Becoming Alien (27 page)

“One side of my farm faces scrublands, where, Granite, you can run all day if it isn’t too hot. Tom, the other side is close to mountains rather near in height to the ones you were born in.”

Until he said that, I hadn’t imagined how much I missed the mountains. I leaned back and sighed.

Tesseract’s wife, Ammalla, bigger-boned than an Earth-woman but still slimmer than Tesseract, with just a hint of a skull crest, called us to dinner. Granite Grit was still running near the farm. Ammalla saw that I was worried and said, “We put a satellite on him when he left the house. But don’t tell him.”

Tesseract put his finger against an ivory-colored plug in his ear and listened. “He’s coming back now,” he told us, “he went swimming.”

Soon Granite Grit, who’d run bare-quilled, came padding onto the porch behind Tesseract’s house. “Towel?” he asked. Ammalla went to help him.

“I got almost overheated,” he said when he came in, “so I went into the water a bit. My feathers—you can see the colors now.” He dropped the big towel from his shoulders to let us see greens, reds, and golds in the quills.

Ammalla put her arm gently around his prickly shoulder. “Dress and join us for dinner.” She arranged a low table for him to sit on and passed me something that looked like potatoes but wasn’t.

“Sir,” Granite said to Tesseract when he came back, “being re-fledged is a good metaphor for what happens to aliens who come here.”

“So you’re less upset about the feather stripping. It makes people odd to themselves so they’re less concerned about the oddity of the others. And it puts you all through a common ordeal.”

“But uniforms still break feathers,” Granite said. “Being re-fledged is one thing. Trying to live as a mammal is another.” Granite reared back a little, then eased his beak down toward his food and dabbed at it. After swallowing, he asked, “Do movies like that ease mammal tensions, too, by playing with xenophobia?”

“Yes. The Federation is full of tensions. But I don’t want any sapient hurt.”

“I can’t hurt you, or Tom, or your wife. You trust me?”

Thinking about the melted walls, only five hundred years ago, I said, “Karriaagzh says that the Federation has to be maintained every day.”

Granite turned slowly and looked at me as though seeing me for the first time.

Since Granite and I were roommates, Ammalla put us in the same room. Granite woke up when I began shaving at the sink and came walking carefully toward me.

“I do this every morning,” I told his reflection.

“Tesseract also?”

“I don’t think he grows face hairs.”

Granite bobbed his body slightly, then went out to see if he could use the toilet.

“They let me use Karriaagzh’s,” he said proudly when he came back.

After breakfast, Tesseract and I rode horse-patterned things, with a touch of analog-antelope, while Granite in his quills took giant bounds through the grass, over steppe brush, snatching at low-flying birds. We stopped by a stream where he danced around, quills twitching.

“Are you happier?” Tesseract asked.

“Yes.” Granite tried to come closer to the riding beasts, but they backed off. “You do care?”

“Safer for me if I don’t have to fear my charges,” Tesseract said.

“No jokes,” Granite said stiffly.

“Yes, I do care.”

“Sense of humor seems to relieve mammal tension by playing with stresses. We don’t do that.”

“Better get an intellectual understanding of it, Granite Grit,” Tesseract said. “I’m a fairly humorous guy.”

We tied the riding stock and went up into the hills on foot.
They weren’t like my home mountains except for the air—after we got up to two thousand feet on the trail, we breathed real mountain air, moist yet electric.

Granite stepped along awkwardly, not really at home in mountains. How sad, I thought, that this air means nothing to him. But when we scrambled up a rock fall, his backward knees gave him better climbing balance than we had with our knees that banged the rock face.

“Born climber,” Tesseract commented.

“No, biomechanical accident,” Granite said tensely, reaching for a hold.

“You have a looser hip structure than I thought,” Tesseract observed as Granite hung one foot way left, bending both his backward knee and another joint which was almost concealed in his upper leg muscles.

Granite grunted and strained for a ledge with his right foot, clinging with both hands to his hold. Then he put his left foot where his hands were and levered up.

“I’ll help you people up,” he said, reaching down for us. He main-hauled me up—we both helped Tesseract.

At the top we saw Tesseract’s house and the plains with another ridge and river beyond that. We sat—the bird crouched down on his shins, me and Tesseract cross-legged.

“Thanks,” I told Tesseract.

As we packed to leave, Ammalla said, “You must come back when we have more young guests. Sometimes elders are boring.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “You and Tesseract aren’t boring.”

“I must come back when my feathers are out,” Granite said. “I’m more colorful than any flying bird I’ve seen here—or any other bird sapient.”

“Granite Grit,” she said, embracing him, not so firmly she’d risk bruising a quill, “I’ll be very happy to see you in full color.” Then she tickled the horny skin around his nostrils.

“You know about our nares?” he said, obviously delighted. Delicately, he ran his tongue around her nose and lips.

“I try to learn the friendly gestures of all my guests,” she said. “And now, Tom,” she said, opening her arms. We hugged.

“What happens now?” Granite asked, shifting his weight from one leg to the other.

“Granite Grit, we asked your species to join us more honestly. We can stop anything you throw at us, but we’ve no plans to harm any of your nations. Would you have attacked us if so ordered? Seized the Rector, say, as a hostage?”

“The Rector, yes. If those were my orders.” Granite edged back and cocked his head, staring at Tesseract with one eye.

“Federation Council would have replaced him before Karst rotated a quarter. They’ve let the whole place get bombed away on occasion.”

“Is it that cruel an organization?”

“Has to be sometimes.”

Granite’s people re-negotiated with the Federation. And the Academy made uniforms optional for heavily feathered birds, so Granite’s kind and other birds could wear fiber torcs instead. But Karriaagzh wore his mammal clothes, and the two other bird species were divided.

