sold in Southwestern Virginia, and got organic ginger beers, very peppery in almost round glass bottles. I walked around the pumps—unleaded gasoline, gasohol, alcohol, methane. My heels were getting bruised, my toes tipped up by the plastic cleats. Marianne sat down on a wood bench under the station’s windowboxes and stared out across the road at a citrus grove, She kept wiping sweaty hair out of her face, off her shoulders, throwing the long strands behind her, and sipping her ginger beer.
“Tom,” she finally said, looking at me, “I need to get to know your friends better.”
“I…” I couldn’t explain that I didn’t have their addresses. “I’ll try to arrange it. Right now, I’ve got a problem I’m researching. Guys spending themselves bankrupt trying to get all the new computers.”
“Need self-sufficiency? I’d love to do what you’re doing.”
I wasn’t sure whether I liked that or not. “Maybe you could work with the Institute of Linguistics,” I said, meaning not first contact work like the officers/officiators, us uhchippran, vrchippran, depending on whether the speaker is one of us or not. From chiwu, one of the oldest words in Karst One, meaning, reduce tension/create closeness. Even the Institute of Defense used the term for their personnel, like weapons reduced tension.
She took off her helmet and tucked all her hair back, then buckled the straps back on. “Let’s go before we tighten up, Tom."
How much farther?”
“About six miles”
You can’t really spell or pronounce uhchippran or vrchippran with American letters or phonemes.
The sun got hot and beat all my languages together under the helmet straps. I rode behind Reeann as close as I dared, bile rising up my esophagus, swearing to myself that I would get in better shape.
When we finally got back to the car, Reeann pulled a varnished wicker picnic basket with leather straps and brass fasteners out of the back. I leaned my bike up against a tree and said, “Expensive-looking basket.”
“It was a gift from one of my professors.” She looked guilty as she unstrapped real china plates from the lid.
“There’s a blanket in the trunk.”
I opened the trunk and put my fingers on wool softer than I knew it could be, grey and black woven in lozenges with red silk bindings around the borders. “Your sister make this?”
“Yeah, spun the wool and wove it when she was on unemployment after a weaving store fired her.”
“They love handspun on Karst.”
“Aliens in handspun.” She laughed as she poured a cold soup into bowls.
“Weavers are covered by the city minimum wage. If you can afford to wear handwoven stuff, it means you’re rich.”
“I visualized a giant lobster wearing one of Molly’s skirts.”
“Nothing’s odder than bipedal birds, about eight feet tall, no wings, but beak arid feathers. But they wouldn’t.” An image of Karriaagzh in a long skirt—I started to laugh, too, as I spread the blanket.
“Here’s some vichyssoise,” she said, handing me a bowl. “Have you had this before?”
“Not on Earth,” I said, sipping a spoonful, afraid it was pureed bean mold. No, it tasted like liquefied potato salad. “Cold potato soup?”
“Yo.”
“Little furry guys drink something like this.”
“Try this.” She passed me, on a plate, breaded chicken leg, thigh and drumstick, with a wedge of cornbread. The cornbread was hot.
“Urn, yes.”
She smiled. “I knew you’d like that, at least.”
“Oh, hell, I like the vichyssoise, too. I’ll eat anything that agrees with my proteins.”
“Really?”
“Except tempeh.” The vichyssoise did seem more appealing now, for some reason, than chicken and cornbread. “Tempeh reminds me of work.”
“Why?”
“Tempeh reminds me of villag, which is an alien bean jelly. Yauntra, God, what a bummer.” I remembered my Yauntry contact, Edwir Hargun, sitting across the room from me, eating villag. As he ate, he told me his people wanted him and me punished if Federation technology caused trade wars between the Yauntry corporations. Fuck those laser-read computer data matrices more tempting to Yauntra than trade beads to American Indians. “If I don’t help the people I’m assigned to work with, I’m a convenient—I guess ‘scapegoat’ is the word. I don’t have a planet species to protect me.”
“Whoa, boy, you want me to leave Earth with you and you could get your butt in trouble. Where would that leave me?”
“I better help them. Or convince the Federation that Earth’s going to get gates for contact soon. We probably should feed information to Carstairs.”
She said, “God, not to Carstairs. He’s FBI bait.”
“I don’t know how the gate transitions work, anyway. Alex doesn’t either. I bet ninety percent of Academy and Institutes people don’t. It’s like how does your car work.”
“I know how my car works. I helped build it.”
‘‘Oh, Reeann, say like television, or computers. You’ve got a couple of guys who know how they work, and then the rest of us know how to use them. Aliens, out there, they mostly just know how to use more things.”
We finished eating in silence. I seemed doomed to run into hypercompetent females when I wanted to be protective. Reeann took my empty bowl and finished the chicken while I leaned back on the blanket. Overhead, leaves cut flickers from the sunlight, shifting in the wind.
“I’m not too tough, am I?” Reeann asked. I looked at her and saw that she’d loosened her hair and was kneeling at the edge of the blanket. I raised myself on one elbow and stretched out my arm to her. She lay down on the blanket beside me, the nylon pants sweaty and cool between us. As she lay down, some of her long hair spread across my throat. “I’d like you to hold me.”
