Becoming Alien (12 page)

How do dogs stand it, that never see another dog all their lives?
I felt like a smart puppy dragged into a world of super-intelligent bats and bears. But between Rhyodolite’s massage and the little pill, I felt my muscles loosen as though they’d been stretched gently.

“Well, it’s finally getting to you,” Tesseract said as I halfway fell asleep. “You want to lie down on the bunk?”

I blinked and nodded. He helped me up. “Am I really primitive? I scored high average for a cadet.”

“It’s not your theoretical capabilities. It’s what you’re used to.”

“Do we shock you? Are you more civilized?” He sat down by the bunk. I felt my face and said, “I need a shave. I can’t stay awake.” My eyes closed as he began explaining pre-cadets, swearing in, legacies, but I’d absorbed as much as could and went to sleep fast.

I slept on my back and didn’t even notice. No dreams.

Sometime later, I heard humming. Rhyodolite and Cadmium, bodies twined together, stood by my bunk, the lumps under their chins vibrating, grown back despite all the human transform surgery. Their weirdness was almost comic this morning. I pulled on my pants and blinked at them, then reached for my toilet bag. The razor was gone. “Did someone take my razor?” I asked, suddenly a bit chilled.

They pushed me up between them and rocked me sideways. “Don’t worry about it,” Cadmium replied.

“Your web armpit is really smelly, Red Clay. If you wave it again when my nose is fixed, Cadmium and I both will be really upset,” Rhyodolite said.

“Try not to be a human animal stranded among us,” Cadmium said. “Be Academy. Species after Academy, after the Federation.”

“At least,” Rhyodolite said, fake tits pressing against my side, “that’s what cadets are
told
to believe by the boss monster.”

Finally, my sore back woke up. “Hey. The places where they stuck me.”

Rhyodolite said something in Gwyng and explained, “Means red clay covered with aliens.”

“Where is my razor? Who’s the boss monster?”

“Meat-eating-ape, Tesseract said your ancestors defeated something like his,” Rhyodolite said. “So perhaps he’s afraid for you to have these hair-slicing things.”

“Can’t have it. Suicide precaution,” Cadmium said. “Come see Karst from space. It will make your face hair seem insignificant.”

Karst hung in space like a green milky marble, glowing. I wished I’d seen Earth from space.

Sitting at the controls, Black Amber moved a chrome stick—I heard gas hiss through the hull, and the ship pivoted. The disc expanded, filled the viewport, and we swung into nightfall. As we passed over, I noticed the land was mostly vacant, no lights like pictures of Earth from orbit. “Nobody down there?”

“The Federation needed a neutral multi-species city, but a city takes a whole planet to anchor it,” Tesseract said. “So we built a planet about five thousand years ago. Twenty million people live in Karst City or around it. Still room to expand.”

When we swung around to day, I looked at Karst City through a telescope. Three rivers, one glittering silver, the others green and broad, ran through the city into a huge bay with more built-up area wrapped around it. In the bay, I saw floating ships that might have been space liners. I was thrilled, a little scared. “Was the Academy responsible for building this?”

“Academy and Institutes,” Tesseract said.

“So big,” I murmured.

“Mos Eisley, it’s not,” said Rhyodolite.

But why did they take my razor? They worry too much about this xenofreaking.
What was I supposed to do, run amock with a plastic safety razor? As I put on a fresh uniform, Rhyodolite kept sneaking touches of the stubble.
Perhaps they want to humiliate me?
I refused to believe I could commit suicide with it.

“Next time, we’ll only know Karst languages, and you’ll have a computer plate in your head,” he told me. “And we’ll hear your tongue mess up in Karst for one-step-at-a-time brains.”

Cadmium spoke up then, “Just remember, ‘refugee’ in Karst I comes from dump heap. We picked you off a dump, didn’t we?”

“You two look like wax dummies left in the sun too long.”

“You look like a stinky-arm human being,” Cadmium said.

“Cut it out,” Tesseract said.

“If he can’t learn, we’ll send him to the fat-in-tea drinkers.”

