Becoming Alien (31 page)

That night, tucked in a sleeping bag, reading, I said to Carbon-jet, “I know what she is…”

He covered my mouth with his muscular, dark hand and handed me a pad and pen.

I know she must be a spy, Carbon-jet; but can I sleep with her anyway?

Carbon-jet rolled his eyes, flashes of whites—vivid against the black T of face skin.
Keep me informed. Don’t go anywhere, away, with her.

One afternoon, in the computer vault below the Yauntra library, Filla arranged that we run out of texts early.

“Tom
Red Clay, come walk in the park with me,” she said, smiling.

Carbon-jet leaned down on his elbows—tense, alien about to spring—then jerked upright to snap off a computer. He began to sleek down his forearm fur and play with the fuzz that ran up the back of his hands onto his fingers.

“If you want, come with us,” she said, in a voice that was fake for any species.

“Have a good time,” he said. “I’m tired of this heat. I’ll go back to quarters and chill myself.”

She and I walked out and took a Yauntry bus, dirty metal painted flake blue, to their biggest park. Musicians played under little porches, and vendors with trays like movie cigarette girls sold sweets that I tried nervously and found instantly delicious.

“What is your home planet like?” she asked.

“I don’t really know. I didn’t see much other than where I was born.”

“Teach me words of your home. Yes, No, Maybe?” she asked in Karst. We walked through the gardens eating sweets and practicing
yes, no,
and
maybe
in English and the three politeness levels of Yauntro.

“And your birthplace? How is it called?”

“Floyd.”

Floyd
on her lips sounded hilarious. “Big city,” she asked in Karst, “this
Floyd?”

Something disarming about women who speak with accents, I thought. “No, hill country with very few people,” I answered in polite but distant Yauntro.

“We have all angles of land,” she said. “Anything you want. I would like to get out of the city myself.”

“If Carbon-jet can come, too,” I said.

“Poisonous thing, but yes,” she answered.

I took her in my arms, stared briefly at her oval pupils, and kissed her once for the country.
They’re oval up and down,
I thought,
not sideways like Calcite’s.

“You want to go?” Carbon-jet asked, stretched out on his bed. He’d rigged a vest to wear instead of a full uniform tunic. “And I’m invited?” He rolled over, picked up his pad, and wrote,
Be very careful.

“Well, can we go?”

“Where
are we going?”

Filla gave me a map, which Carbon-jet duplicated and gave to the protocol officer.

We went ninety miles south, then followed a switchback road up a scarp rise and onto the rolling country back of it, on the mountain as we say in Virginia. The trees bore alien fruit, not apples, but the orchards were still laid out in those two-way rows—double symmetries up and down the slopes. High country, maybe six to seven thousand feet up. The houses weren’t so ramshackle—more stone than frame, no brick, but the air was cool, softly windy—that eternal mountain air.

“We didn’t turn the way you said we’d turn on the map,” Carbon-jet said, gripping the back of the front seat.

“Oh, I found a better house,” Filla said.

“We’re
off
the map,” Carbon-jet added a few miles later.

“Better house. Two bedrooms, one with a massive air cooler. Better for you.” Filla smiled at him through the rearview mirror.

Carbon-jet folded the map and stared out the windows. Filla drove through a few more switchbacks and turned off down a dirt road that led to a little wooden house on the first shelf above a creek bottom, built like mountain people did before tourists put hexagonal solar things on ridge tops.

“Do you remember the logging camp we passed back about fifteen minutes ago?” Filla asked Carbon-jet.

“Yes,” he said dubiously.

“Well, Red Clay and I are going back there for firewood. The air cooler for your room is like the one in your quarters back at Uzir. I won’t steal him.”

She was nervous, here with two aliens, but something gave her confidence. We must be covered by at least ten secret guns.

Carbon-jet’s shoulder fur flared out just a bit, and he lowered his nose at her, presenting the T face skin directly vertical. Then he lowered his fur, reaching up under his vest to smooth it, and trudged on short little legs to the house.

