Becoming Alien (36 page)

“Help me get this tray to the shelf, up there, please.”

That afternoon, when a light airplane landed, we all, including the Yauntries, went to the porch. Granite Grit stalked off with Feldspar, a purple iridescent female. Both whirled cast­off breeding plumes in their hands, bouncing and swaying as though beauty and analytical genetics could solve all problems. Cadmium followed, looking bemused and one-quarter frightened as he walked his rolling way behind them.

Bird elegance—the two of them, vivid feathers glistening, lifted my spirits. They were
together.

As Cadmium came up to Rhyodolite, his nostrils fluttered. Rhyodolite dipped his head and spread his arms. Could Cadmium smell residual anger juice, I wondered, or just all the ape sweat?

“The birds insist on being/becoming friends,” Cadmium said. “Due to you, Red Clay (full of feathers).”

Granite cocked his head at Cadmium, handed his streamers to Ammalla, and went inside. He brought out raw meat dangling from his bill. Feldspar, already slightly round in the belly, ducked her head and opened her beak. Both crops pulsated as Granite pushed the meat down her throat. After Feldspar swallowed, Granite asked in Karst I if we’d be embarrassed by such displays. “Feeding each other is such a pleasure now.”

“Anything life-evoking is lovely,” Ammalla said, stroking their breeding plumes through her hands.

Then Granite bent his legs, the way Karriaagzh did to reduce his height, but with his gold and blue feathers undamaged, and sidled up to Rhyodolite. Feldspar settled down by Granite, leaning her breast feathers against his arm.

“Thanks for saving me,” Rhyodolite said in a small voice as he trailed a skinny finger over Granite’s head feathers. The finger backed up as it came close to the nares.

Hargun, who couldn’t understand Rhyodolite’s speech, looked at Rhyodolite and Granite and said to Ammalla, “That pretty display of inter-species reciprocal community doesn’t impress me one bit.”

“Sir,” she said, “what you saw was very hard won.”

He walked into the house without saying anything more. The other Yauntries followed.

“What a goo-egg,” Granite Grit said.

Cadmium reached into a bag, pulled out the lathed Frisbee, and tossed it to me. He said, “Keep it. We’ll play later.”

Tesseract and Ammalla’s house had a separate wing for people who needed seclusion and Barcon attendants. One of the two Barcons told me, “Hargun wants to see you.” The Barcon didn’t seem happy to be tending both Rhyo and the Yauntries. “Maybe safer if he came out to the hall.”

“I’ll go in.” I might as well trust them. Karriaagzh was sending me back with them.

When I went in, Hargun was sitting behind a table. “You were bait for us,” he said in Yauntro.

“I wasn’t aware of it.”

He laughed, a bit harshly, then asked, “Why are you with these beasts? You’re almost a real person.”

“What the hell did you expect to fetch your satellite?”
I said in English. “You sent out a probe. Did you expect aliens to look like you?”

“A rational universe would produce creatures like us. But it’s the accidental coming together, isn’t it? And the Karriaagzh pretends we’re all aspects of the same mind.”

“Perhaps if you were younger, you’d adapt better to being around other sapients,” I replied.

“Don’t you miss your own people?” he asked harshly. We'd had a pleasanter interview after he’d killed Xenon and held me prisoner.

“Ambassador, you know what I miss.” I felt quavery inside as I said that, wishing I could be with Yangchenla now, wishing Warren was sane, here, without fuss from Black Amber. “But these are my friends.”
Yangchenla and I could be primitive together. Granite has Feldspar.

“Feathered lizards?”

“Why don’t you talk to Granite Grit? His people started out afraid of the Federation also.” Hargun’s eyes caught me on face, armpits, and hands, before he said, “I’m no more a xenophobe than you are.”

“Probably not,” I told Hargun as I walked out.
“See you around.”

Ammalla served meals on the porch, which forced the Yauntries out of their rooms three times a day,before they went back, like lions escaping a circus audience by retreating to their cages.

Cadmium and Granite began playing with the Frisbee out in front of the porch, leaping and snatching it. The Gwyng could tumble better, but Granite had a definite high-jump advantage. Each time Granite made a high jump, though, I saw Cadmium flinch.

