by Rebecca Ore
“Not supposed to think so much about species differences,” Carbon-jet said as we passed them.
“You looked first,” I replied as we sat down at the end of Karriaagzh’s table. Karriaagzh and Sim glared at me, so I quickly shut up and sat very still.
Two tables faced each other across the pit—white hair against gray feathers. As the morning crept on, I found out how boring life-and-death negotiations could be.
Then Sim said, “Your people must know that attempting to suborn Yauntry intelligence is unethical.”
Looking at me and C-j, Karriaagzh replied, “I refuse to waive immunity retroactively.”
“We suspect contacts with you will de-stabilize us. The computer in the first ship was beyond anything we have. And what if a species tries to dominate the others?”
Karriaagzh said, “Only medicine is dominated by one species—the Barcons, who don’t use that against the rest of us.”
Sim looked for a Barcon, saw one, and shuddered slightly, then said, “Can we keep our native physicians?”
“Of course. And species don’t always agree along group lines. Close parallels can be most annoying.” Karriaagzh added in Yauntro, “Send observers to Karst from each corporation if they function as semi-independent political units.”
The discussions veered off into dull discussion of the nature of the observers on Karst and Yauntra, what Institutes might be observed, etc., etc.
Then Sim said, “And we must discuss retribution for the Federation damages to Yauntra’s defenses.”
“Define your Yauntro term ‘retribution,’” Karriaagzh said. As he listened, he slid his nictitating membranes a quarter way over his eyes and raised his feathers—deep in thought—while Sim explained slowly that the Yauntro term meant money for damages paid by a nation or corporation to another.
Suddenly Karriaagzh seemed to understand. His feathers snapped flat, the eyes opened wide, membranes back. “I believe,” he said stiffly, “that this is somewhat like a Karst II term that means, depending on pattern context, something similar to the Karst I word for punitive damages.” The crest started rising. “Punitive damages?”
Encoral Sim leaned his chin down on his folded arms as he listened to Karriaagzh.
The bird eased his crest down, all the time staring at Sim with those yellow eyes. “You can’t mean that,” Karriaagzh said. “Perhaps mutual recompense—we’ve both suffered from misunderstandings.”
Hargun closed his eyes and leaned back up, then suddenly caught Karriaagzh with a full gray stare. “Bird,” Sim said, “you’re so expressive for a feathered space creature. But not always convincing.”
“Perhaps the Federation could give money,” Karriaagzh said, “for startling you so badly. We understand your species is afflicted with xenophobia—most of you. Would this be offensive?”
Damn them, they enjoy this. Karriaagzh moved more fluidly than he let himself move on Karst, and he spoke damn good Yauntro from so short a study of it.
“We will admit to being startled,” Sim said with a smile, “if you pay your debt without disrupting our economy. We don’t use your currency or trade items could hurt our local manufacturers.”
“We’ll give you training. Your corporations and government can figure out how to use it,” Karriaagzh replied. Sim grimaced. Behind me, Yauntries drew in hissing breaths.
We all ate lunch standing around the table Karst-style as Karriaagzh’s Barcons and native Yauntry servants brought food in. The two negotiators kept hammering.
“Laws?” Encoral Sim asked, gray eyes slitted. “What laws will your visiting scholars obey? Ours? Yours?”
“Negotiator, except for sexual and eating behavior, we’d obey your laws on your planet. But give us time to learn them. We can’t waive immunity until we do. As for your students on Karst, should you send them, we would like to discuss how appropriate your laws would be in that context. We’ve given you copies of Federation legal codes and the rules of space claims, interplanetary trading.”
Sim looked briefly at me and Carbon-jet, the tokens in this game. “So many regulations. We’re still translating. How are we to protect our adjacent system space?”
“We protect any species’ title to its solar system—inside that is planetary business,” Karriaagzh answered.
Sim considered that as he chewed, then said, “What limits to raw materials? Anything necessary that the universe will run out of soon?”
“Considering the gates, and considering that we control breeding and migration on all systems except systems of origin—Yauntra’s solar system for your species—there are almost no limited resources.”
“Lithium? Aluminum?”
