Becoming Alien

by Rebecca Ore

  Suddenly, I saw the exact muscles quivering in Filla’s face, arms, the Yauntry cops brown and yellow suits. The cop on my left had an insect bite on his jaw, grass stains on one knee.

  Snap—gone. Carbon-jet had pulled the thing off my head. “Very interesting device, Jerek,” I said. “So I don’t have to take notes?”

  “And your skull computer records, also. Wash and dry your hair before you leave.”

  And if I got killed, they could read out my last minutes. “How many bytes does the skull computer store?”

  “Hour loops of what you hear and an equivalent amount of biodata, without disturbing the translator program.”

  Filla and I worked for a couple of weeks without speaking to each other more than linguistics work required—more, actually, than I wanted to talk to her.

  And she got paler and paler. Finally, I noticed her hair begin to turn light blond. After we finished for the morning one day, she begged me, third-degree-formality Yauntro, to have lunch with her.

  Carbon-jet fleered his lips and told me to go ahead. Filla took me to a small restaurant, into a back room with separate chairs and individual little tables, so we sat apart. A waiter brought us dishes of jellied starch with meat and strips of vegetables.

  She said, still being most polite, “I’m sorry if I insulted you by taking exception to your appearance. It has its charms.”

  “Fuck it. Your people and my people are using us. Let’s discuss how to deal with that.” I used bare forms, without politeness affixes, business talk.

  She looked at me with at shock. “I didn’t tell them I’d failed. I couldn’t.” Hastily, she began eating as I picked among the strange vegetables, watching her look up nervously from time to time. “Perhaps,” she finally said, not as politely, but not sheer business either, “I’ll bring my brother with us. Leave the Jerek here—too mocking.”

  “Well, I can’t protect you this fast against brain games,” Carbon-jet said, “or truth drugs and scanners, if they’ve got such stuff, but we can always trace you through your computer if we’re above the local horizon.”

  “You want me to go ahead, then,” I said, rather wishing he’d say no.

  “We know who you’re supposed to be with and when you’re supposed to return. Why would they link you with Filla if they were arranging an accident?”

  As Filla drove up the scarp road, I realized, mountainous or not, the countryside didn’t look like rural Virginia, but was really sub-tropical. That earlier weekend, my eyes had done the brain’s own wish-landscaping.

  And the little house on the second terrace above the creek was the Yauntry miniature of the Karst planet stage-set business. When we got to the house built for me, I saw another Yauntry car, bigger than Filla’s, parked by the woodshed. Her “brother,” a huge Yauntry the size of Tesseract, opened the door, peered out suspiciously, then helped Filla with her bags.

  I started in, but the brother-type said, “Stand and spread your arms.”

  As he moved a metal disc over me, I said, “What makes me mad is how casual my people are about this. I think the fact that a spy female—so obvious—picked me up would have caused more excitement. They didn’t give me any advice or anything.”

  The disc paused upside of my head. “Shut up.”

  My head exploded in a hideous screech, like forty million fingernails on real slate blackboards. As soon as I could hear again, the man asked, “That?”

  “Tr-translates Gwyng, Karst II languages for me.”

  Nervous about touching me, he twisted my head to the side with his fingertips, then tapped the artificial bone. “Would it kill you to take it out?”

  Suddenly, I had to try very hard not to piss in my pants. “It’s just a language computer for Karst II.” I thought about how isolated I was. Oh, so sorry. Accident on mountain road claims alien life. Filla mourns.

  “You don’t need it to talk to us?” he asked, watching me sweat. “Come in, now.”

  “No,” I answered, stepping inside.

  Sitting at a table, he opened a gray anodized box with black dials with white lettering and pulled out two electrodes. “Come here.” I did, and he pasted the two electrodes on my skull. My ears rang; I saw a dial move, stop. “Well,” he said, “if your skull computer did have any other functions you didn’t mention…”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “We want contact with our cadets, if we send cadets. A non-Yauntry could transmit messages less conspicuously.” He turned my skull in his hands again and spoke to Filla in a language I didn’t understand. “Do species conspire against each other by type group? We’re both from tropical brachiators so we should be allies.”

