by Rebecca Ore
Two weeks later, Rhyodolite opened the veranda door and said, “It was horrid.” Black Amber slingshotted herself out of a padded tube with both hands, koo’ing, weaving her body back and forth as soon as she stood up.
Rhyodolite stumbled to her. She tucked him up against her side and brushed her muzzle along his lip comers and eyelids. Twined together, they talked in a Gwyng language my computer couldn’t slice right. She led him to a pile of floor cushions and both, trembling, sank into them.
“Are you tired?” I asked him.
“Dead-body-eating-ape question. If the gravity well/trap we’d set hadn’t been there, they would have gated into their sun. Now most upset to find they must share the universe. Xenophobes like you.”
“I’m not such a xenophobe,” I said.
Black Amber cradled him and nibbled his hands, then said, “Federation needs drug traps/automatic sedation of ships caught in the gate nets.” She nodded to the air as she spoke, a long big campaign of the Under-Rector’s—avoid or drug primitive stupids. I slunk off to bed, a refugee.
The next morning, while Rhyodolite and Black Amber slept with cats and baby Gwyngs, I answered their phone. A deep voice asked, in rough Karst II, to speak to Black Amber. When I said she was asleep, the voice switched to Karst I and said, “Tell her it’s Karriaagzh.”
The bird. “Certainly,” I said. I went into the Gwyng sleeping room, touched Amber gently, and said, “The Rector’s on the phone.”
She stretched and froze, then slid herself free of the Gwyngs’ tangled limbs, wrapped cloth around her pouch and genital slits, then came out.
Nodding slightly, she listened to the Rector, then hung up with a deep head bob. “The Rector will come(self-invited) to the house soon,” she told me. Then she nibbled her palms and went back to the sleeping room.
About an hour later, when a medium-sized gray electric car pulled up, Black Amber, in a pink shift that bared her webs, came out to the steps. Shouldn’t she wear her uniform? I wondered. The web veins were distended, and the air smelled of alcohol. I looked closer and saw that her webs were damp, as though she’d tried to cool them off.
Without help from his driver, the Rector unfolded himself from the seatless back of the car—huge bird, moving slowly. He cocked his head sideways at Amber and bent his hocks. If he’d stood erect, he’d have been at least eight feet tall.
Black Amber, blocking my way, stood on the stairs so she could look down at him. One leg dabbed out toward him, twisting, as though she was fending him off. Are they going to attack each other? I wondered.
“Rector Karring’cha, we mistook/misunderstood (due to family preoccupations) when you were coming (deny evasion). Would you (female talking to male) come in and (hide your feathers) discuss (paying attention to me) the problems we’ve had with first contacts? Last mission badly handled.”
No expression on the bird face—bony ridges shaded his yellow eyes. The arms twitched, though—arms longer than most aliens’, then grey crest feathers ruffled and rose as he listened. She’s insulted the hell out of him.
He was scary, huge, impassive, grey feathers clamped tight to his body. I kept looking at him—feathers covered the blade-shaped upper arms but tapered off to scales on his lower arms and to yellow skin on his hands and fingers. He smoothed his thigh feathers and shuffled his strange shoes.
Those yellow eyes found me sitting by a piling. I ducked my head a bit, then flushed that he might think I’d nodded hostilely. Karriaagzh slowly blinked at me before looking back up at Amber. “Black Amber,” he said in Karst II, “my respect for you/r opinions, but life and space (both) have risks. If you(r species) wishes to avoid first contacts, I will most eagerly assign you (and every Gwyng) to safer duties.”
Black Amber kicked the air. She jerked her foot back and shifted her weight onto it, but the foot still twitched. “We do not leave our own to die in space or on primitive planets Federation policy/rule centuries before we landed you/refugee, bird Rector.”
The Rector looked at me again and twitched his beak sideways, as though preening the air, then cocked his head, not looking back at Amber, his gaze drifting away from both of us.
“My apologies, Rector,” Black Amber finally said. Her fists clenched.
The Rector looked at the fists, then locked eyes with Black Amber. She trembled; he raised his crest high. Then the giant bird sighed as though he should have given up on this bitch long ago, lowered his crest, and got back in his car.