“Lithium’s rare, but no one forces you to sell.”
Hargun came up. “Will your creatures be decent among us?” he asked as Karriaagzh gorged on meat. “I’ve heard bird sapients get sexual pleasure from feeding gaping babies of any species. Will even feed inanimate objects.”
Karriaagzh grabbed his lower mandible. Muscles between his eyes quivered. His crest shot erect, and he stared at Carbon-jet, then at me.
I blushed. Eyes fixed on me, motionless even though the membranes slid back and forth across them, Karriaagzh said, “Sirs, I have as part of my mating and bonding behavior such an act. Under stress, the act comforts. Did you not share sex with your female, Hargun, when you came back here?” Karriaagzh seemed to stare into my brain, see me with Yangchenla. “While I’ve been away from my own kind for over fifty years, these drives are powerful, as much they amuse sneaky young mammals.” He finally looked away from me.
I raised my hands alongside of my nose, trembling.
Karriaagzh continued, “It is not equivalent to your vomit. We have an organ that cleanly grinds food and the bolus is odorless and very nutritious. The babies…”
“Hargun’s sorry he brought it up,” Sim said, “but your food-grinding organ was throbbing over his babies.”
Karriaagzh, nictitating membranes half covering his eyes, looked stiffly over the Encoral Sim’s head. “The Federation brings us knowledge of all the ways that Mind works out life systems. Yet, in our sex acts, we often look foolish. In following instincts that bind matter to mind, perhaps no species is completely intelligent. Between all of us…”
“You’re saying sex makes us fools?” Sim asked.
“One of my cadets was made a fool here, over sex,” Karriaagzh said as he slumped down to the floor, taking his meat plate with him, nibbling away with his beak.
I rushed out into the hall and Carbon-jet followed me out whistling merrily. “Sneaky young mammal,” he said.
I guess I shouldn’t have explained to them about the Rector. “They’d asked about it when he wriggled his crop at the Hargun kids,” I said, slipping into English.
“Karst I, boy, Karst.”
“He wriggled his throat organ at Hargun’s children. They must have connected what I said with Karriaagzh’s going out at the first dinner.”
“He made Hargun look prissy.”
That night, at a Yauntry-style formal dinner, I dodged my waiter and apologized to Karriaagzh.
He pecked my head almost hard. “For that, you wash the stones.”
Yuck, those meat-greasy stones. “Yes, sir,” I said.
“Carbon-jet was amused?”
“He thought you made the best of it.”
After dinner, I went to the Rector’s room. Karriaagzh was crouched on the red suede mat in front of an English falconry book, surrounded by feather-cleaning paraphernalia: sawdust in a big shaker, combs like serrated knives, oils, razors, towels, and plastic pins. Beyond the mat was his feather dryer. I looked at the tools and Karriaagzh; cleaning him feather by feather could get real old, real fast.
“Sit down beside me. I want you to read this.” Nervously, I sat, and he passed me the book, open to a section on feather repair—imping.
As I looked at the photo of a hawk on its back with a wing stretched out, Karriaagzh inspected himself in a three-way
mirror and said, “If you cut out the kinks on the bigger feathers and splice the feather segments together, I’d look less like a dirty old man.”
I was startled to hear more English, then felt guilty that I’d told the Yauntry about his pleasure reflex.
“Do these tonight,” he said, pointing to about ten feathers.
“The longer these negotiations last, the better I’ll look.” He caught my reflected eyes in the mirror. “Your species trained hunting birds—interesting to think about, for me.”
Where to begin? I cut and spliced, using glue and plastic needles inside the feather shafts. Down silkier than Granite’s came out in my hands and stuck to the glue. The musty feather smell made me gag. “What’s happening?” I asked.
“Molt,” he said. “It’s stressful for us.”
I sat behind him, holding the feathers until the glue hardened. After the last splice, Karriaagzh went to shower, taking a bottle of soap with him. I looked through the falconry book until he came padding back, totally sopping wet, the big hoof nails on each foot cut short. He patted himself carefully with a towel and turned on his dryer.
“Tom, what are Gwyngs to you?”
