by Rebecca Ore
“We are not socially obsessive and you (anti-social, isolated) should(not) talk/gossip,” Rhyodolite said.
“Don’t shit in my ear, Gwyng,” the Barcon replied.
Gwyngs. Tropical islanders with blood-pump tongues, they lived by the ocean. As we drove up, I recognized the houses from space station holos, walls of planks woven together like baskets, but nobody there had told me those were Gwyng houses. Behind the houses, animals grazed. It will at least be calmer here, I thought.
Inside Black Amber’s house, Gwyngs, elbow to elbow, lay around on foam mats covered with squishy fake hide. Or they squirmed into tube sofas, two or three together, koo’ing.
Little Gwyngs and the three Earth cats came and cuddled up to me. And I was eager, with my touch-crazy ape hands, to stroke them—the familiar cat fur, the strange feel of the Gwyngs’ smooth stiff hair and thick skin.
“Black Amber’s busy (in her room) with dispatch box (today’s),” Rhyodolite said, “but when she finishes/stops, she’ll ask to see you.”
The Gwyng adults hanging around the house memorized my features, then went on squirming together, chatting in Gwyng languages my computer couldn’t transform. Finally, just as I was about to ask Rhyodolite if he’d show me the beach, Black Amber came out and said, “We have no fixed mealtimes, so your food is in our food storage room for your self-service. Red Clay, not much personal time (don’t care to give any).”
At least, that was what the computer gave me.
Black Amber, a major Gwyng official, fussed with visitors and dispatch boxes all day every day. Periodically a bell rang and she went into a private office, built of metal and plastic and set in the house like a giant safe.
Most mornings, some Gwyng kids and I walked on the beach, followed by the pouch-host animals—motley creatures like cows crossed with rhinos, or long-legged hippos with Holstein skins. Gwyng kids clambered over them, sliding into the pouches if they were small enough.
The bloodstock animals, varicosities dangling like ropes under their fleck and shoulder skins, stayed more aloof. Some of these were milked like cattle, besides being blood sources. I helped the Gwyng kids with the milking machines and the electric blood drainers—nothing primitive about that.
And in the strange basket-woven houses, with floors that bounced gently underfoot, I saw screens that played odd fast-shifting patterns.
“Black Amber, your TV set seems to be broken.”
“Not vision electric pattern, but/more pattern of understanding,” she said. “News language.” She looked up at the screen. “Gossip/social babble.”
“You can read that?” I asked.
“Even (I personally/not all Gwyngs) holograms/light interference patterns.”
She stared at me—what, I wondered, did she see? There was a sparkling distance about her, the scars and the glossy dark fur with reddish undertones. “What do you know about savage female-placental (who xenofreaked)?” she asked. Her hot thin finger dropped on my wrist, right on the pulse.
“Her people sent ships up to manipulate their lower classes.”
“Farce to attempt/force contact with species-without-space drives. But perhaps/because since I am (just) an Under-Rector, the bird sneak-changes policy.”
“What happened to Calcite?” I asked. “If Calcite’s caught in some Karst infighting…”
“Hush.” Black Amber took her finger off my pulse. “Skull computer gives depth/complexity from your speech. Better than your Ang’ish Emotions complex.”
Then she scooped up an Earth cat, who’d purr for whatever scratched behind its ears.
Black Amber refused to sponsor me at the Academy, so I waited for another sponsor. Tesseract visited occasionally, to teach me proper English and speak Karst I with me. “Some days,” I said in English, hearing that my voice tones weren’t quite human now, “I think I’m just a live souvenir you picked up off the Blue Ridge.”
“You can’t go back.”
“What about Calcite?”
“We might send her back. Her people aren’t as sophisticated as yours. The whole incident would fade into myth.”
“They’ll kill her,” I said.
“She’s not fully sapient.”
“Being murdered would hurt her just the same. Didn’t you test her before you brought her to Karst?”
“The bird was desperate.”
She was right, I thought. They liked refugees because our stunts indicated we’d keep stunting on, brave little half-sapients, saving them. “So she dies.”
“Tom Red Clay, she isn’t dead, just out of the Academy. We might find a primitive species to put her with.”
