Becoming Alien (15 page)

Black Amber looked from me to him, her lips loose, then pursed forward.

“You’re 100 percent congruent in proteins and DNA, RNA,” one of the Barcons said, “so you both are the same species. Red Clay, if you can’t stand the Academy, we’ll give you tools so you can try to make a place for yourself in their society. We thought we’d introduce you now.”

The human stared at me as if Karst I were gibberish. “Own kind,” the Barcon said to him. “Fresh family. Breeding permit.”

“No,” he said firmly in hideously accented Karst I.

“Yes,” the Barcon said. They weren’t arguing about the same thing, I thought.

The man stared around the room, at the lights even, as though he’d heard about places like this.
Yeah, and it’s just as bad as he’d thought.
“We sell to
Bon,
won’t take
spy-Bon
in. Want women for him, don’t you?”

“Bon
is root from their language for demon,” one of the Barcons told me.

I felt my face go hot. “Look, I want Academy training, not to get cut loose into some primitive tribe.”

The human stared at me. “We are not primitives. We are the only true beings here.”

“Sounds
just
like your people,” Black Amber said. She oo’ed, almost koo’ed, but pressed her thumb against her chin lump and spread the other fingers over her muzzle, her eyes sparkling maliciously. He stared at her, not comprehending, but perhaps picking up on the mocking tone. She buzzed a little picture of me in his clothes into my brain.

“I won’t go;” I said.

“No, but some contact might be more comfortable for you,” one of the Barcons said.

“I’m not that,” I said. “Even if he is
human.”

The man smiled a nasty smile, eyes very narrow, then he pulled back against the sofa, as if waiting for these creatures to turn him loose.

“Perhaps,” a Barcon said, “moving males from social group to social group is difficult. Maybe easier to move females. “

“My
daughters are not for sale,” the man said.

“There are others in the west side of Karst City,” one of the Barcons replied.

I asked, “When did they come here, anyway?”

“About five hundred average planet cycles ago. They need fresh DNA,” the other Barcon said.

“Demon, take me away from this,” the man said, standing up, arms bent slightly at the elbows, knees flexed, ready to die if need be to get out of this room.

“We can bribe some of them to take you, if you don’t prove capable of Academy work,” the biggest Barcon assured me as they led him out. “They’re poor enough.”

∞ ∞ ∞

I felt bad enough before Rhyodolite brought Calcite, dressed in brown, to Black Amber’s house. Brown, I figured, was a non-status color here. The Oriental and she both wore it.

“Oh, I think I remember you,” she said. “Weren’t you kind once?” Empty eyes, no
Calcite
there. Filed-down teeth gleamed when she smiled. A face shifts when memories go.
Like a zombie,
I thought, unable to speak to this body before me, a corpse tricked into living. She looked hurt that I wasn’t answering her. Mind-wipe
was
getting clubbed dead from inside the brain, and I was glad my brother was safely crazy in the Veterans Hospital.

Rhyodolite took her hand and led his pretty little zombie inside. Blood rushed to my cock and head, and I felt absolutely dizzy.

“Don’t do that to her,
man,”
I yelled at him.

He flexed his hand almost into a fist, a Gwyng gesture like our middle finger.

Black Amber didn’t like the girl being there either. The Gwyngs screamed at each other in languages my computer transformed into squalls I couldn’t put meaning to other than the obvious sense, the quarrel.”

I liked Black Amber better for yelling at him, and even better for sending Calcite away.

Rhyodolite didn’t walk with me on the beach that day. When I came back, he was down on the floor, other Gwyngs nipping at his armpit webs.

“Serves you right, you son of a bitch,”
I said in English.

He was too socially mobbable by other Gwyngs to stay angry long with aliens who didn’t tease-nip him. The next day, he sat down beside me on the beach and said, “Do you understand/accept?”

“No,” I said. “You’re a loser among your own kind, aren’t you?” We sat in the sand digging up little clams no bigger than my thumb joint to eat raw there on the suddenly chilly beach. “You people plan to rip my brains out, too? I’m just a junk kid myself. Waiting. Waiting.”

“You don’t eat your own kind, do you?”

“She was a
cannibal,
wasn’t she? Well, she was better off…”

“No. Reason (by her example) why we must avoid primitive planets. Too much shock, to them.”

“What about me?”

“Want to prove yourself?”

“Sure.”

“I am going to/want to return to active duty almost immediately-to-soon. You want to space-hop (punning image) with me, pre-cadet? I am capable (financially and in terms of authority) of sponsoring pre-cadet (for later cut in planet trade shares).”

