by Rebecca Ore
His bare feet had raw sores on the tops of his toes, and one heel oozed a clear liquid. He was freezing with his Jerek. Shouldn’t I turn him in for his own good? “Warren, you could do better than this. We can’t be that much different."
“Scares you, doesn’t it?”
“I won’t ever become like you.”
“Call off the Barcons, little brother, or you’ll be sorry.”
“Warren, I can’t abandon you.”
“Shit, don’t. Come visit. Try some drugs.” His grin was crooked, as though his brain couldn’t quite communicate through his facial nerves, signals scrambled.
I didn’t say anything more, just walked out alone, looking to the street like a whore’s customer. When I got out of the slum and caught a bus, I cried, the tears burning as though they’d clotted inside like bad blood and came out half scab.
Everyone on the bus with me went silent, then murmured until I got off. I took the elevator up. Marianne said, “He’s using again.”
“Yes.” I slumped onto a couch. “What do I do?”
“I asked what the drug laws were here. They’re relatively liberal. The Barcons pull in dealers when the drug use in a population goes over a certain percent. It’s a hundredth percent total living hours for where we’re living. I found out through the computer.”
I went to the terminal and called up the percent for where Warren was living. Two percent total hours, A twentieth of the population could stay stoned all the time. All the population could get stoned one hour a day. “What do they do to dealers?”
“Don’t ask,” Marianne said.
“He had sores on his feet,” I said to her as I typed a message to the Barcons in charge of Warren: WE MUST TALK. Then I stood up, almost tripped, slightly dizzy. “Is Karl sleeping?” Marianne nodded, then hugged me sideways like a Gwyng. We went in hip to hip to watch our sleeping son.
Appalled again at how tiny he was, I said, “I don’t want anything ever to hurt him or you,”
Marianne squeezed me and said, “All I hope for is that nothing damages us permanently. Any of us.”
That sent my thoughts back to Warren.
“We don’t understand why you insist on continuity of personality. If we remove his addictive nature without changing his memories, he’ll know he was changed, and if he considers it tampering…” The Barcon trailed off without concluding the statement. We were sitting in my little Academy office, a report from the Institute of Control about the Sharwan and the Wrengee on my terminal screen.
I was getting very depressed today, no good news. “He wants you to stop treating him. He said I’ll be sorry if you don’t leave him alone.”
“He’s a known drug technician. He’s marked to be brought in if the rate becomes excessive. Then we treat him as is prescribed.”
“What’s that?”
“Drug aversion.”
“He wouldn’t use drugs again?”
“Officer Red Clay, he could never even go near them.”
“What can be done?”
The Barcon sighed. “A personality re-structuring with some false memories."
“How many years do you think you’d have to cut out to give him a drug-free past?”
“We haven’t examined that issue completely.”
“He’s been using since he was fourteen, not excessively, but…” I felt as though I’d been drugged myself, some amphetamine that burned the myelin off my nerves and left me jangling. What, I asked myself, was I defending? "Can you give him memories of tapering off, of stopping? Cancel these last few weeks?"”
“Will you authorize?”
“He’ll hate me forever.”
“We…” He sighed.
I looked up sharply, having not heard a Barcon sigh like that. “What is the problem?”
“We will try to keep him as human as possible, but stopping the drug involvement is most critical, right?"
I remembered where he was living, in a cold room with a Jerek sterile. “Can you do anything for the Jerek he’s living with?”
“Her cell signature isn’t on the drugs sold there. Since she’s also not Academy or Institute, she can do what she wishes, which includes dying of pernicious anemia. Or of drug toxicity. Do you want that for your brother?”
A little slip of skin, sweat—Warren tagged each cap he handled as his product. And dying of drugs, several of Warren’s old Earthside connections managed that without precisely overdosing—couple of murders, couple of suicides, a car crash. I said, “He never used badly, he’d always detox on his own every couple months, before Mica came. Before v’r…this.”
