by Rebecca Ore
Granite stepped along awkwardly, not really at home in mountains. How sad, I thought, that this air means nothing to him. But when we scrambled up a rock fall, his backward knees gave him better climbing balance than we had with our knees that banged the rock face.
“Born climber,” Tesseract commented.
“No, biomechanical accident,” Granite said tensely, reaching for a hold.
“You have a looser hip structure than I thought,” Tesseract observed as Granite hung one foot way left, bending both his backward knee and another joint which was almost concealed in his upper leg muscles.
Granite grunted and strained for a ledge with his right foot, clinging with both hands to his hold. Then he put his left foot where his hands were and levered up.
“I’ll help you people up,” he said, reaching down for us. He main-hauled me up—we both helped Tesseract.
At the top we saw Tesseract’s house and the plains with another ridge and river beyond that. We sat—the bird crouched down on his shins, me and Tesseract cross-legged.
“Thanks,” I told Tesseract.
As we packed to leave, Ammalla said, “You must come back when we have more young guests. Sometimes elders are boring.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “You and Tesseract aren’t boring.”
“I must come back when my feathers are out,” Granite said. “I’m more colorful than any flying bird I’ve seen here—or any other bird sapient.”
“Granite Grit,” she said, embracing him, not so firmly she’d risk bruising a quill, “I’ll be very happy to see you in full color.” Then she tickled the horny skin around his nostrils.
“You know about our nares?” he said, obviously delighted. Delicately, he ran his tongue around her nose and lips.
“I try to learn the friendly gestures of all my guests,” she said. “And now, Tom,” she said, opening her arms. We hugged.
“What happens now?” Granite asked, shifting his weight from one leg to the other.
“Granite Grit, we asked your species to join us more honestly. We can stop anything you throw at us, but we’ve no plans to harm any of your nations. Would you have attacked us if so ordered? Seized the Rector, say, as a hostage?”
“The Rector, yes. If those were my orders.” Granite edged back and cocked his head, staring at Tesseract with one eye.
“Federation Council would have replaced him before Karst rotated a quarter. They’ve let the whole place get bombed away on occasion.”
“Is it that cruel an organization?”
“Has to be sometimes.”
Granite’s people re-negotiated with the Federation. And the Academy made uniforms optional for heavily feathered birds, so Granite’s kind and other birds could wear fiber torcs instead. But Karriaagzh wore his mammal clothes, and the two other bird species were divided.
“This is difficult for us,” Granite said about a month later. “Fledging.” He tried to pull off a split feather sheath behind a shoulder blade.
“Can I help?” I asked. We were listening to music in the central square, Gypsum gone as usual. The Rector’s People wouldn’t give him a new room, but he only slept here.
Granite backed around to me. “Be careful.” I gently pulled off a horny sheath and watched the new feather unfurl like a butterfly. Then another.
“Better to be reciprocal. Can I shave you?”
“I shave every morning. You’re not going to need this done every morning, are you?”
“Afraid of letting me touch you? With the electric razor?”
I pulled another sheath away from a green feather and saw a tiny bit of mite damage on the tip. “Well, some people used to get shaved at hair-cutting, barber, shops.” After I pulled off all the loose sheaths, I got out my electric razor and a lotion Barcons gave me to soften my beard.
Granite got me to lie down, with his feet curled around my head. I looked up at the pin feathers around his falcon eyes and giggled.
“Be calm,” he said, rubbing lotion into my skin, his fingers curiously prodding. “Why don’t you just grow the face hairs out?”
“My kind doesn’t.”
“Your kind isn’t here,” he said, carefully moving the razor over my face. “Are any humans here?”
“Some primitives.”
“Listen, Tom Red Clay, some of my people are primitives. If they were here, and no one else civilized of my kind, I’d take comfort from my primitives.”
“Are you tired of going to movies and music with me?” I asked, suddenly feeling terribly lonesome as the bird shaved my chin. He loved both fighting movies and music—like the mountain guys.
“You don’t want to be another creature’s pet.”
