Becoming Alien (18 page)

Hargun stared. I’d seen Rhyodolite’s cock before, but wondered if he was being insulting to strip in front of us.

“Now you go to Karst,” Hargun said as soon as Rhyodolite was dressed.

I was surprised at how relieved I felt. We went with Hargun to a blue Yauntry car, paint like polished enamel, which took us to the airfield where we were first brought down. This time, the airfield was almost deserted except for a Federation transport on a gate net. Two Barcons leaned against it.

As we got out of the car, one Barcon came up and looked Rhyodolite and me over, as though we might have been changed in Yauntry hands, infected by some weird sapient brain parasites.

Hargun, in his own language, said something to the Barcons. One translated for us, “He asked us to tell you that he was as kind as he could be.”

Hargun looked at me and said, “Hum, Tom?”

I remembered the bird dying, the chains, then an image of Mica and Warren rose to mind, shotgun and pistol, and I said, “Hum, Edwir Hargun,” holding out my palm toward him. He took my hand and put it on his shoulder. The transport opened, and a Gwyng looked out nervously, then koo’ed when he saw Rhyodolite. We stood there a moment while Rhyo fell babbling into Gwyng arms.

“They said the shooting of the bird cadet Xenon was an accident,” one of the Barcons said.

“No,” I said, “it wasn’t.”

“Well, they get forgiven for it, either way,” the Barcon said, “since we were in their planetary system.”

We climbed into the transport, Rhyodolite and his Gwyngs and me without any of my own kind. A Barcon brought me a cold beer. I sucked on it, then continued describing the attack, over again, how the squad of men fired on the bird.

Rhyodolite freed himself from the other Gwyngs and came over. He said, “The bird jumped. Then they fired. Red Clay, they were scared.”

“Xenon was scared, too,” I said.

One of the Gwyngs wrinkled her face and hugged me. “Rough business for a pre-cadet.”

Too exhausted to say more, I slumped into a crash chair. Turning my head slightly, I saw Rhyodolite get engulfed in a hot wriggle of Gwyngs.

“Piss on their cheese,” Rhyo said, and koo’ed until he choked.

∞ ∞ ∞

Black Amber and the old hawk Rector Karriaagzh, both fully uniformed, looked like we’d interrupted a serious conversation when we arrived at the Karst landing field.

“See,” Karriaagzh said in Karst II, “your Rhyodolite survived. The Red Clay refuge-seeker survived. Only one of my parallels died, and he showed fear first.”

Black Amber massaged her hands.

“Food, new clothes, sleep,” Rhyodolite said.

Black Amber held out a cadet’s black uniform to me. “Still want it, Red Clay?” she asked.

“I earned it.” I sounded tougher than I felt.

Amber and Rhyodolite koo’ed. The Rector pulled out a pocket screen, punched a display up, and said, “You need the cadet training, although I suppose you did as you thought you should.”

“What did I do wrong?” I asked. “Were we set up? We weren’t supposed to be in that kind of danger.”

The Rector said, “Unless we tell you to resist or lie, never do it. The dangers of first contacts are exaggerated, but fear magnifies your xenophobias.”

Black Amber looked as though she wanted to explain more.

“But I’m a pre-cadet. It wasn’t supposed to be a goddamn first contact. Sir, they killed one of us.”

“Red Clay, your job is to stand still and be non-threatening. Not that we want our cadets killed, but a species which has murdered one of us can be extraordinarily contrite, if we don’t react with hostilities.”

So I hadn’t earned a medal, I thought as I put on the black cadet uniform. “Who’s sponsoring me?”

“I am,” Black Amber said.

I watched her smooth down the hair on the backs of her hands, then said, harsher than I’d meant to, “You still want the public apology?”

The Rector stood up over me and rubbed his beak through my head hair. Black Amber flinched, then said, “We’ll discuss that later.”

Back at the Gwyng beach house, Rhyodolite melted a pint of butter and slurped it up with a broad oval straw and his funny tongue muscles.