“You don’t think this Karst, this Federation, isn’t stressful to me. Barcons go to the Northeast Quadrant, too.”
“And what do you do to them?”
“Re-build them and send them home.”
“Oh, could you please do that. Back home.” Getting Warren back to Earth now would be as difficult as extracting the Sharwan from the Wrengee planet, but I was going to force myself to be a little optimistic here.
“We must see how the reconstruction works,” the Barcon said. “Have you given us your permission?”
I felt like I was too exhausted to do otherwise. “Yes.”
The Barcon stood up. “We will tend to your regrets if that proves necessary."
“Only if I allow you to,” I said, almost ready to retract my decision, wondering if I could.
The next day, Bir from Marianne’s birth group came to watch Karl while Marianne and I went to a First Contact Party. One of my cadets, a Yauntry from Frosted Granite Corporation, had been aboard an observation station when their charge species gated out.
We went through the strange tunnel entrance at the Rector’s Lodge— “like a womb, we all get reborn here,” Marianne said and came in late to the large lodge room filled with all the seating instruments. A Barcon was already filling drug orders for some of the cadets. I spotted my cadet, Simla Doth, who had small northern Yauntry teeth and snow white hair, but brown eyes, not green or grey.
“Sorry I’m late.”
He fingered his sash. Beside him was a representative of the people he’d contacted vaguely Gwyng-like, but with smooth bare-skinned faces. They both seemed to smile at each other, then Simla took me aside.
“I wondered why you made us cadets first, not people of the Institutes. Now, quickly, we’ve been on both sides—first contact and first contacting.”
“It’s like an initiation.”
His face crinkled up in a Yauntry smile, almost like mine. “Great fun, though’.”
“If it goes smoothly,” I said.
“Topaz is most experienced.”
I remembered her from my own First Contact Party, the tri-colored almost human looking woman, so serious. “Yes. Hers are good teams to be on.” I looked around and saw Marianne talking to Karriaagzh.His throat organ throbbed once. I felt vaguely like he’d made a pass at her and went over.
Marianne smiled and said, “Tom’s worried about his brother."
Karriaagzh’s inner third eyelids flicked—why did this upset him—and he said, “Drugs are terrible.”
“Even supervised like this?” Marianne asked, waving her hand at the Barcon on the drug dispenser.
“I have many pleasures,” Karriaagzh said. “Perhaps you mammals will snoop later?” He stalked off, hocks flexing high, feathers quivering.
Marianne asked, “What was that about?
“He, I guess, he masturbated, or something, by throwing up, no, regurgitating in a toilet that’s decorated like a baby bird.”
“And you watched him?”“ Marianne sounded more shocked that I’d watched than he’d done it.
“Rhyodolite made me.”
“Karriaagzh needs friends,” she said.
I went up to the drug box thinking about smoking dope one last time with Warren. With Warren, not here in front of my cadets. Not in front of in my wife either.
The Barcon on the box said, “Red Clay, we don’t thin
k you should take drugs now!”
“I’d like to smoke one of my home planet drugs with my brother.” I wrote tetrahydrocannabinol on the drug box scribe pad. “This, but in the plant.”
“One last time?”
“The Institute of Medicine is going to fix him right. Make it where he can’t stand drugs, purge his memories.”
The Barcon talked into a communicator, then said, “One last time,” as he keyed the dispenser to disgorge a small metal box. I slipped it into a pocket in my tunic, under my dress sash.
When I turned around, Ersh was standing there watching me. Someone had ripped three jewelry rings out of his scales. He looked exhausted. “I’m a refugee.” He used the Karst One term for that word, with all its connotations, and sighed as if he knew them all now.
“I’m having a rough time with some of my con-specifics,” I said, “and my wife had a baby three weeks ago, so I’m sorry if I’m less than completely polite by your standards.”
“Not at all,” Ersh said. “I was rude myself, but then you were afraid of me.”