“This is difficult for us,” Granite said about a month later. “Fledging.” He tried to pull off a split feather sheath behind a shoulder blade.

“Can I help?” I asked. We were listening to music in the central square, Gypsum gone as usual. The Rector’s People wouldn’t give him a new room, but he only slept here.

Granite backed around to me. “Be careful.” I gently pulled off a horny sheath and watched the new feather unfurl like a butterfly. Then another.

“Better to be reciprocal. Can I shave you?”

“I shave every morning. You’re not going to need this done every morning, are you?”

“Afraid of letting me touch you? With the electric razor?”

I pulled another sheath away from a green feather and saw a tiny bit of mite damage on the tip. “Well, some people used to get shaved at hair-cutting,
barber,
shops.” After I pulled off all the loose sheaths, I got out my electric razor and a lotion Barcons gave me to soften my beard.

Granite got me to lie down, with his feet curled around my head. I looked up at the pin feathers around his falcon eyes and giggled.

“Be calm,” he said, rubbing lotion into my skin, his fingers curiously prodding. “Why don’t you just grow the face hairs out?”

“My kind doesn’t.”

“Your kind isn’t here,” he said, carefully moving the razor over my face. “Are any
humans
here?”

“Some primitives.”

“Listen, Tom Red Clay, some of my people are primitives. If they were here, and no one else civilized of my kind, I’d take comfort from my primitives.”

“Are you tired of going to movies and music with me?” I asked, suddenly feeling terribly lonesome as the bird shaved my chin. He loved both fighting movies and music—like the mountain guys.

“You don’t want to be another creature’s pet.”

“I’m not your pet. They’ve promised me that they’d bring me a breeding group in a year.”

“Tom,” he said, pulling the razor back and blinking his eyes before continuing, “do you want your own people kidnapped from your planet?”

I hadn’t thought of how they’d bring in a breeding group. “Kidnapped?”

“Tom, don’t you have to mate? I can’t imagine you missing that.”

When I came back from classes a couple days later, Granite and another half-feathered bird, but a solid color
—female,
I realized—were gravely studying charts spread out on a low table.

“The feathers link with gene structures for other things,” Granite explained. “So the females bring family line genetic maps and check to see what males are worth fighting for.”

Over the next few weeks, lots of female birds, all different solid colors, all big as Granite or bigger, came cruising by with their genetic charts.

When spring came, Granite sprouted streamers from his shoulders and began displaying against others of his kind. Only twenty-five of them—but they seemed to be everywhere, colorful and quarrelsome. As the displays got violent, the Academy sent small groups off to various Rector’s People’s farms.

Granite, his potential ladies, and present rivals went to Tesseract’s, and I asked if I could visit on weekends.

When I got to the airport, Karriaagzh, in mammal clothes, and two new birds motioned for me to join them.

“I was going up to Tesseract’s,” I said.

“I’m taking these people there,” he said. “We want all Granite’s kind to have mates.” The two new birds, both solid colors, seemed nervous, breeding plumes shorter than the female breeding plumes I’d seen sprouted here.

No one spoke on the flight out, until we were over Tesseract’s. From the air, I saw four birds, three males and one female. “There’s another female there, but I don’t see her,” Karriaagzh said.

The two young bird females in the flier watched the guys throw their colored feathers around and talked to each other in bird.

When I was getting out of the flier, I saw Granite bound ten feet or more off the prairie and lash out at the other bird with his strange feet, both their feathers streaming around them, flame-colored, glinting.
What rules,
I wondered,
or could they kill each other?

Tesseract leaned over the porch rail and called to them in their own language. They bounced apart and turned, panting, eyes protected by the transparent shields, to watch us walk up.

“More females,” Karriaagzh said. “And might I spar with you? It’s been a long time. Heel punches?”

Granite, eyes still veiled, bobbed his body.

“But don’t insult me,” Karriaagzh said, pulling off his mammal clothes, then hopping in his matted feathers. Granite stared at Karriaagzh, then feinted a kick experimentally at him.

“Insult,” Karriaagzh said, clipping him soundly on the upper leg.

The hens began their sparring, all four of them, a whirl of blue, purple, and brown.

“Amazing lot of tendon spring,” Tesseract said.

Ammalla smiled. “They
are
beautiful”

Karriaagzh stopped and joined his Rector’s People, holding his green and gold uniform in his hands. “And they do well in gath-math and molecular chemistry,” the Rector said, handing Ammalla his clothes. “Now I must cool off.” He went down to Tesseract’s pool and swam, a large, wet, gray-feathered dinosaur.

Granite scored three quick hits on his opponent, who dropped to a crouch. Then they both stood up and unveiled their eyes, ruffled their feathers and laid them down. Granite bounced up to us, hopping like a giant skinny fighting cock. “We like it here. Other species can admire us without jealousy.”

Tesseract looked from bouncing Granite to his boss swimming slowly, head only above water, in his pool. “By the way, Granite Grit, how long do you people live? And how does your year compare to Karst’s?”

Between high leaps, Granite said, “About 120…about the same, longer maybe.”

Tesseract looked from the young bird to the old. “You’ll be around a long time then.”

Ammalla said, “Wonder if they’ll get as gray as the Rector?”

“It was the feather-stripping,” Tesseract told her. “He’ll outlive Black Amber. She won’t like hearing that.”

Karriaagzh climbed out of the pool and shook himself like a dog. His feathers were thin—most of his bulk was body mass.

Looking at me, he said, “Tesseract, Tom is to spend the break time at Black Amber’s.”

“You know what’s going on there. Why not here?”