“I’m not your pet. They’ve promised me that they’d bring me a breeding group in a year.”
“Tom,” he said, pulling the razor back and blinking his eyes before continuing, “do you want your own people kidnapped from your planet?”
I hadn’t thought of how they’d bring in a breeding group. “Kidnapped?”
“Tom, don’t you have to mate? I can’t imagine you missing that.”
When I came back from classes a couple days later, Granite and another half-feathered bird, but a solid color—female, I realized—were gravely studying charts spread out on a low table.
“The feathers link with gene structures for other things,” Granite explained. “So the females bring family line genetic maps and check to see what males are worth fighting for.”
Over the next few weeks, lots of female birds, all different solid colors, all big as Granite or bigger, came cruising by with their genetic charts.
When spring came, Granite sprouted streamers from his shoulders and began displaying against others of his kind. Only twenty-five of them—but they seemed to be everywhere, colorful and quarrelsome. As the displays got violent, the Academy sent small groups off to various Rector’s People’s farms.
Granite, his potential ladies, and present rivals went to Tesseract’s, and I asked if I could visit on weekends.
When I got to the airport, Karriaagzh, in mammal clothes, and two new birds motioned for me to join them.
“I was going up to Tesseract’s,” I said.
“I’m taking these people there,” he said. “We want all Granite’s kind to have mates.” The two new birds, both solid colors, seemed nervous, breeding plumes shorter than the female breeding plumes I’d seen sprouted here.
No one spoke on the flight out, until we were over Tesseract’s. From the air, I saw four birds, three males and one female. “There’s another female there, but I don’t see her,” Karriaagzh said.
The two young bird females in the flier watched the guys throw their colored feathers around and talked to each other in bird.
When I was getting out of the flier, I saw Granite bound ten feet or more off the prairie and lash out at the other bird with his strange feet, both their feathers streaming around them, flame-colored, glinting. What rules, I wondered, or could they kill each other?
Tesseract leaned over the porch rail and called to them in their own language. They bounced apart and turned, panting, eyes protected by the transparent shields, to watch us walk up.
“More females,” Karriaagzh said. “And might I spar with you? It’s been a long time. Heel punches?”
Granite, eyes still veiled, bobbed his body.
“But don’t insult me,” Karriaagzh said, pulling off his mammal clothes, then hopping in his matted feathers. Granite stared at Karriaagzh, then feinted a kick experimentally at him.
“Insult,” Karriaagzh said, clipping him soundly on the upper leg.
The hens began their sparring, all four of them, a whirl of blue, purple, and brown.
“Amazing lot of tendon spring,” Tesseract said.
Ammalla smiled. “They are beautiful”
Karriaagzh stopped and joined his Rector’s People, holding his green and gold uniform in his hands. “And they do well in gath-math and molecular chemistry,” the Rector
said, handing Ammalla his clothes. “Now I must cool off.” He went down to Tesseract’s pool and swam, a large, wet, gray-feathered dinosaur.
Granite scored three quick hits on his opponent, who dropped to a crouch. Then they both stood up and unveiled their eyes, ruffled their feathers and laid them down. Granite bounced up to us, hopping like a giant skinny fighting cock. “We like it here. Other species can admire us without jealousy.”
Tesseract looked from bouncing Granite to his boss swimming slowly, head only above water, in his pool. “By the way, Granite Grit, how long do you people live? And how does your year compare to Karst’s?”
Between high leaps, Granite said, “About 120…about the same, longer maybe.”
Tesseract looked from the young bird to the old. “You’ll be around a long time then.”
Ammalla said, “Wonder if they’ll get as gray as the Rector?”
“It was the feather-stripping,” Tesseract told her. “He’ll outlive Black Amber. She won’t like hearing that.”
Karriaagzh climbed out of the pool and shook himself like a dog. His feathers were thin—most of his bulk was body mass.
Looking at me, he said, “Tesseract, Tom is to spend the break time at Black Amber’s.”
“You know what’s going on there. Why not here?”