“Black Amber’s my sponsor. What else do you mean?”
“Wy’um, her heat. Did she use you to scare away the others?”
“Sir?” I wasn’t raised by Warren for nothing. Sometimes, it was better to seem stupid. “I just made tea. Did get tackled by one—I can’t tell them all apart.”
Silently, since I was supposed to have cleaned him earlier, he showed me how to spread preening oil. This close up, I saw patterns of lighter and darker gray on his body feathers and upper limbs.
“Red Clay, do you like knowing things that no human who mocked you as a parolee will ever know?”
“That’s not why I came to Karst,” I said, a bit hotly. “And Amber’s right about real primitives. Calcite, another refugee, freaked out. Barcons killed her personality to keep the body alive.”
He didn’t reply, just combed himself where he could reach, then handed me the combs. “I thought you weren’t so tactile,” I said when I began to comb his back, him crouched with half-closed eyes between my feet.
“We don’t gather information with fingers.” He opened his eyes and looked at mine in the mirror again. “Tug on the new feather sheaths, don’t force them off,” he said, shutting his eyes and crooning softly to himself as I worked.
“I think I’ve finished.”
He opened his eyes, bottom lids dropping slowly, head very heavy, and turned around. “Good work for a novice.”
Stiffly, I backed away, sure I’d get the tedious jobs this trip. He asked, “Would reciprocal grooming be polite?”
“I owed you after today.”
“Why did you tell them about my pleasure reflex? It made me seem terribly strange.”
“They thought you wanted to eat the Hargun children, so I had to explain.”
“Rhyodolite took you to spy on me. Gwyngs can be hateful. And you were aroused by Black Amber’s mating.”
He took my arm and sat me down between his spread-out toes, poured oil on his hands, which were softer than I’d expected, and chopped the soreness out of my neck.
“I know a bit about mammal back muscles.” He rubbed a bit lower. “Many creatures strengthen social units with reciprocal grooming. Only sapients create social grooming analogs—trade, tourism, storytelling.”
“Barcons? They’re not so social.”
“Pairs and families—brain parasites on their home planet make strangers affectionate. We’re lucky they don’t think us infected with brain worms and kill us.” His thumbs mashed down on either side of my spine. Even if a woman had done it, the massage was too rough to be sexy, but it hurt good.
“You’ve been quite tense?”
“Of course,” I said.
“I’d like you to stay on Yauntra.”
“No.” Yangchenla!
“If we surrender someone, they’ll have proved they’re lords of their own planet,” he said.
Not me! All my muscles coiled up again, my stomach burning. We both stood up, and I wished him good night. He settled back down on his suede-covered mat.
Two days later, Karriaagzh brought the Karst people to his room and told us, “You’re now under Yauntra inter-corporate treaty and criminal laws. Contacts with Yauntries who suggest illegal activities must be reported to me and either Edwir Hargun or the Encoral Sim within six hours. No texts can leave Yauntra without releases signed by the Encoral Ragar Sim. Don’t speak to each other in analog Karst II.”
Carbon-jet leaned back, mouth slightly open, tongue flickering over sharp teeth, face skin crinkled.
“Red Clay, Carbon-jet, Sim suggested immunity for the others if I would surrender you both on past espionage conspiracy. I refused. Hargun was also opposed, on Tom’s behalf.”
“One question, Rector-who-has been-suspended,” Carbon-jet said. “Why are you here? I thought you had clout enough to avoid a potential embarrassment, and Yauntra may be quite embarrassing to you.”
“If I did overreact, then I should settle the problem I started, Rector or not. And, Carbon-jet, I save my political credit for really important matters.”
“Yes?”
“Carbon-jet, I tell you to stay away from the corporate crests.”
Edwir Hargun called to ask me if I was ready to begin trade work. “I hope,” he said, “that you weren’t offended by what I said on the video.”
“Nah, I figured that was just politics.” I felt weird talking to Hargun; his boss, maybe even mine, wanted me jailed. Jail again—far away and very alone, this time. But Hargun had defended me.
That afternoon, we worked at the estate. Hargun brought a Yauntry computer—old fluist—to read our non-graphics trade list. Each offering had been current when we left Karst.
