Becoming Alien (30 page)

Rhyodolite, still sounding sleepy, said, “Don’t try to figure it out. He’s alien.” He yawned and oo’ed at me.

“It’s so the boss ape won’t have to hit you,” I said.

“He’s really alien,” Cadmium murmured, so weirdly my computer barely processed it. Black Amber coughed and began to work the hydrofoil around toward her beach house dock.

The pouch babies—now I understood what they were, other Gwyngs’ children that Black Amber was raising—greeted me with a big Cheddar cheese they’d figured out how to make. I suppose they also knew I was too stinky to get laid by a bat, but they still liked me.

I unpacked and came back to the main sitting room. Cadmium and Rhyodolite had gone on, but Black Amber was sitting there, yawning so wide I saw the little teeth, the muscular ring at the base of the tongue.

“How do you get any work done with all these heats a year?” I asked, almost angry. I hadn’t really wanted to sleep with a Gwyng, but my dreams tore me up.

She shut her mouth and looked hurt, nostrils pinched shut, eyes closed. Then she rolled back in her cushions and koo’ed like a fool. “But your people…I was there. They constantly…but…oh, Red Clay.”

I blushed and went out for a swim. When I came back she was straightening up in the kitchen. “What I did,” I asked, “helping with the tea, was that what Mica did?”

She turned around, tears in her eyes. I gently embraced her, and we rocked side to side a bit. “You must learn to be sung,” she said, “and not to be bluffed away, to keep me from being pulled too much between males. I am better as a politician than a breeder. Sit down by me now.”

I sat down beside her. “Red Clay,” she softly said, “relax your throat. Just open it and relax it. Lean against my arms and close your eyes, it’s easier.”

Vampire movies flashed through my mind. She stroked my throat and said, almost irritated, “Loosen.” Then she began singing, going up and down some Gwyng scales. At first it was like someone breathing down my mouth, then I relaxed and felt my own voice singing without me doing anything. Only for a second—I tightened up again. She stroked my face. “It is possible. Try with me.” She rolled over onto my lap, utterly loose.

I bent down over her wrinkled face, the nostril slits, the bone curves around the eyes, eyes closed now, and sang “Happy Birthday to You,” with her vocal cords humming along.

Nothing that happened to me so far was odder—to sing and be sung Gwyng-style. I leaned back and she reached up and stroked my face. “You must do well in the Academy for me,” she said.

I got a call the next day from the Rector’s office. One of his Barcon clerk-medics told me Karriaagzh wanted to see me in the morning. Black Amber showed me how to drive her car on the beach.

The controls made sense, so we decided I wouldn’t have any trouble, as long as I followed the map computer and stopped for the lights.

I drove up to the Rector’s office and parked in a lot beside the entrance. A Barcon stopped me when I got to the screening desk, and took a blood sample. I asked why, but he just swabbed the puncture with an icy chemical that stopped the bleeding instantly. Then he took me to the Rector’s outer office. Karriaagzh, in his green and gold, came out and asked me to follow him in.

He had an odd inner office—huge chandelier which dangled from a ceiling so high he didn’t brush the lowest crystal as he passed under it and settled to the floor beside a low boomerang-shaped table of highly figured dark wood. The only thing on the table was a chrome-cased terminal with keyboard and writing pad.

As he looked me over, his facial feathers twitched in disconcerting patterns, so I looked down, away from his weird yellow eyes with those fierce bony ridges over them.

“How was the Sub-Rector Black Amber?” he asked curtly.

“That was a strange experience,
sir,
”
I said. Feather tufts at the side of his head pricked forward at the English word. “An
English
honorific,
sir,”
I said. He twitched some feathers at his beak comers—imitation smile? Real smile? “An old Gwyng died,” I continued. “It had been living in a pouch host. And the mating—weird. But I guess I shouldn’t judge.” He just looked at me, then some feathers shifted up and down on his neck. “Was the mating open?”

“Rector Karriaagzh, among my people, such things are private.”

“Not among Gwyngs,” he replied. “Don’t pick up her weird attitudes about me.” He sat for a moment, calling up displays on his terminal, looking at them, calling up others. Then he said, “We’d like to prepare you now for your trip to Yauntra. Basically, you’ll be tested on how quickly you learn another language in the sequential group. The linguistics team feels confident that they’ve mastered the main grammar structure and have adequate function-word vocabularies, know the major bound morphemes. Black Amber doesn’t want you to go now. Perhaps she wants you for company.”

