Being Alien

by Rebecca Ore

  The Barcon whispered in my ear, “He had some trouble when we did the language operations—we had to isolate him for four days. Let him go.”

  “Warren, you know you’re always welcome at my house.”

  Yangchenla said, “Come on, Warren, let’s go.”

  Chalk came to the door and said, “Tom, come in with me. Karriaagzh and Black Amber quarrel for Marianne.”

  I went rigid, wedging myself in the doorway, until Warren disappeared into the plane, then I let Chalk pull me back into the house. We went into the second wing where I heard Karriaagzh say, “But she herself put Tom in danger.”

  “What?” I asked. Marianne lay curled up on a cushion, her head propped up on her hand, elbow on the cushion, staring out between Black Amber and Karriaagzh.

  “Translate (correctly) for me, Red Clay,” Black Amber said. Her feet were writhing, her arms flicked out once to help her balance. “Tell your female that your people are xenophobes, that we’re now facing another xenophobic group.”

  I translated for Marianne. She said to me, “Does she understand what I say?”

  “Her skull computer transforms our sequential signal to something hologramistic, only done in sound, like sonar.”

  “Black Amber, Karriaagzh, when you quarrel, you make me very nervous,” Marianne said. “Black Amber, you’re afraid of Karriaagzh.”

  Black Amber hissed. Karriaagzh raised his face, feathers, but not his crest. “The fear can be managed, Black Amber,” he told her in Karst Two.

  Black Amber crouched and turned toward him, eyes gone blank, non-sapient. Marianne said, “Black Amber, no. Karriaagzh, you both ought to separate now.”

  Karriaagzh pulled his feathers tight, the membrane slid out slightly over his eyes, looking like a thick tear in each corner.

  “I’m still getting used to vr’ech, Karriaagzh, don’t be as bad as she is,” Marianne said.

  “Uhyalla,” Karriaagzh said, muscles bunching around the eyes to pull the membrane back. His feathers jerked stiffly.

  Black Amber looked down at her hands, fingers curled, sinews rigid, and said, “Red Clay, Red Clay, so difficult.” She spread her arms and pulsed blood through the webs, then slowly began to topple over. I ran up and caught her, the webs hot and sweaty against my arms, her head dangling.

  Karriaagzh hopped over, a gait I’d never seen him use before—terrible gait in these circumstances—lowered his body and took Black Amber’s left web between his beak mandibles, crouching. He tightened slowly, his eyes closed, stiff quills erected over his rigid brows.

  Black Amber opened her eyes and shrieked, He dropped her web and bounded backward, arms thrown out for balance. I tried to hold her as she began thrashing, but ended up falling with her to the floor.

  “You stupid whore,” Karriaagzh said to her. “With Wy’um.”

  Black Amber said, “The last was open. Contact with your crippled brains contaminates, perverts.” She rolled to her back and touched her left web with fingers that jerked back. She wouldn’t look at Karriaagzh.

  Marianne said, “I can’t stand this. Get out, both of, you.”

  “They’re both high Federation officials,” I said.

  “If I can’t get them to go away now when they’re upsetting me on my wedding day, this Federation is a farce.”

  Karriaagzh said, softly, “She would have damaged her embryo with a coma now.”

  “They’ll all die from now on,” Black Amber said. She closed her eyes and hugged herself, webs stretched over her chest, head thrashing. “Translate that. She’s female.”

  “I’m leaving,” Karriaagzh said. “Tell Black Amber I am willing to desensitize her.” Karriaagzh walked out of the room, wiping his beak.

  “Shit,” Marianne said. “Shit. Black Amber, you had better get desensitized if you’ve got such a problem with him.”

  Black Amber’s body quivered, then she tried to get up, floundering. “Cold,” she said. I turned around and saw Chalk and Agate watching.

  “We’ll bring hot water and a vasoconstrictor skin rub," Agate said. “So she can’t trade off her nymphs anymore?”

  “It’s more than web-creeping predator with him. He pursued me with his policies,” Black Amber said.

  “You like snakes, spiders?” I asked Marianne.

  “I get startled weirdly when I see a snake suddenly.”