When he left, I stripped to shorts and went down to the beach.
Karst’s beach soothed me. Funny, because I’d never been to any ocean on Earth, but this alien water sent me noisy waves full of shells not much different from ones I’d seen at school. Beaches and waves had to be alike on all planets: sand, waves and wind, shells. A row of white bird-things flew by, flying the same as birds. I sat down in the swash where the waves slid back, searching for shells that looked most like Earth ones.
Rhyodolite came down after me—I suppose Tesseract told him I’d been worried about Calcite.
“Shells,” I said, “the same as Earth’s.”
“Growth by mathematical series,” Rhyodolite said, dropping down in the wet sand beside me. After we’d watched the waves a bit, he asked, “You miss/yearn sexually for, the Calcite (a bit animal)?”
“Not really sexually, but she isn’t an animal, you know.” I shuffled through a heap of small shells looking for spiraled ones.
“Don’t identify with her. We might misjudge you.” He looked over at me, face wrinkles in deep shadow from the sun, nostrils faintly quivering as he breathed in and out. Somehow he’d gotten sand on his little chin. “I have been forced (mildly) to be a sneak-sex-getter,” he told me earnestly, maybe testing me, trying to get me to reject him. “I am small for a Gwyng. On your planet, Black Amber took sex-period suppressants, not me. One year. Then she was shot. Barcons and Cadmium came. No chance after Cadmium.”
“Isn’t she like your mother or sister?”
“No. I was given to her as nymph. Hard loss to have a small body. Larger the Gwyng female/more social power. Small males play forever.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know about this confession. He was about five-two, Earth measure. But he was wiry—worked out with weights, ran, swam, played a weird ball game. I was lonely for ball games. “Could you teach me hazard?”
He didn’t answer me as he paced a bit on the beach, body rocking over his short legs. Then he looked at the surf before sitting down beside me again. “Xenofreaked placental female Calcite is not xenofreaking now (more or less).” His thin fingers rambled through the sand, pounced on a tiny clam, split the two shells. After eating the clam, Rhyodolite asked, “You interested (in any way)?”
“She doesn’t make me feel less lonely.”
“Introducing to own species coming,” he said, seemingly satisfied. “Black Amber has arranged.”
Whatever he was, flanked by Barcons, sitting with raised shoulders in coarse brown wool robes, he wasn’t American. I hoped he really wasn’t another human, but I knew he was, maybe by smell, body posture. His sweating face looked almost like an American Indian’s. Stocky, Asian? His hair was bound up in cloth-covered cords.
Black Amber looked from me to him, her lips loose, then pursed forward.
“You’re 100 percent congruent in proteins and DNA, RNA,” one of the Barcons said, “so you both are the same species. Red Clay, if you can’t stand the Academy, we’ll give you tools so you can try to make a place for yourself in their society. We thought we’d introduce you now.”
The human stared at me as if Karst I were gibberish. “Own kind,” the Barcon said to him. “Fresh family. Breeding permit.”
“No,” he said firmly in hideously accented Karst I.
“Yes,” the Barcon said. They weren’t arguing about the sa
me thing, I thought.
The man stared around the room, at the lights even, as though he’d heard about places like this. Yeah, and it’s just as bad as he’d thought. “We sell to Bon, won’t take spy-Bon in. Want women for him, don’t you?”
“Bon is root from their language for demon,” one of the Barcons told me.
I felt my face go hot. “Look, I want Academy training, not to get cut loose into some primitive tribe.”
The human stared at me. “We are not primitives. We are the only true beings here.”
“Sounds just like your people,” Black Amber said. She oo’ed, almost koo’ed, but pressed her thumb against her chin lump and spread the other fingers over her muzzle, her eyes sparkling maliciously. He stared at her, not comprehending, but perhaps picking up on the mocking tone. She buzzed a little picture of me in his clothes into my brain.
“I won’t go;” I said.
“No, but some contact might be more comfortable for you,” one of the Barcons said.
“I’m not that,” I said. “Even if he is human.”