He stared me straight in the eyes as if he knew what Granite Grit had told me about becoming another alien’s pet.

“If I didn’t go, how long would I be at Amber’s?”

“Another month. Cadmium and Rhyodolite have gone out on other missions. Your mission’s simple. And you might like being among people similar to you. Sometimes Karst seems like a movie studio where too many films are being made at once, with overly ambitious casts. A rest, perhaps, with some work, exploration of a new planet and species. You were able to talk without fuss with the Yauntry delegate at the First Contact Party.”

The Barcon tech came in and cocked his finger at Karriaagzh, who said to me, “Or you could visit your bird friends—Granite Grit and his new mate?”

“Being among all those mated types just makes me feel lonely.”

“And the
human
woman is out of contact now, off buying goods from the
primitive
humans. The Yauntra women might be appealing.” He typed into his terminal and signed with a light pen.

“What was that finger wriggle about?” I asked, squirming slightly in the sudden silence.

“Report on various hormone levels. Nothing to worry about,” Karriaagzh said distantly, clamping down all his head and face feathers. “You’ll have an eight-day introduction to linguistics at the Institute for Sound Communication Studies, and then join the team on Yauntra to finish learning linguistics and linguistic contact procedures. We’ve sent to Black Amber’s for your luggage there.” He looked up, feathers still flattened, and said, “I hope all goes well for us.”

The Barcons escorted me out.

The first time I’d landed on Yauntra, I’d been chained. Now, I waited above the planet in an observation satellite for a shuttle, since Yauntra gravity nets blocked direct gating to the planet surface. I plugged in holograms and waited, then reviewed information on Yauntry grammar and waited some more.
Alone again, almost here.

Finally, a Yauntry came in, round chin tucked down, and said, “Red Clay, you’re wanted.” I followed him to the main deck and saw a new alien, who looked as though someone had depilated and polished a black T across his eyes and down his pointed nose. Otherwise, he was furry, face covered with black hair like eyebrow hair, the other fur chocolate brown and dense. He said, “Placental male.” I kept looking at him. “I’m Carbon-jet, a Jerek, and the Federation’s junior linguistics officer here. Karriaagzh sent a message pod about you. You’re Black Amber’s protégé.”

“Jereks were checking out my roommate when he was trying to do weird spy things to the computer,” I said, remembering out loud.

The Jerek tucked his nose down, seemingly annoyed. “That has nothing to do with my function here. We’ve had twenty-seven Federation people on Yauntra for about half a year, all studying Yauntro.” He paused, then said, “Let’s go.” We crawled into a shuttle.

Finally we dropped out of orbit to Uzir, one of Yauntra’s main cities, and touched down on the field where I’d landed months ago. This time I saw no curious Yauntry press photographers, just a car and driver who took us both to a dinky apartment near Uzir’s university, in the building Yauntra reserved for aliens. The apartment was cold.

“So I’m back,” I said.

Carbon-jet asked, “Can you take near-freezing at night, or are we going to have to have separate air temperature systems?”

“I’d rather have it warmer.”

He closed his little shoe-button eyes and sighed. The black lids were shiny—from a distance you wouldn’t have known whether the eyes were open or not.

The Yauntries in charge of our various alien comforts sent some guy over to install a heater in my room, while Carbon­ jet and I hung insulating drapes. The rest of the apartment was cold, about 45 degrees. I ordered the Yauntry equivalent of sweaters.

Carbon-jet said, “Why don’t you grow out your face hair while we share this space? You’d be warmer.”

We went each morning through what Carbon-jet called sweltering heat, to a battered sub-basement library room where Yauntra linguists and us aliens translated cultural materials. As soon as I mastered the basic morphemes and could give a grammar scan, I’d interline a Yauntra text printout with the corresponding Karst I grammar and all the words I could construe. Carbon-jet, stripped to briefs, argued with a Yauntry scholar for hours about the precise implications of idioms while I doodled cows,hens, and pilling machines.

We must have bored the computers. Yauntra—the planet; Yauntre’h—a (mid-politeness level) native(s); Yauntro-the language (null-polite).

And when we went back to the apartment, Carbon-jet talked only in Yauntro, stumbling after meaning since he was still learning it himself.

My first free day, I took a bus tour of the Yauntra capital with a Yauntry student who was learning Karst I. Slowly, with great aching pauses as we fumbled through each other’s languages, he told me about the wife his corporation found for him. The whole Galaxy was obsessed with sex.

