Becoming Alien
Page 36
“But will you have contempt for Hargun for his belonging to Sim?” he said.
“No, I can’t,” I said, remembering the first time I saw Hargun, when he was afraid of me but was trying to be kind. “He is what he is. Sir, you acted differently when you talked with the Yauntry. Different with other species. What’s the real bird?”
“I’ve been rather a long time among mammals.” He wiped his beak with his hands. “If I’m alone for a few days, then re-join you, it’s strange all over again.” He shrugged as I would have.
Then jets hissed and turned us into a night re-entry path. Karst City traffic lights below us moved like a galaxy on fast frame. My body surprised me—reacting as though I’d come home, relaxing, the dryness gone from my mouth, my lungs light with alien air.
“So we’re all Mind together? I don’t know if it is true, but I can believe it right now.”
Author Biography
Rebecca Ore was born in Louisville, KY, out of people from Kentucky and Virginia, Irish Catholic and French Protestant turned Southern Baptist on her mother’s side and Welsh and Borderer on her father’s. She grew up in South Carolina and fell in love with New York City from a distance, moved there in 1968 and lived on the Upper West Side and Lower East Side for seven years. Somehow, she also attended Columbia University School of General Studies while spending most of her energy in the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. In 1975, she moved to San Francisco for almost a year, then moved to Virginia, back and forth several places for several years, finished a Masters in English, then moved to rural Virginia for ten years, writing sf novels and living in her grandparent’s house after they died. Next came homeownership of a small house in Philadelphia with a walled garden, one wall stone and brick, one wall stone against a hill, and the west wall not there, since the neighbor and she shared the space.
She’s been mostly an academic gypsy and has been variously an editorial assistant for the Science Fiction Book Club, a reporter/photographer for the Patrick County Enterprise, and a assistant landscape gardener. She left Philadelphia after 12 years and ended up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, for a time. She is currently retired and living in Nicaragua after working for government sub-contractors for over a year.
Table of Contents
1 Floyd County, Virginia
2 Steel Things, Steel Places
3 Reframing Sense: The Language Operations
4 Xenophobia Variations
5 Breaking Down to Common Mind
6 The Other
7 Body Bribe
8 Brain Wishes
9 Alien Manners
10 Us and Them
Author Biography