I asked him, “What will the Federation do to species we contact?”

“We tame them,” he said. “Good trade contacts develop. Sometimes more of us die.”

I put my head down on my arms and bawled.

Barcons mopped us cadet initiates with reeking gook to strip us bald except for hair or feathers around our eyes. After I washed the hair down the shower drain, I shivered, naked, with nine other freshly de-haired males. One of them, slit-nosed with gray skin, blew alien powder at my crotch from a hair dryer-shaped blower. “To keep from chafing,” the alien said, handing me the blower so I could spray dust on him too.

Bitching about how this de-hairing hurt our dangling balls, we climbed into our black uniforms and went to an old building for the convocation. I looked up at the prism windows and beams of blond wood with dark gray veins that looked positively un-Earthly.

Of course. The wood
was
alien. About a thousand novice cadets shambled in, gawking at the hall, each other, and the old gray Rector Karriaagzh, who stood in a hooded pulpit like a Jack-in-the-pulpit blossom. I remembered we’d had pulpits with hoods on Earth at one time.

All the aliens tried to find seats suited to their joints and leg lengths, but settled for what they could reach as Karriaagzh turned on a sound system and muttered harshly into it.

When his crew of mixed teenage aliens settled down, Karriaagzh, his grating accent suddenly very impressive, welcomed us in both Karst languages.

“You have duties to an ecology of Mind that goes beyond species,” Karriaagzh said intensely. “In your oath, you will promise to obey Federation officials and protect all known sapient life, but your duties go beyond that. Academy before species, Federation before Academy, Mind above all.”

Beside me, a dark alien with a flat face and tiny round ears muttered, “He believes this accident that we are has some big ultimate meaning?”

Karriaagzh continued, “You think a five-thousand-year-old institution is permanent? I come from a species with ten million years of history. Not one of its institutions lasted more than half a million years. If you don’t maintain the ideals and goals of the Federation, it
will
wither, random death will claim it.”

“His species is dying out,” the alien beside me whispered, not terribly impressed, although I was.

We all stood to pledge our lives and energy to the Federation, then stood looking at each other until black-clad cadets with gold shoulder stripes led us out in groups of ten by stumps of ancient metal and stone walls, by centuries of buildings, to the dorms.

My group went through absolute mazes of hallways. Every hundred yards or so, the senior cadet spoke a name. A bald alien, race and sex disguised by the baggy black uniform, went into a room. Some left their doors open; others closed them instantly.

“Red Clay.” I walked into my new room, feeling vaguely like a prisoner in the black uniform. No underwear, absolutely bald, I felt my legs, my dangling genitals, my arms, as I’d never felt them before, as raw skin.

It was an odd room, three alcoves, each raised by one step, around the central square. Two alcoves, each the size of the central square, were off to either side, but the central alcove stuck out into a courtyard. The courtyard alcove bed, mounted on a frame that traveled up and down on smooth metal posts, was at ceiling height. I went closer.

A naked bird, with a beak like pointed lips, glared down at me and said, “You mammals make me look terribly ugly.” He pulled a sheet around his shoulders, but I got a solid eyeful—raw pebbly skin, yellow, like a plucked chicken.

Absolutely correct, ugly, but I didn’t look great either.

“They want us to all look alike. At least as much as possible.”

The bird fluttered membranes vertically across its eyes. “We never went around in such fabric things.”

“All the other bird species do. Even the Rector.”

“Lactating monstrosities forced them,” the bird muttered, reaching for the bed’s controls. As the bed slid down the metal wall posts, I backed away. The bird stepped off the bed, straightened his backward knees, and stood up about six and a half feet tall. His breastbone poked out like a dull machete.

“What’s your name’?” I asked. Surely, he wasn’t dangerous?

“Granite Grit,” the bird said, awkwardly pulling on his blacks. Each foot had three club-like toes.
Granite Grit,
I thought, staring at those huge clawed toes,
sounds like a fighting-cock line.
“And the Academy calls you?” he asked.

