Becoming Alien

by Rebecca Ore

  Yowh, right to the balls. My own balls shrank up in sympathy. So three Earth cats, the freshly sterilized male and two females, went with us.

  When the Barcons began packing up the cable net, I noticed the Gwyngs twining together and dabbing out with their feet. Tesseract said, “I promise I’ll get us out of the well and into the net without geometry failure.”

  We went on board ship. No windows, nothing. How long was this going to take?

  “Put your suitcase under the bunk,” Tesseract said as he sat down with a steel cap on his head, wires leading to a computer with flat displays, not liquid crystal, something better. He squeezed his eyes closed and sat there for seven minutes, then asked, “Ready?”

  We all sat down, then the ship lurched.

  “How long will this take?” I asked.

  “We’re ten light-hours out, at the first switching point. Wait until the station crew checks the airlock,” Tesseract said, “then we can get out in the station and stretch. We’ll be here awhile, Tom, so you can meet the crew. They’ve seen months of your television, but haven’t ever met a human before.”

  I heard clunking on the outside of the hull. More aliens who traveled millions of miles in no time flat. Superior aliens. “Where’s the john?” I asked.

  Tesseract got up and swung a small basin down from the wall, looked at me, and adjusted it to fit. My bladder jammed with all them looking. They were amused.

  The airlock doors slid into the walls, and I stood there gaping up at two big hairy aliens. That’s what Barcons look like with the hair. Black coarse hair, like, well, almost like bear’s fur. They talked alien at the guys I’d traveled with, then one said to me in English, “We keep the station rather cool. Less parasites that way.”

  “Get me out of this body,” Black Amber said as we went with the new Barcons into the station. “Most painful body I’ve ever been molded into.”

  I was surprised at how roomy the space station was, but it didn’t have windows except two thick ones in a little observatory room. Instead, the aliens had walls of holograms: all kinds of landscapes, even cartoon holograms, composite holograms of impossible landscapes. And the walls without holograms were carpeted or covered with semi-hard plastics, which deadened all sounds. The furniture wasn’t fixed to the floor either.

  Tesseract showed me to a room bigger than my bedroom at home. “God, the station is huge” I said.

  “People live here for long terms. We don’t want social friction. So space enough to avoid each other.”

  He unfolded my bed, a mattress attached to a shelf hinged to the wall, while I checked out a padded tube, like a cocoon sofa, covered in a funny cloth almost like velvet. The inside was obscene, squishy. “Gwyngs love that,” Tesseract said as he watched me scramble back out. “Reminds them of the pouch, I guess.”

  “I wasn’t expecting that stuff inside,” I said.

  “You might want to be left alone for a while, but if you don’t, tell me.” He showed me a flat pressure switch on the wall above a marble-sized intercom pickup so I could call them. “Or just come on out.”

  Desperate for privacy, yet not sure I really wanted to be alone, I nodded. “And the toilet adjusts,” he said, pulling the wall toilet out just like the one on the ship. “Tilt it to suit.”

  I smiled grimly. He touched a wall stud, and Mabry’s Mill popped out of a wall, but I felt almost physically ill to see something from home. “No.”

  “Would you prefer New York City?” he said.

  Maybe, I thought, nodding very slightly. The wall began playing a reconstruction flat movie from some TV show, a weirdly edited New York. “How do you turn it off?” I asked.

  He showed me, and I sat there, alone, after he’d left. Suddenly, I felt like a microbe in vast space. Very tired, I crawled into the bunk.

  The next day, after I shaved, Tesseract introduced me more formally to the other aliens who watched us humans: no names for the Barcons, which seemed odd, and various chemical and rock names for the others, more Gwyngs, just like Alpha/Mica, the same webs, funny goat nostrils. Only one Gwyng spoke English.

  All the Gwyngs wore pants like gym pants and vests with deep sleeve holes. The Barcons just wore pants. Either the Barcons were all females with breasts on the lower trunk, or both sexes had tits.

  While Black Amber went through surgery, I wandered around the space station, turning off holograms. All that alien scenery made me nervous: funny beach houses made of woven planks, carved stones marking a tunnel in front of a glacier, alien jungles. In all of them the light seemed wrong. But when I left each room, I switched the hologram back on, so the aliens wouldn’t complain.