Rhyodolite hobbled out on the porch, then one of the younger Yauntries came out, looked at Rhyodolite, then out at the bird and Gwyng playing with the Frisbee, finally at me. Rhyodolite walked down carefully on his splinted legs to join Cadmium, who gently lobbed him the Frisbee.

“We have discs like that on Yauntra,” the young stranger told me. I saw his fingers twitch when Rhyo threw to Granite Grit.

“Join them.”

“Huh-na. They can’t talk, can they?”

“Hum. I’ll translate your Yauntro.”

“I was on the team—we’re all here—that shot your other bird. I remember kneeling down on him out there and feeling the webs give under my knees.”

I’d wrestled a Gwyng—had a tactile flash of how web flexed under a knee. Real squishy. “Rhyodolite told me you guys captured the ship.” How had Rhyo remembered? Smell? Memory for patterns?

Rhyodolite hobbled back toward us and yelled. “Come down,
Yaungtri
person. Red Clay (sometimes linguistically too plastic), translate honestly for me. Tell him if he hadn’t backed off my webs, I couldn’t have chilled down. Would have bit.”

“He says he remembers and forgives you. Go down.”

“Liar. Non-translator. I want to throw one into his neck,” 
Rhyodolite said, catching a toss from Cadmium and waving the Frisbee so wildly I thought he’d topple off his plastic-coated feet.

“But watch your neck,” I added.

The Yauntry smiled, just a lip twitch. I yelled for Rhyo to toss me the Frisbee, caught it, and handed it to the Yauntry, who turned it over, looking at both sides. “Handmade?” the Yauntry finally said.

“Yes, we cut down some plastic.”

“Umph,” he said as he went down the stairs to throw a fairly combative curve at the Gwyngs. Both grabbed for it, Rhyodolite almost tumbling into Cadmium, who steadied him before whirling the disc to the birds, who tossed it over the leaping Yauntry’s head back to me. I lobbed it, low and easy, to Rhyodolite, to see what he’d really do.

As Rhyodolite threw the Frisbee so that it rose into the Yauntry’s chin, a Barcon came out. “The game should move back to the pool where the Gwyng can rest his legs in the water and not have too much throwing leverage,” the Barcon said. “Is the Yauntry happy?”

Cadmium and the birds instantly agreed to move around back.

“I’m amused a bit,” the Yauntry said when I translated the Barcon’s question for him.

Edwir Hargun came hunting his man only to find the younger Yauntry playing around Tesseract’s pool with all the enemy aliens. Ammalla followed Hargun and suggested he come inside for tea. Hargun looked at the Yauntry soldier leaping after a Terran-model Frisbee tossed by a swimming bat, cheered on by two monster-show parrots and me, who looked like a deformed Yauntry. Without speaking, he turned and followed Ammalla inside.

The Yauntry cocked the Frisbee toward Granite Grit. “Is he like the bird on the ship?” the Yauntry asked me.

“Not the same species.”

“If I was scared, then he was scared, too, wasn’t he?” the Yauntry asked me, still holding on to the disc.

“We were all very scared.”

“No weapons.”

“No. Better the new species should shoot, maybe.”

He lobbed the disc to Granite Grit. “You invaded our system. I feel awkward playing with you now.” He turned around and left.

The rest of us continued playing in and around the pool until Rhyodolite complained of the cold. Cadmium and Granite reached down to help him out, but he splashed them.

Granite shook, water spraying off his blue head feathers, then stepped closer and crouched. Rhyo heaved water at the bird with his webs. Turning his head, Granite grabbed and caught Rhyo’s arm.

Rhyo squalled, as if he were being killed.

Cadmium’s shoulder hair went erect. Barcons came running. Instantly, Granite dropped Rhyo’s arm and sat down at the edge of the pool, lay his wet head on his hands.

“Grabbed him,” Cadmium told the Barcons. “Rhyodolite was throwing water at us.” Nervously, he smoothed down his shoulder fur, while Rhyodolite, gasping, treaded water.

Granite made strangled sounds, then managed to say, “I didn’t grab him hard.”

The Barcons looked at each other. Tesseract and Ammalla came down behind them. “Gwyng foolishness” the Barcons told them.