  “Yes.” Black Amber said, “Karriaagzh is my snake.”

  “For her. Karriaagzh represents a primordial threat the way snakes threaten monkeys. We react to fingernails on blackboards—primitive monkey alarms…” I felt dizzy myself and went over to a cushion by Marianne. Chalk came up and gently stroked me across the eyebrows with his thumbs. In English, I said, “I’m caught here between Black Amber and Karriaagzh.”

  “Terrific,” Marianne replied. Chalk touched her hand gently. She just blinked, moved her hand up on her lap.

  I continued in English, “Just because they’ve got more technology, you expected them to be morally superior?”

  Agate came back with the hot water and skin rub, heating Black Amber’s body core with a warm drink, closing the peripheral veins to send the blood back to the major organs.

  Marianne watched Agate, then asked me, “The hippies were right then? Technology fucks you up?”

  Chalk said, “If you continue to speak in that language, I will call Travertine to translate.”

  I didn’t think a bird in here would be a good idea, so I spoke in Karst. “Some species have been technological longer that we’ve been. But technology just makes life easier, not perfect.”

  “Brings us in contact with much complexity,” Agate said, sitting by Black Amber, rubbing the Gwyng’s nippleless chest. “Most of us find a few species to work with, leave the other ninety alone. None of us understands all of one another.”

  Black Amber sat up. She said, “Nothing can make me desensitive with that one.”

  “You need to walk around,” Chalk said. “You could begin desensitizing with Travertine.”

  “Not today,” Black Amber said as Agate and Chalk, both much smaller and lighter than she, helped her to her feet.

  “Oh, Tom,” what did she say?” Marianne asked when Black Amber and the Jereks had left the room.

  “She wouldn’t work with Karriaagzh on desensitizing her aversion to birds.”

  “I’ve already figured out that Black Amber doesn’t work with Karriaagzh period. Tom, Karriaagzh said he could teach me Karst Two. After my skull computer is installed.”

  But Black Amber wanted my humans with her.

  The next morning, while Marianne still slept, I walked into an open elevator with speakers softly playing Brahms. If I shouldn’t be here, the machine won’t work, I decided as I pressed the down button.

  But the door slid up, the compartment sank, then the door slid down again. I stepped out into a tunnel lit with glow tubes, some twisted and dropped on the rough stone underfoot, others hung in wire baskets. A spring ran down between black stones, faint light glittering on its ripples. Down the hall, I heard water dropping, echoing against stone, then something hollow and metallic hit stone, a tube chime down in the darkness that pivoted forward when water trickling into it filled it beyond the balance point. Empty, it pivoted back, hit the stone, and caught more water.

  “Agate, Chalk?” I began to see doorways off either side of the tunnel and stone Jerek figures in a niche at the end of it.

  “Tom, you came down,” Chalk said from the first room.

  Agate added, “He’s curious. That’s a human trait, isn’t it, Tom?”

  “Agate? Did you want to be alone?”

  “Come satisfy your curiosity. You’re cold,” Chalk said. He was right. The water in the hall was nearly ice-cold. I slipped off one of the stepping stones.

  The three of them, the parents and the young daughter, were playing silver flute-like instruments blown like bottles, not held transversely like human flutes. They put the flutes back under their noses, mouthpieces pressed
against the shark-like lower jaws and played. Lisanmarl lowered her flute and said, “I wish I was a Gwyng or a Barcon.”

  Before I could ask why, Agate said, “Don’t.” I didn’t know whether she meant that I shouldn’t ask or that the young Jerek shouldn’t elaborate.

  “Maybe...” Lisanmarl began. She picked up her flute and blew out discordant notes.

  “I’ll leave,” I said.

  “Make them leave me alone,” Lisanmarl said. “I don’t want to be spayed now.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, beginning to move back.

  “Lisanmarl is sterile,” Chalk said. “Don’t tempt her. Watch your brother around her, and Sam.”

  “I’m sorry I came down here if…”

  “She’s maturing fast. You needed to be told. Steriles are always in low-grade estrus. Please don’t take advantage of her. We know you’re not happy with Jereks, but please.”

