Becoming Alien

by Rebecca Ore

  The Barcon touched the skull plate over the left ear hole and stared at it. I noticed that it looked plastic. “We hear the last sounds from this,” the Barcon said. “Computer.”

  Rhyodolite, the black face strangely stiff although tears dripped off the chin, stroked the arched bone, thicker than in a human skull, on the outside of the eye hollow.

  “We want to get Warren,” the blond Gwyng, Cadmium, said.

  “He’s insane now, in a jail hospital,” I said.

  “How convenient,” Cadmium replied.

  I slowly stood up. “I’ll give you Warren’s map. He hid Mica’s body in an old copper mine.” Mica’s three kin and the shorter Barcon went-off with the map in their human car.

  I sat with the other Barcon and finally asked, “Does this happen often, a ship crashing?”

  “Not precisely a ship. Often enough the transformation geometries crash. Their field collapsed in transition. How did you manage with a Gwyng for so many months—so social?”

  “I liked him being friendly.”

  “You, your small predators, dogs, cats, social squirming all day, all night. Yet xenophobic.” The big alien, all dark on the couch, muttered more in its own language, and I felt I was more a thing to be watched than a person.

  “I miss him. We were going to go to California together, look for the locator egg.”

  The Barcon drew back, startled. “He…of course, he couldn’t explain exactly. Do you think we watch you?”

  In California, I realized, there was an alien safe house, like spies have.

  Then he said, “The Gwyngs are almost lethally empathetic with each other.”

  “I liked him because he wanted me to come to space with him, but you’re not friendly,” I told the Barcon.

  The alien just sat, not replying, in a house built with drug money, with another alien’s skull on the kitchen table. Finally, I turned on the TV and exposed more human follies on the six o’clock news.

  The aliens’ car, the left door removed, came back with a big wooden crate wedged in the back seat. My guard and I went out on the porch to watch the others put the crate in the barn.

  After the Gwyngs put the crate up, the Barcons rigged up a net of one-inch cables in a thirty-foot circle. Sighting to the horizon, tightening wires, testing voltages, hooking cables in and out of our house current, putting black and white boxes in and out of the electrical circuits, the aliens fooled around for a good three hours before the smaller Barcon spoke into a microphone.

  Enough more time passed for them to hook in another box, test it, take it out, and put in a box that finally was satisfying.

  Black Amber, wearing some of Warren’s old clothes, came over to me. Taking my wrist gently in her fingers, she found my pulse, which gave away my heart’s humping. “We always leave,” she said, “accounts hidden from untrustworthy people. If he left accounts you know about, then he trusted you. Despite…”

  That last word was bitten off. Despite what? “Yeah,” I told her, “we hid his diaries and drawings really good. He did a drawing even as he lay dying. I was only a kid when he was here, still in regular school.”

  “Did you tell others?”

  “No. Even the law didn’t find the diaries when they busted us.”

  “You’re under legal supervision here. Why?”

  “I helped Warren with his business. Your kin, Mica, did too.”

  She dropped my wrist and raised her hand to sniff the shirt sleeve.

  The air over the cables turned blue, shimmering, and a small spaceship, more like a diving saucer than an aerodynamic plane, popped into the blueness and thumped down on the cables. All the lights flashed off and on as though lightning had struck a transformer somewhere. Then a ship light flooded the barn with a greenish yellow glare.

  “Rector’s man Tesseract,” Black Amber said, sounding less than fully satisfied. “He’s been studying your kind.”

  The creature who came out was nearly human—taller than the Barcons, a big alien with a crested skull, bald pink skin over the bone ridge, coarse hair either side of it, heavy jaws, like an ape-man, but he wore a tunic and pants. As he climbed down from the machine, he looked at me and smiled, lips tightened back, not pursed. If he’d had a skull like a human’s, I could have thought he was a giant Mexican. The lips parted to show big teeth. At least he and the Gwyngs both had five-fingered hands.

  “Tesseract. Former pilot, good in space math,” explained one of the Barcons. “Represents the Academy and Rector in this investigation. He knows xenophobia very well.”