Granite shook his wet feathers and told Rhyodolite, in Karst II, “Can’t stand being grabbed, don’t splash.” Rhyodolite looked up at him, shuddered, then swam to the pool rim and held on, bobbing up and down as he breathed in and out, his eyes squeezed shut. “Rhyodolite, I’m sorry if I startled you,” Granite added, very quietly.

“Cadmium, help me out,” Rhyo said, eyes still closed. I helped Cadmium pull him onto the apron where he lay shivering, water soaked under the plastic splints. Rhyodolite opened his eyes and quivered his pupils at Granite nervously before easing himself to his feet. “Let’s go inside and get warm,” he said.

As we walked to the house, Rhyo leaned against Cadmium. Granite moved tentatively toward Rhyo, but Feldspar touched his shoulder.

Hargun watched from the porch, a deep smile on his face. As we passed, he said to me in Yauntro, “Not such a loving bunch after all.”

After getting Rhyo out of his wet pants, we draped him in towels until Ammalla brought an electric blanket and hot butter. The two birds gingerly nestled down on either side of his chair, talking in bird over his knees.

Rhyo asked wearily, “Why did you birds rescue me? I failed my own bird.”

“You’re Tom’s friend.”

“I feel death guilt now.” Rhyodolite drew back, arms tensing against the chair. The web veins throbbed once.

Finally, Granite Grit said, “Rhyodolite, your fear instinct is unbecoming of a sapient.”

“We want to help you with your fear. Can you stand us in your room at night?” Feldspar said.

Rhyodolite wiggled and looked back over his shoulder at Cadmium, who gave an eye roll. “I suppose so. You’re as warm as we are. Cadmium finds my splints uncomfortable (two ways)—very restless/without sleep.”

“We will stay with you quietly. You don’t splash,” Granite said, “and we won’t grab.”

“I feel terrible about this.”

The Barcons came in and re-splinted Rhyodolite’s legs with drier plastic.

Before I went to bed, I checked to see how they were managing. Cadmium and the birds were asleep—the blond-streaked Gwyng curled under Feldspar’s breast feathers, muzzle touching Rhyodolite’s shoulder, one arm slung over him. Rhyo lay rigid on his back between the birds, his open eyes almost glazed.

“If it’s that bad, just wriggle out and sleep in my room.”

“I’ll be okay.” He looked at the birds on either side of him, then lifted Cadmium’s arm very gently and rolled over, closing his eyes.

Feldspar stirred, dropping her eyelids, but with the nictitating membrane half veiling her eyes, barely awake. She rubbed her beak against the two Gwyng heads and rocked forward a few times to smooth her feathers, then looked, a bit more alertly, haws back, at me before settling her head back on her arms.

Rhyo tucked his fingers under Cadmium’s shoulder.

I felt odd, isolated, as I went to my room. My sleeping alone seemed almost a prejudice. I envied Gwyngs their ease with each other—no humans I knew had such physical closeness unless they were lovers. Maybe because we slept together after sex, humans, at least my kind of humans, had sexualized the bed.

But, really, sleeping piled together on mat didn’t seem all that comfortable either, I thought as I felt my body twitch that sleep twitch.

I had weird dreams: humans, Warren, Mica screaming. When I woke, I found blankets twisted around my legs. After I untangled the bedclothes, I went to see how the Gwyngs had managed under the birds. Rhyodolite was asleep on his belly, half covered by Feldspar’s and Granite’s puffed up feathers. Cadmium, dressed already, was spreading his face wrinkles open and wiping the grooves with a wet swab, watching himself in the mirror. Granite eased away from Rhyo and Feldspar and stretched first one leg and arm, then the others like a chicken.

Cadmium watched Granite in the mirror as the bird shook his feathers, all puffed up, before twitching them down. Turning back to his own reflection, Cadmium fussed with his service sash.

I sat down beside Rhyo, smelling the faint chlorine Gwyng smell. Feldspar woke up and rubbed her beak through my hair, then looked down at Rhyodolite, who still slept, arms wrapped around himself. She moved her hand as though she wanted to stroke him, but stopped.

Finally he sighed, turned his head toward me, and opened his large dark eyes. I felt a little embarrassed.