After the car pulled out of sight, Black Amber smeared fist gland secretions furiously on the stairs and railing. I wondered if she hated being afraid of him.
Rhyodolite slept through the Rector and Black Amber’s meeting. His superior officer called him that afternoon with Karriaagzh’s side of the conversation. Rhyo jerked the phone away from his ear, bobbed his head at the earpiece several times, then pulled the receiver close, screaming, “No one, not any sapient ever accused Gwyngs of cowardice,” and hung up.
“That’s too much,” he said to me. He walked—almost lurching—down the stairs and wiped his fists over and over where Black Amber’d left her own anger secretions earlier.
Gwyng kids started using the side and back stairs. The other Gwyngs up and down the beach stopped visiting until the smell faded three days later.
Relentlessly, Black Amber had Tesseract train me in proper English. Yet she refused to be my sponsor or help me find one.
I begged Rhyodolite to take me away on his next mission, dangerous or not, just to get away from the house. For about eight days, no flights, nothing. Then the Academy had just the flight.
Three years earlier, a search ship picked up a probe coming through recently gate-charted space near a planet-orbited sun. Karst traced the orbit back to the fifth planet.
Now the observation team, which had been watching the system since the probe was discovered, spotted nuclear launches from high planet orbits. One was in a trajectory that would take it out of its solar system altogether.
Rhyodolite, myself, and the bird cadet, Xenon, could volunteer to pick up that probe.
Rhyodolite said, “Lots of ambiguities about that assignment. Sure you want to go?”
“Of course.” I wasn’t going to be more chicken than a Gwyng.
“With that web-shuddering bird again,” Rhyodolite said. He sucked his hands and explained, “We’re going into their solar system. Our gate capacity should/may be able to outmaneuver them, but it’s their system.”
When we arrived at the ship, Xenon stood stiffly by its bags as though waiting for a reprimand, the breeze ruffling those long olive hackles.
“I-could-tell-you-were-sober-and-reliable and other lies of the Galaxy,” Rhyodolite muttered under his twitching nostrils as he swung himself through a hatch. He lowered a gangway, and we came on with the baggage. The ground crew loaded the whole ship into a huge transport globe, called a cargo belly.
The cargo belly dropped us at the alien planet’s observation station.
For the first time, I wore a space suit and floated around in the sky, tethered, while I helped string up gate/gravity cables.
No up. No down. To give myself some arbitrary point of reference, I decided down was Rhyo’s little triple ship.
When I re-entered the ship, Rhyo was sitting in a chair, Xenon hunched down on its hocks beside him, both computing the geometry for a jump near a gas-giant planet where we’d intercept the satellite. Xenon would lean forward to explain calculations, and Rhyo’d shove the computer board at him. A little almost-dance with them.
As the station crew positioned our ship on a net, Xenon got the computer ready to generate a shipboard field to catch us while Rhyodolite looked at me and squeezed his nostrils shut.
We popped back into space/time in the right orbit, and Rhyodolite and Xenon congratulated each other.
Suddenly, the artificial gravity went out. Making incomprehensible Gwyng noises, Rhyo shoved toward the radar controls as Xenon and I shot up, startled muscles pushing us
off the floor.
“No, no, no,” Rhyodolite said as the radar screen went crazy from interference—radar bouncing from a wall surrounding us was impossible.
“Open the port,” Xenon said, its legs flexing in the air as though it was trying to get its balance, scaly fingers gripping a hand-hold.
Rhyodolite opened the port, but looked at us. Xenon and I looked. We were surrounded by huge ships, whose people knew about gravity nets, because we were floating between two of them.
Rhyodolite finally glanced out, pulled his nostrils open and shut a few times, and hauled himself to his seat. “Not (definitely not) supposed to be a first contact mission,” he said as he wriggled into the chair and pulled a lap strap tight. Then he looked at us bleakly and said, “Prepare to be boarded. Not completely lost until we die.”
“What do you do to prepare to be boarded?” Xenon asked, legs flexing faster, as though it was running in air, feathers bouncing up and down.
