Being Alien

by Rebecca Ore

  “Alone and he’s tired. Show him to his room, now,” Black Amber said.

  “Could I walk around a bit?” I asked.

  “I’ll go with him,” Cadmium said, “I have the skull computer.”

  Black Amber’s nostrils slowly squeezed down into narrow slits, then she said, “Yes (reluctantly).”

  We went out of the great room onto the side porch overlooking the ocean, which I could hear below banging into the rocks. “Late at night, the fog rolls back,” Cadmium told me. “In the morning you can see refractions—no, you can’t. The sky will be fogless, more clear.”

  “Blue sky when clear?”

  “As on any planet with the right air. Black Amber’s new pouch child—is it Wy’um (possessive).” He stumbled over that construction; I barely made out the name. He added, “The History Committee Person.”

  “The matings have been open.”

  His long finger caught my wrist, one finger on the pulse. “I don’t know if you lie or not. Black Amber, is she angry with the bird?”

  “I haven’t seen her in a couple of months.”

  “We need to work better together, Black Amber thinks (I’m not sure). Hard with others, brains different. How are you perceiving this?”

  “Correctly, I think.”

  He koo’ed. “Uneasy-don’t-be-rude. Come.” He began descending stairs cut into the rock. I followed him, afraid he’d lose me in the fog. We went down the cliff and onto a small crescent beach, mostly cobbles. Several large black animals wiggled back into the water.

  I wasn’t sure what I saw. “Hands?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are they?”

  “Maybe the next sapient. The Gwyng name wouldn’t register in the computer.”

  A small diurnal bat flew overhead, peeping, then going into ultrasonics as it flew into the fog. My computer picked up the lower fringes of that. I asked Cadmium, “Do we have to stay outside?”

  “Black Amber has business to tend to."

  "She always wants the Federation to do more with the present sapient members.”

  Cadmium said, “Contact dislocates years after initiation. Even 400 years after. Do you want to swim?”

  The air temperature was about fifty degrees; I didn’t know if the water was warmer or colder. “I’m a subtropical brachiator.”

  “I’m not.” He rolled his shoulders and took off his shift, then began wading out. One of the large seal-like creatures spy-hopped out of the water two feet from him and bugled through an inflatable nose.

  He hit it on the shoulder and it dove and brought up strange lentil-sized things, gigantic shelled unicellular animals, parallel to something extinct on Earth. Cadmium passed several to me and bit into one of those lentil creatures himself.

  Edible. Like sucking eggs.

  * * *

  When we went back up the cliff, the other Gwyngs except for Black Amber were on the veranda. They all were watching a barn off about a quarter mile. The doors opened and Black Amber, her Sub-Rector’s pants draped over her arm, ambled out. As she got closer, I saw that her wrinkles were slack and her lips pursed in an oo.

  Black Amber said, “Pouched. Female (satisfaction).”

  Eshing said in Karst Two, “When she is twelve we’ll send her to Karst to become Rector if you can’t manage.” Black Amber looked stunned, lips parted, not oo’ing now. Eshing continued, “The bird threatens to outlive-you.”

  “Karriaagzh refuses to age or resign,” Black Amber said. She came up the veranda stairs, and I saw she was damp, sweating. Drying her head with her pants, she asked, “Do you mind if I take suppressants?”

  “No alien crudities here,” Eshing said. “We’ll provide your assistance.”

  “Cadmium and Red Clay can assist.”

  Eshing said, “We are not on Karst now, protégé. And this mating will be (I insist) open. Witnessed by us.”

  Black Amber threw her arms apart. Veins throbbed in her armpit webs. Eshing pinched a web and spoke in Gwyng, but I knew that she’d keep Black Amber from chilling down into an avoidance coma. Her web between Eshing’s fingers, Black Amber shuddered, then she said, “Tom, Cadmium, leave.”

  “Can I go back to Karst?” I didn’t want to be alone on this alien planet, but I didn’t really want to witness another one of Black Amber’s matings—her in blind heat, the males shoving each other, a pre-pubescent or three trying to keep the Gwyngs from damaging the female.

  Eshing went eyeball to eyeball, belly to belly, against Black Amber, and talked Gwyng to her, then said, in Karst Two, “We want Red Clay to tell Karst we are still Gwyng here. You will stay close but will not be a visual witness.”

