Becoming Alien

by Rebecca Ore

  His nose wriggled. After he started the car, he asked, “Might we not stop for canned mild alcohol solution for drinking? Beer?”

  Son of a bitch thinks this is funny. “You drink beer? When you’re on a mission?”

  “Autopsies are hard work—cutting delicately, looking at tissues, chemicals. Horrible smells. Sawing skull open and finding shock.” He paused, then said, “And so much contact all the time with Gwyngs and xenophobics.”

  When we stopped at the Hop-In, the big alien headed for the beer display and stared at it like an amazed man.

  Back to the farm, Sam the Barcon went off with his female and the beer. They came back hours later, drunk, wriggling their noses like crazy, watching all the other aliens, all of us, as though we were odd-tempered exotic bugs.

  Black Amber nodded tensely at them, but they just shook their nostrils at her. She glared over at me, huge eyes rolling by the small human-sized eye holes.

  “No, ma’am,” I said. “I’m sober as a stone.”

  “Tried to escape us,” she said. “I hope you test out to be only marginally sapient. We’ll rip out your memories then.”

  “It’s just a test,” the big Barcon said as he sat me down under that helmet. But I didn’t trust him.

  The smaller Barcon turned a knob after the helmet came down. Thousands of little wires pricked my scalp, and they strapped my head tight to keep the trembling from pulling the little wires loose.

  A test? I watched their six-fingered hands working dials. “Close your eyes,” the female said. When I closed my eyes, I saw a test pattern—a blue cross on a white field. Then the Barcon twirled a dial and told me to keep my eyes shut and describe what I saw as best I could. The test pattern started jumping around. I opened my eyes, and the Barcon pulled back a lever.

  “Keep them closed.”

  “Are you going to take out my memory now?”

  “I told you, no.” The Barcon scratched her nose and looked annoyed, if that’s what a tightness around the lips meant. So I kept my eyes closed, still expecting chunks of my life to rush out on their electricity.

  The pattern rotated to the right, stretching and curling its bars and shifting colors. Then it rotated to the left, up, down. Finally, it wavered and the lines simply couldn’t be described. When I saw gold starbursts and red flashes, the alien told me to open my eyes. She cranked the needles out of my scalp and unstrapped my head. I was surprised that I wasn’t bleeding, but they’d been tiny little needles. Still nervous, I ran back over my memories of the last two years and found them almost more vivid—Mica/Alph dying on the kitchen table—than I would have wanted.

  “High cadet average,” the Barcon said slowly, index finger tracing lines on a computer’s flat screen.

  Black Amber looked at me and said, “How did you do it?”

  I shook tension out of my wrists and forearms. “I score real high on human tests. No test anxiety, teachers claimed. But I guess I’m just a bright guy because I sure was damn tense this time.”

  The Barcon’s nose wriggled as she handed me a towel to mop off the sweat.

  “Whatever the test, I don’t want you on Karst,” Black Amber said. Her human body, especially her head, looked distorted, as though the flesh were trying to heal back to Gwyng form again. “You’ll remind me that Mica died horribly, in great fear.”

  When Tesseract came in, they all talked alien awhile, and the Barcons led Black Amber off. “Come see the transport,” Tesseract told me.

  I hadn’t been in an alien ship since Warren and I stripped Mica’s wreck. The aliens had padded the floor and walls with rubbery stuff and set chairs contoured for various species near black glass display panels. Tesseract motioned for me to go through a door.

  A small compartment—the autopsy room, just a little bigger than the table. Mica’s corpse lay so cut up I could barely recognize him. I shuddered, pitying him, scared for myself.

  “Would you pledge on his body that you meant him no harm?” Tesseract said, a small box, probably a recorder, whirring between his hands.

  “Yes, and…” I was about to say, I’m not lying to get the space academy gig either, but did I have a choice in that? Or did I even want that, with Black Amber hostile to me?

  Tesseract bent his head forward a bit and waited. I didn’t know what to swear by—the head was opened, the body cavity. The shoulder, I decided. So I laid my hand on his cold wet shoulder, the stench of formaldehyde almost crippling my lungs, and mumbled, “I never meant to hurt him, or let Warren hurt him. I would have saved him if I’d only known how.”

