Being Alien

by Rebecca Ore

  We rode to the river and down a bit along a paved cart path. “It looks just like a river,” she said.

  Another bicycle came by, maybe a Yauntry riding it. “And that looks just like a bicycle,” I said to her.

  She watched the rider pedal down the path. “I’m not hallucinating. He’s got cam cranks.”

  “Parallel evolution,” I said, meaning both the humanoid appearance and the machine.

  “I will need a new language for this, I’m sure.”

  When we got back to the apartment, all the others were watching movies on a flat screen. “What’s it like out there?” Sam asked Marianne.

  “Sort of okay. We got stopped by a furry giant thing who asked to see our passes, though.” She walked back to a bedroom, stripping off her jersey as she went.

  We ate dinner together in our apartment, Travertine gulping whole dead rabbit-sized mammals, fur and all, the Berkeley humans rolling forks around in a pasta dish heavy with Gwyng-made Jersey butter. I felt like I needed meat, so I skinned and broiled half of one of Travertine’s mammals.

  After dinner, Travertine regurgitated his grinding stones into his scaley fist and went into the visitor’s bathroom by the elevator.

  “Can he eat any other way?” Sam said.

  “Ask him,” I said.

  Marianne moved her pasta around on her plate a bit more and said, “I bet it’s rude to criticize someone’s eating habits here.”

  “But is it going to store its dead animals in our refrigerator?” Molly asked.

  “I was cruel to one of his kind once,” I said, “so don’t nag him.”

  Travertine came back, his stones wrapped up in a white cloth. He pulled out a drawer and put them in, then said, “If you’d prefer, I could cut my meat up.”

  “No, eat the best way for you. I suspect it’s hard on you being alone with us,” I said.

  “I must understand humans, then Rhyodolite’s Gwyngs, then the Yauntries.” My fellow humans didn’t understand the context, but I did. He was the same species as Xenon. And Xenon panicked under Yauntry guns—no friends around him at all, just aliens, a Gwyng and a human, both cold and remote to him. The Yauntries killed Xenon, thinking he was about to attack them. Misunderstandings all around.

  “I felt tremendously guilty later,” I told Travertine, “and Rhyodolite has tried hard, for a Gwyng, to become used to birds. Rhyodolite felt guilty, too, when he got to know Granite Grit.” Travertine’s tending us was another multi-agenda Federation deal.

  “Granite Grit is not my kind. If I haven’t made you too uncomfortable,” Travertine said, “then might we go out to the music?”

  “Sure,” Sam said. He whistled Doo, Dee, Da, Du, the notes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  Travertine swept his eyes clean with his vertical inner eyelids, less transparent than Granite’s or Karriaagzh’s nictitating membranes, and said, “Music may connect more than semiotic systems do.”

  We took a red bus filled with bald cadets in black tunics and pants. “I was like that four years ago,” I told my fellow humans.

  “Will they do that to me?” Marianne asked.

  “Not in the Institute of Linguistics,” Travertine answered. Our bird guide nodded slightly at me when the cadets got out at the xenophobia movie house. Out on the street, the species differences were blurred by harsh overhead lights.

  “Looks like a street,” Sam finally said. “Alive.”

  We got off the bus and went up an outside flight of stairs by a white wall covered with thousands of alien graffitos in maybe one hundred different scripts. Sam traced a big red Gwyng glyph with his index finger and looked at Molly, who handed him a pen. He scrawled, “Sam brings music.”

  Inside the club, two Ahrams on a dais played blue-glazed clay flutes while, down in a pit, a gold-furred Jerek danced in a tooled leather loincloth, front and back panels hanging down to the floor. The naked T of skin across her eyes and down her nose was pink, not the usual black. As she swayed on her short legs, the black leather panels blurred in the shadows at her feet. Among the other aliens, I saw two of Granite Grit’s bird kind, watching, sitting down like nestlings, their heads bobbing to the music.

  Sam said, “My God, she’s got little tittles down near the hip band.” Then he asked, breathing it out, “Can I see what they’re playing.”

