by Rebecca Ore
Having quills in the skin roll under my fingers was the oddest sensation—
alien, yet… The tips bristled against my fingers, but the bulk of the lengths were still under the skin.
“Go with the way they’re growing,” Granite said sleepily. The skin softened as I rubbed in the lotion, and the muscles under the quills quivered and relaxed. “I…don’t…get… out…in…the…sun…enough.” I helped him off the perch. He stretched out one arm and leg, then stretched the leg and arm on the other side, stumbling against me. I felt the quills twitch against my hands when I steadied him.
As Granite settled to the floor, Tesseract slumped in his chair, put his own tea aside, and sighed so deeply that I, remembering my own panic time, was embarrassed. “Did you sigh like that when I went to sleep after my xenophobic reactiveness?”
He smiled, sighed again, and said, “We’ll take him to the infirmary now.”
“Is his friend going to live?”
“He’s paralyzed. We’ve got him on a respirator. As soon as we’ve gotten the other birds stabilized, we’ll make a decision.”
Tesseract got up and knelt by Granite, who was down in a heap on the floor, and tried to rouse him. Granite mumbled a complaint in bird language. “Okay, my friend,” Tesseract said before calling in the Barcons with a stretcher.
Karriaagzh checked on us again. “Maybe a hot oil bath would be nice for him now.” He sat down bird-style by Granite and touched the other bird’s bottom eyelid, which flicked. “I don’t remember much of my first days here, but I do remember itching.”
Granite shifted around as the Barcons lifted him onto the stretcher. Karriaagzh added, “Security must talk to them now, before all panic, but keep in mind they have their honor, loyalties.” The old bird ran a finger around the other bird’s ear holes and added, “Also, check for mites.”
While the Barcons tended Granite, monitoring him while he slept, I went on to deal with my schedule as best could. When I came back to the infirmary, a Barcon directed me to the showers. Granite was standing bare-skinned under a hot water spray, nictitating membranes covering his eyes, huddled over while Barcons scrubbed him and rinsed. Then they covered him with hot oiled towels and led him to a bird leaning cushion. He propped his elbows on it and drew his haws back and looked at me.
“Mites,” he said. “And xenophobic reactiveness.”
“They must have survived in the facial feathers,” one of the Barcons said, “then went down to feed on the new feather tips. If your feathers are messed up, it isn’t our fault this time.”
The Barcons were testing miticides on another bird, but for Granite now, they’d use lots of hot water and soap.
“Always something,” the Barcon concluded. “Now we’ve got to check all the bird kinds for mites, but probably only this kind has them. Among them, I bet they’re epidemic. Such stress they put themselves under.”
Granite said dismally, “We must seem rather like a joke.” He stared at me, flashing the third eyelid again vertically across his eyes. “We have special mite powders. But Red Clay’s crew seemed to be in too big a hurry to ask for all our equipment.”
“I’m sorry. Rhyodolite was boss on that one.”
The Barcon was incredulous. “Sent a Gwyng to fetch birds?”
“I’m going to tame that Gwyng the way I’ve been tamed,” Granite said.
“I don’t believe you’d be able to tame a Gwyng, bird,” the Barcon said. “That’s a hard-wired reaction.”
“In a sapient, there shouldn’t be hard-wired reactions,” Granite said.
“We’ll have to fumigate your room, so you both can stay here. You can get your schedule through our computer for duration. Someone will tell your other roommate.” They lead Granite by the elbows to another room; I tagged along behind.
“That Ewik won’t be coming here?” Granite asked.
“Is that xenophobia or is that something personal?” the Barcon asked with a wiggled nose.
“Personal.”
“He’d rather not associate with us,” I said.
“Well, we’ll let him seek other quarters, if he wants.”
Granite gestured assent and crouched down in the oily towels. The Barcons gave me a little electric heating cup full of more oil I could use when the towels cooled. In an hour or so, after they’d checked the slides, they’d take him out for another bath.
A little skinny bear brought me another plastic foam slab and some sheets. How is he?” she asked me quietly as Granite blinked and nodded.
“I’m okay,” he said. “How are you?”
“Busy,” she said.
The Barcons came back, and the biggest one said, “Mites in the ears.”
The third eyelid veiled Granite’s eyes, and he shuddered. I decided not to watch. He stood up and came with them before they went for his elbows. I wondered if backward knees worked better when the creature who had them was frightened and exhausted—he seemed to walk steadily enough.
While they were deep-cleaning his nares and ear holes, I fooled around with the computer, checking on what I could.
Barcons—species with eccentrically orbiting home planet. Weather varies immensely. Long winters. Longer summers. Extremely ecologically various. Includes among parasites a sapient, without space capacity. Barcons mildly xenoreactive to physical contact by species with null social distances. Hard-wired fear of oral or digital to oral contact with strangers, due to a parasite spread. First contacted 4.000 years ago. Further Information restricted.
∞ ∞ ∞
Granite came back without the Barcons. His ear hole had been scrubbed red; one of the nares bled a little. He crouched down and pulled the towels around himself again. I poured on the hot oil while he asked, “And you went through this? You had a xenophobic reaction?”