For the rest of the party, I stayed around the fringes of the party, with the Barcons against the wall, while Marianne talked to everyone, fascinated. I was glad she liked it.
When we got home, Bir’s son had his forefeet up against Karl’s crib, sniffing through the bars, while Bir explained, “They’re born utterly helpless, not strong boys like you.”
I almost expected him to bark he looked so much like a puppy with his face beginning to pug up.
“So you’re back,” Warren said. Moolan stood holding the door, as though she was thinking about pushing me back out. Warren was stretched out on his mattress, back and one elbow against the rear wall, operating a pump that loaded needle cubes. Odd how quickly he’d adapted to some of the new technology.
“I brought you something. I guess you’ll think it’s an unsophisticated drug now, marijuana.” I opened the box for the first time since I’d gotten it from the Barcon at the party, tilted it, all dark green sticky buds with visible resin beads, toward Warren. Moolan sniffed the air and shut the door.
“They even packed paper,” Warren said, getting up off the couch and taking the box out of my hands.
Moolan sighed and picked up a bone she was using as a biting stick. She said, “I want to detox for a while, but there’s a waiting list. Everyone in Karst City wants to detox for a while.”
I remembered dopers talking like that, as if everyone in Southwestern Virginia was using, just the good folks being secretive about it. “Can you use tetrahydrocannabinol?” I asked.
She raised her hand and rocked her fist, neither yes or no, almost the fingers out, palm down rocking that was the human sign “ifsy-shitsy,” then went and curled up by Warren, her furred skin not touching him, he being too hot-blooded for her comfort. They’d compromised on the room temperature, too cold for him, really, with his bare feet.
“You want to smoke some with me, or is this a pure gift?”
“One last time,” I said. We locked eyes, and I looked away first. He laughed as he rolled a small tight joint, popped it in his mouth, and drew it through his lips. I suddenly didn’t want to smoke with him. Warren, I didn’t know Warren really, I realized. Nor had I realized before this moment how much I’d changed—so straight, so hardworking, so middle class, but not a human middle class. But then Warren paused in the ritual and stared off at the door, not his 1,000-yard war stare, but something else, softer.
He looked back at me and said, “You know, here there are just a hundred more ways to get into trouble.”
Moolan bit her stick. Warren lit the joint with an electric heat point and sucked in deeply, then handed me the joint, his fingers clammy against mine.
The Barcons grow extremely good shit. Instantly stoned into tunnel vision, I was sorry I’d done this. Warren said, “My,” and took another hit, then breathed the smoke into Moolan’s mouth in a drug kiss. She shivered and left for her room. “Stare at the wall for days,” Warren said after she’d closed two doors, the noises of them battering against me. I didn’t know if he was referring to her or us. He was still bigger than I was, but I suspected I was in better shape if I had to beat him up. The Barcons, of course…
“The Barcons?” Warren asked, coiled against the wall.
I stared at him, seeing his wrinkles as places where he’d begun to die under the skin.
He got up and put on some Jerek stone chime music—I braced myself, but it was in tune. “Relax,” he said. “Maybe I do need saving?”
Who was Warren? I didn’t know if he was taunting me or agreeing to whatever the Barcons would do. “Only if you want help,” I replied, wondering where I’d drawn that cunning from. I sounded sincere, even to myself. He kept looking more and more like a stranger, like a fifty-year-old druggie with amphetamine-dried muscles, Alkaloids and acids etched his skin. An old degenerate ape, my brother. I managed to say, “I remember you from when I was eight, ten.”
“You didn’t even know what was going on.”
“I suspect not, but you’re still my brother.” We were talking to each other in English, but not in country dialect, formally from my days here and from his social workers.
He took another hit from the joint—how could he do that much cannabis—and said, “Shit, we’re not having any fun, are we? Can you get out okay?”
“I can call…” I was about to say one of the Barcons, who knew I was making this visit, but managed to mangle that into “…a cab.”