  “I don’t know anything about that. I’m new there.” The Yauntries stank, of sweat and rotten flowers. Slowly, I got up and walked out. The brother followed me to the woodpile, which had been covered with clear plastic since Filla’d taken me and Carbon-jet up here.

  “She says,” the brother told me, “that you were shy, so we lightened her skin and hair to make her more like you.”

  I dropped a heap of little branches in his arms, and said, “Is that a fact?” in English, watching carefully to see if he was going to drop the wood and hit me. “She lied. She’s terrified of me. It hurts.”

  After I picked up more wood, we went back inside, and I stacked the wood away from the stove. The two aliens watched me build the fire, stabbing inside the counterfeit stove with an imitation Earth poker. Finally, I said, “What do you want to know? I’ll tell my guys and report back on how they react.”

  They seemed to be calculating the poker’s length, checking me for strange sprouting hairs, or, God knows, sudden tentacles.

  “You make me feel alien,” I told them, hating feeling so alone. “You guys made me feel horrible from the first day your troops pinned us down with your gravity jerking.”

  “Monsters for companions,” the man said.

  I started to pace the floor, swinging the poker until I saw sheer terror on their faces, the hands inside their clothes. This was how Xenon died. He was scared and they were scared. Slowly, as if they had their guns trained on me already, I put the poker down, and sat down on the floor, legs tucked up tailor-style. “The Gwyngs don’t make me feel this alien. It’s bad enough being the intelligent talking creature who fixes tea when the guests come. But a makes-you-nervous alien? Your eyes are round enough; don’t stare at me like that. I don’t have any weapons on me. I’m sitting down. Okay, I’ll lean back on my hands.” I did precisely that, wondering if they could follow all that Karst.

  Suddenly, I floated outside the scene, outside my body—as one intelligent ape of one species talked to two of another—all of us alien. Tufts of hair marked my armpit and groin glands—not like a chimpanzee. I could grow face hair to my hairy chest, with only a strip of slick forehead, nose, and cheek skin bare. Not too different from Carbon-jet, after all.

  Sure was a weird alien sitting in front of them. Filla looked like she was going to have hysterics, but the universe never uses exactly the same pattern each time it forces a beast to think.

  What burdens thoughts could be, I decided as I choked on a laugh. Monkeys. And the Gwyngs were such perfect bats—if you’re into thoughtful mob sociability, then you’ve got to be a Gwyng.

  Finally, I got myself under control, leaned up, hands to my face, almost in tears. The Yauntries still had their hands on concealed weapons, but they seemed to recognize tears as a reasonable reaction to the situation. “We don’t understand all you spoke,” the male said.

  “No, I understand,” Filla countered, which touched off a spate of talking in a language I couldn’t follow.

  “So I grow face hairs,” I muttered dumbly.

  “Filla, take him for a walk.”

  They must have given her a good weapon, because she looked more confident about being alone with me than the last time. She stayed five paces or so behind me, so I just rambled around, going down to the spring, while I thought about ho
w badly I must have wanted to see resemblances to Virginia to have imagined myself back in similar country. But then, I could never go home again, despite Yauntry armed women and spies radioing back and forth for instructions.

  “You smell odd,” Filla said behind me. “You stink, of dead flowers.”

  Back at the house, the whole scene seemed ridiculous—all us sweating in fear of each other while the big guys…what were the big guys really doing? Filla looked at her brother Yauntry, who smiled faintly.

  “I’m not trained for this,” I told him. “If Filla wasn’t trained either, the whole incident is absolutely stupid.”

  “Perhaps your Karst masters chose you because you’re not so valuable.”

  I had no planet to back me; that was true. “What about Filla? What if I’d just eaten her?” I dropped my arms, lowered my shoulders, and shambled, ape-style, toward her. She pulled out her weapon, all nice and chromed, and grinned, teeth bare. “Shit,” I said. “You’re supposed to have fallen in love with me?”