“Yes.”
“Mites and aliens. What combinations. I should have thought about mites.” He’d had a rough day. “Did the Rector’s Man talk to you like that when you were upset?”
“Um, kinda.” I thought about how Tesseract played to the species differences even though the Federation wanted us to ignore them. Talk and get the sedative down, but the talk’s content depended on the species of the freaked. “We’ll both survive and get our blues,” I told Granite.
“All the creatures look more like you, Red Clay. My kind is so outnumbered.” He looked at the bed pad and said, “I think I’ll unwrap these towels and go to sleep, even if it isn’t a nice high bed. When will we have the third meal?”
“They’ll bring you something. I’m going to see if I can’t just go to the cafeteria.”
“Come back tonight.”
“No problem.”
“Are you afraid of me still, in your mammal squishy way?”
“I guess not.”
“Guess? Mammal answer. Was the Rector’s Man serious about the invitation? If that was said just to calm me down, I wouldn’t come with you, but I’d like to run.”
“I’ll check. But I want you to come with me, too. I don’t have many friends here.”
“Isn’t Tesseract your kind?”
“No.”
“I thought maybe you’d grow a crest and thicker jaws when you matured,” Granite said as he lay breast-down the foam pad. He looked at it, then prodded the foam with his beak, a little nervous again. “I’m sorry I thought of you as a lactating monstrosity. Your sex doesn’t lactate, does it?” He pulled the covers over his head, going with the quill grain.
“No, we don’t lactate,” I said.
Slowly, his bottom eyelid rose again, this time, I suspected, more worn out than sedated. When he laid his beak down on his hands, I left quietly, to meet my schedule.
The next morning, I woke up on my strange mattress and looked over at Granite Grit sleeping on his pad. Funny, when he was asleep, he looked more alien—as though talking drugged the brain’s visual functions. Silent, he was a heap of yellow skin studded with feather pins, a beak with a tiny hook on the end of it; and muscles
that slanted differently than mine. I got up quietly and dressed while a Barcon came in to check. The Barcon waited until I was dressed, then followed me out into the hall.
“We’ll keep him here until tomorrow, then he can go back to classes. And how are you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Lonely for your own kind? We wondered about you tagging along with the bird.”
“I’m all right,” I said.
“We can get you a female from the other culture group of your species, if you need.”
“Everyone seems so surprised that I’m doing so well,” I said, going toward their computer to get my schedule. I was a bit annoyed, a bit worried. Maybe something always hit isolates eventually.
“I couldn’t live without my mate,” the Barcon said. I printed my schedule and left, not sure what to say.
Two days later, when I got back from classes, Granite was talking to Tesseract. “I’m not afraid of anyone, exactly,” Granite said, “but I’m afraid of…”
“Well, don’t be afraid of me,” Tesseract said. “You don’t like being odd here?”
“Not at all,” Granite said quickly. “But our home planet officials… I don’t want to be in precisely the position I’m in.”
I came on in and asked, “Should I go back out and eat?”
“Take Granite with you. I’ll give you passes for outside, and movie tickets. Semi-illegal movie, but I thought you both ought to see it.”
Granite rose and said, “What happens next, to us, to Sulphur?”
Tesseract said, “We could maintain him until the feathers grow back. Then… As for you, we’ll talk to your people.”
“You’ll decide then.”
“He won’t go back all ugly,” Tesseract replied. He handed me the movie tickets, drew out a little map so we could find the place, and gave us off-Academy passes. “Blue bus number 3 will always get you back here,” he said.
“I can’t distinguish blue from violet,” Granite said, “but then you can’t see shades below violet, can you?”
“Some can. I can’t,” Tesseract said.
I said, “I can tell blue from violet, Granite.”
After dinner, we started out. Granite asked, “Have you been outside the Academy grounds before?”
“Yes, several times, but not around here.”
He slowed down his strides and I half jogged to keep up with him. We showed our passes at the gate and looked out at the city, peddlers, tremendous numbers of aliens in all sorts of clothes, all sorts of colors. Hairy, not hairy, feathered, naked skins of all sorts of textures. Aliens, walking along, buying from other aliens, getting on alien buses, all totally calm.
“I hope,” Granite Grit said, “we don’t meet anything that’s afraid of me tonight.”
I opened Tesseract’s map and looked for the bus that would take us to the movies he recommended. Are we being followed? I wondered, but I didn’t mention my suspicion to Granite. What could I do if Granite went xeno again?
We went to the back of the bus so Granite could hunker down on the floor without getting in anyone’s way. “They didn’t design these for us,” he said, holding on to my knee. As the bus pulled back into traffic, he swiveled his head around at all the people. “We’ve been followed. I’m glad, actually.”
About ten blocks later, Granite looked at my map and pushed a button. The bus stopped and we got off, three doors from the building. It didn’t look like a movie house; but when we showed the man at the door our tickets, he let us in. Semi-illegal movies? I thought as we walked into the screening room.
Granite managed to wriggle up on the seat by me, near the aisle. Before the lights went down, I noticed that most of the people in the audience were in blue uniforms.