  The next day, I went to the hospital room to see Black Amber, who lay wrapped tightly in plastic film. She’s a big Gwyng, I realized, seeing her now with the legs and arms back to normal size and comparing her to the other Gwyngs at the station.

  Tubes went through the plastic at various points—eyes, nose, mouth, shoulders. Some flushed liquid over her skin and drained it off, plastic pulsing. I thought how this must hurt, worse than gunshot. She rolled her eyes toward me, slowly, as though the tiny eye muscles were freshly re stitched.

  Her face wasn’t so wrinkled, but I supposed that was post-surgery puffiness. I couldn’t see her tongue, but she raised her head and I saw the muscle lump under the chin.

  So much like Mica. I ached for all that surgery she’d gone through, in and out of human form, the gunshot, trying to get her son back.

  A Barcon took me by the arm after a few minutes and led me out. “She isn’t in any danger,” one of the hairless ones who’d been on Earth said. “We stop the pain. She’s been through it twice before.”

  One of the Barcons, a few days later, decided I needed something to do and asked me to help tend Black Amber. Unwrapped from the plastic, she lay under covers pulled up to her nippleless chest, two triangular heating pads ready beside her to warm her webs. On her lap, she held a machine with five finger-operated toggles, like little chrome joysticks. “I hate humans,” the box said for her. “Conditioned by the gunshot, deaths. And your hatred of aliens.”

  “Out of all you met, they were all bad?” I asked, holding up a glass of Gwyng formula with the broad straw they used.

  She twitched her fingers against the language machine’s joysticks. “Maybe,” the machine said for her.

  Taking care of her was eerie, as though she were the large ghost of Alpha/Mica. The two others in human face visited her, but stood off, as though the surgery and her weakness made them nervous.

  “When the Gwyngs feel comfortable around Black Amber again,” Tesseract told me, “we’ll have a formal ceremony, investing her in her new Sub-Rector’s uniform.”

  “Why don’t they feel comfortable around her now?” I asked.

  “Gwyngs can’t stand weakness,” he said. “I guess since they live so densely in their colonies, they had to isolate the sick to avoid illnesses wiping out a group. But they don’t get sick often. They trance out to escape social friction, but otherwise they’re healthy and totally social.”

  Isolation seemed to distress Black Amber, who called me to her room a couple of times. But when I came in, she stared at me and didn’t speak. Once she said, through the machine, “Still a monster, I see.”

  As she got better, she exercised with free weights and I spotted for her. But otherwise I was bored, among the static holograms. “Teach me your languages,” I’d ask, but all the aliens refused, saying that would interfere with the language operations.

  Finally, the Gwyngs tussled and Black Amber beat them all. “You bluff bone-breaks,” Cadmium accused her.

  She looked at him and koo’ed.

  “So we’re ready to go back to Karst,” Tesseract said, watching Gwyngs squirming bodies together, Black Amber top Gwyng, social again.

  Black Amber came out in a green uniform embroidered with real gold bound up in the piping around the neck and sleeves. Her body and head hair, freshly washed, picked up red highli
ghts. I still saw scars on her face where the Barcons had re-built it, but the puffiness was down, the Gwyng wrinkles deeply grooved from her nose and eye comers. Slots for air when she presses her face against a blood animal, I realized.

  “Pre-cadet uniform,” Tesseract said, handing me a pair of baggy white pants with wrap strings, a little hand riveter to use for making string holes, and a white tunic that came down to my knees.

  Black Amber silently showed me how to fold the pants front, where to put the rivets. Then she bumped elbows with me for the first time, and oo’ed, just a little.

  Tesseract said, “Welcome, Pre-Cadet Red Clay. Mica gave that as your Academy name.”

  “Being a cadet is not a delight,” Cadmium said.

  3

  Reframing Sense: The Language Operations

  There’s no sense of distance with space gates. Instead of bumping dozens of light-years from gate to gate, I might have been in a boxcar, being coupled and uncoupled in switching yards. The Gwyngs, frustrated after getting me instead of rescuing their own, slumped together and stared at the walls. At a gate a light-day from the Academy and Institutes planet, I heard more radio chatter in alien languages, clunking sounds against our ship. Tesseract led me through a grey plastic tunnel as we switched to a dual-drive ship.