  Cadmium looked at me and shrugged like, I’m sorry, I had no input, a gesture he’d learned from me. Only Black Amber, among the other Gwyngs, could understand a human shrug.

  * * *

  Cadmium pitched a tent for us near the barn, but we still heard the noises. “We both spoilt by Karst,” Cadmium said. He moved stiffly, aroused by the pheromones.

  “Eshing says Gwyng systems work best for all Gwyngs.”

  “Black Amber really loves Wy’um.”

  “That, in us, is perverse/selfishness.” He spread his arms as if he, too, wanted to evade this stress with a self-induced chill-coma. “She won’t impregnate fast (old).”

  “Old?”

  “Forty, forty-five planet cycles. Old.”

  “How many planet cycles do you live, using Karst cycles?”

  “Sixty is beyond intelligent life. The body may wiggle."

  “Oh. Oh.”

  She didn’t settle for two weeks.

  Cadmium and I went to the post-heat party. Black Amber was an ungracious hostess until Eshing took her outside. We pretended not to notice the screams.

  On the flight down to the space-gate city, Black Amber stayed in her tube sofa, eyes tightly closed, beads of oil leaking out from between her eyelids. Other Gwyngs would glance by the tube, but their eyes never stopped, never really looked at her.

  She opened her eyes when we landed and moaned as she pulled herself out of the tube. We walked to her car. She was stiff, bruised. “Should I drive?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, and we went back to the plastic-walled hotel. Gwyngs were dismantling sections of it, quietly, with lasers, loading the pieces on trucks.

  Black Amber ordered new clothes and a sleeping group before she went into the sleeping room. I heard water running and a hair drier. When she came out, she sat down on the floor beside me, her head hair still damp, and asked, “Do you know more about me now than you want?”

  “I thought once first contact was over, then…”

  “First contact is the beginning of ‘then.’ We have artificial food. More can live (more badly).”

  “What do we do now?” I asked.

  “We go back to Karst/bird terrors/bird idiocy.”

  Black Amber didn’t say much more as Cadmium and I rode with her to the Gwyng planet gate facility. The Gwyngs who bolted her car down in the transport pod didn’t speak to us either, although her transition still got priority, fast handling through the gates. A bear crew, no Gwyngs among them, unbolted the car when we arrived at Karst. Black Amber sighed and drove out on Karst. I asked, “Can I see Marianne now?”

  “Not yet. Wait until she isn’t embarrassed by her Karst language ability.” We didn’t go into town. Amber drove on instead up the coast to her beach house through her herds of pouch beasts with older Gwyng children playing beside them.

  “The children aren’t yours.”

  “Nymphs are currency (Barcons don’t understand).” She drove up to her woven plank house on stilts. A small blue electric car the size of a golf cart, but completely enclosed, was parked under the house.

  We went in. Rhyodolite, her oldest pouch kin, sat in her great room, looking tragic, wrinkles sagging, oily eyes, nostril slits faintly rippling. I remembered, though, that he could be a tease. Cadmium’s blond-streaked body fur rippled. Rhyodolite, tiny, st
ill scarred from his third and last shape-shift mission two years ago, asked, “Gwyng-Home Gwyngs disapprove of you? My first contacts disapproved of me/of Federation. Hurt feeling with xenophobia. Lost trade shares/vast fear for no profit.”

  She opened her arms and bent forward slightly; they rushed awkwardly to her and cuddled against her sides, all three Gwyngs swaying together.

  “But I agree with Gwyng Home (in policy issues),” Black Amber said. “They don’t understand/xenocentric.”

  “But now Red Clay has new woman for us to tease,” Rhyodolite said, his lips, pursed so tight they dragged all his wrinkles forward. “Red Clay, relieve pain of scornful aliens. Here, bad xenophobe species name in Karst for slow minds.” He handed me a piece of paper: SHARWAN, FIRST CONTACT FAILURE, NON-CONTRACTING SPECIES. POSSIBLE DANGER. SEE THE INSTITUTE OF CONTROL FILE 5897-A.