“Who do I have to ask?”

“Black Amber and the Rector’s Man. Better/tentatively superior than you being bored/lonely here (when I leave anyway). Cadmium would come with me, but he’s training.”

“And?”

“They’ve assigned me to train a bird cadet. Better to have you to keep him away from me.” He paused and got up off the sand, dusting it out of his fur the best he could. Then he hunched slightly and said, “Don’t remind Black Amber (semi-dangerous to you now) of Mica.”

“I remind her of Mica every time she sees me.”

“Perspective problem/locked pattern sight. Out of vision, then pattern can shift. She may accept you as her cadet finally.”

“Oh.”

“Red Clay makes noise indicating perception?” Rhyodolite koo-chuckled. Then he leaned over in the surf to take a drink, knuckles down, knees bent, the muscle hump where his jaw met his throat bouncing up and down. In his left vestigial web, I saw a faint crescent of bruises where the crepe-like skin running from his shoulder blade joined his upper arm.

I touched the bruises and asked, “Calcite?”

He flinched.
Hurrah for her, nailed him despite brain-wipe and all.

Courteous and grave, the bird folded scaly forearms across his belly, and said, “I’m Xenon 7.” The bills, like stiff lips, immobilized his face—no facial expressions. When he unfolded his arms, his black cadet’s uniform slid awkwardly off his olive shoulder feathers.

Avoiding the creature’s brown eyes, Rhyodolite shuddered slightly and said, “Tom, put his bag up.”

Xenon’s hand was soft as a human’s, softer, I noticed, when he passed his bag to me. I stowed food cases and clothes bags, then we sat inside the ship while the ground crew loaded it on a net for gating.

Those trips I was the junior flunky: twist that dial, mix Rhyo’s space food formula, develop this chip fast—the computer’s flinked, and flinked computers kill. In the monotonous cargo stations, each lit the same, each heated or cooled to the same temperature all over the Federation, the bird cadet stuck close to us, nervously.

But Rhyo was edgy as though neither of us were a good shipmate. He’d brought a kitten along to sleep with, but some sleep periods, the black kitten would ignore Rhyodolite and play with the bird’s feathers, thin and long like cock hackle all over. “Tom,” Rhyodolite would ask, “catch it for me so I can sleep.” The bird would lean back, sighing, from the cat, no expression on its beaked face.

One stop before Carg, a newly contacted bird world, Rhyo got wonked on drugs and alternately giggled at us and wept until we reached Carg Station.

We took on new cadet candidates there, nine birds, bigger than Xenon. They goggled at our bird, Rhyodolite, and me, as though we were all equally strange.

Aloof in his operator’s chair, Rhyodolite watched them through a drugged haze, but one came up to him on backward-bent legs, feathers puffed slightly, head weaving from side to side. “Need (we all) Karst practice,” it said, in slow and roughly aspirated Karst II. “We must memorize sounds/sonic maps/drawings since mammal doctors can’t/won’t work skull computers and learning drugs for us.”

Rhyodolite hit all the gates fast and dropped into pre-landing orbit, hardly giving us time to strap down for reentry. After Rhyodolite landed and shut down the ship, all the birds, including Xenon, climbed unsteadily down the ladder. Slumped in his chair, Rhyodolite flexed his nostril slits, staring out a viewport. Representatives of the two other Federation bird species helped the new cadets onto buses. “Xenophobe, yourself,” I said.

“Things like those used to eat (and may not have stopped) little (image of a bat walking upright, wings spread for balance. Like crawling-rib (snake image) for you?”

“I don’t hate
snakes,
crawling-rib creatures.”

“No lethal intentions toward birds (from us). Just armskin/flight nerves/web muscle jumps.”

“The Rector’s a bird. Does this complicate the tension between him and Black Amber?”

As the last pre-cadet who’d flown with us hopped up the bus steps, Rhyodolite said, “The Rector is my nightmare. 
Bird-possessed poor me.”

“Black Amber?”

“Hush/stop prying.”

After reporting in, Rhyo and I took a black bus, with a Gwyng squiggle on it, back to Black Amber’s.

The next morning, I tried to explain Frisbees. Odd, to be lonely for Frisbees, I thought as Rhyo lathed down some plastic the way I’d described.

On the beach, I tossed it to Rhyodolite. Rhyo koo’ed hysterically as he caught it backhand, then threw it up over my head on a great boomeranging loop. I turned and caught it, then saw Black Amber coming.