I thought about the picnic basket, then looked at her eyes, rimmed around the bottom lids with tears not quite large enough to fall. “Is it something I said?”
“No, just everything. Maybe my period.” She wiggled slightly and I rolled to my side and put my arm over her breasts. No. We just fell asleep, and nobody stole our expensive bikes, either. I woke up hearing her pulse clinking near my ear and gently moved her wrist and wiped her hair back.
“Tension,” she murmured.
“Yeah?”
She rolled onto her back. The wind blew through the nylon shorts and the padding in my crotch was clammy. She said, “Tension made us sleep.” With her bottom lip pushed out and up, she blew stray hairs off her face.
I raised up on my elbow, checked the bikes, then looked down at her. “And why are you tense?” Her lips were swollen slightly, as though she’d rolled them against scratchy wool when she was asleep. “Because.” She smiled, moved her shoulders and her hips slightly “Because we both may be crazy. That’s the most reasonable explanation.”
I sat up. “I’m not crazy. My brother may be, but I’m not. The Barcons tested me.”
“I saw one of them bend in the jawbone. Humans can’t do that. But…”
“Why don’t other people see that?” My voice went shrill.
“Tom.” She sat up beside me. “I
’d like to talk to Alex and the others again. And I want to see you again.” I stood up and she raised her hands to me. Up she rose as I took her hands and tugged, but we just held each other like children. This woman, I realized, wasn’t like Yangchenla at all. We loaded her car, put the bikes on the roof, and drove home through the long hill shadows.
“Next time,” she said as I unloaded my bike at the apartment, “bring a change of clothes. Short chamois gets pretty soggy. You could get boils down there. I wouldn’t like that.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“No.”
“You want to come in for a bit?”
“Tom, I’ve got to change or I’ll get boils, down there."
“I… I wouldn’t want to see boils there.” I remembered the Barcons telling me that resident bacteria and other parasites often proliferate when the host is under stress.
She tucked her full lips between her teeth, trembling with giggles.
“I won’t have any hard feelings if you go.”
“But if I stay.”
“We’re both nervous, aren’t we, Reeann?” I bent down and kissed her through the open car window. She just ran the very tip of her tongue in through my lips, then bit my bottom lip gently.
“I’ll be back, Tom. But just because I know doesn’t obligate me, does it? I’m not going to be kidnapped?”
“No, I wouldn’t allow them to do that to you.”
“Well, I think I will come inside then.”
I brought her bike and my bike inside with us. We were more like teenagers than people who’d had lovers. She ran her tongue over my raised velar ridge and giggled when I leaned back and said, “Surgery. Yes, I’m human.”
Her breasts were very different from Yangchenla little tight ones. They tilted her dark nipples up, not the pale beige ones of the high school girl back in Floyd County, not Yangchenla’s small dark ones that came so quickly to a point—big oval nipples. Big breasts, more flesh on her than I thought she’d have with all the bike riding. Slippery legs, shaved, sweaty… I wondered vaguely what she’d wear out of the house, her bike clothes were so sweaty, clammy in my hands.
She turned on the radio as we passed it on the way to the, bedroom.
Then we heard furniture slamming into the wall overhead. “They said they were Swedish,” I told Reeann before we began laughing helplessly. Finally, I said, “I can’t get it up if I’m…” Helplessly squirming.
“That’s all right. They’ll be through soon, then it’s our turn.”
We both lay back and I watched her breasts roll as she laughed. Suddenly I couldn’t laugh. I closed the drapes to the garden sliding glass door and crawled back on the bed as though my cock were glass and could break.
I wouldn’t have noticed if the Swedes had broken through the ceiling and landed on top of us. Then it was over. Reeann and I slept a bit, then she got out of bed naked and opened the drapes to stand there looking out into the little garden. The room was dark, so I didn’t think anyone could see in. I sensed she didn’t care. After a while, she said, still looking out in a way that would have been distancing in a Yauntry, “I love men who get lost in me, who don’t watch themselves. Promise me, though, that you are human.’’
“I am. The Barcon can prove it.”
‘‘I know human molecular biologists who could prove it, too, Tom. Would you mind if I had one test you?” She has samples in her cunt, I thought, my cock worming backward.
“Okay,” I said.
“I’m sorry I asked when I did,” Reeann said, “but I’m scared.” She looked at her bike clothes wadded up on the floor, walked naked to the bathroom. I sat there, listening to music I’d never heard before and running water. She came back out wrapped in a towel, her hair wet. Could I borrow a shirt and a pair of your pants?’’
“Come back here and sleep,” I said. “We’ll have breakfast in the morning, talk.” I got out of bed and turned off the radio, then found a shirt and handed it to her, saying, “You can wear this to bed if you need to.’’
She looked younger than me as she put it on and climbed back into bed with the towel between her legs. She sighed and stared at the ceiling, her arms wrapped around her waist I pulled the covers over us. In the living room, the little gas heater whomped and ignited.
“Grits!” she said in the morning and I didn’t know whether she was joking or really protesting. She dipped her fork in them, tines down, and spread them, then lifted the fork with about one grain on it and tasted.