  6

  Some Kind Of Alien Wedding

  The phone buzzed the next morning while the creatures at Black Amber’s house were all sleeping, tangled up together.

  At least, the Gwyngs were sleeping. Rhyodolite woke up and answered in Karst Two, then handed it to me. “The master bird, ready to send thousands to their deaths in hysterical first contacts, calls you.”

  “Come on, Rhyodolite, he’ll hear you.” I took the phone and adjusted it to fit human ears, then switched off the hold function. “Red Clay here.”

  Black Amber’s eyes slowly opened. Karriaagzh said, “I sent a car for you, Tom.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said. He made a throat-clearing noise, deep noise with those hollow bones vibrating behind it and hung up. Black Amber slid away from Cadmium and found her plastic plate that fitted over skull computers. She stuck a fine wire into it, said, “Put back standard functions,” and laid it behind my ear.

  I dressed in my officer/officiator’s uniform, wishing I’d washed it after we left the strange Gwyng house on the cliffs. But I hadn’t, so it’d stink of Gwyng arguments. Karriaagzh had no sense of smell, but his Barcons would know.

  The car driven by a Barcon, not a bear as was more usual, came up to Black Amber’s ten minutes after Karriaagzh hung up. I slid on my black shoes. Cadmium bent down to close the straps. “Don’t make Karriaagzh wait,” Black Amber said. “He wants immediate contact with the entire universe."

  Rhyodolite said, “Tell him the Shangwan refused/not my fault (possible?/doubt/nervous of being blamed).”

  Sharwan, he meant. Rhyodolite had no ear for what to him were nonsense sounds.

  The Barcon opened the rear door from the driver’s seat and said, “Your people are doing well. Now at Rector’s People Chalk 137 and Agate 120. Jereks, very solid couple.”

  I said, “I haven’t met them.” Jereks—the weasels, who worked so much for the spy Institute of Analytics and Tactics. Aliens with eyelids shiny and black as their eyes so you could hardly tell when they blinked. Carbon-jet, the Jerek spy who bit me in the leg when he was arrested by the people we’d just admitted to the Federation—he didn’t have the nerve to bite anyone more directly responsible. “Can’t they go to a Rector’s People I know better, a species…?” I couldn’t tell him I didn’t like Jereks. I had to like most sapient species—why couldn’t I have one species that I didn’t like, didn’t have to get along with? Why not a little xenophobia after sympathizing with so strange a creature as Black Amber?

  “No, you need to be tamed to Jereks.”

  “What about Gwyng Rector’s People?”

  “You have a Gwyng sponsor.” Rigid, inflexible, remote—typical Barcon, not S’um, who’d calmed Sam Turner by playing harpsichord duets with him.

  “What does Karriaagzh want to talk to me about?”

  “About Yauntra, about Gwyng Home.”

  I leaned back against the seat cushions and stared at the rolling coastal hills, the glints of ocean beyond them. We crossed the northernmost river that fed into Karst Bay and were suddenly in the city near the water landing docks. The Barcon drove through the slums as if they didn’t matter. I thought I saw Yangchenla’s oldest uncle, selling buttered and salted tea from a pushcart.

  Then we turned inland and I saw the Academy walls and towers, and felt an odd rush of relief, at a somatic level.

  “You do stink of Gwyng,” the Barcon said as he let me out in front of the Rector’s office.

  I walked inside and .took an elevator to Karriaagzh’s floor. Almost no one was in the building—I remembered that it was spring mating season here—behind Earth’s seasons. I went through the huge Karriaagzh-sized doors into the outer office.

  “Come in,” Karriaagzh called. I did; he sat behind his boomerang-shaped desk. On the desk, beside his terminal, a teapot suddenly steamed, went to full boil, then simmered down. As I looked at it, he said, “From Yauntra.” He dropped in some loose herbal tea, turned the pot off, and brought out a University of California Berkeley cup for me and his spouted bird cup. “From Alex.”

  “Thank him for me,” I said.

  “He likes humans very much.”

  “He got us in trouble with the FBI.”

  Karriaagzh stared at me. One hand scribbled on his keypad. Then he looked at his computer screen. “Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he said in English before translating that to Karst equivalent terms. “Ah, Alex. He has interesting ideas. If only people could gradually become accustomed to the idea of the intelligent other.”