  Travertine got up and talked to someone standing behind a curtain, made of short wood slats. He came back with a small drum. Sam tapped it. The sound was like an apple dropping into a rain barrel. He rested his palms on the rim and looked at the Ahrams. One of them cupped a hand and brought it down. Before I could tell Sam that meant yes, he drummed, the Ahrams played under his drumbeats, and the Jerek’s feet moved with Sam’s right hand, while his left hand fingers tapped out rain tones.

  Molly said, “The dancer’s hands go with the flutes.” And I looked and it was so. Sam’s drumming sped up, slowed, caught the Jerek’s pulse. The beat was inhuman. She began wailing high tones that might have been a language, gold fur swaying, darkening with sweat that rolled down from her hip band and chin.

  Marianne leaned against me, body tense and swaying across the music, syncopated. I put my arm, around her shoulder, then noticed Molly. She was crouched forward, her hands gripping her knees, head cocked slightly, lips slightly parted so I could see that her teeth were on edge.

  I bent toward her and whispered, “Do you like it?”

  “Do they fuck across species lines?”

  “Yes, but mostly males whose females breed in season.”

  She leaned back and closed her mouth.

  “Beers, people?” Travertine asked. “Made from Tibetan barley, in fact.” He set down squat blue cans with pop-tops not entirely in the Terran mode.

  Finally, Karriaagzh and Black Amber decided to give all the humans the Karst One language operation. I went with them to the same hospital where I’d had my own language operation. In one of the patient rooms, I kissed Marianne good-bye and hugged Molly. Warren was sedated, in an adjoining room with Sam.

  “We’ll keep him on Prolixin for the present,” a Barcon told me. “His brain is warped in the ventricles.”

  “What can you do?” I asked.

  “Re-build and insert pre-programmed sections, if you insist on keeping a consistent identity.”

  “I do insist,” I said and went home alone to my new apartment. Black Amber arrived a moment after I did. She was dressed in Gwyng rig, neck collar with a narrow cloth attached that draped down her chest and over the pouch slit and genitals. Over her shoulder she carried a zippered sling purse. I let her in and went to stand by the window, eyes half focused down at the street, all the uhyalla, vr’ech, whatever, just ovals and ellipses of heads and shoulders. She asked, “Need help with packing again/so soon? Ready for Gwyng Home.”

  “I can manage.” I packed my most human clothes. She threw my blue officer’s uniform on top of that.

  In the elevator, she leaned against me, wrinkles brushing my cheek. “Karriaagzh paid for all the language operations. Is your kin threat to me?”

  “The Barcons can take care of him.”

  She parted her lips and put her mouth up against my ear, then gnashed her teeth together to sharpen them.

  “Don’t let him hurt a least one of us (threat).”

  We got out in the basement where she’d left her plastic-hulled electric car and drove through the bright night. Karst nights are never darker than dusk—I’d have to get used to that again, She turned into a driveway leading to a gate station by the third river, a giant masonry building all windowless white. She drove the car through the building’s double doors and up a ramp into the gate transport. A bear and Gwyng crew fastened the car down, then Black Amber pushed a button and the hatch closed. “We end and begin,” she said as the gate transition light went on.

  A minute of slight wobbles, two and a half minutes of stillness, and the arrival light flashed. Gwyng Home.

  “Priority, so fast,” she said, leanin
g on the hatch door switch. When the seal broke and the hatch swung up, we drove into a building that looked dusty, unused. Six or seven Gwyngs watched, nostrils twitching slightly. Black Amber stopped, and one with a tiny plastic ring clipped through the bottom of his left nostril slot came up talking in a Gwyng language. My computer squealed and babbled, trying to transform his speech by Karst Two rules.

  “Show him your identity slip,” Black Amber told me. I gave it to him. He stuck it inside a small cube with an eyepiece and examined it. When he took my Federation ID out, a plate of wavy plastic came out of a slot in the cube. “Take the plastic and show it the next time anyone with a nose ring stops you.”

  I took it and slipped it in my wallet. The Gwyng touched my armpits and babbled again. Black Amber oo’ed slightly.

  She was going to take a nymph out of her pouch and then go into heat. I wasn’t sure who’d be the one to help with that. “I packed human-style deodorant,” I told her.

  “I have heat suppressants this time. Cadmium is here/on Gwyng Home/not near. We will stay in this urban area tonight, join with him (both traveling to meet at third location).” Cadmium was the fourth live alien I’d met, back in Virginia, a serious little cuss.