  “I want normal space time,” Black Amber said with the box. Steel slabs pulled back into the walls.

  Tesseract turned off the cabin lights so as not to dim the stars. “There’s Karst’s sun,” he said to me. “Looks tiny out here.” The Gwyngs looked out briefly and went to the bunk room.

  Around the sky, I saw huge puffs of stars and glowing gas. In the near space, tiny space-suited figures worked around hundreds of space transport pods, from small one-man diving-bell-like units to huge round container vessels as big as moons. Welding torches glittered like dust motes.

  “Black Amber wanted a week on reaction drive, but since she’s asleep, I’ll get us a bit closer quicker,” Tesseract said. He closed the shutters and sat down at the controls. We lurched again.

  Then Tesseract cut off the gravity to let me float, pulled back the shutters, and rolled the ship slightly. Under us, I saw the curve of a big planet with a ring like Saturn’s. We drifted closer, and I saw lumps in the ring—coarse rock cobble. Tesseract talked to another alien and waited for the time-lagged replies.

  “Always charming to see someone see space the first time,” Tesseract said as he started the rocket drive. “Most of us see the emptiness as a nuisance, not part of the structure. But for you, all this is powerfully charming, yes?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “It’s still the universe that built us, even if we evade its distances with our agile minds.”

  While I was still staring into space, the Barcons came in. “We’ve got to continue working out your biologic,” the big male Barcon said.

  “What do I call you?” I asked.

  He looked at me without changing his expression. Tesseract smiled. “Ah, Barcon, he has to have a name. Human nature.”

  “S’wam.”

  “The Earth alias, plus the Barcon form for male,” Tesseract explained.

  “We don’t get too close to our medical subjects,” the female Barcon said stiffly.

  I followed the Barcons to the medical bay where S’wam punched tiny holes all over my back, dabbing each with a different chemical. “We need to know what chemicals to use when we operate on you for language.”

  “Operation for language?”

  “When we put in the skull computer and make space in your language center for new languages,” S’wam told me as he rolled plastic film over my sore back.

  I was going what inside my soon-to-be-violated skull.

  “I’d spray to ease the sting,” the female Barcon said, “but we want pure reactions. We’ll wait until we get to Karst before doing brain tissue biopsies. Sleep now.”

  “I’ll try,” I managed to say. The cats squalled in their boxes. Was I just another exotic pet, I wondered, and how could Barcons be confused with black humans with their slanted eyes, skinny jaws with too many angles, noses that wriggled.

  In the bunk room the Gwyngs were sleeping, twined around each other, Black Amber in the center. The Barcons pulled down a narrow bunk for me on the wall across from the Gwyngs’ large pallet.

  “We brought human drugs and beer to make you sleep better,” the female Barcon said. “We are all very tired and want you to be passive.”

  “Some drugs and beer are dangerous.”

  “Aspirin?” the male Barcon said, handing me a cold beer and a couple of little white pills that looked exotic in this environment.

  “Thank you,” I said, sipping the beer, swallowing two aspirins. “I’ll sleep better now.” My back ached. “Good night, S’wam.”

  “No real night here. Sleep.”

  I lay down on my stomach on the bunk and looked for the covers, but all I saw was a little rheostat that made the space warmer or cooler. “Okay,” I mumbled.

  I looked back at Black Amber, whose face showed thin scars in the dim crosslight. Tesseract came in, and I whispered to him, “I’d be more comfortable with a sheet.”

  He handed me a cross between a sheet and a blanket, made of paper, then crawled into his own bunk, big body twisting under a similar sheet. But they aren’t like paper, exactly. I thought, they don’t rustle.

  Quiet, disposable alien sheet. I could hardly relax under its strange texture, but finally I dozed off, dreaming of deer mocking wolves. Waking with a jolt, I saw the Barcons together in a bunk, softly murmuring to each other. Tesseract was gone, but the Gwyngs were still sleeping.