  Tesseract said, “We will teach you.” The box stopped whirring. Me wondering and afraid, we stared at each other across species and star distances.

  Tesseract left the next day in his little ship. The Barcons left and came back. “We told Mr. Jenkins we were social workers and psychologists,” the female said, “called in by relatives who thought you were going into the same craziness that got Warren.”

  Black Amber koo’ed like a giant demented dove. Bat bitch was as sensitive to emotional undercurrents as Mica’d been.

  I still made my egg contracts, driving to Christiansburg with one of the Barcons first; then the Gwyngs went with me, always with the belt on, an alien on the trigger box.

  “Tom, we need to stop and get beer for the Barcons,” Rhyodolite said during the second trip. “They complain about being stuck with us.”

  We stopped at a store where I could cash a check, and I got out with a black Gwyng and a blond Gwyng, both dressed in jeans and hippie shirts, alien enough for Christiansburg if they had been what they looked like.

  One of the locals asked, “Black girls better, Tom?”

  The woman-faced Rhyodolite, placed a smile on the false lips, and said, “No, I’m with this blond man.”

  Another old boy, in dirty overalls, red clay clotted on his steel-tipped shoes, looked around the store carefully and asked me, “Law off your tail yet? Know a man needs a good helper.”

  The Gwyngs, six-packs in their arms, looked at us.

  “No, I don’t make ’ludes no more,” I said loudly.

  The girl-faced Rhyodolite started to pay for the beer, but the clerk asked for I.D. Cadmium leaned over with adequate plastic. As we started for the door, the old guy in the steel-tipped shoes said, “No offense meant.”

  I nodded curtly, almost like a Gwyng.

  “What was that about?” Cadmium asked.

  “Illegal business everyone expects me to get back into. I hated it, hated what it did to my brother.”

  “Poor little xenophobe,” Rhyodolite said.

  “I’m not a xenophobe.”

  “Prove it,” Rhyodolite replied. “Play with us.”

  We didn’t go straight to the farm, but drove up to Roanoke where the Gwyngs bought a carton of science fiction books and a dish antenna and electronic gear.

  Under human fluorescent lights, I noticed where they’d been cut to make them look human, almost saw the forms they should have had.

  Alone for a while in the Sears store, I stood unwatched behind some stoves. Rhyodolite flipped from channel to channel in the television department while Cadmium was outside loading socket wrenches and a soldering iron on the truck. Now, I thought. Now what, some crazy part of me responded. Save my species? No, they could have exterminated us earlier if they wanted to. I’ll save myself. I was just an ex-felon on Earth. Other humans were xenophobic nuts, and I wasn’t like them. I’d take the space gig.

  Cadmium, who’d come back inside, touched my arm. “I’m coming,” I said.

  The young Gwyngs rigged up the TV something awful. Reception came from all over, like cable. At night, bored and tense, we watched re-runs of M*A*S*H, Buck Rogers, and anything else if they couldn’t find a war movie or space flick to make humans look bad.

  Finally, a few nights later, we got bursts of patterned interference on several different TV channels, and the Barcons went out to re-spread the landing grid.

  Signals from
the ship took hours to reach us, blurring the TV programs in flashing patterns only Gwyngs could read.

  “Now,” Black Amber said after two days. The Barcons trudged out to the barn while the Gwyngs continued watching TV. The ship’s transformation into our space flickered the house lights.

  We froze. Finally, we heard the Barcons and Tesseract talking as they came up the porch steps. One of them knocked on the door, and I got up to open it. “More polite this way?” Tesseract said. “May we come in?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “These people have been driving me nuts.”

  “And we haven’t been made comfortable either,” Rhyodolite said. “They have legends of dangerous bats.”

  For the last three egg trips, the Gwyngs had collected heaps of stuff that showed how we imagined aliens. The living room looked like fifteen-year-old science nuts had invaded: boxes of sloppy soldered wires and chips hooked to the TV, science fiction and flying-saucer books flopped all over the carpet, beer cans and E.T. and Wookies models on the tables. The Gwyngs looked from Tesseract to the stuff as if they hadn’t collected it themselves and oo’ed.