“Red Clay.”
Like the Rector says, forget species. This is just a beaked guy, who hates lactators, your roommate for God knows how long.
“You like your bed?” His foam slab was very thin, covered with a pebble-textured plastic.

He gestured yes, the Academy gesture with the hand tossed back.
He seems rougher than Xenon.
I felt vaguely guilty.

“Why did intelligence develop?” the bird finally asked despairingly.

“To protect big heads on poky bodies,” said a new voice in Karst II, the third roommate. He looked like a chunky Gwyng, but with nostrils on a cartilage structure, a real nose.

“We,” the bird said, “aren’t poky.” He stared down at the third alien like a great homed owl looks at a frantic blue jay.

“I don’t think intelligence has really developed yet,” I decided, remembering humans and Yauntries.

“I’m Gypsum 8, born on Karst of Ewit stock,” the creature said. “Who are you (both)?”

“Red Clay,” I said.

“Oh, that refugee connected with the Gwyngs.” He's decided intelligence certainly hadn’t developed on my planet, I thought. The Ewit turned to the bird. “And you?”

“Granite Grit.”

“From Carg?”

“Yes.”

“Hey,” I said to Granite Grit. “We flew you in.”

The bird inspected me with his dark reddish brown eyes, moving his face skin in odd waves. “The flight was difficult. The Gwyng-thing is hostile. Would not practice the…language with me.” He climbed back onto his bed and retreated ceilingward.

“Odd. An unsocial Gwyng,” the Ewit said, “Well, I have Karst friends here that I must see.” As he wandered out to talk to more civilized beings, I thought I’d have left, too, except I’d get lost. Hell, I
was
lost.

Some weird bears bustled in with three sturdy computer consoles, followed by a blue-clad ape-stock officer, who asked, “Where are your roommates?”

I pointed to the bird bed. Granite Grit looked down, the junior officer flinched, and Granite slowly landed his pad at floor level.

“The other one,” Granite said in Karst II, “isn’t here. We drove him out.”

“Gypsum, Karst—born Ewit—he knows these consoles. We’ve got one Karst II and two Karst I boards, or would you rather have a Karst II board?” the alien, who looked rather like me but not really, asked the bird.

Granite said, in Karst I, “I’d be just as happy with small segment linear for written.” Those transparent vertical eye-lids flicked across his eyeballs again.

The ape-alien said, “All right,” as the bears put the console in Granite’s alcove. “The computers and mass storage unit linked with your terminal can switch architectures to give you different hard-wired systems. Don’t try much parallel pathing; the system could go sentient and start arguing with us. Your board can be placed on your cubicle wall here,” he said, indicating plates inside the alcove, “or here,” indicating floor plates in the central common area. “They operate by voice, keyboard, or light pen. Keep the printer filled with paper, in the hopper, here, and thread it, like this.”

He opened a side panel. A stack of paper, fanfold, sat there, feeding up into the machine. All that showed on top of the console was a slot.

“Give me your hand,” the junior officer said, “and I’ll set you up. You log on by hand pattern.”

Granite got off the bed and placed his hand, with opaque brown nails like arrowheads, on the key-in plate. The junior officer delicately etched its outline with an electric scribe.

“Just put your hand inside the lines. If it grows, call us and we’ll re-key you.”

One of the bear-like techs added, “We’re leaving a manual with each console. Other cadets have survived it.”

They set us up and went
bye.
The manuals dented our foam pads seriously—thousands of pages, plastic-covered monsters. The bird lifted off again for the ceiling, muttering about rude mammals. I abandoned the manual and opened the closet-like cubicle beside the bed.

Exactly like the bathroom in Floyd, I thought, until I sat down on the toilet and noticed it was lower, but not uncomfortable. Fitted into the space with the toilet was a tiny shower with sliding doors and a weird basin, just big enough to wash my hands in, with a dial for water temperature and a lever to cut the water on and off. After I relieved myself, I considered how they’d fitted all this in a box so small I could touch the walls each way. Mirror over the basin. I still looked human, but a bit ugly.