  The investigator.

  Rhyodolite hugged his breasts and then looked down at them as if he wasn’t used to having flesh hanging there. “And he and his wife,” the little black Gwyng said, “regard the rest of the universe as the prime source of intelligent pets. Ahrams, that kind…”

  Cadmium said something sharp to Rhyodolite, who shut up as Tesseract came closer. Over six and a half feet tall and massive, Tesseract had a very disconcerting twinkle to his eyes. Whatever he was, he spoke the language the Barcons spoke. The Gwyngs jabbered in Mica’s bell-tone language, and I felt horribly outside it all.

  “Well, let’s get on with the investigation,” Tesseract said in good English. “One is insane after shooting the sub-cadet Gwyng Mica. The other said the killing was an accident.”

  “Not altogether an accident,” I said, “but Mica had a gun aimed at my brother.”

  Tesseract looked at Black Amber.

  “Near-technological planets are most unpleasant,” she said. The black human-looking Barcons went into the spaceship and came back out with a stretcher on wheels, not much different than an Earth-style ambulance stretcher.

  “Can you bring him back to life?” I asked the larger Barcon as we stood in front of the crate.

  “Perhaps if you had frozen him properly, before tissue damage.” He touched the box. “No.” They pried up the top boards with an alien crowbar.

  Inside I saw the big heavy plastic bag that Warren’d heat-sealed, and inside the plastic, Mica…Alph, all dead and wrinkled up, paler than he’d been in life, veiled by the plastic and embalming fluid, naked.

  The big Barcon slit the bag with a scalpel. Black Amber twisted away from the two Gwyngs who tried to hold her back and reached for Mica’s body. She was too weak to lift it onto the stretcher herself, so I helped her.

  As cold formaldehyde soaked my clothes, I felt the dead-meat feel of the corpse in my hands and shuddered. The Barcon pulled Black Amber’s arms away, then wiped the body gently, speaking to it a little.

  “He says Mica was smaller the last time he examined him,” Tesseract said to me, pulling me back.

  Black Amber passed her hands over the dead face, the bullet hole in the chest, then back to touch that broad mouth which curved thin-lipped around the short muzzle. Her fingers stroked the armpit webs and trailed out to the arms, twining her live fingers with his long, cold dead ones.

  Cadmium and Rhyodolite, stiff in their fake human bodies and faces, worked her fingers loose and pulled her back from the body so that the Barcons could take it into the ship for the autopsy.

  Tesseract took me back into the house. He was amazingly strong—I couldn’t have run if I’d wanted to. I ached from fear as though all my muscles were strained.

  “Calm down,” he said, sitting me down in a chair and kneeling beside it. He rubbed the skin over his skull crest and said, “I guess that’s rather hard to do.”

  “Black Amber asked about records,” I said. “Al… Mica and I buried some in the corncrib.”

  Tesseract said something in alien to the Gwyngs. Black Amber glared at me and went back to-Mica’s room, but the others turned around and went back outside.

  “And something else, if you’d let me go to my room,” I said, thinking about the drawing Mica had given me just before he died. Tesseract raised himself off his knees and held my elbow as I took him into my room and found the drawings. The law’d ignored, it, probably thought I’d d
rawn some space fantasy myself. The big alien took them in his hand and said, “Do you know what these mean?”

  “One was the last thing he did.”

  “Would you want to go with us? Do you know what we’d do with you?”

  My heart pounded. He put his hand on my chest and sighed. “Not so dire. He wanted you to be a cadet because you weren’t as xenophobic as other humans. Little Mica pre-cadet. Very interesting for a Gwyng.”

  I sighed, and he took his hand off my chest, patted me gently on the shoulder, then took the drawing and called the gun-happy Rhyodolite up to guard me. “I need a shower badly,” I said.

  Black Amber came out of the bathroom herself and spoke alien to Tesseract as she dried off her phony human body, not bothering to cover either the fake cock or the real fur-rimmed pouch slit, like a wide navel—an unreal shameless body to her. It made me a bit angry, until I saw the bullet scar below her ribs.