The man smiled a nasty smile, eyes very narrow, then he pulled back against the sofa, as if waiting for these creatures to turn him loose.
“Perhaps,” a Barcon said, “moving males from social group to social group is difficult. Maybe easier to move females. “
“My daughters are not for sale,” the man said.
“There are others in the west side of Karst City,” one of the Barcons replied.
I asked, “When did they come here, anyway?”
“About five hundred average planet cycles ago. They need fresh DNA,” the other Barcon said.
“Demon, take me away from this,” the man said, standing up, arms bent slightly at the elbows, knees flexed, ready to die if need be to get out of this room.
“We can bribe some of them to take you, if you don’t prove capable of Academy work,” the biggest Barcon assured me as they led him out. “They’re poor enough.”
∞ ∞ ∞
I felt bad enough before Rhyodolite brought Calcite, dressed in brown, to Black Amber’s house. Brown, I figured, was a non-status color here. The Oriental and she both wore it.
“Oh, I think I remember you,” she said. “Weren’t you kind once?” Empty eyes, no Calcite there. Filed-down teeth gleamed when she smiled. A face shifts when memories go. Like a zombie, I thought, unable to speak to this body before me, a corpse tricked into living. She looked hurt that I wasn’t answering her. Mind-wipe was getting clubbed dead from inside the brain, and I was glad my brother was safely crazy in the Veterans Hospital.
Rhyodolite took her hand and led his pretty little zombie inside. Blood rushed to my cock and head, and I felt absolutely dizzy.
“Don’t do that to her, man,” I yelled at him.
He flexed his hand almost into a fist, a Gwyng gesture like our middle finger.
Black Amber didn’t like the girl being there either. The Gwyngs screamed at each other in languages my computer transformed into squalls I couldn’t put meaning to other than the obvious sense, the quarrel.”
I liked Black Amber better for yelling at him, and even better for sending Calcite away.
Rhyodolite didn’t walk with me on the beach that day. When I came back, he was down on the floor, other Gwyngs nipping at his armpit webs.
“Serves you right, you son of a bitch,” I said in English.
He was too socially mobbable by other Gwyngs to stay angry long with aliens who didn’t tease-nip him. The next day, he sat down beside me on the beach and said, “Do you understand/accept?”
“No,” I said. “You’re a loser among your own kind, aren’t you?” We sat in the sand digging up little clams no bigger than my thumb joint to eat raw there on the suddenly chilly beach. “You people plan to rip my brains out, too? I’m just a junk kid myself. Waiting. Waiting.”
“You don’t eat your own kind, do you?”
“She was a cannibal, wasn’t she? Well, she was better off…”
“No. Reason (by her example) why we must avoid primitive planets. Too much shock, to them.”
“What about me?”
“Want to prove yourself?”
“Sure.”
“I am going to/want to return to active duty almost immediately-to-soon. You want to space-hop (punning image) with me, pre-cadet? I am capable (financially and in terms of authority) of sponsoring pre-cadet (for later cut in planet trade shares).”
“Who do I have to ask?”
“Black Amber and the Rector’s Man. Better/tentatively superior than you being bored/lonely here (when I leave anyway). Cadmium would come with me, but he’s training.”
“And?”
“They’ve assigned me to train a bird cadet. Better to have you to keep him away from me.” He paused and got up off the sand, dusting it out of his fur the best he could. Then he hunched slightly and said, “Don’t remind Black Amber (semi-dangerous to you now) of Mica.”
“I remind her of Mica every time she sees me.”
“Perspective problem/locked pattern sight. Out of vision, then pattern can shift. She may accept you as her cadet finally.”
“Oh.”
“Red Clay makes noise indicating perception?” Rhyodolite koo-chuckled. Then he leaned over in the surf to take a drink, knuckles down, knees bent, the muscle hump where his jaw met his throat bouncing up and down. In his left vestigial web, I saw a faint crescent of bruises where the crepe-like skin running from his shoulder blade joined his upper arm.
I touched the bruises and asked, “Calcite?”
He flinched. Hurrah for her, nailed him despite brain-wipe and all.