I was nervous, myself. We stopped by the trash pile and loaded the back of the car with cut-off limbs and slabs only saying Yauntro words for “here’s one we won’t have to cut” and “here’s a good one.”

When we got back to the house, I took an armful of wood in to the stove. A new schoolhouse box heater, I noticed, just like the one I described to Hargun, but with Yauntry foundry labels instead of English ones. Sawdust under the pipe hole looked fresh. Wood stoves on Yauntra?

Carbon-jet came out of his room, saw me setting a fire, said, in Karst I, “You’ve got to be kidding,” and went back to the roaring air conditioner in his room. The weather didn’t make us build a fire, but I’ve always liked wood heat’s feel, smoother to the skin than oil heat. While I got the fire going, Filla curled up on an Earth-style couch by the heater, watching me.

Then I opened a window a crack and we just sat quietly—me thinking about winter days before the family had oil, using wood stoves, and a feather duster to skim that fine ash off the furniture. I’d watch Mom, who’d intently look into the wood grain, whisking the feathers over, looking, whisking again.

Filla cooked eggs on the stove when the fire got hot enough—just like my mother had done. The way that alien girl fed eggs to me was downright provocative—spooning them into my mouth and hers alternately, curled by me. “It is our custom,” she said. Having her body up by mine felt good—alien spy or whatever. I put my arm around her.

“I’d like to stay like this forever, you and me,” I said. “No more getting shot at or seeing shipmates die. No more hours studying crazy languages that don’t sit right on my tongue.”

“I sit on your tongue?” Halfway between misunderstanding me and propositioning me, she reached under my tunic, then froze. “We can…” Her fingers tugged my chest hairs, then drew back.

“Filla?” I looked very closely at her and saw her hands do a fine tremble that wasn’t for sex.

“This is all very strange.”

“I imagine it is,” I said as I got up and put more sticks in the fire box. “You can sleep in the bedroom. I’ll sleep on the couch.” I laid my hand on her shoulder. It quivered, so I jerked my arm away from her. “Not quite like sex with another Yauntry, is it?” She made me feel alien. Xenofreaking bitch, and I didn’t even have a little relax’um pill, nor the boring but species-appropriate talk to get the pill down her. “Seducing me probably seemed like a good idea back in town. Now you can’t follow through, can you?”

“You’re not supposed to be so different from us.”

She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do.
That flashed in English. I remembered all the story behind it—one of the dealers in Martinsville told Warren how some bitch trapped him, and he should have known because when he tried to make her, she didn’t know what she was supposed to do. But I’d
known
this was a setup for the spy bitch. Why was I doing this with her? I felt sick inside.

I looked closer at the wood heater.
About as long as my arm…
that’s how I’d described the heater we’d had when I was a boy. “Filla, your people made this heater for me. They sent you here to talk to me.”

She looked at Carbon-jet’s room and back at me, quivering.

“Damn,
stop shaking, Filla. Let’s at least treat each other like reasonable beings.”

“I’m happy if you say we can see again,” she said in miserable Karst, which made her seem fluffy and cute, but I wondered about a species that sent a girl for spy sex with aliens who terrified her.

And I knew it all—she was a spy, she was afraid of me—but I still wanted to see more of her. Too lonely, that’s why. When I sat down on the couch, she sidled off to the bedroom. The lock clicked. Pissed me off, this alien neurosis, with the door locked against me. I stretched out on the couch and wondered how many Yauntries surrounded the house.

I dreamed I got her to see things the Federation way, my way.

When I woke up, Carbon-jet and Filla were fixing separate breakfasts. He whistled when he saw me stumble up to a sink to shave after I’d used the john. “Still has to scrape off the hairs that grow in the night,” Carbon-jet said. “Some weird tribal ritual.” His black face skin crinkled as he explained to Filla, “I suggested, since we shared quarters, that Tom just grow the face hair out for warmth. Or let the Barcons depilate him permanently, but he likes to fuss with his little electric machine.”