  “I don’t think humans can half believe intelligent other sapients share the universe with them. Should Alex go up to the FBI and say, ‘Maybe I’m an extraterrestrial’?”

  “Let’s not talk about this right now,” he said. Karriaagzh slid his transparent inner eyelids vertically over his yellow eyes, dimming them. I watched the muscles around his eyes bunch, relax, bunch up again, until he saw me watching and raised his crest. He wrote on his pad again, and the terminal display changed. “The Barcons said you have traces of thumb gland odor on your body. Gwyng were angry around you.”

  ‘‘‘Not enough to wipe the juice on me.”

  “But enough to leak slightly.” Feathers around his beak twitched, and his inner eyelids relaxed. “Black Amber—can she be separated from Gwyng Home policy?”

  “She can’t do enough for them.” Karriaagzh’s beak gaped slightly, and I regretted saying that much. “Gwyng Home seems like a poor planet. “

  “Overpopulated,” Karriaagzh said. “They would starve if not for gas-giant industries, which the Federation made possible.”

  “She thinks we need to work more with present Federation members, not send out additional observation teams. Gwyng Home thinks she’s been morally corrupted by alien contact, but they don’t disagree with her politics.”

  “Observation teams don’t speed up on-planet technological development.” Karriaagzh shielded his eyes again with the transparent lids. “We didn’t have an observation station at one system, and the species spread into another planetary system. Rhyodolite was on the team that tried to contact them. Not effective. Not convincing.”

  “He said there were problems.”

  “If we’d contacted the Sharwan just before they developed gate technology, they might have been friendlier.” He slid his nictitating membranes back. “We need to expand contacts, now, before the Sharwan form their own Federation.”

  I went to Marianne at the Jerek Rector’s People’s place, in the north by the polar sea. Big polar sea, so the place wasn’t freezing all the time, just in the winter. It was early summer now and just froze on occasional nights.

  But Chalk and Agate’s house looked just-like Tesseract’s—sprawling, lots of porches and wings—only they’d backed the main wing up against a mountain. My little plane landed on a runway near the swimming pool placed on the same side of the house as Tesseract’s.

  I climbed out of the plane and looked into two Jerek faces. Their noses were up; so I wasn’t getting threat-face, but they were otherwise unreadable. Chalk was the male—he had slightly lighter fur than Agate.

  I asked them, “How
are they?”

  Chalk said, “Marianne is well beyond the rudiments.”

  “Warren?”

  Chalk looked at Agate, then answered again, “He heard about other humans. We’re arranging a meeting. If he joins them, he’ll still have a city pass.”

  “With the Tibetans?”

  “Yes. The Barcons checked his sperm and found it unaffected by his brain malformations, so he has a duplication breeding permit. Is this too upsetting?”

  “I want Warren to be happy.” I didn’t want to break his balls by switching from younger brother to boss, either.

  All my twentieth-century human colleagues came out now as if signaled. They wore grey tunics down below the knees except for Marianne, who wore white with a green stripe across the shoulders at clavicle level—pre-Linguistics. Then Warren shuffled out, in jeans and a plaid wool shirt, his feet in felt slippers.

  “The clothes are boring,” Molly said.

  “They’re a disguise,” I told her. “Do you have other learners here?” I asked Chalk.

  “We don’t do this generally,” Agate said, lowering her nose slightly. No, they were Rector’s People, not near-poor language-trainers.

  “But you’ve all learned Karst One?”

  Warren said, “Thought I’d really gone crazy. Language worse than a bad drug.”

  “I enjoyed it,” I said. Marianne and Molly looked at each other.

  “They cut off my music,” Sam said, “English and my music. But it came back. Weird language, this one.”

  “So many meanings,” Marianne said, looking at me as though I was strange to her now.

  “Meanings driving me…” Warren began.

  “Don’t say it, Warren,” Sam said. “Remember the Barcons.”

  Warren shuddered, and I wondered what happened in the hospital. “We’re refugees…stinks,” he said.

  “Can we move back to the apartment?” I asked.

  “When Sam learns his subjunctives better,” Chalk said. “Come in. The house is Rector’s People, like Tesseract’s, but we have Jerek quarters below.”