Becoming Alien (32 page)

More horrible yet—if she had gone to bed with me, not even that, if she’d relaxed with me, I’d have volunteered the few Karst secrets I’d known to have a quiet month in the country with her.

She came up and touched my hands gently. But I noticed three of her kind watching intently from a short distance, cop-like. My cock withered. “Filla, I’ll see you at work. I’m going back to talk to Carbon-jet.”

She muttered a farewell and walked straight up to a Yauntry cop. Dumb bitch, I almost fell in love with her again. An amateur, not a pro, spying for her people.

I decided I should talk to the senior Federation guy here, the protocol officer, and walked back to my quarters, shoulders hunched against all the Yauntry stares.

The old ape smiled after I explained what had happened. “The boy’s here,” he said into his intercom.

Carbon-jet entered, all snippy-nose, through a side door. The ape introduced him as the resident officer from the Institute of Analytics and Tactics.

“I’m not surprised, Carbon-jet,” I said.

He pulled his thin lips back from considerable teeth and punched code on a terminal. He looked from the terminal to me. “Find out what she wants to know. We’ll take you on as an Institute trainee. You won’t be under Karriaagzh directly. We’re pretty independent.”

“She’s just some amateur fool. And I’m no spy, either.”

“You lived illegally on your home planet.” He tucked his nose down, but didn’t let his eyes meet mine. “Many newly contacted species try, however clumsily, to see if the Federation is an agency of empire rather than free association. We let them investigate, so long as no one’s hurt. The Yauntries approached me sexually, but I’m faithful to my own.”

“So you—Karriaagzh—thought I’d respond to an alien woman, because I got hot at Black Amber’s.
Like a jack without jennies? Making mules.”

“Explain that alien noise,” Carbon-jet said.

“Pen up a male without his females. He’ll fuck anything.” Carbon-jet sat down. “That
was
the general idea. If you join our Institute, we can use you
with
your consent. You’ll know what we want to know.”

“But she’s scared of me. I slept with a girl once on Earth—I know how it’s supposed to go. I don’t want to sleep with some alien
bitch
who thinks
I’m
a monster.”

“Well, if he’s not genuinely attracted, then I doubt he’ll have sexual reflexes,” the old protocol ape said.

“No. And I won’t let the Barcons tamper with those.”

Whistling faintly, Carbon-jet seemed to count parquet bits in the floor. “Please see this woman again, if she wants,
” he finally said. “We need to assure Yauntra that the Federation doesn’t initiate violence, but can defend itself. You got along well with Granite Grit. Why don’t you help us here?”

“How could one species attack one-hundred-plus species?”

“The birds didn’t believe the Federation had so many species in the alliance. The Rector showed one of their war presidents enough different species to convince them that we weren’t lying.”

“Okay. But I’m not joining your Institute.”

“Just volunteer to help. This device aids memory.” Carbon­ jet pulled out a curved grey slab like a big skull bone and a jar of gritty jelly. He smeared the inside curve of the slab with a fingerful of jelly, then fitted it to the back of my head and guided my hands to hold the slab while he plugged a cord into it. “Think about this morning,
” Carbon-jet told me, steadying the slab with his own hands, alien thick fingers up against mine.

Suddenly, I saw the exact muscles quivering in Filla’s face, arms, the Yauntry cops brown and yellow suits. The cop on my left had an insect bite on his jaw, grass stains on one knee.

Snap—gone. Carbon-jet had pulled the thing off my head. “Very interesting device, Jerek,” I said. “So I don’t have to take notes?”

“And your skull computer records, also. Wash and dry your hair before you leave.”

And if I got killed, they could read out my last minutes. “How many bytes does the skull computer store?”

“Hour loops of what you hear and an equivalent amount of biodata, without disturbing the translator program.”

Filla and I worked for a couple of weeks without speaking to each other more than linguistics work required—more, actually, than I wanted to talk to her.

And she got paler and paler. Finally, I noticed her hair begin to turn light blond. After we finished for the morning one day, she begged me, third-degree-formality Yauntro, to have lunch with her.

Carbon-jet fleered his lips and told me to go ahead. Filla took me to a small restaurant, into a back room with separate chairs and individual little tables, so we sat apart. A waiter brought us dishes of jellied starch with meat and strips of vegetables.

She said, still being most polite, “I’m sorry if I insulted you by taking exception to your appearance. It has its charms.”

“Fuck it.
Your people and my people are using us. Let’s discuss how to deal with that.” I used bare forms, without politeness affixes, business talk.

She looked at me with at shock. “I didn’t tell them I’d failed. I couldn’t.” Hastily, she began eating as I picked among the strange vegetables, watching her look up nervously from time to time. “Perhaps,” she finally said, not as politely, but not sheer business either, “I’ll bring my brother with us. Leave the Jerek here—too mocking.”

“Well, I can’t protect you this fast against brain games,” Carbon-jet said, “or truth drugs and scanners, if they’ve got such stuff, but we can always trace you through your computer if we’re above the local horizon.”

“You want me to go ahead, then,” I said, rather wishing he’d say no.

“We know who you’re supposed to be with and when you’re supposed to return. Why would they link you with Filla if they were arranging an accident?”

As Filla drove up the scarp road, I realized, mountainous or not, the countryside didn’t look like rural Virginia, but was really sub-tropical. That earlier weekend, my eyes had done the brain’s own wish-landscaping.

And the little house on the second terrace above the creek was the Yauntry miniature of the Karst planet stage-set business. When we got to the house built for me, I saw another Yauntry car, bigger than Filla’s, parked by the woodshed. Her “brother,” a huge Yauntry the size of Tesseract, opened the door, peered out suspiciously, then helped Filla with her bags.

I started in, but the brother-type said, “Stand and spread your arms.”