Tesseract said something curt in alien to Cadmium. “You okay?” he asked me.

“Sure.” But I fluttered inside as he asked. “Is there anyone I salute when we leave the ship?”

Tesseract touched my shoulder. “Look, right now, you could crawl off the ship naked, and no one would think much of it. You aren’t considered sapient until you learn Karst languages.”

“Did I leave Earth for some sort of massive alien put-down?” I was pissed off, and afraid. Were they right to treat me like a fool?

“I know your people are quite technological, paleo-electric era, to borrow and shift English terms,” Tesseract said. 
“When you can write in Karst, thank the Rector for the appointment.”

A bell rang—Black Amber pulled on a headset with a microphone dangling in front of her muzzle. She spoke Gwyng into it, then reached up, her vestigial webs straining against her uniform sleeves as she pulled a short lever to close the window shields.

“These landings are so archaic when we have gates,” Cadmium said as he belted himself into a chair. Tesseract helped belt me down in another chair.

“This
is primitive?” I said, gripping the chair arms as the ship shuddered and groaned. Then we changed course again, a fierce hiss, weight lurching to the right. I felt vibrations through the seat as Black Amber pulled down three knife switches. Suddenly I weighed a ton.

The viewport shields parted. A huge, fabulous city, all cut stone and dark wood, swooped by. I’d never expected a space city to look old. Faceted glass, polished metal building trim and caps, copper roofs, then bushy green parks swirled by under us.

We shot over and landed outside the city on one of the runways I’d seen from space. A huge whomp came from the ship’s rear, and I was thrown way forward against my straps.

“So I’m not on Earth,” I said.

“Would you like a sedative?” one of the Barcons asked.

“No.” The aliens didn’t need to sedate this country boy; I was dazed enough and just sat while Tesseract undid the chair straps. Then I walked unsteadily to the viewport and looked out at the alien trees.

Green. More green. And the flowers bloomed in regular flower colors, faded and wilted now—I’d skipped spring. The buildings looked like airport buildings, despite being completely on another planet. Just all these aliens around.

“Are you okay?” S’wam, looking like an African growing fur, asked.

“Yeah. The plants look green.”

“Chlorophyll and hemoglobin here, too, like all the Galaxy we know about. Very economical to evolve—biochemical brothers. Come out. You can see more.”

I stepped down a rickety aluminum ladder, feeling light, not sure that was a different gravity or shock. Tesseract and the Barcons talked to each other in alien, nervously, I thought.

The Earth cats squalled in their boxes as Black Amber and the two still raggedly human-looking Gwyngs off-loaded them. Cadmium looked really weird in full light with Gwyng fur tufting up on his blond man’s body, short fuzz instead of stubble on his face.

Eerie, I thought, and started laughing.

“Don’t,” Cadmium said, his human face contorted with Gwyng concern. S’wam knelt beside a medical-looking bag. “You aliens worry too much,” I said, getting myself under control as S’wam brought out the injector cube. “No,” I said, gesturing him back.

Aliens went about their various jobs, hardly bothering to glance at me.
Refugees land here every
day
—that helped calm me down, but I was a bit pissed, too. I was the first human—no, not the first. Other human screw-ups lived on some primitive range. Barbaric me, whose brother shot an alien, was no surprise to these space sophisticates. A few looked over and moved their faces slightly. I blushed for my beard stubble.

Two curly-coated short aliens drove up in an electric cart and loaded it with baggage and cats, then drove across a runway that was non-shiny black, smoother than asphalt without being plastic-slick.

“We have a ride waiting,” Tesseract said, “and the Gwyngs are very tired of looking human.”

Karst’s sun shone in its blue sky, and aliens walked around as if spaceships landed every day, on that strange-surfaced runway which was dusty, little particles of dirt that looked just like Earth dirt, stirred by a breeze that felt no different from any Earth air. But I felt like I was being mildly electrocuted, all my muscles jangling.

Tesseract led me into a reception building where he got a tag for my wrist before we all climbed into something that looked like a commuter bus, grey and green paint peeling over the electric engine. While we were going down an expressway in what had to be a warehouse district, I fell asleep. I don’t believe they drugged me.