  We got back in the car and drove by stacks of plastic round apartments, other buildings with smokestacks like factories, heaps of plastic scraps, then other trash mounds of paper and cardboard. Black Amber’s was the only private car on the unpaved shell road that ran along beside a rail line. The trees here looked stunted compared to strap-leaf trees on the Karst Gwyng islands, and the air had a metallic tang to it. The landscape didn’t look slick the way Karst City, outside the slums, was. “We synthesize food for most of our people, oils, proteins. Herds are for the wealthy.”

  “What about pouch hosts?”

  “Enough wealthy to breed too many Gwyngs,” Black Amber said. The computer transformed that with odd flatness.

  “What do you get from the Federation?”

  “We eat alien hydrocarbons.”

  I saw two ruins—granite building walls that looked fused. Nuclear war here? “Is this the poorest part?”

  She didn’t answer, but rolled her huge eyes so far under the bone protrusions protecting them that I saw only a murky yellow brown, her sclera.

  “You use plastic for everything?” I asked, touching the hotel room’s woven plastic walls. They were stiff, like celluloid. “Then the Gwyng houses on Karst are primitive?”

  “Not primitive, extravagant,” she said. “This hotel is (almost) poverty, recycled into food after we use it.”

  The plastic in the living-room ceiling glowed—no switches—and the single bedroom was dark, just one mat. I looked at her and she said, “You, I, and bought sleepers will share that.”

  “Bought sleepers?”

  “No kin here,” she said. “Hotel provides fake-home warmth.” I saw one tube sofa like an emptied silkworm cocoon, the Gwyng news screen playing moiré patterns that they read as language, and an enameled box the size of a refrigerator. Black Amber found an intercom and spoke Gwyng in it then told me in Karst Two, “I asked for real food.”

  “You haven’t been greeted by anyone.”

  “My rank is with the Federation, not Gwyngs,” she said, pacing on the plastic floor mats, fake tatamis, body lurching side to side over her short bowed legs. She stopped in front of the tube sofa and wiggled into it, crossed her arms, and leaned her small chin on them, huge eyes fixed on me, bone protecting them, furred skin over that. Layers and layers—mentally shielded, too. I’d never known she had no rank among the Gwyngs. Or was this something new? Maybe gossip about Wy’um had gotten back to Gwyng Home.

  “You don’t have any status here?”

  “Different status,” she said, shutting her eyes.

  The next morning, I woke up tangled in Gwyng limbs and gently unwound myself from them. Black Amber was up, leaning against a wall with a towel covering her pouch slit and crotch. One of the hired Gwyngs started, nostril slits flared, when he opened his eyes and saw me. He wriggled out from the sleepers, waking the others. “Did you (both) sleep well?” the largest female among them asked in Karst Two as the five of them stood up and stretched.

  “We appreciated your warmth,” Black Amber said.

  “The non-Gwyng was not so sleepy?”

  “Before I could answer, Black Amber said, “He doesn’t usually sleep/like to sleep in heaps. I’m teaching him to be polite.”

  I said, “I did sleep,” but then realized that only Black Amber could understand me.

  They all filed out, two naked females and three males with covered crotches. “Is nudity common?”

  “Body coverings come from the Old Ones’ ruin areas mostly,” she answered.

  “Were those Old Ones’ ruins I saw yesterday?”

  “Gwyngs evolved after the Old Ones died/killed selves.”

  Black Amber spent most of the morning talking Gwyng on the phone, sometimes lying in the tube sofa, sometimes sprawled on the floor. About every ninety minutes, she asked me to heat bottles of her blood drink or melt butter. She sucked up liquids through her oval glass straw—big as two thumbs held side by side—pushed down deep in her throat. I watched her breathe in and out while she sucked. Then she handed me the straw and glass to wash and got back on the phone. No other Gwyngs seemed really eager to adopt a Black Amber child.

  Finally, somebody must have said yes. She put the phone down and stretched, webs rippling. She told me, “I (and you) will go North. Our North has many parallels with Linguist’s city, Barkaley.” She got up off the floor and dressed in Gwyng rig, her Sub-Rector’s uniform in her shoulder sling.