  “Human women stay in low-grade estrus, too,” Lisanmarl said, “so he won’t want me.” Her black facial skin began to gleam in the cold light.

  Chalk said, “We invited you down with human music and pheromones. Maybe you think Jereks can be too oblique. Here’s your pheromone disrupter.”

  Lisanmarl played human music at them. I felt very awkward and slightly angry. “I’m sorry,” I said again. “Should I lock the elevator when I leave?”

  Chalk and Agate looked up with blank Jerek faces, naked skin over their noses wrinkled. “We don’t like blocked exits.”

  “Blocked exits,” Lisanmarl said, “remind my parents of avalanches, but I was born on Karst.”

  “Being born on Karst explains it,” Marianne said when I told her about my walking down a pheromone line to the Jerek tunnel. “Lisanmarl knows other species do things differently.”

  “But what does she want? Sam?”

  “She’s come onto him already. He said he didn’t want a furry girl with tits below her navel, but could Molly and I tell him how to get out of it gracefully? Tell her we permanently pair-bonded like Barcons, we said. Molly’s not sure he didn’t sleep with her.”

  “Lisanmarl believes that?”

  “Precisely what’s going on? Permanent heat?”

  “Same as human women, they said, always in low-grade estrus.”

  Marianne laughed, then asked, “Why spay her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  One of the house Barcons told Marianne that Lisanmarl could die of pernicious anemia in ten to fifteen years if she wasn’t spayed. Estrogen in heat quantities washes out the hemoglobin’s iron. Some Jerek steriles wait until the first effects show. Chalk and Agate didn’t want to let their daughter take a chance or live the sterile life.

  Chalk came up to me a day later and said, “We thought you ought to know why we’re tense now. We may resign as Rector’s People because of this.”

  “Don’t,” I told them. “I had no idea you were upset. I thought you were like the first Jerek I met.”

  “That’s because you think all Jereks are tense.”

  “No it’s because I was preoccupied with my brother.”

  Chalk laid his hand on my forearm and said, “A problem’s shape depends on species, but we all have troubles enough. “He raised himself on the balls of his feet and rubbed his chin against my clavical.

  “Will I stay here while Marianne has the skull computer installed?”

  “No, you have an assignment. Black Amber sent word. Take your bicycle—they installed a device for it in the space station gym.”

  7

  Crocs and Pretty People

  Being an officer/officiator in the Federation, I would have duties. And so, having just registered us as a mated pair, the Federation separated Marianne and me. During the last four years, I’d spent a total of seven months on Watch Species 467 Station monitoring radio and video signals from the Watch Species 467 planet, learning one of their languages. Now space-time around that planet writhed—they’d done gate experiments—so ten of us who’d learned at least one of their languages came to wait to see if Watch Species 467 would develop space gate technology during this watch.

  In the language I’d learned, Wreng was one of Watch Species 467; I’Wreng meant two; Wrengin, the many; Wrengee, the people. They looked more reptilian than any creature I’d seen before. The structure of their solar system, few comets, coolish sun, should have produced birds. But, while their sun was a bit distant, the planet atmosphere was a bit high in carbon dioxide. So, sparse feathers, scales on the hands. No beaks, either. They’d never been runners. We’d seen their porn movies so we had a good idea of what they looked like—feathered heads and leathery bodies, clotted with saucer-sized erectible scales, some of them pierced and hung gold rings on.

  A shiny black couple, Argon IX and Argon X who I’d worked with before, opened my transport and asked in English, “Did you bring your new wife?”

  I missed Marianne and I hadn’t been gone from Karst more than an hour. “No, she’s having the second operation. Who’s here that I know besides you guys?”

  They looked at each other uneasily when. I said Marianne wasn’t with me, but I thought maybe it was because someone I didn’t like was there. “I promise to behave, whoever it is."

  “Barcons from before, and the ape-stock, Wool from the Institute of Science, plus a bird-stock. We don’t ask species.”