“We don’t grow animal body hair like either of you,” Filla said primly.

“From pictures I’ve seen, he could grow face hair down to his toes. Right, Red Clay?”

“No, just to my nipples.” Killing off my face hair seemed unmanly. I wasn’t the only creature on Karst who shaved daily—me the face, others other things, some backs of hands, fingers, foreheads, whatever. And the jerk was making Filla nervous. “Filla, how are you doing?”

“Fine, Red Clay. Do you think I’m a spy?”

Carbon-jet whistled again and put his hands over his face.

“Filla, I told Hargun I was lonely, and you got assigned to our study group, with your almost Earthwoman’s tits, long hair for a. Yauntry.”

She looked from the short fur on Carbon-jet’s head to my razored-clean chin. “Perhaps I thought I’d be appreciated by you, for having such features? Do all space people have fur or bristles?”

Carbon-jet lowered his nose slightly at Filla as I sat down cross-legged on the kitchen table and glared at her. “Some have feathers. Your guys shot one of those.”

“So odd to see hair coming out from your face last night.” Filla said softly. “Then to feel the chest. I couldn’t.”

Carbon-jet’s teeth came together in a click. “Red Clay, you didn’t scrape off those barbaric bristles before taking this smooth-skinned
thing
to sex?”

“Maybe we should come back,” I said, “with more-of her people, so she won’t feel so isolated among aliens.”

“Sure, wonderful. Do it Gwyng-style.” Then Carbon-jet changed to the language we hear when the computer transmutes Karst II,
“Was she about to freak?”

“She was trembling.
”

“Speak Yauntro, young man, we can’t hear you,
” Carbon-jet said. “Slick-skinned Filla, you may be a wonderful spy here on Yauntra, but you’re a fucking amateur when it comes to aliens.” Carbon-jet looked from her to me and back again, then went to his room, came out wearing a pocket vest, and walked outside.

I fixed eggs for breakfast while Filla watched. Since coming to space, I realized, as I watched her back, I hadn’t really been angry until now. Alien angry. I was pissed that the bitch Yauntry flinched—like I was weird with my beard, body hair, and straight jawbones. I breathed deeply, and she flinched, damn her, again. “I want to just get back to Uzir now,” I told her.

“I’m sorry if I upset you by being startled.”

“Bullshit.”

“What?”

“Excrement from a lactating monster, male,
Earth
species, with horns. Big.”

“A curse? Why?” she asked humbly.

“Why are you trying so hard to be friendly when I terrify you?”

“I feel conflict over this,” she said in Karst. She folded her hands over her chest and leaned against a cabinet.

“Fuck it,
Filla.”

“Did you ever consider that I might want to contact aliens intellectually, privately?”

Maybe she wasn’t Hargun’s spy. Carbon-jet came back then, as I was considering asking her more, and said, “Why don’t we just go back to the university?”

“Great idea,” I said, moving on to pack up. Filla stood in the middle of the living room, staring at us both as we neatened up the place and loaded the car.

Carbon-jet came out of her room with a walkie-talkie. He tossed it to her and suggested, “You go out and make your report to your people, too.”

She turned red. “Jerek, named Carbon-jet,” she said like she’d memorized it.

When we got back, I headed for the library, and Filla tagged along. We walked toward the cement buildings, me striding fast, she almost running to keep up, passing Yauntra students hung with typical student rigs—backpacks, computer disc satchels, and calculators.

“Wait,
Tom.”

The Yauntries stared at me as she called. They were the moderately xenophobic Yauntries, who shot nervous gentle birds, who tried to make me into a mysterious space alien. As they pointed their round alien eyes at me, I resented them intensely. Not looking back at her, I stopped. “Tom, Red Clay, we need to know…” Her voice faded.