“Shit, not a cab? “ Warren began to laugh.
I had to walk to the street and find a call box, feeling most hideous. The Barcons came for me quickly and even more quickly detoxed me. I know they were waiting close. As soon as I was straight, I thought I remembered that Warren seemed resigned to whatever procedures the Barcons would use to help him.
A few days later Marianne was telling me about the nursery her child-bearing group planned to start. “We need enough of each species of child to make sure the sexual socialization will be generally species normal. Yangchenla finally agreed to put her daughter in the group; we’ve got two other Tibetan women interested.”
The phone buzzed. She, thinking it might be a call she was expecting from her birth group, answered, stiffened, and looked at me, then said, “No, we must tell him. Yes, it’s our custom. We aren’t at all like Gwyngs. Shit.”
I got up and took the phone, adjusted the earpieces for me. A Barcon voice said, “Your brother died of a drug overdose. We are still with his body. His Jerek found him."
“Deliberate?”
“We aren’t sure.”
“Let me come down there.”
“We can bring you in fast. Go to the roof of your building."
“Warren’s dead,” I told Marianne, but I realized they’d told her that.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re going down there?”
“Yeah. His Jerek… why didn’t someone?” I felt so responsible and so helpless.
“Karl and I will come with you.”
“They’re picking me up off the roof.” I remembered seeing a few helicopter-type craft around, not many, not big ones. It isn’t safe for a woman and baby, I wanted to tell her, but then that neighborhood wasn’t safe for anyone—Warren died in it.
“Maybe you should wait until they bring the body in?”
“No, I want to talk to his Jerek.”
Marianne sat down and curled up in a little ball, then said slowly, “Don’t blame her. Or yourself.”
“I brought him here.”
“Don’t do that to yourself,” she said. “You have me, you have Karl."
I kissed her on the forehead, then went upstairs. The small helicopter was waiting, too small for Marianne and Karl to have joined us. We rose, bouncing in the updrafts between buildings and parks, all the different architectures rolling away under us, alien trees whizzing past.
“We will come back with you,” the Barcon pilot said. “There are some options for the b
ody.”
“If he wanted to be dead, let him stay dead,” I said, suddenly feeling almost angry with him, then guilty again.
“We will observe you, sedate if necessary.”
“It’s customary in my species to grieve,” I said. "And I better goddamn well be allowed to do it.”
“I understand the implications of the expletive,” the Barcon said. We dropped down on top of Warren’s building and went spiraling down grim clanking iron stairs. Rust like blood was rotting them.
Warren lay on a Barcon gurney, eyes open and glazed, stains around his ears and neck where I could see the skin fresh ashes in the wrinkles on his forehead—smeared there? His feet were so white the sores were barely visible.
I turned and saw the little Jerek, Moolan. She bent her body and rocked slightly, then pulled at her pelt. Huge tufts of fur came out, even where she wasn’t pulling. Then I saw the words Warren had scrawled on the wall, in English. FUCKERS I’VE OBLITERATED YOU ALL.
When I gasped, one Barcon grabbed me while another cut around the words and peeled the layer they were on away. The walls were paper, laminated paper and plastic, I thought, numb in the Barcon’s hands, staring at the clean void in the dirty wall.
“Mourning in moderation, we permit,” the Barcon holding me said.
“Why didn’t you bring him in?” I said to Moolan.
“He was beginning…happy. We were going to get well.”
“We were fooled,” the Barcon said. “One of us who specializes in humans warned us that sudden cheer without good reason could be lethal.”
“We were lethal to him,” I said.
“No, he was lethal to himself,” the Barcon holding me said. He pushed his knuckles against my throat pulse point, then let me go.
“Should I die now?” Moolan said.
“What tunnel?” one of the Barcons asked. She looked away, not answering them.
“Is it too late to spay her?” I asked, desperate to save someone now.
“What motivation for continued medical stabilization?” the Barcon who’d asked her about her tunnel said.