  Must have woke me when Tesseract changed shifts with the Barcons, I thought. I slept again and dreamed horrible murky dreams about a cat who shot at me. Finally, I woke up again, turned up the rheostat-controlled heat, and lay there, afraid to look at the aliens right away.

  “Can I see your back now?” S’wam asked as soon as I stretched. I almost rolled over, but remembered my back just in time, so wriggled out, trying to keep from landing on that sore skin. The Gwyngs had gone, but Tesseract was asleep again now, snoring faintly, his mouth open, big teeth faintly visible. I pulled on the white pre-cadet pants and, sweating a little, followed the Barcons to the medical bay.

  S’wam let me see my back through mirrors. Three test holes that had begun to itch looked red, while four others had turned black. S’wam ran a tickling rod around the seven messy punctures and washed out the holes, cleaning out the dead flesh. His mate finished up with little suction cups that sprayed and drained each hole.

  “Well,” S’wam said, “we now know how to kill you.” He checked off boxes on a chart and spoke his language into a dangling microphone, then re-sealed the cleaned areas, which felt very sore now. “You like space? You must see this,” he said.

  This turned out to be an ice planet, so close it filled third of the viewport. The Gwyngs stared at it without talking. Fractures in the planet’s ice glaze splintered sunlight into colored and white flares.

  So beautiful. “You also find it beautiful, Black Amber?” I asked.

  She looked at me and back at the planet. “Lungy see’ng i,” she tried to say. Then she waved her hand at me, not wanting to leave and get the English-speaking box. “S’oos be.” She moaned.

  Lucky seeing it, supposed to be. Earlier, I’d noticed hand signals that seemed to be for yes and no. I raised my fist and said, “Lucky seeing it, yes? You nod the fist like this for yes?”

  She grabbed my head and covered my mouth. I held myself still against those long bony fingers, feeling them squirm over my lips. Her other hand twisted my hair. As the ice planet slowly drifted away, Black Amber pushed me roughly away from her.

  Then she found a writing pad and wrote to me.

  Signal agreement by cupping the hand slightly and bringing it down. Do not make fists at us. Do not. It is supposedly lucky to see Ichrea on an incoming flight. Hideous to have you here and not Mica.

&
nbsp; I read the note and looked up; Cadmium closed his left hand and made a fist, pumping the fingers. Then he opened his hand under my nose. Even with it surgically adjusted to look like a human hand, I saw a hole at the base of the thumb, wet fluid around the hole. I sneezed—my eyes watered.

  I cocked my elbow and puffed my armpit at them. Cadmium jumped for me, biting at my armpits.

  “Stop. Now,” the female Barcon ordered, grabbing us in her massive hands. I trembled.

  Rhyodolite said, “Cadmium isn’t sure of human challenge signals.”

  “He made me sneeze.”

  “Odd or even,” S’wam said.

  “Odd,” Cadmium quickly replied.

  “I punch the computer for a random number. If odd, Cadmium apologizes first. If even, you.” S’wam touched buttons on a console. The number was odd.

  Cadmium caught his head just about to bob and said, “I apologize. I thought you insulted the Sub-Rector.”

  I said, locking eyes with him, “I intended no insult. I’m alone here.” Because I felt my lips begin to quiver, I looked away first.

  “I think,” S’wam said with a big sigh. “I should take another look at your back.” In the medical bay he took my chin gently in his hands and said, “Move slow.”

  He unwrapped my back, put stronger solutions in the test punctures, then re-plasticized it. I noticed when S’wam turned to go that he didn’t walk like a black man or a white. The medical bay door closed behind him. They’re all aliens, I thought as I looked around me. And I can’t go back. The only familiar object was a mirror. I went over and looked at myself—needed to shave. Maybe I can talk to Tesseract, if he’s awake.

  There’s no handle on the door. I was sure they’d locked me up, but when I moved closer, the door slid into the wall. In the bunk room, from the back, Tesseract looked human enough: same shoulder muscles, curve of the spine. Big, though.

  I asked, “Can I talk to you?”

  He rolled over and yawned hugely, exposing giant nut-cracking teeth. Alien, broad-skulled with that bald bone ridge on top, thick jaws. I felt faint.