“No muscle moves, no words. Strictly psychological preparation (due to ridiculous policy).” Then he said, almost to himself, “No checks for lumpy gravity and active gate interconnections anymore?” His fists almost clenched, and he said something in another Gwyng language, its analog hissing in my computer. “Were we set up? To force a contact?” I asked.
“I don’t know (who…). “ Stabbing a glance at Xenon, Rhyo continued, “If these trap-setters are not birds, spread arms loosely from sides. This is rumored (no bets) not to be any mammal’s attack gesture.” He reached for the radio and said into it, “Immediate danger of being boarded. Need higher mass to get us out of their gravity trap. Seven hundred thousand mass measure should do it.”
Xenon, beak gaping, took in a hissing breath. Our ship lurched sideways, and Rhyodolite and I gasped, too.
“Can’t we talk to them?” Xenon said.
“Say in what? We don’t know (but who’d tell a Gwyng these days) what system they (animal/non-sapient) have for radio/video?”
“So?” I asked, asshole puckered, biting my shorts. “So?” I suddenly realized I was almost hysterical.
“We go back (hypothetical) and ask for better research.” Rhyo’s fists were spasming curiously. He finally nibbled at the anger juice, his arms lifting out from his sides, the web veins pulsing. “Bird hideous, couldn’t take Amber’s complaints.”
Two space-suited figures floated toward us and looked in our ports. Suddenly, we got lots of gravity. Wham, the bird and I hit the floor. Rhyo sagged in his chair. The bird whimpered, an odd sound coming from something that large.
While we lay pinned, we heard aliens fussing around our airlock. The gravity eased up, so Rhyo reached for the control panel and cycled the lock, muttering, “Xenophobes, come in. Come on. We’ll be nice prisoners.”
The two figures outside the viewport continued to watch us.
“Rhyodolite, I certainly hope they use the same air as we do.”
“Red-Clay-covered-with-aliens, if not, they’ll kill us because we tried to poison them.”
“They use the same air,” Xenon said.
“You know? We get odd people/creatures in our forces these days,” Rhyo said, opening the inner door.
Five heavily armed space-suited figures swarmed in. I felt naked beside them. This has to be a test, I thought numbly. I wasn’t trained for this.
Hackles erect on its neck, Xenon shrieked. Two aliens went to the floor, prone, guns aimed. The three others slowly knelt. The bird half danced back a step. The central kneeler fired.
As blood and stuff splattered me, I flinched. Rhyo, still strapped in his chair, said, “Your kind of ape.”
I looked at the guns aimed at me, faces shadows behind the helmet glass.
More aliens, in uniforms, not in space suits, came in. They were horrible caricatures of human beings: eyes rounder than mine and blob noses. Curved jawbones left no point to the chin. They had darker skin than mine, coarse straight hair on their heads, but hairless faces, except for eyebrows and eyelashes. Their joints bent funny.
Rhyo spread his arms, web veins pulsing, and said, “Impossible. I’ll wait.” He gasped a few times, then slumped. Like Mica, playing possum, I thought. But they’ll think he’s dead.
A sweating alien approached me. I spread my arms out a bit and went rigid, seeing Xenon’s corpse sprawled out on the floor. Two aliens held guns on me while the sweating alien stripped me, even took off my wrist tag.
Leaving me naked and quivering, the aliens carefully unstrapped Rhyo. He slid to the floor. They laid him out and looked at me. I started crying, tried to stop.
A medical character came in to take Rhyo’s blood pressure and check his heart. Having obviously caught one beat where he expected ten to twenty, the alien leaned back on his heels, looked at me, and pointed from Rhyo to Xenon’s body. I thought the alien was asking if Rhyodolite was dying, dead. I pointed from Rhyodolite to me, meaning, no, alive.
The medic broke a glass ampule under Rhyodolite’s nose, but Rhyodolite wasn’t coming around.
The aliens also checked Xenon, but he’d been very dead from the first. They went through the ship, looking at me from time to time, seemingly a bit more embarrassed with each weaponless locker they checked.
My kind of ape. I was freezing, utterly naked. Finally, one of them came up to me and spoke a couple different languages at me. I said in Karst, “We only came to see about the satellite we thought you launched to go out beyond your solar system.”
The alien pointed at the computer and said, “Fluist?”