Three giant Ahrams with elephantine legs stalked across the screen. My heart jolted; this was an alien horror film. The audience screamed, laughed, told the filmed Ahrams that the digital distortions were biophysically incorrect. As Granite, beak parted slightly, watched the movie, the pin feathers on his face writhed.
“You watch so I can look at you,” he said about midway through one Ahram’s attack on a Gwyng, seemingly tickling the smaller sapient to death.
“Okay.” I laughed nervously.
“Laughing. Is this funny? Split between xenophobia and mock of xenophobes.”
As we walked out of the movie theater, Granite Grit looked at the various aliens, furred, naked-skinned, feathered, and said, “I guess Tesseract wanted me to know mild xenophobia is accepted. We can deal with it.”
“It was a very strange movie,” I said.
As we waited for the bus, Granite said, “We thought force held the Federation together, that some one species was dominant. What force?”
“Maybe,” I said, somewhat reluctant to voice what I was thinking, “all the species’ mutual jealousies keep the system honest. And new species can’t afford not to buy in.”
“Such a bait for joining—a five-thousand-year-old collection of all the stars’ thinking.”
“Curiosity drives intelligence,” I quoted from somewhere.
“But the tension!”
The next morning, we started for the country in Tesseract’s little flier. As Granite Grit boarded, he apologized for being troublesome.
Tesseract took Granite’s hands and accepted the apology.
“I’m even glad you made us see that movie,” Granite added as he looked for a convenient place to sit.
Then up we flew over Karst City into the interior. The ancients who built Karst with the transformed energies of space war knew beautiful geography: plains enough to rest a plainsman’s eyes and fatigue my mountain-bred ones, then a river and mountains with forested foothills merging into plains again.
“This river’s tributaries go up into country made to look like an old continental surface,” Tesseract said. He turned the flier and went up a river that looked like the Dan, bouncing on its rocks.
“One side of my farm faces scrublands, where, Granite, you can run all day if it isn’t too hot. Tom, the other side is close to mountains rather near in height to the ones you were born in.”
Until he said that, I hadn’t imagined how much I missed the mountains. I leaned back and sighed.
Tesseract’s wife, Ammalla, bigger-boned than an Earth-woman but still slimmer than Tesseract, with just a hint of a skull crest, called us to dinner. Granite Grit was still running near the farm. Ammalla saw that I was worried and said, “We put a satellite on him when he left the house. But don’t tell him.”
Tesseract put his finger against an ivory-colored plug in his ear and listened. “He’s coming back now,” he told us, “he went swimming.”
Soon Granite Grit, who’d run bare-quilled, came padding onto the porch behind Tesseract’s house. “Towel?” he asked. Ammalla went to help him.
“I got almost overheated,” he said when he came in, “so I went into the water a bit. My feathers—you can see the colors now.” He dropped the big towel from his shoulders to let us see greens, reds, and golds in the quills.
Ammalla put her arm gently around his prickly shoulder. “Dress and join us for dinner.” She arranged a low table for him to sit on and passed me something that looked like potatoes but wasn’t.
“Sir,” Granite said to Tesseract when he came back, “being re-fledged is a good metaphor for what happens to aliens who come here.”
“So you’re less upset about the feather stripping. It makes people odd to themselves so they’re less concerned about the oddity of the others. And it puts you all through a common ordeal.”
“But uniforms still break feathers,” Granite said. “Being re-fledged is one thing. Trying to live as a mammal is another.” Granite reared back a little, then eased his beak down toward his food and dabbed at it. After swallowing, he asked, “Do movies like that ease mammal tensions, too, by playing with xenophobia?”
“Yes. The Federation is full of tensions. But I don’t want any sapient hurt.”
“I can�
�t hurt you, or Tom, or your wife. You trust me?”
Thinking about the melted walls, only five hundred years ago, I said, “Karriaagzh says that the Federation has to be maintained every day.”
Granite turned slowly and looked at me as though seeing me for the first time.
Since Granite and I were roommates, Ammalla put us in the same room. Granite woke up when I began shaving at the sink and came walking carefully toward me.
“I do this every morning,” I told his reflection.
“Tesseract also?”
“I don’t think he grows face hairs.”
Granite bobbed his body slightly, then went out to see if he could use the toilet.
“They let me use Karriaagzh’s,” he said proudly when he came back.
After breakfast, Tesseract and I rode horse-patterned things, with a touch of analog-antelope, while Granite in his quills took giant bounds through the grass, over steppe brush, snatching at low-flying birds. We stopped by a stream where he danced around, quills twitching.
“Are you happier?” Tesseract asked.
“Yes.” Granite tried to come closer to the riding beasts, but they backed off. “You do care?”
“Safer for me if I don’t have to fear my charges,” Tesseract said.
“No jokes,” Granite said stiffly.
“Yes, I do care.”
“Sense of humor seems to relieve mammal tension by playing with stresses. We don’t do that.”
“Better get an intellectual understanding of it, Granite Grit,” Tesseract said. “I’m a fairly humorous guy.”
We tied the riding stock and went up into the hills on foot. They weren’t like my home mountains except for the air—after we got up to two thousand feet on the trail, we breathed real mountain air, moist yet electric.