  The male motioned for her to put the weapon away. It looked like a 9 mm automatic—big. “Filla admitted last night that she finds the idea of sex with aliens revolting.”

  “I’d have slept with her, but she obviously doesn’t like to be around me except with her killing thing.”

  “Sit down,” the brother said in rudest Yauntro. Low business. “What do you know about the tribute the Federation wants us to pay?”

  “Tribute?” I hadn’t thought about that, but the Academy and Institutes couldn’t be cheap to run.

  “Yes,” he said, standing in front of me. “They want us to pay tribute on interstellar commerce in Federation ships, or through Federation gates. Your Federation monopolizes the known geometries to force money from us.”

  “All I knew was that I’d get a share of duties since I was one of those who first-contacted Yauntra. I don’t know anything more.”

  “Plus charges on all things your many species claim to have invented first. I suspect honest independent discoveries aren’t allowed in your Federation universe. “

  “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Are we supposed to kill you and then be made guilty?” He stared at me, suddenly nervous. Maybe he’d taken an alien bait? “Just how long have you been with these people?”

  “Around two years. Less.”

  “What cargoes fly between planets?”

  “Art things. Computer discs. Some minerals…lithium. Ideas are the main trade item,” I said, remembering the bit about ideas from a history lesson.

  “We have lithium, also hydrocarbons.” He sat down heavily and leaned toward me. “Can you appreciate our position?” One grade of politeness.

  “You’ve got me curious,” I said. “I appreciate your reluctance to trust the Federation, and I hope you understand why I can’t trust you.”

  “Personal or political mistrust?”

  “Personal, because you look at me as if I were a monster, armed as you are.”

  “We have xenophobia, as your people reported to Karst,” he said. “Do you understand us now?”

  A denial would have been more soothing. Filla had just sat there, listening. Now she got up, stretched, and said, “Tom, Red Clay, I am sorry. But my experiences didn’t include sex with hairy creatures.”

  The phrase So human an animal drifted through my roiled brain.

  “We’ll eat now,” Filla said.

  The male and I watched each other while Filla cooked. “What is your Rector?” he said suddenly.

  “A solitary bird. But his kind has space capacities, just doesn’t use them.”

  “Tell Carbon-jet we plan to subvert the bird control of the Federation by organizing a tropical-species resistance group, ex-brachiators.”

  “Apes,” I said in the Karst slang for our stock.

  “Yes, we will pit apes against feathered lizards,”

  “It doesn’t work that way. I’ll have to tell them all about our conversations.”

  “We understand that.” He smiled. I wondered if he knew how fully I could reconstruct the conversations. Filla came in with dinner, and we ate out of bowls held in our various laps, each watching each for bad manners or totally alien weirdnesses.

  Then I wondered if they’d given me more than an hour of pure silence.

  Back with the pointed-nose Carbon-jet, memory-jogging plate to my skull, I asked, “Do you want to know what color his clothes were?”

  “Just tell me exactly what was said, including foreign-language statements.” He reached over my shoulder to punch on a recorder, then stood behind me, holding the plate steady.

  Exactly. Down the time line. I could even taste the food I’d eaten when we’d finished talking. After I’d told all my memory held, Carbon-jet tugged the plate—wet plop as it pulled away from my jellied hair and scalp. “We undid what they did to your skull computer, also,” Carbon-jet said. Weird. I went to wash my hair and dried it before I came back to Carbon-jet.

  When I returned, C-j was entering data furiously on his terminal. The display changed, and he wrote strange characters with a light pen before saying, “I wish I could meet the Yauntry responsible for this move, especially since they knew I sent you.”

  I was caught between two young intelligence officers strutting their stuff—elaborating lies and honesties for pure cleverness. Agile minds—I almost suspected Carbon-jet of being yet another ape.

  The next day, Yauntry cops with big smiles came to the library room where Carbon-jet and I were working and told us, “No Federation creatures or message pods can leave Yauntra until the Xi’isisom files are returned.”