  “Still,” Tesseract said, stepping over one of the boxes, “the Rector wonders if we should contact this planet as an experiment. They’d love our technologies.”

  “Mica wanted me to take his place at the Academy. If you contacted us officially…”

  The other aliens looked at me as if I’d been a rude child. Black Amber nodded and began to clench her fists, but Tesseract eased his fingers between hers and gently opened her hands, talking softly to her in alien. He’d wanted my reaction to that proposal, I realized, so he spoke in English.

  “If your planet is contacted,” Tesseract explained, still rubbing Black Amber’s hands and elbows, “then we would take home government candidates before we took legacies.”

  Great, if the universe met Earth, I’d still be a parolee, busting hump on mortgage payments and Warren’s and my fines.

  Black Amber spread her lips, stared an eye-stab at me. Black Amber’s in a bind, I thought. Black Amber, you allow contact—you keep me out. But you’d hate to see us killer xenophobes in your Federation.

  Silent and tense, we hunched over our laps, sitting in the living room. Finally Tesseract said, “Black Amber, is this really impossible for you?”

  “They shot me, they killed Mica. Hideous species. Contact would be stupid.”

  “Tom,” Tesseract said, “I’ll have tea with Black Amber, then talk to you.”

  Black Amber and the big crested alien went into Mica’s old bedroom. I remembered Mom and Dad going in there to talk in private, and how little I felt then. The same now. The two Barcons heated water, then suggested that the younger Gwyngs and I go tend the layers. We loaded feed onto the trolley, them helping me, not saying much, and gathered the eggs and washed them.

  When we came back inside, I heard Black Amber crying in the bedroom and Tesseract’s low voice. My hands got cold and tingly, my mouth sticky.

  “Black Amber hates losing,” Cadmium told me. Finally, Amber and Tesseract came out, Tesseract stroking her side gently. Black Amber’s eyes looked glazed.

  Tesseract spoke softly to her in alien, and she went back to Mica’s old room. While the Barcons made more tea, Tesseract asked me where we could talk privately. “Warren’s room,” I suggested, the farthest from Black Amber.

  After I closed the door, Tesseract walked over to the window and looked at my garden. I’d just plowed it two weeks before they came.

  “You should understand about Gwyngs,” he finally said, sitting backward on a straight chair, chin to chair back and legs around it—the way Warren sat. “Gwyngs work harder to be alive than almost any other sapient. Twice they crawl into pouches. You know what a marsupial is? The true mother’s pouch, then a host mother’s pouch. And Mica was Black Amber’s true son. Once they leave the pouch host, life for them is easy, very social. No Gwyng expects death before brain rot, unless the Gwyng goes insane, which to them is premature senility.”

  “Oh.”

  “Mica was nearly insane, by their standards, before he died.”

  The Barcons brought in a strange un-Earthly tea. I felt more relaxed after I drank some, then realized it was drugged. Well, this is it, I thought. Tesseract waited for the tea to loosen me up. I felt tranced, worried as hell, but the body odd, like the fear didn’t register. Slowly, I lay back on the bed.

  “So Mica was her baby?” I said. “I remember when I was five and Warren was a god.”

  “I met Mica once,” Tesseract said. “Charming for a Gwyng.”

  The tea loosened hideous memories: the shotgun noise, the gunshots, Alph/Mica crying on the porch, legs full of bird shot. I rolled belly down and mumbled, “I miss him.” I almost forgot Tesseract wasn’t human, then looked at him and saw that crest, skin, and flesh over a bony skull ridge, the big jaws. “The tea’s drugged,” I said.

  “For relaxation purposes,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. “It doesn’t make me feel…” I started shaking with sobs, missing Mica worse than I thought, missing Warren. Tesseract touched me, and I pushed him off and asked, “What was in the tea?”

  He stared down at me, eyes hazed slightly, and I remembered he’d drunk tea with Black Amber. What a universe! I wondered what came next, then he stood up, stretched, reached at the ceiling curiously with his fingers. Smiling, he said, “This tea is difficult, but we have better teas.”