Brooding in gold and green Under-Rector’s clothes, she trudged through the sand, dark eyes on the Frisbee. Then she said, “Rhyodolite, first contact mission. Come (abruptly/ now) talk (with me).”

“You (Red Clay and Xenon) can’t come on this,” Rhyodolite said. “Dangerous.”

After Rhyo left, Black Amber slept with cats, went into Karst City on business, and avoided me. Tesseract came four times to improve my English, bringing books so technical I knew only in Karst how to explain the diagrams. And I preferred to talk in Karst. English made me homesick. “Interesting book here, Tom. An American astrophysicist’s theorized a space gate. His aliens—holy from space again! But your people are thinking.”

“I miss Rhyodolite,” I told Tesseract. “But he’s not much of an officer, is he?”

“He does better with mammals than birds.”

Two weeks later, Rhyodolite opened the veranda door and said, “It was horrid.” Black Amber slingshotted herself out of a padded tube with both hands, koo’ing, weaving her body back and forth as soon as she stood up.

Rhyodolite stumbled to her. She tucked him up against her side and brushed her muzzle along his lip comers and eyelids. Twined together, they talked in a Gwyng language my computer couldn’t slice right. She led him to a pile of floor cushions and both, trembling, sank into them.

“Are you tired?” I asked him.

“Dead-body-eating-ape question. If the gravity well/trap we’d set hadn’t been there, they would have gated into their sun. Now most upset to find they must share the universe. Xenophobes like you.”

“I’m not such a xenophobe,” I said.

Black Amber cradled him and nibbled his hands, then said, “Federation needs drug traps/automatic sedation of ships caught in the gate nets.” She nodded to the air as she spoke, a long big campaign of the Under-Rector’s—avoid or drug primitive stupids. I slunk off to bed, a refugee.

The next morning, while Rhyodolite and Black Amber slept with cats and baby Gwyngs, I answered their phone. A deep voice asked, in rough Karst II, to speak to Black Amber. When I said she was asleep, the voice switched to Karst I and said, “Tell her it’s Karriaagzh.”

The
bird. “Certainly,” I said. I went into the Gwyng sleeping room, touched Amber gently, and said, “The Rector’s on the phone.”

She stretched and froze, then slid herself free of the Gwyngs’ tangled limbs, wrapped cloth around her pouch and genital slits, then came out.

Nodding slightly, she listened to the Rector, then hung up with a deep head bob. “The Rector will come(self-invited) to the house soon,” she told me. Then she nibbled her palms and went back to the sleeping room.

About an hour later, when a medium-sized gray electric car pulled up, Black Amber, in a pink shift that bared her webs, came out to the steps. Shouldn’t she wear her uniform? I wondered. The web veins were distended, and the air smelled of alcohol. I looked closer and saw that her webs were damp, as though she’d tried to cool them off.

Without help from his driver, the Rector unfolded himself from the seatless back of the car—huge bird, moving slowly. He cocked his head sideways at Amber and bent his hocks. If he’d stood erect, he’d have been at least eight feet tall.

Black Amber, blocking my way, stood on the stairs so she could look down at him. One leg dabbed out toward him, twisting, as though she was fending him off. Are they going to attack each other? I wondered.

“Rector Karring’cha, we mistook/misunderstood (due to family preoccupations) when you were coming (deny evasion). Would you (female talking to male) come in and (hide your feathers) discuss (paying attention to
me)
the problems we’ve had with first contacts? Last mission badly handled.”

No expression on the bird face—bony ridges shaded his yellow eyes. The arms twitched, though—arms longer than most aliens’, then grey crest feathers ruffled and rose as he listened.
She’s insulted the hell out of him.

He was scary, huge, impassive, grey feathers clamped tight to his body. I kept looking at him—feathers covered the blade-shaped upper arms but tapered off to scales on his lower arms and to yellow skin on his hands and fingers. He smoothed his thigh feathers and shuffled his strange shoes.

Those yellow eyes found me sitting by a piling. I duck
ed my head a bit, then flushed that he might think I’d nodded hostilely. Karriaagzh slowly blinked at me before looking back up at Amber. “Black Amber,” he said in Karst II, “my respect for you/r opinions, but life and space (both) have risks. If you(r species) wishes to avoid first contacts, I will most eagerly assign you (and every Gwyng) to safer duties.”