  Tesseract answered her, and she began bobbing like a turkey cock, furious. The singsong speech turned to hissings.

  “You told her Mica wanted me to be a cadet,” I said.

  “Yes,” Tesseract said. “Now go take your shower.”

  In the shower little Rhyodolite prodded me with the gun to turn me around, bend me over. “One of the ones who shits,” he said, as if having an anus was a defect.

  “I’m sure you knew that before,” I said. What if they’d seen pornographic movies from space, us unknowingly naked before aliens?

  When I came out, Black Amber stared at me with those big eyes as one of the Barcons took a plastic bag of Gwyng bones to the ship. She finally asked, “Why should Mica want you to take his place with us?”

  “We tried to escape Warren together. I wasn’t sure what he planned to do with me once we found the locator. But I guess he did have plans for me, after all.” I remembered how I’d been afraid he was just using me and felt guilty.

  “Your brother is a criminal,” she said, a quiet voice with a buzz saw in it.

  The two Gwyngs and the big skull-crest guy, Tesseract, gently led Black Amber back to the room Mica’d used. I let the Barcons put me back in my room and heard them tape the windows and slide wedge locks in under the door. I got into bed and stared at the ceiling, lights still on. They’ll make killing me look like an accident, or suicide.

  When I woke up, the smaller Barcon watched me from a chair. Funny jaw, I thought again, too many bones in it. And the bones around the eyes, the eyes themselves slanted, like a wolf’s eyes, not like human Orientals. And the six fingers on each hand. I wondered how they could go around in public looking like that. But then humans didn’t expect aliens to go running around in public.

  From the sun on the floor, I knew it was well toward noon. I’d slept a long time, but I didn’t feel drugged.

  After I dressed, I went into the kitchen past the humanoided Gwyngs, who looked at me as though I really was an amazing horsefly.

  Black Amber handed me a bowl of scrambled eggs and raisins. Too much salt, I thought absently, before I looked closer and realized raisins and eggs! Smiling probably a bit too grimly, I ate the eggs as if nothing was wrong with them.

  “When do you have to be inspected by your legal people?” the larger Barcon asked.

  “I’ve got to go to see him in three days.”

  The aliens gave me about half an hour to eat and get really awake, then Tesseract called us all to the living room. I smelt court when I saw how they’d set up the furniture, and almost balked at the door. Tesseract sat behind a table with alien machines on it, strange contraptions in battered aluminum like boxes, as though they’d seen lots of travel.

  So, then, the Barcons on the couch were the expert witnesses, and the three Gwyngs on the other side of the room were prosecutor and jury. I worried about the defense.

  Instead of asking us to rise, like I expected, Tesseract played his hands over a keyboard real fast. A machine spoke for him in English, introduced himself as an investigator for the Federation of Space-Traveling Systems.

  Yeah, last time I’d just been up against the Commonwealth of Virginia. The machine spoke next in two other languages, the birdsong Gwyng one and what Tesseract and the Barcons used.

  Tesseract said, through the machine, that he had been authorized to deal with emergencies, deaths, and wills of Academy officers, cadets, and pre-cadets. The Gwyng called Mica had been a pre-cadet assisting two others when their ship failed, sub-catastrophically, and space-holed to a planet with a sapient culture approaching space competence in some sectors, but with xenophobic reactions, as earlier monitoring teams had recorded.

  Then the bigger of the two Barcons told us the skeletal remains showed burn signs. From the skull computers and Mica’s own reports, the Barcons determined that these Gwyngs were killed when the twist friction caused supplies and ship metal to ignite.

  I sat like an ice person while this went on. The Gwyngs stared at me, eye assault.

  The whole planet Earth, I thought, is on probation.

  The big Barcon twitched his jaw in some funny way, as though some of those bones were jointed different than the jaws of all the rest of us. He hit one key on a machine, which began printing and speaking the autopsy results.

  Initial Injuries appear to be well-healed cuts and burns on the body. This correlates with both accounts given by the planet species natives and by Mica in his reports. A second series of less well-healed scars resulted from injuries caused by small lead projectiles, one of which was recovered from the left calf.