  We drove by tank yards and square gate station buildings. “Gwyngs hire out to prospect gas giants. Gas giant work (hint of danger, but Gwyngs can’t/afford to/be intimidated).” I saw three runways, plastic like all the Federation runways I’d seen, but a Gwyng crew was digging up one of the runways in sections.

  I asked, “For recycling?”

  “Sun and landing pressure breaks down the molecules. Makes yeast/bacterial work easier.”

  “But you prefer food from animals?”

  “All Gwyngs do,” she said. I saw hangars, no airport terminal, but realized that Gwyngs arranged ticket purchases by computer and didn’t carry much baggage. We went in one of the hangars where a female-sized Gwyng in a stained white shift looked at Black Amber’s ID.

  Black Amber said to me, “Bump bodies sideways but not too hard. They are kin for the flight/a formality.” I touched the three Gwyng crew members very lightly, afraid they’d cringe. One stiffened and squeezed his nostrils shut.

  We got on a small jet wide enough for tube sofas and a small aisle. Three cushioned tubes were on the right side, with legroom between them, the aisle on the left, then three tubes on the left and the aisle on the right, forcing the passengers into a serpentine path, and so, by threes, except for the last three tubes in the tail of the plane.

  “Get in the tube during takeoff, then sit on it during the flight until I tell you to get back in,” Black Amber told me before she chattered in Gwyng to her con-specifics.

  I sweated in the tube—no air-conditioning on Gwyng jets. But I guess the tubes were safer than seat belts in case of a crash.

  The jet landed twice—passengers got off and others got on. One baby Gwyng burst into those oily Gwyng tears when he saw me.

  Then we landed in chilly fog and went into a private room inside the hangar. Black Amber stripped off her Gwyng clothes and put on her Sub-Rector’s uniform. Among other Gwyngs, she looked disguised in long pants and tunic.

  “And you wear yours,” she told me.

  I dressed in the Academy uniform for the first time since I’d left Karst to go to Berkeley. The tunic dangled below my knees like a large hobble. “Do I need the sash?”

  “No.” She brushed her head fur against the grain, then dabbed a gel on it before brushing it back. Then she used a lighter bristled brush on her face fur, neck, and ba
cks of hands. “Brush your head hair, and the visible hand hair.”

  I used her brushes, then slid my wallet in my tunic side pocket. Black Amber moistened her fingers against her tongue and smoothed down my eyebrows.

  Then we went out; her contacts were waiting—seven Gwyngs in shifts with armholes cut deep for webs, three large Gwyngs, three medium-sized, one of them Cadmium, Black Amber’s pouch child. They stood on the sides of their feet, toes curled inward. A big one, a female, said in Karst Two, “You brought a stranger, Black Amber zh’Wringa Vel.”

  “Only half stranger, zh’Wy’um Eshing. Red Clay is serviceable.”

  “Your herds have been sterilized?” They switched to a Gwyng language. Cadmium just looked at me, not speaking, his blond-streaked head hair slightly erected. Then zh’Wy’um Eshing, kin of Wy’um’s, I guessed, said to me, “Come with us, Red Clay.”

  We got in a stretch limo that looked like a stolen 1930s Mercedes, but it had no driving wheel, accelerator, just a computer pressure pad. Eshing wrote a pattern on the pad, saying to me, “We’ll get something you can eat.”

  “Fried blood cakes would suit him fine, with honey,” Black Amber said. They talked Gwyng again. Eshing looked at me as though she suspected I understood, but all my computer did was squeal when they talked. Black Amber took a small curved plate out of her sling and laid it over my computer, saying in Karst Two, “Now it won’t record.”

  Oh. I leaned back and watched the fog. Then we passed over a cattle guard, no, a blood and pouch beast guard, and drove through pastures, by sudden juniper-shaped trees, to the zh’Wy’um house—stone this time, built on a cliff edge, with the usual wraparound Gwyng porch. The stone was pierced with many long oval windows, no glass in them. We went into a gloomy, great room, cold with splashes of light coming through the stone windows.

  “Do you chill easily?” Eshing said to me.

  “Give him some blankets and put plastic over his windows.” Black Amber said.

  “He sleeps alone (mild shock, not wanting to be rude)?” Eshing asked.