The next free day, the Yauntra scholars invited me and the other Karst aliens to the country for a late summer festival picnic. Unlike Karst, it was honest country on a normal planet, really old and eroded, not cobbled together with alien plants still hustling for ecological niches.

I lay back on the grass, green like grass is, good structure for a creeping rhizome plant. Yeah, Karriaagzh was right; Karst was constructed for aliens to gesture from. Yauntra just had one sapient species under a hundred-year-old world government, but the land was fabulously complex, old.

Carbon-jet was relentlessly swimming, trying to stay cool. He climbed out of the river and said to me, “They took away the cooling belt I generally wear. Didn’t know what it was and didn’t trust it.”

“He was trying to smuggle high-technology embarrassments onto the planet,” one of the Yauntry said. “We stopped the entry of disruptive systems.”

Carbon-jet dried off with his uniform top and slung it across his narrow fuzzy shoulders, and told them, “Technology goes where it will.”

The next day I came from blinding myself on Yauntra script and green-screened terminals to find I’d been invited to dinner with Edwir Hargun. Since he was Ambassador to the Federation, he wanted to meet us all.

An old crotchety person, Federation protocol officer, a stringy-haired ape, warned me not to discuss my captivity.

“Say you were warmly welcomed after the initial misunderstanding and that you much appreciate his kindness.”

I remembered the electric blanket that Rhyo used to warm with and smiled. The old protocol officer continued, “Their government tried to destroy all the tapes of your cursing their cheese. And they wonder why you taught them English and not Karst I.”

“I thought they were the bad guys.”

Despite the uniforms and various cuts of suits, all the Yauntries I got introduced to blurred in my mind—round wide eyes, dark skin, short round noses, high cheekbones, and round jaws—short head hair even on their women. I started sorting them, finally, by eye color and the clothes. Lots of the same uniform here—with different embroideries. Uniforms, cops?

One of those uniformed guys came to my apartment to take me to Hargun’s and asked in Karst I, “How did you feel when you landed at the same place where you’d been brought down earlier in chains?”

I tried to figure out his rank—young, junior officer?—and smiled into the earnest blue-gray eyes. “Other than the initial accident, my first meeting with the Yauntry people was pleasant.”

“Why, then, were you in restraints?” He opened his car door up, like a gull-wing DeLorean. I got in beside him and he looked over at me as though he rather wished he could put restraints on me again. Xenophobes, but just moderately.

“Perhaps the officers in charge wondered what we planned, sneaking into your space. Of course, I thought we were picking up a satellite that bore messages for aliens.”

“I heard one of your companions was a real monster—giant feathered fanged bird who could kick open a man’s belly. I’ve heard that birds rule you.”

“No.”

“Wasn’t a bird alien shot?”

“Yes. He and one of your people stumbled against each other in the initial boarding. A weapon went off. We accepted your apologies for the accident.”

“Mursha
Hargun says a huge gray bird rules you.” The guy seemed to become more afraid of me as we talked, but he asked his questions mechanically, like he was ticking them off a list. “Your Federation will let us alone if we wish? Plans no reprisals?”

“No offense taken. Listen, I
was
angry to be brought down in chains.”

He smiled or grimaced. “I would have been.”

“I’m just a student, trying to learn your language. I don’t make policy.”

“Our attitude toward you strange ones doesn’t offend?” That felt like his own question.

“We seem to be on decent terms now.”

“What are your Federation’s intentions toward our lithium?” We pulled up to another apartment building with a Yauntra globe in front. The driver picked up his car radio­phone and said, “Good evening,
Mursha
Hargun.”

Mursha
was one of their ranks, I guessed. “I don’t know anything about your lithium,” I said as I got out. The driver led me up to Hargun’s apartment and put his hand and mine on a door plate.

Hargun came to the door and invited us in. “Well, and how did you find your conversation with this young alien?” Hargun said to the other Yauntry. “He looks almost like a real person, doesn’t he?”

“He admits he didn’t like the restraints,” the other Yauntry said as he moved off.

“Thank you for inviting me to dinner, Ambassador Hargun. What does
Mursha
mean? Is it a rank or what?”

I must have fractured their idiom. Hargun shook his head slightly and said, “Mursha—trusted…I can’t quite explain it. And how is your intimidating rector?” We went into a room with a camera pointed at two big armchairs with small red-lacquer tables set beside them.