  Subject showed fat loss consistent with a period of lowered metabolism and some mineral deficiency. The subject was taller than he’d been at his last physical examination, and showed muscle development consistent with manual labor. Subject had been shot in one lung, which seemed to have precipitated a shock death within less than one hour. The lead projectile wound was not necessarily fatal. Subject appears to have died due to possible misapprehensions about an injection of a local painkiller, residue of which was found at an injection site near the arm joint.

  The examiners feel that if subject had attempted to fire a projectile weapon at the planet species natives, he had little or no understanding that the results could be lethal. However, since weapons of this type can be lethal, the defensive reaction on the part of the senior native was not unwarranted. Both natives seemed to have tried to help subject following the shooting Incident.

  Avoiding alien eyes, I stared at the printout as the machine sprayed out other translations.

  “Mica willed his position in the Academy to this human,” Tesseract said. “If we don’t take Tom off-Earth, we’ll have to destroy his memory or credibility. Tom, we won’t kill you or your brother.”

  Black Amber said, “Brain-wipe this one, and his crazy brother, too.”

  Brain-wipe sounded extreme, a death inside the body. Gonna steal my body or my mind.

  “Rector Karriaagzh will decide,” Tesseract said with a grin. He added some alien words that Black Amber hissed over.

  Tesseract sent a message pod back on the cable net, and we waited. A wait in a house full of aliens.

  When Monday came around and I was dressing, the male Barcon handed me a stiff leather belt. As I put it on, I felt two little wires prick through my clothes and skin. I climbed into one of the aliens’ rental cars with the Barcon, who checked the car dash as thoroughly as if the Toyota had been a spacecraft. He turned the ignition key delicately, head cocked. I directed him toward town and the courthouse.

  “What do I call you?” I asked.

  “Barcon. We don’t share names.”

  “That won’t work well in the sheriff’s office,” I said.

  “Sam Turner, then,” he said stiffly.

  As we walked in, the deputies stared at the black guy, and he looked from them to me, slowly.

  “Got you a new lawyer, Tommy baby,” one deputy called out, “or is the man investing?” I walked on with the alien to the probation office. The probation officer, Mr. Jenkins, waited.r />
  “Who’s this?” Mr. Jenkins asked.

  “Sam Turner,” I said, using the big Barcon’s alias. “He’s thinking about buying some of my land.”

  “Well, he’ll have to wait outside if he’s not a lawyer. And your land’s tied up now.”

  The Barcon put one hand to his waist. We got you covered, I knew he meant.

  “Nah, he ain’t mah lawyer.” Pile on hick, I thought, let’s just get Jenkins and all the aliens listening in behind the wires relaxed, and let me be unbuzzing, loose. Not nearly electrocuted by my own nervous tension. The Barcon left the door open a hair when he went out.

  “Jobs?” Jenkins said.

  “What’s the use in trying to find jobs? I’m an ex-felon, no civil rights. You ought to come out and see the place.” Oh, please, care enough to come by. “I manage on chickens. I’ll give you a couple dozen eggs, free.”

  My belt shocked me and got hot over my spine.

  “As long as you keep making the egg deliveries.” Oh, shit, but the damn aliens know now from other than me that I’ve got to get the eggs delivered.

  “Yes, sir. All I ever wanted to be was an honest farmer.”

  “But you’re talking of selling land? I realize you got used to easier money, but it’s up to you. Society has helped you all it can.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “But…” I felt like my spine was on fire. I shut up.

  “And if you leave the county without permission, it’s jail if I see you again. We were very lenient to allow you back in the county after what you were involved in.”

  Sam the alien grabbed me with a wrist lock as soon as I opened the door to leave. When we got to the car, he asked me to explain myself.

  “Human psychology,” I said, feeling sick. “If you tell people to drop by, they won’t.” I wished I’d hinted I was being held hostage by drug people, get some human police out to the farm. But probably the wires in the belt would have given me a “heart attack” there in Jenkins’ office.