  Carbon-jet stared at them with his challenge face, nose tucked down, the whole T of naked face skin even shinier. His microfilms for Karst—not going. Since nobody got radio waves to beat Einstein, Tykwing, et al., C-j’s information was stuck on Yauntra. Unmanned message pods were easy to trap in gravity nets.

  We couldn’t find a data entry for the missing materials under the title they’d given us.

  Next morning when we woke up, Carbon-jet and I debated whether to go back to the sub-basement or not. We went, thinking that since we weren’t guilty, we might as well keep working.

  Filla and the male Yauntry who’d been at the cabin last time were both there, looking at me as if they knew I was bait, but still, hook and all, they had to take me.

  “Would you like to go back to the country?” Filla asked, her hair back to a more normal Yauntry color.

  “No,” I said.

  Carbon-jet looked up at the silent male and lowered his nose slightly, then raised it when the male smiled and moved a hand to his waistband. Where human pants had pockets, the Yauntry pants had a fold and a lump…there, that’s where the gun is. Carbon-jet said, “Tom, maybe you’d better go with them.”

  “Come on, Red Clay Tum, we won’t hurt you.”

  “Why is everyone doing this to me?” I gripped the chair, then saw Carbon-jet’s rigid face and went with them. The country we drove through looked less and less Earthy. We went to a different cabin, stone and cold, up in their tropical highlands.

  I’d come only with the clothes I had on, but they produced other things of mine someone must have snagged from the apartment.

  At first, I was really scared, thought they’d kill me, or bring me up on spy charges and pen me here alone on Yauntra forever. Or maybe, I figured when they didn’t speak to me but locked me in a stone room with an iron door, they were waiting to see what Karst would do.

  Since they’d forgotten my razor, I grew stubble, which exasperated Filla. The two Yauntries were so damn wary around me, either keeping a jump away or crowding in close, sweating through the old parallel armpit glands. Stink glands. They’d both walk me outside by a little creek where I’d flip stones over to uncover flat crabs that were Yauntra analogs to crayfish.

  The third day, the male said, “So far, they’ve done nothing for you, animal.”

  I sat hunched up against m
y room’s stone wall, staring at him. It seemed we sat for days, them watching my face hair grow, my mind tightening up in a knot, blanking out the alien people, landscape.

  “You’re destroying me,” I finally said.

  “Take him outside,” he told Filla.

  As she walked behind me, I wondered what I could eat to make myself sick, force them to take me to a hospital, something. But they might let me die. Alien should have known fuji was poison.

  Finally, one day, a phone buzzed. Filla’s brother took it off the wall and into a separate room, then came back, scowling, talking with Filla in their strange language.

  “We’ll have company soon,” she said to me.

  After about an hour, we heard cars driving toward the house. Then I saw, out the window, at least a dozen Barcons and Jereks. The Rector Karriaagzh ducked through the door, with a needle-gun in his four-fingered hand, crest erect and quivering, followed by Carbon-jet, Black Amber, and Edwir Hargun.

  “He tried to disgust us by the neglect of his personal grooming,” Filla said in Karst. Black Amber’s nostrils clapped, but then she oo’ed at me.

  “Shut up,” Karriaagzh said in Yauntro. He invaded the Yauntries’ personal space with beak and toes. Filla backed against the farthest wall.

  “Sir,” I said, “they think you’re the Federation’s ruler.”

  Karriaagzh looked at the frightened Yauntries and at Black Amber, who kept her own distance. He coughed, then said, “If I were, I wouldn’t be here.” Looking at Hargun, he asked, “Does my height affect your judgment so adversely?” Hargun studied the cold stone floor and his own people’s faces.

  I wasn’t sure what was happening, but Edwir Hargun didn’t give me or C-j any eye contact. Occasionally, he’d squint at the Rector as we all got into various cars, including one without a rear seat for Karriaagzh.

  We drove back down the mountain to a landing grid, outside Uzir. When the cars emptied out, we all stood around the blue light bringing in another Karst ship. Hargun looked at all the Barcons and Jereks with guns, miniature robot cannons cruising like vicious high-tech turtles, while Black Amber watched Karriaagzh as if he were the dangerous one.