“You’ll be busy. I’m putting a species group here.”
Most sapient species with seasonal breeding have the main rut in the spring. And if they didn’t, the Barcons adjusted them so the classes could stop for the breeding season.
In species unaffected by the season, older cadets joined a trade or diplomatic crew. First-year cadets went to the country in species groups. I was alone—so I had to go to Black Amber’s. Black Amber was pregnant. Unless the larva lived, which wasn’t likely, she’d come into heat after delivery.
7
Body Bribe
When I met Black Amber at the docks, she looked only a bit thicker in the lower abdomen. “Red Clay (testosterone-fumed),” she said, sprawled across the bow of a rental hydrofoil, “come ride to Gwyng-owned islands, archipelago most like Gwyng Home.”
The hydrofoil skimmed across ocean that had barely gotten salty since aliens cooked the water out of gas-giants. At the island, the dock had no groove-way ratchets for the boat, so we tied up with real ropes. The Gwyng island looked tropical, with artificial cliffs crumbling behind the houses and strips of pasture.
More relaxed than I’d ever seen her, Amber hummed and swayed in the driver’s seat as I put our bags on the roof of our borrowed car. She called me Mica, oo’ed and corrected herself, but my skull computer still caught glitter on my Academy name.
Black Amber, still swaying, drove the car slowly up a coral-graveled road, until a Holstein-colored pouch beast, bigger than a rhino, lumbered into the road, followed by two more pouch hosts and a smaller black and brown blood beast with ropy veins dangling from its neck like dewlaps. Six baby Gwyngs followed them, two hauling up the beasts’ tails into the pouches. They poked their heads out around the tails to stare at us.
We stopped. Gwyng kids giggled coos like a pigeon roost, while I wondered when Black Amber would hit the horn. Finally the beasts lumbered off the road. Black Amber hugged herself, then drove on to a basketwork house like her beach house. The cliffs were close behind, a white limestone planet-sized stage set.
I carried the bags up the steps. “You know these,” Amber said, swinging a long arm at Rhyodolite and Cadmium.
They leaned against each other. “Dead-animal-eating-ape still studying the Barcon cut-up business?” Rhyodolite said.
“I bet you know about our breeding habits, but did they explain body bribes?”
“Shut up,” Cadmium told him. “Black Amber, it is open, isn’t it? You’ve invited a proper number?”
She didn’t answer, so Cadmium turned to me as I passed with the duffels, and said, “Doing eye dissection, I see.”
A muscled cloaca excretes their soft wastes. I didn’t answer, but started remembering more Gwyng biology, the bones in their arms that gave them more grip than I had. How they hooked their hands around their shoulders so easily—as Rhyodolite and Cadmium did now, staring at me through alien eyes that saw polarized light.
“Come to witness Gwyng mating ritual? Like the film?” Cadmium said. “You do look at us like were biological cut-ups?”
The heat pheromone molecule is sluggish in the air. It affects both male and female behavior. Black Amber twitched her shoulders and went through into another room. The walls were padded with grass mats.
“Stinky armpits, we like you well enough,” Rhyo said. Cadmium interrupted and Gwyng-talked a language my computer couldn’t handle. Rhyo said, “Cadmium wants you to sleep on the beach.”
I looked at their hands to see if the thumb-base glands were swollen—a sign that a Gwyng was angry.
“Our glands are empty,” Rhyodolite said. “We are waiting for Black Amber’s season. Not angry, tense.”
“Much stinky armpit sex-organ hairs odor from his glands,” Cadmium commented. “But no nose to tell him much openly/consciously.”
“I don’t have glands in my armpits.”
“Better to learn own biologic than other people’s,” Cadmium said. “We’ll swim/cool off before we eat.”
“Can I go with you?” I asked.
“Black Amber swaying from side to side and humming as you came here?” Rhyodolite asked.
“Yes.”
“Absolutely come with us,” Rhyodolite said.
“He’ll stink up the whole ocean,” Cadmium said, then launched into impassioned Gwyng that I couldn’t follow.