4
Xenophobia Variations
Courteous and grave, the bird folded scaly forearms across his belly, and said, “I’m Xenon 7.” The bills, like stiff lips, immobilized his face—no facial expressions. When he unfolded his arms, his black cadet’s uniform slid awkwardly off his olive shoulder feathers.
Avoiding the creature’s brown eyes, Rhyodolite shuddered slightly and said, “Tom, put his bag up.”
Xenon’s hand was soft as a human’s, softer, I noticed, when he passed his bag to me. I stowed food cases and clothes bags, then we sat inside the ship while the ground crew loaded it on a net for gating.
Those trips I was the junior flunky: twist that dial, mix Rhyo’s space food formula, develop this chip fast—the computer’s flinked, and flinked computers kill. In the monotonous cargo stations, each lit the same, each heated or cooled to the same temperature all over the Federation, the bird cadet stuck close to us, nervously.
But Rhyo was edgy as though neither of us were a good shipmate. He’d brought a kitten along to sleep with, but some sleep periods, the black kitten would ignore Rhyodolite and play with the bird’s feathers, thin and long like cock hackle all over. “Tom,” Rhyodolite would ask, “catch it for me so I can sleep.” The bird would lean back, sighing, from the cat, no expression on its beaked face.
One stop before Carg, a newly contacted bird world, Rhyo got wonked on drugs and alternately giggled at us and wept until we reached Carg Station.
We took on new cadet candidates there, nine birds, bigger than Xenon. They goggled at our bird, Rhyodolite, and me, as though we were all equally strange.
Aloof in his operator’s chair, Rhyodolite watched them through a drugged haze, but one came up to him on backward-bent legs, feathers puffed slightly, head weaving from side to side. “Need (we all) Karst practice,” it said, in slow and roughly aspirated Karst II. “We must memorize sounds/sonic maps/drawings since mammal doctors can’t/won’t work skull computers and learning drugs for us.”
Rhyodolite hit all the gates fast and dropped into pre-landing orbit, hardly giving us time to strap down for reentry. After Rhyodolite landed and shut down the ship, all the birds, including Xenon, climbed unsteadily down the ladder. Slumped in his chair, Rhyodolite flexed his nostril slits, staring out a viewport. Representatives of the two other Federation bird species
helped the new cadets onto buses. “Xenophobe, yourself,” I said.
“Things like those used to eat (and may not have stopped) little (image of a bat walking upright, wings spread for balance. Like crawling-rib (snake image) for you?”
“I don’t hate snakes, crawling-rib creatures.”
“No lethal intentions toward birds (from us). Just armskin/flight nerves/web muscle jumps.”
“The Rector’s a bird. Does this complicate the tension between him and Black Amber?”
As the last pre-cadet who’d flown with us hopped up the bus steps, Rhyodolite said, “The Rector is my nightmare. Bird-possessed poor me.”
“Black Amber?”
“Hush/stop prying.”
After reporting in, Rhyo and I took a black bus, with a Gwyng squiggle on it, back to Black Amber’s.
The next morning, I tried to explain Frisbees. Odd, to be lonely for Frisbees, I thought as Rhyo lathed down some plastic the way I’d described.
On the beach, I tossed it to Rhyodolite. Rhyo koo’ed hysterically as he caught it backhand, then threw it up over my head on a great boomeranging loop. I turned and caught it, then saw Black Amber coming.
Brooding in gold and green Under-Rector’s clothes, she trudged through the sand, dark eyes on the Frisbee. Then she said, “Rhyodolite, first contact mission. Come (abruptly/ now) talk (with me).”
“You (Red Clay and Xenon) can’t come on this,” Rhyodolite said. “Dangerous.”
After Rhyo left, Black Amber slept with cats, went into Karst City on business, and avoided me. Tesseract came four times to improve my English, bringing books so technical I knew only in Karst how to explain the diagrams. And I preferred to talk in Karst. English made me homesick. “Interesting book here, Tom. An American astrophysicist’s theorized a space gate. His aliens—holy from space again! But your people are thinking.”
“I miss Rhyodolite,” I told Tesseract. “But he’s not much of an officer, is he?”
“He does better with mammals than birds.”