  And Wool wouldn’t tell you what he was. Yes, it’s divisive to ask species, and I’d been bad about doing that. We were supposed to class people only as to temperate-zone terrestrial evolvers, cold-zone terrestrial evolvers, tropical-zone evolvers: bats, bears and birds, and apes. There was a non-obligatory bound morpheme referring to travel modality that let us distinguish apes, bats, and bears from birds. Everything except birds had changed travel modes, bats from flying to walking, us from brachiating to walking, bears from four-footed gaits to bipedalism. Bird-stock was always bipedal. “So, who are they?”

  Granite Grit came out. “Tom, Red Clay, so we’re separated from our females for a month. The space warpage here has been in the wrong direction. The gates self-catch, so don’t fall into gravity wells or our nets.”

  Argon X, the female, said, “Wool doesn’t think the Wrengee are gating out. Someone else is trying to gate into this space-time.”

  Wool said, “Red Clay again?” He wore only pants, a thin creature that would have looked almost human except his skin was thick, mottled browns and greys, face almost immobile, and the eyes solid brown, no white showing, with a crepuscular creature’s slip pupils. He was yawning, too mid-day for him to be up, stretching a body that showed more ribs than I had, scratching the hair that covered his head, neck, and shoulders. “Maybe this watch won’t be so boring.”

  “I want it to be boring. I’ve got a wife now.”

  “And didn’t bring her with him,” Argon IX said.

  “Some of us can live without our mates,” Wool said.

  To change the subject, I asked, “How are we dividing the watches?”

  “You’re limited to sixteen hours up, as usual, although I think it’s foolish,” Granite said. He settled down on his, hocks. “Take some of the dark part of the rotation.”

  Wool said, “Karriaagzh sent a message pod. If the creatures making the gates aren’t Wrengee, check to see if they are Sharwan. If they’re Sharwan, we call in the Institute of Control and contact the Wrengee immediately.”

  The station, like all observation stations, was huge, studded with holowalls and digital sound systems, multispecies bathrooms, room to avoid the others if one’s companions got on one’s nerves. Fake lights, tunable as to frequencies and intensity, gave the place a strange sense of spaciousness. Research on humans indicated that I’d be happiest with windows on at least two walls, so three bright fake windows played Virginia scenery, with artificial sunlight timed to match the station’s cycles.

  Granite and the Barcons shared this space with me during the day. The Argons and Wool, with different light needs, tended to communicate by holopho
ne, although they liked my light at some times of our rotation.

  In his cubicle, Wool monitored the twitches in space-time, then wandered out at odd hours. He had two sleep periods a rotation and woke up desperate to talk.

  The Federation wants you to be as happy as possible in the observation stations, get plenty of rest, don’t get too bored, because at any, minute, you may have to come face to face with folks who had no idea the universe had any other templates for sapient beings than theirs. Or people whose worst nightmares were distorted versions of themselves. Or people who were just plain hysterical.

  Marianne sent me a letter:

  Dearest Tom, Loved Red Clay, wha’Fran Rock Flour Red,

  As you know, I’m at Black Amber’s house on the beach just north of Karst City, missing you. Molly and Sam are with me, but not Warren, who seems to have taken up with a Tibetan tribal woman.

  Black Amber—strange to think she ever passed as John now, she’s so alien. Once I began to read the computer auditory input as language, she began haranguing me. While she loves you and me, the whole business of looking for new planets is dangerous, the watch stations provocative. Tom, I can imagine the fury the Air Force would have if their first space probe was captured by aliens who then told them humans would have to join a union or avoid whole categories of space.

  Do you know Rhyodolite, her pouch kin (adopted child, I take it)? What can he do, sexually? Sam goes around muttering about alien sexual exploiters, but Molly still thinks he slept with the Jerek kitten.

  We are back at the house for a few days while Black Amber has her baby and goes through heat. One of the Barcons explained it to me. I met Wy’um, who stayed around even after Cadmium, the blond Gwyng who seems sort of “puritanical,” ordered Wy’um off.

  Black Amber’s son by Wy’um is neat, a brash little daredevil. I feel a biological pressure to breed—like there aren’t enough humans here. I’m a bit frightened by the urge, though.

  Come back soon, I miss you. It’s bad to be the only single human female on the planet. I’ve been studying more Karst Two with Ewits, who aren’t quite as weird as Gwyngs, but, Tom, they are all aliens here.