We trudged down to the water. After I’d had enough, I hauled out and sat on the beach watching them. Flight neuro-wiring gave Gwyngs mean butterfly strokes, boosted by their armpit webs. I wondered if eventually Gwyngs would evolve into aquatic creatures, swimming off with those long waterbug arms.
Cadmium and Rhyodolite disappeared into the sun glitter. I finally spotted them, lost them again. After about two hours, they came rolling in on the surf, tired.
We were all resting in shallow water, letting the waves lift us up and down while our hands grabbed the bottom against the undertow, when Black Amber stepped out onto the deck. She only wore a short shift cut out under the arms so the webs were bare. Like a cat, she rubbed her lips against the deck roof posts.
Rhyodolite and Cadmium hurried out of the water to her, questioning her in Gwyng. She appeared dazed, but she finally asked me to approach and explained, “My womb cleared, but the nymph didn’t pouch. I’ll be attractive in a few days.” She sniffed. “Red Clay (glitter), your web glands will be a problem. We become even more nose-sensitive during season.”
Then she pulled herself up by the post while Rhyodolite and Cadmium told me, as I’d heard in class, that the nymph was no more to them than a nocturnal emission was to me.
“Her friends want a viable Black Amber child to raise as pouch kin,” Cadmium said. “She’ll try until they get one.”
“His odor is impossible,” Rhyodolite said.
Black Amber said, “(One of you) take him to the city for a Barcon armpit job.”
Rhyo called the Barcons to explain what they wanted done to me. Then a Barcon spoke and Rhyo pulled the receiver back and stared at it.
“A (female) h’mn is looking for you,” he said.
I felt coldly startled. “Human?”
“That noise.” He talked to the Barcons some more, and then said to me, “Female con-specific primitive.”
I felt bewildered. One of those people? “How did she find out about me?”
“She asked for a cadet h’mn. Only one.” Rhyodolite’s lips pursed, the wrinkles deepening, and his nostrils flared a bit at the top.
Cadmium leaned against Black Amber and tried to rub her tummy, but she swatted his hand away. “Cadmium, you take him in,” she said.
After the Barcons scraped my armpits, they showed me into a room with a low table, which wa
s set with handleless cups, an electric kettle, and leaves compressed in a brick. I picked up the brick and sniffed—tea!
An Oriental woman, dressed in a brown tunic and pants, a plaid scarf and embroidered boots, came in with a tray of cakes and butter. She stared at the bed, which I hadn’t noticed before—my sheets on it and some furs which must come from her custom, I thought, suddenly shy.
A Barcon introduced us, “Cadet Red Clay, Tom; this is Free-Trader Yanchela.”
She had an impassive, almost flat face, a woman of about twenty-five or so, I guessed, with her hair long. Washed, but not cut. “Tum,” she said with a bow.
“Tom,” I corrected. “Yanchela?”
“Not to talk as out-species. Yangchenla.”
“Yangchenla?”
“Tom.”
“We’ll leave you both here, if you want.”
She nodded curtly. I showed her to a cushion by the table and began trying to fix the weird brick tea. I was a bit intimidated by her.
“Here, let me,” she said, crumbling off a bit of the brick and setting it up to boil in an electric teakettle. “These kettles are very convenient, don’t you think? Cleaner than a fire.”
“How long have you been here?”
“I was born in the city. My parents had me educated in the language of most of these creatures, my brother also.” She had an accent, the tongue and larynx hadn’t been re-built, but she spoke like she thought in Karst I. “The old guys think Karst is a supernatural punishment region. This place doesn’t seem supernatural to me.”
“You did come from someplace else, originally, if you’re the same kind of people that I am.”
She looked at me, then checked the tea. “So you’re a cadet here when none of my kin are given a chance.”
“Why can’t your people become cadets?”
“Something about sponsorship. You say we came off another planet? What happened between when we came off and now, when you came off?”
“Parts of Earth are almost like here. We’ve got electric tea pots, cars, buses, airplanes, but we don’t use the transformation gates.”