  I said, “I’m sorry I didn’t get him away. Was he really going crazy? Warren said cats lived among humans and didn’t go crazy.”

  “The Gwyngs are unique sapients.” He sighed. “We try, in our Federation, to smooth over the differences, but…”

  I cut in, “Cadmium says Black Amber doesn’t like losing.”

  “Be kind to her. You’ll spend some time together while we turn her back to Gwyng-shape. We’ll do it at the observatory station, since she’s dominant for a Gwyng and would be uncomfortable in your shape among her own people.”

  But what did becoming-a-cadet mean? Later that afternoon, I got Tesseract away from the others and offered him a beer, if he could drink on duty. He smiled. I smiled, and we drank together in the kitchen while the Gwyngs and Barcons loaded their souvenirs in the ship.

  “Very strange business,” I told him as he leaned back against the kitchen counter, sipping beer like a real man. “What do cadets do?”

  “You smile almost like we Ahrams do,” he said. “Do you come from tree-dwelling stock that evolved into walkers who had to become intelligent to protect their awkward locomotion? Very social, but with sexual activity constant, high male aggressiveness, at least before intelligence became a major factor in social organization and technology?”

  “Yeah, and another teacher said God made us out of clay.” He hadn’t answered me as to what cadets do. That was, I realized, a kind of answer. I wondered how much Mica had really liked me.

  I got in touch with Warren’s lawyer and sold Warren my share of the farm with life-tenancy rights for me. The trip to the lawyer’s was quick-—then I felt truly cut off from Earth, a stunning feeling, as though I’d been flash-frozen. Later that day, I sold all the hens and the cow, knowing if Jenkins heard, we’d have to rush.

  Tesseract took me aside. “The xenoreactiveness of your species,” he told me gravely over another alien nerve tea, “might be latent in you. Our two Karst languages have similar slang terms—xenofreak in English, more or less. The Academy warns all potential cadets. Someone brought a few of your species to Karst several hundred years ago. Most are primitives in a reserve. If being a cadet is too stressful, or if you hurt one of us, you’ll have to go live with them.”

  I drank his tea, feeling it slow me up a bit, but not quite like pot. “I could just go plain crazy, like Warren,” my tongue said despite me. Not the best answer, I realized in the following silence. “But aren’t we more alike than not,” I asked, “if this tea affects both of us the same way, and you didn’t even evolve here?”


  “How do you know it’s affecting me the same way? The Rector thinks we’re all inevitable expressions of one universal mind, but you should see him.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “Big Bird, like on Sesame Street,” Tesseract said, sounding slow and sloppy. “With fingers,” he added, wriggling his own, “instead of wings.”

  “Real alien,” I said, feeling conspiratorial, ape to ape. “Not more or less normal-looking, like us.”

  Tesseract smothered a giggle in his big hand, then looked at his teacup and said, “I drink too much of this. But all you little alien cadets…”

  “What else?”

  “Black Amber’s been promoted to Sub-Rector. She demands an apology, in public, for your not escaping with Mica. And she wants you to learn a more educated dialect of English. I could teach you.”

  I nodded.

  “If you can’t manage our language, we’ll have doubts about your sapience.”

  Fast, very fast. We packed clothes, books, VCR machine, tapes, and the rest of the cultural relics. Then the Barcons raided the refrigerator for food samples. I brought several plastic razors, wondering if any other species shaved their beards.

  One of Mica’s cats who’d stayed to play with the search crew rubbed up against Black Amber as she unhooked the VCR from the TV. “Did this one know Mica?” Rhyodolite asked, reaching over to stroke it. Black Amber picked up the cat, which went snuggling limp and purred. The alien rubbed her face against the cat’s mouth and spoke to it in Gwyng.

  “She says it should evolve into a wonderful sentient,” Cadmium translated. “Reserved enough on first contact, then genuinely friendly.”

  I said, “I guess they’ll go wild again.”

  Black Amber looked at me as though I’d showed her my hideous alien-shooting side, then spoke in Gwyng to the Barcons, who picked up the cats and checked under their tails. The male Barcon went out, to the ship, I supposed, and came back with something like a pencil-sized cattle prod. “We can fix,” the female Barcon said.