“Computer,” I responded in English. This language thing hadn’t worked with Mica, but if they had Karst I-type minds, we might be able to understand each other. I’d teach them English—didn’t want them badassing around space luring other Karst speakers into traps.
“Kampootir. Fluist.”
They seemed to be understanding. Okay. I stood trembling as they wrapped cloth around my waist and loaded me down with chains. “Fluist?” I said as they cut the computer out of the ship with torches and whirring metal saws.
“Fluu-ist.”
“Fluu-ist,” I repeated again.
“Hum.”
“Tom,” I said, wiggling a finger at myself. “Tom.” You guys don’t know how bad it can get if we can’t communicate.
“Tom,” the alien who’d stripped me said, then pointing to himself and all the others, “Yauntry.”
“Yantry?” I tried.
“Yauntry.”
“Yauntry.”
“Hum,” went the Yauntry.
I wasn’t sure if Yauntry was nation, species, or squad name. Abstractions get you into trouble.
What ugly assholes, I thought, trying to blind myself with fury as they led me into their ship and put me into a cell after taking off the chains. No windows, unpainted metal walls, one light bulb on all the time under a wire grid. I got furious, which abruptly switched to fear. Jail again and nobody to talk to. I had to shit, from terror. There was a bucket in the cell for wastes.
After the ship moved around, gas hisses and all, two guards came in, grabbed and re-chained me, fixing my hands so I couldn’t raise them above my waist. They stood back and a gray-suited guy came in with a glass of water. I moved toward him to take it, but he pulled back and said, “Huh-na.”
I waited. “Hum,” he said, putting the glass up to my right hand and watching me bend my head down to my chained hands, contorting for a drink. I wondered why the fuck he didn’t hold the glass for me if they wanted me chained.
He did take the glass then, and held it while I sipped, and finally put a hand on my shoulder to steady me.
“Gwyng hum?” I hoped rising tones implied a question. He asked one of the guards for something, got a metal tag that unlocked my hands. Then he handed me a drawing pad with a felt-tip sort of marker, too blunt to stab with.
Like with Alpha/Mica, I thought. Suddenly very afraid, I drew Rhyodolite. I pointed to myself and said, “Tom, alive. Yauntry alive.” Then I touched him slowly and sai
d, “You alive.”
He flinched. The guards stirred.
“Huh-na,” I said, waving my hands, then I drew the dead bird, saying, “Bird dead.” I pointed back to the drawing of Rhyodolite and looked the Yauntry official in the eyes.
He pulled out a pocket recorder and played a tape of all the things I’d said when they first trapped us. After looking at me for a long moment, the alien said, “Ging alif-dad. Tom?”
I looked up at him. He pointed to himself and said, “Edwir Hargun.” Sounded almost human. Xenophobes, too. My kind of ape.
He unchained me and shut the cell door. Through the walls, I felt the ship twitch as it accelerated.
For two days the aliens fed me rations from our ship: mine, Rhyo’s, the bird’s, and changed the waste bucket, but left me otherwise alone. I spent those days trying not to go mad. Terrible questions rose in my mind: Was I working for the good guys or interplanetary thugs? Had we been set up?
The ship twitched again as it began to brake. On the bunk, I gripped the mattress edges until we were down.
Three aliens put leg irons and a waist chain with manacles on me. As I went out, blinking into their nasty sun, I saw Rhyodolite lying naked and chained on a stretcher. Think hillbilly, I thought, think survival.
Black Amber is right. We must be more careful.
Then an alien covered Rhyodolite up to the chin with a blanket and felt his wrinkled little face.
Others draped my handcuffs with towels as they jabbered to each other, then one bent and took off the leg irons. “Thanks,” I said. He looked at me, then at the others, and shrugged.
As I walked where I was led, camera lenses glittered in the alien air. I could imagine the headlines, “Alien Invaders Captured.”
Edwir Hargun offered me food while the soldiers tried to sneak my handcuffs off so the cameras couldn’t catch them.
The food looked like cheese. I kept my face still and reached, slowly, for it. Camera aliens crawled around, butted into each other, lifted lens machines high in the air. Hargun tightened his lips; it seemed a smile to me.