Black Amber kicked the air. She jerked her foot back and shifted her weight onto it, but the foot still twitched. “We do not leave our own to die in space or on primitive planets Federation policy/rule centuries before we landed you/refugee, bird Rector.”

The Rector looked at me again and twitched his beak sideways, as though preening the air, then cocked his head, not looking back at Amber, his gaze drifting away from both of us.

“My apologies, Rector,” Black Amber finally said. Her fists clenched.

The Rector looked at the fists, then locked eyes with Black Amber. She trembled; he raised his crest high. Then the giant bird sighed as though he should have given up on this bitch long ago, lowered his crest, and got back in his car.

After the car pulled out of sight, Black Amber smeared fist gland secretions furiously on the stairs and railing. I wondered if she hated being afraid of him.

Rhyodolite slept through the Rector and Black Amber’s meeting. His superior officer called him that afternoon with Karriaagzh’s side of the conversation. Rhyo jerked the phone away from his ear, bobbed his head at the earpiece several times, then pulled the receiver close, screaming, “No one, not
any
sapient
ever
accused Gwyngs of cowardice,” and hung up.

“That’s too much,” he said to me. He walked—almost lurching—down the stairs and wiped his fists over and over where Black Amber’d left her own anger secretions earlier.

Gwyng kids started using the side and back stairs. The other Gwyngs up and down the beach stopped visiting until the smell faded three days later.

Relentlessly, Black Amber had Tesseract train me in proper English. Yet she refused to be my sponsor or help me find one.

I begged Rhyodolite to take me away on his next mission, dangerous or not, just to get away from the house. For about eight days, no flights, nothing. Then the Academy had just the flight.

Three years earlier, a search ship picked up a probe coming through recently gate-charted space near a planet-orbited sun. Karst traced the orbit back to the fifth planet.

Now the observation team, which had been watching the system since the probe was discovered, spotted nuclear launches from high planet orbits. One was in a trajectory that would take it out of its solar system altogether.

Rhyodolite, myself, and the bird cadet, Xenon, could volunteer to pick up that probe.

Rhyodolite said, “Lots of ambiguities about that assignment. Sure you want to go?”

“Of course.” I wasn’t going to be more chicken than a Gwyng.

“With that web-shuddering bird again,” Rhyodolite said. He sucked his hands and explained, “We’re going into
their
solar system. Our gate capacity should/may be able to outmaneuver them, but it’s their system.”

When we arrived at the ship, Xenon stood stiffly by its bags as though waiting for a reprimand, the breeze ruffling those long olive hackles.

“I-could-tell-you-were-sober-and-reliable and other lies of the Galaxy,” Rhyodolite muttered under his twitching nostrils as he swung himself through a hatch. He lowered a gangway, and we came on with the baggage. The ground crew loaded the whole ship into a huge transport globe, called a cargo belly.

The cargo belly dropped us at the alien planet’s observation station.

For the first time, I wore a space suit and floated around in the sky, tethered, while I helped string up gate/gravity cables.

No up. No down. To give myself some arbitrary point of reference, I decided down was Rhyo’s little triple ship.

When I re-entered the ship, Rhyo was sitting in a chair, Xenon hunched down on its hocks beside him, both computing the geometry for a jump near a gas-giant planet where we’d intercept the satellite. Xenon would lean forward to explain calculations, and Rhyo’d shove the computer board at him. A little almost-dance with them.

As the station crew positioned our ship on a net, Xenon got the computer ready to generate a shipboard field to catch us while Rhyodolite looked at me and squeezed his nostrils shut.

We popped back into space/time in the right orbit, and Rhyodolite and Xenon congratulated each other.

Suddenly, the artificial gravity went out. Making incomprehensible Gwyng noises, Rhyo shoved toward the radar controls as Xenon and I shot up, startled muscles pushing us off the floor.

“No, no, no,” Rhyodolite said as the radar screen went crazy from interference—radar bouncing from a wall surrounding us was impossible.

“Open the port,” Xenon said, its legs flexing in the air as though it was trying to get its balance, scaly fingers gripping a hand-hold.

Rhyodolite opened the port, but looked at us. Xenon and I looked. We were surrounded by huge ships, whose people knew about gravity nets, because we were floating between two of them.

Rhyodolite finally glanced out, pulled his nostrils open and shut a few times, and hauled himself to his seat. “Not (definitely not) supposed to be a first contact mission,” he said as he wriggled into the chair and pulled a lap strap tight. Then he looked at us bleakly and said, “Prepare to be boarded. Not completely lost until we die.”