As he moved a metal disc over me, I said, “What makes me mad is how casual my people are about this. I think the fact that a spy female—so obvious—picked me up would have caused more excitement. They didn’t give me any advice or anything.”

The disc paused upside of my head. “Shut up.”

My head exploded in a hideous screech, like forty million fingernails on real slate blackboards. As soon as I could hear again, the man asked, “That?”

“Tr-translates Gwyng, Karst II languages for
me.”

Nervous about touching me, he twisted my head to the side with his fingertips, then tapped the artificial bone. “Would it kill you to take it out?”

Suddenly, I had to try very hard not to piss in my pants. “It’s just a language computer for Karst II.” I thought about how isolated I was.
Oh, so sorry. Accident on mountain road claims alien life. Filla mourns.

“You don’t need it to talk to us?” he asked, watching me sweat. “Come in, now.”

“No,” I answered, stepping inside.

Sitting at a table, he opened a gray anodized box with black dials with white lettering and pulled out two electrodes. “Come here.” I did, and he pasted the two electrodes on my skull. My ears rang; I saw a dial move, stop. “Well,” he said, “if your skull computer
did
have any other functions you didn’t mention…”

“What do you want to know?”

“We want contact with our cadets, if we send cadets. A non-Yauntry could transmit messages less conspicuously.” He turned my skull in his hands again and spoke to Filla in a language I didn’t understand. 
“Do species conspire against each other by type group? We’re both from tropical brachiators so we should be allies.”

“I don’t know anything about that. I’m new there.” The Yauntries stank, of sweat and rotten flowers. Slowly, I got up and walked out. The brother followed me to the woodpile, which had been covered with clear plastic since Filla’d taken me and Carbon-jet up here.

“She says,” the brother told me, “that you were shy, so we lightened her skin and hair to make her more like you.”

I dropped a heap of little branches in his arms, and said,
“Is that a fact?”
in English, watching carefully to see if he was going to drop the wood and hit me. “She lied. She’s terrified of me. It hurts.”

After I picked up more wood, we went back inside, and I stacked the wood away from the stove. The two aliens watched me build the fire, stabbing inside the counterfeit stove with an imitation Earth poker. Finally, I said, “What do you want to know? I’ll tell my guys and report back on how they react.”

They seemed to be calculating the poker’s length, checking me for strange sprouting hairs, or, God knows, sudden tentacles.

“You make me feel alien,” I told them, hating feeling so alone. “You guys made me feel horrible from the first day your troops pinned us down with your gravity jerking.”

“Monsters for companions,” the man said.

I started to pace the floor, swinging the poker until I saw sheer terror on their faces, the hands inside their clothes. This was how Xenon died. He was scared and they were scared. Slowly, as if they had their guns trained on me already, I put the poker down, and sat down on the floor, legs tucked up tailor-style. “The Gwyngs don’t make me feel this alien. It’s bad enough being the intelligent talking creature who fixes tea when the guests come. But a makes-you-nervous alien? Your eyes are round enough; don’t stare at me like that. I don’t have any weapons on me. I’m sitting down. Okay, I’ll lean back on my hands.” I did precisely that, wondering if they could follow all that Karst.

Suddenly, I floated outside the scene, outside my body—as one intelligent ape of one species talked to two of another—all of us alien. Tufts of hair marked my armpit and groin glands—not like a chimpanzee. I could grow face hair to my hairy chest, with only a strip of slick forehead, nose, and cheek skin bare. Not too different from Carbon-jet, after all.

Sure was a weird alien sitting in front of them. Filla looked like she was going to have hysterics, but the universe never uses exactly the same pattern each time it forces a beast to think
.

What burdens thoughts could be, I decided as I choked on a laugh. Monkeys. And the Gwyngs were such perfect bats—if you’re into thoughtful mob sociability, then you’ve got to be a Gwyng.

Finally, I got myself under control, leaned up, hands to
my face, almost in tears. The Yauntries still had their hands on concealed weapons, but they seemed to recognize tears as a reasonable reaction to the situation. “We don’t understand all you spoke,” the male said.

“No, I understand,” Filla countered, which touched off a spate of talking in a language I couldn’t follow.

“So I grow face hairs,” I muttered dumbly.

“Filla, take him for a walk.”

They must have given her a good weapon, because she looked more confident about being alone with me than the last time. She stayed five paces or so behind me, so I just rambled around, going down to the spring, while I thought about how badly I must have wanted to see resemblances to Virginia to have imagined myself back in similar country. But then, I could never go home again, despite Yauntry armed women and spies radioing back and forth for instructions.

“You smell odd,” Filla said behind me. “You stink, of dead flowers.”

Back at the house, the whole scene seemed ridiculous—all us sweating in fear of each other while the big guys…what were the big guys really doing? Filla looked at her brother Yauntry, who smiled faintly.

“I’m not trained for this,” I told him. “If Filla wasn’t trained either, the whole incident is absolutely stupid.”

“Perhaps your Karst masters chose you because you’re not so valuable.”

I had no planet to back me; that was true. “What about Filla? What if I’d just eaten her?” I dropped my arms, lowered my shoulders, and shambled, ape-style, toward her. She pulled out her weapon, all nice and chromed, and grinned, teeth bare.
“Shit,”
I
said. “You’re supposed to have fallen in love with me?”

The male motioned for her to put the weapon away. It looked like a 9 mm automatic—big. “Filla admitted last night that she finds the idea of sex with aliens revolting.”

“I’d have slept with her, but she obviously doesn’t like to be around me except with her killing thing.”

“Sit down,” the brother said in rudest Yauntro. Low business. “What do you know about the tribute the Federation wants us to pay?”

“Tribute?” I hadn’t thought about that, but the Academy and Institutes couldn’t be cheap to run.