Back out, I opened the humongous computer manual, trying to find out when and where we ate. I could ask for things in plain Karst, so I called up the day’s schedule. About ten screens scrolled by, the start of a schedule for over fifty thousand people, before I escaped and got something simpler, the first-year cadets’ schedule.

We had meals scheduled. I was getting hungrier and hungrier, but had no idea of where to find the food.
Maybe this is the first test. You couldn’t pull a map, you starved?

The map finally came up with a little “you are here” sign and explained that I could adjust scale or relative schematicity by twisting knobs to the right of the keyboard.

By twisting the knobs enough, I went through the Academy architectural data in cross-section. I guessed I could use the tallest buildings to figure out where I was, so I slanted things at a 45-degree angle and pulled a paper copy.

Just curious, I rolled the schematic/information density knob until the screen showed full color and detail as sharp as a photo. I pulled another print which looked like a Kodachrome.
What about video games?

“Hey, Granite Grit, come down and take a look at this!”

The bed whispered slightly on its columns as it sank. Granite took one look at the map, pointed to a building, and said, “Three buildings away—food.”

We went out, trying to orient ourselves by memorizing door styles, plants, windows. The bird’s walk was almost running for me.

At the cafeteria door, each alien spoke his or her name into a talking computer. The bird was told to go upstairs. Granite Grit actually looked alarmed when I got a different assignment on the ground floor. Then I realized I had the maps. “I’ll meet you here,” I told him.

I found table Ah-zha 104 and saw table companions that ranged from Gwyng-looking to almost human, all with relatively dark skins except for one piebald, who looked diseased.

“You like cushions?” the most human-looking one asked.

Cadets, I noticed, could sit on cushions or stand to eat, like Gwyngs. My tablemates were on cushions.

“Cushions are fine,” I said, not wanting to be fussy. I’d got the place with the menu screen, so I read and punched for all of us. The selections were…arrgh, so many options. I finally ordered a baked-to-coagulation bird, fruit, baked grain meal leavened with yeasts, and two random vegetables.

A live waiter brought the food. “Status,” the piebald murmured. We weren’t just bald adolescent sapients, we were Academy cadets. Machines served the masses.

As we ate, we silently watched each other. When I was almost finished, I looked up and saw my bird roommate scrambling toward me.

“Red Clay, could you loan me your map or come back with me to the room?”

“I want to walk around,” I said. “We’ve got a free afternoon.”

Granite’s skin tried to wriggle non-existent face feathers. I held out the building floor plan.
Shit,
we’re only three buildings away, I thought.

The bird stepped toward me, took the map, and danced back, studying the map. We walked outside together. “I think the dorm is that way,” I said, pointing. Granite moved back and forth in little hock-lift steps, then twitched as though he were trying to shrug out of his clothes.

“I’d walk with you, Red Clay, but I’d feel odd.”

“Oh, sure,”
I said in English. “Good-bye, Granite Grit,” in Karst.

∞ ∞ ∞

All afternoon, I explored the campus, navigating by the eleven high towers.

As I walked through the strangely scaled gardens between the other buildings, I saw they varied weirdly. Almost too close together, the buildings crowded each other like alien competitive plants. Some looked like ultra-modern Earth buildings except lichens had crumbled their stones. Others looked ancient, with a touch of Aztec, but were only half finished, alien construction crews guiding stone- and brick-laying machines.

Bits of old walls poked up here, there, looking melted and glazed, rough seats for new little cadets freshly stripped of hair.

By accident, I found a maze of name-covered walls—not labeled on my maps—fifteen hundred years of names in Karst I and II characters/glyphs. The oldest walls were stainless-steel slabs. The newest were thin granite, so polished I saw my face in the stone behind the gold inlaid letters.