“He seems well. You don’t think, really, that he rules us, do you?”

He stared at me strangely, eyes almost rigid in his head, and pulsebeats began echoing in my own skull—as though we’d just encountered each other for the first time, dangerously. Then he said softly, in Karst I, “Your people came to rescue you and the other one very intensely. Very much pressure on us.”

“Fanged giant man-killer?” Hargun didn’t reply. “I told that guy the bird stumbled against one of the boarding party.”

Hargun’s eyes fluttered. He looked up at the camera, then called in another Yauntry, who put a covered tray on each table. “Reasonable,” he finally said. Then he looked back at me and said, more brightly, “I saw no intelligent animals on Karst who looked as much like us as you do. How many of your people study there?”

“I’m the only
human
in the Academy. My planet doesn’t have connections with the Federation.”

“No? How did they avoid the Federation?”

“Since they don’t have space drive, Karst didn’t contact them. I tried to help someone who was stranded on
Earth,
my planet—didn’t work out well. Although he died, the rescue team took me back with them.”

Hargun steered me over to the chair most exposed to the camera. I lifted the tray lid. The Yauntries had prepared a local imitation of Gwyng blood cakes, Yauntry fruits, and breads. “Do many of your people know about the other intelligent animals landing?”

“My brother, who went crazy. That’s all I know about. Federation crews landed at least once in the past and brought other
humans
to Karst with them. I met two other
humans,
one a woman, other people like me, but…I want to get to know her better. My Academy roommate thought I ought to, to avoid becoming just a pet of other intelligent animals. Your language doesn’t have a word like
alien?”

“We didn’t imagine. We could use
murshi,
but we try not to make racial distinctions among Yauntry too often, and you are not Yauntry.” He stopped talking a moment, then said, “Perhaps
you
are a hostage?”

“Well, not exactly.” I almost explained about the aliens being surgically transformed to look like humans, but decided that would scare Hargun. “The
alien
I helped wanted me to take his place. And the Rector agreed.”

“So they don’t have special mind tools to make you forget? To learn languages fast?” Hargun asked, his breaths getting faster and shallower.

“Yeah, I learned Karst language through mind work.”

Hargun looked at me so hard I looked away from those strange green round eyes with the slightly oval pupils. Off-putting eyes. He swayed back as though he didn’t want to be standing close to me. “Very interesting,” he said. “So the Rector brought you to Karst, sent you here? And your planet isn’t officially part of the Federation?” He ate a vegetable stalk, slowly, then continued, “So you have no companions, no mates, lovers of your species?”

The whole universe, I swear, all mated except poor me. “No, although I almost had a lover from a species that resembled me, more than yours.” Poor Calcite—totally alone. “She got sick.”

“I’m sorry.” He was genuinely sorry, for a second. “I forget that an isolated person might find such talk disturbing. And you, an intelligent animal twice removed from your home. If it wouldn’t upset you, tell me about your home, how you lived, what you liked about it?”

Talking about Floyd County and humans for an hour was both neat and a strain. Finally, I asked, “Why are you giving me so much attention?”

“Ah, I’m a fatherly type. You’re just a lonely person, needing to talk, perhaps. Not too stressful?”

“No,” this little intelligent animal said, twice removed from home, to the alien Ambassador to a Federation neither understood. “Why is that camera there?”

“I must document myself,” Hargun answered, “to prove my loyalty.” After that, the driver came for me.

When I got back, Carbon-jet was curled around his notepad with the air conditioner going full blast. He looked up and asked, “What did Hargun want?”

I put on a coat and an extra pair of pants and said, “He asked me about my Earth home. And whether birds had conquered us.”

“Um,
” Carbon-jet said as he hurriedly scrawled me a note that said,
Write, in English, everything you both said tonight.
Don’t speak any more about it.

I wrote and then Carbon-jet took what we’d both written into the bathroom with a microscope and a camera.

As I curled up in my imported sheets, I tied to remember when I’d just been me among people, on Earth, without aliens, before Mica.

A couple of days later, we got a new linguist, Filla, a shy-seeming girl Yauntry who had a body shape like a human woman’s, breasts lower than they needed to be on Yauntry women. Eyes like mine, Carbon-jet pointed out. With hair longer than most Yauntries, who generally grew it only down the backs of their necks. Hers was dark blond, with reddish tints, curled below her nape and fluffed up over her ears.