“If I cook breakfast,” I told her, “that’s it—eggs, bacon, grits, toast, and coffee.”
I should have told her to eat the grits with butter and salt or with hot sauce, like Warren did, borrowing from immigrant Mexican apple pickers.
The phone rang then—Barcons. “Marianne wants to meet you and discuss things,” I told the one who answered.
“Has Alex been around?”
“Not in the last three days.”
The Barcon sighed. “Alex should remember we have his pride on ice.” Meaning Alex’s skull crest. “We’ll be by to visit soon. At your place or Marianne’s?’’
“The people you wanted to meet,” I told Marianne.
“Where? Your house or here.”
“How soon?”
The Barcon must have heard her question. “Today when we can get over.”
“Here. I haven’t prepared Molly and Sam for this yet.”
“Here,” I told the Barcon.
“We need to go out to Tilden Park for some exercise this afternoon,” he replied
I wondered if the FBI or CIA had heard what Reeann and I’d been saying this morning. But I could prove I was human. If all the fake paper checked out and my fingertips held up, I’d be okay, but nervous. Real nervous. Damn Alex and his weapons-designing doper buddy. Marianne pulled on a pair of my pants, zipped the best she could, rolled the cuffs up, and went home, rolling her bike beside her. I went out to the laundry and put in both our skin shorts and jerseys, plus the towel.
By the time she got back, dressed in baggy green pants and a cotton sweater, I’d done the dishes. When I let her in, she smiled very slightly and went over to my computer, looked at the printouts of the library holdings on Japan.
‘‘You think Japan had the answer?"
‘‘Maybe. But the high tech you crave always changes your society, looks like."
“You should also study the Hopi Indians. They didn’t want to modernize, just survive as Hopi."
I thought about Yangchenla’s people, some who wanted to be part of Karst’s multispecies urban culture, others who wanted to follow their yaks. Less than 500 Tibetans, almost all originally from one village, and they couldn’t agree. Three non-villagers, maybe Indians, maybe Chinese, had been visiting when the Federation ship crashed, but that didn’t explain Yangchenla craving for Federation position. She was purely village stock. I said, “Humans are weird.”
“You’re human.”
“Yeah, and I’m weird, too. We should be, careful about what we say. People might think we’re crazy, not just playing a game about this alien stuff.” I pointed to my ear and to the walls.
‘‘But your friends are coming.”
“Yeah, we’ll go take a walk with them.”
About that time, I heard a knock, just one fist blow, on the door. Marianne stepped farther into the room, by one of the sliding glass doors as I checked out the peephole.
Barcons. I pulled the chain stob out of the slot and opened the door to two of them dressed in jeans, plaid shirts, and Nikes, the smallest female, still over six feet tall, and her mate, not the first ones I’d met.
The female looked at Marianne and said, “I’d like to thank you for your help the other night, and to apologize for embarrassing you.”
Marianne said, “I dislike bigots.” I looked at her closer and saw that she was paler than usual.
“We’d like to take you on a picnic,” the male said.
As we left the house, the male sidled up to me and whis
pered in Karst One, “Change the bed coverings. I can smell them from here.”
I turned around and locked the door. They had an old two-door green Nash, funky-looking and rigged to bum gasoline. Marianne shivered slightly as she got in.
“Don’t be afraid of us,” the female Barcon said.
“Why not?” Marianne said, shifting her hands to her knees, squeezing them.
“Because it makes us nervous,” the male said.
“What are your names?”
“Jackie and Sum,” the female said. “I’m in the Jack job. He’s the S’um, or Sam.”
Shit, I thought, the first non-humans she meets knowing they’re aliens would have to be Barcons. Reann looked over at me as if asking does it get any weirder than this?
S’um said, “We tend not to get too close to other species, sapient or not, but don’t be afraid of this.”
“I taught her vr’ech and uhyalla.”
“We don’t get close to vr’yalla. Our species has vr’ech parasites that destroy brain tissue and ride the emptied bodies,” the Jack said, jaws trembling slightly. Marianne drew back as far as she could from the front seat.
S’um spoke to Jackie in Barq. Then he said to Marianne, “We will take good care of you, your reproductions. We’re excellent physicians, can fix or cure most anything, learned from getting parasites."
We stopped at a light. When it changed, S’um hit the gas and the little Nash leaped.
“I thought I heard a big motor,” Marianne said. “Eight cylinders. Very surprising in such a small old car."
"We’ve restored it,” Jackie said.
“Good mechanics, too, but we’re not known for that,” S’um said.
“It wastes a lot of gas,” Marianne said.
“We only use it on special occasions. It beats the heat. Alex doesn’t know about it either.”
“Is Alex a problem for you?” Marianne asked.
“He is resident here, but unorthodox.”
I remembered another Analytics yalla describing Karriaagzh by a Karst word that meant “unorthodox.” We pulled into the Tilden parking lot. The two Barcons got out first, then pushed the seats forward so we could get out. S’um pulled out a backpack and put it on. Marianne looked down at her feet—she had thongs on.