The room was plain, white, like an ex-kitchen, with the Yauntry equivalent of roller blinds, a table for the computer, and unpadded wooden chairs for us.
Both of us moved around the room stiffly. Hargun knew almost too much about me: he’d seen me shaking with terror after the Yauntries shot Xenon; he’d been at Tesseract’s when Yangchenla visited me. If Tesseract and Ammalla had paid her to fuck me, maybe he knew. After Hargun set up the operating system, I loaded the first non-graphic card. “Push this,” Hargun told me. “The operating system varies some from spoken Yauntry.”
The list began to scroll—and went scrolling on, our monster. The first day, first Hargun watched it, jotting down frame numbers, then me, mumbling the items, noting whatever caught Hargun’s interest. Intimidating Federation—technology beyond my dreams, from planets utterly more advanced than Earth.
That afternoon, Hargun stopped the machine. “We must be primitive! What are Jerek sterile entertainers? What are Llammash space net matrices? Biochips, core-riding plasma containers, deep space mining tori!” He yanked the card out of the computer and stared at it. “Don’t be insulted, but I’m glad you’re not from one of those planets. How much more primitive are you compared to us?”
I thought a bit—I hadn’t seen either Earth’s or Yauntra’s most advanced technology. “Say, twenty years behind you.”
“And our computer,” Hargun stabbed viciously toward the computer screen, “doesn’t intimidate you?”
“On Karst,” I said, “the teaching computer works in our regular languages, one non-linear. And lines per inch, scan dot sizes—all that changes to fit the graphics you want.” I sounded dazed.
“What is the capacity of your teaching computer?”
“Main storage is on a crystal discontinuity, semi-liquid iron crystals, with microgates, like the ships. Your computer here looks like Earth ones, bit more sophisticated ROM storage.” I leaned against the wall, suddenly awed by my pet terminal on Karst.
Hargun got up out of the operator’s chair and asked me to key in fluist/computer. Over thirty planets offered computer plans—molecular chips, crystal-discontinuity storage wi
th microgates, laser crystal matrixing—more advanced than what Yauntra had.
Hargun yanked the card and asked me to let him have the chair. He ran an economics model program. Let lithium be high—Yauntra would be less affected, but might not get the highest-tech computers. Let lithium be low—local industries were suddenly obsolete. He stared at the screen, stabbing keys.
“You can’t tempt us like this. Cruel.”
“You’re blaming Karst if the technology tempts you?”
“Impacting technology. Sim asked me to check computers.” He put the trade list back up and scrolled through computers again, then pulled a printout.
“Not my fault,” I said.
A night later, Carbon-jet asked me into his room to watch Karriaagzh on television. As I came in with a quilt, C-j lay on his mattress looking up at Karriaagzh’s image. The Rector, dressed only in feathers, explained, “I’m really lighter than I appear, about twenty percent lighter per volume area than a mammal would be.”
“Yeah, filled with hot air. And he seems so helpless,” C-j interjected, “when he closes his eyes, the bottom lid so hurtly sliding up. Red Clay, do you think birds are less calculating because they’ve got wired-upside-down eyelids and because they weigh twenty percent less than a seven-to-eight-foot mammal would weigh?”
I shrugged and wrapped the quilt around me. On-screen, Karriaagzh and the Encoral Sim agreed that Yauntra would control its own solar system.
“We’ve always said,” Sim commented, “that the satellite was not launched to leave our solar system, but was rather a deep probe to investigate our hydrocarbon reserves.” Karriaagzh, hunkered down on his shins, admitted that the Federation infringed by entering the system.
Neither Karriaagzh nor Sim mentioned the Federation blockade. “The Encorals promise Yauntra that satellite thieves can’t force trade concessions damaging to the local corporations,” Sim said.
“Oh, shit,” I said as Karriaagzh asked for a translation of the Yauntro term “force concessions.” Repeating the phrase, accent shifting across the syllables in several politeness forms, Karriaagzh puffed up his feathers and hauled out his eye shields, much, I guessed, to the utter fascination of all Yauntra.