Tesseract shook me awake later and said, “Here’s the hospital where you’ll have the language operations. Go with S’wam and the Gwyngs. I’ll see you later.” I looked up and saw a big building, like a short-armed concrete cross, lots of stories, lots of windows. All the passing alien shapes ran together in my mind. S’wam, the sort-of-human Gwyngs, and I got off the bus and went inside.

The floors were covered in
something
like linoleum, but closer to rubber, noiseless underfoot. We walked to what looked like a nurses’ station with a waist-high counter and terminals, flatter screens than most Earth computers, and a drug trolley locked to a post.

Cadmium and Rhyodolite joked around with a pug-faced nurse who hunted behind the counter for our records. Really pug-faced, like a dog, and dark-skinned, she made me feel vaguely sick…

Rhyodolite finally asked the nurse for something, probably a phone, since she handed him a metal rod with flat discs on either end. He adjusted it to fit his face. Ah, like the toilets, I thought, as he talked. Then he gestured to Cadmium with a cupped hand and told S’wam and me, “Our own operations are scheduled here. We’ll be in touch.”

As they walked away, the Barcon handed the nurse a plastic card. She pushed it—I guessed it was data on me—into a computer, punched some keys, then handed S’wam back the card. He moved me toward the elevator.

Shit, we had to wait for it just like any other elevator. S’wam asked me if I was okay.

“You all look alien enough, but the sky’s blue, the dirt’s dirt, and the trees are green. We’ve got plastic. We could build a landing strip like that. It looks like Earth here.” I trembled a little. “But I feel lighter.”

“Denial is
very
soothing,” the Barcon said as the elevator door slid down. He gently took my elbow and pushed me in. “It goes up like an elevator,” I said.
Utterly too late and too far away to be scared…
my
life was way out of my control now.

On the sixth floor, we got out in a huge meeting room
with eight doors off to the side of one wall. I saw tall shiny black aliens, short fuzzy aliens, aliens with knees that bent backward, aliens with bones in funny places—skull crests, real sharp cheekbones. Fuzzy big aliens, fuzzy little aliens, naked-skinned aliens…until my mind jammed and refused to classify them any further.

Most were relaxed. But six acted like female kittens in first heat—wide-eyed, keeping lots of air in the old lungs. We were the ones here for the language operation.

I nearly freaked, looking at aliens being scared. Then I spotted the eighth of us, with an Ahram translator like Tesseract. He shielded her—a human-looking, female-looking, good-looking woman. Maybe another human, from Europe?

“Let me talk to
her,”
I said to S’wam.

S’wam talked to her translator and said, “She’s rather sedated. But you can try. She may look like you, but she’s not the same species. Very primitive planet.”

She smiled at me delicately, eyes not quite focused. I smiled, almost stroking her with my eyes—she was very delicate, four-foot-ten with a head almost too big for her body. Her mouth bent funny on the face, different.

I blushed again for my stubbly face and asked S’wam if I could come closer. S’wam talked to her translator, who asked her in a guttural language I couldn’t imagine her speaking, but she answered back in the same burrs and gargles.

“You’d be welcome. You don’t look like a nightmare,” S’wam said with a flick of his nose.

I stepped closer, feeling her body heat. I didn’t want to know whether she’d saved Karst people while I’d failed. She reached for my hand, her five fingers twining between my own. Both of us having flat fingernails with white tips seemed miraculous. She widened her eyes at me. I ached to go skinny-dipping in all that warm blue.

Then something really alien walked into the room—an olive and brown bird guy with soft-looking hands and scaly arms, here to welcome us. S’wam translated as the bird spoke. “He says now that we are to show you to your rooms.”

The translators fanned out behind us, ready to catch anyone who bolted. I remembered Tesseract said we weren’t considered fully sapient until we knew the languages. S’wam reached for my elbow, but I said, “I won’t run off. Let’s get settled in. Then I’d like to get away from the crowd for a while.”