Becoming Alien (37 page)

“You’re not that cold-blooded, Red Clay, cuddle up,” Rhyo told me as he wriggled over on his back and looked up at Feldspar, who gently wiped congealed goo away from his eyes.

He only flinched a little.

“You’ll be okay with us eventually,” she said, rubbing around his ears.

“Then I should tame myself with the Rector,” Rhyodolite said as he reached for her hand and pulled himself up. “You can tame Hargun. One Yauntry already fetches our plastic flying toy.” Rhyo looked for his luggage, carefully walked over on his splinted legs, and pulled out his uniform tunic. “I’m going to get the Barcons to take off the rest of the splints. I want a long hot salty bath, with bare legs,” he told us as he left.

Cadmium stayed with us. “You birds would make great first-contact people or linguistics investigators,” he said to Granite, “if you weren’t so different from most sapients.”

“For a linguistics team, shouldn’t matter,” Feldspar said in Karst II. We went silent a bit, thinking about first contacts—at least I was.

“This Federation is wonderful,” Granite Grit said, preening what feathers he could reach with serrated metal combs and oil mist. “Your kinds (unjealously) admire us for our genetics work. Utterly surprising—we love alien attention.”

“Do the other sapient birds admire you?” Cadmium asked.

“Don’t know. They never bred for colors.” The two birds began to preen each other, and Cadmium and I went out to the porch for breakfast.

“Very odd, Red Clay, sleeping beside great birds.”

“Odd sleeping in piles the way you Gwyngs do.”

“Why?”

“Humans
don’t,” I said before I thought.

“Universe’s worst answer. Don’t you get lonely, trapped unconscious in your dreams—no one but you moving through them?”

I shrugged at him, trapped in reality alone: “Non-conspecifics aren’t the company I want in bed.”

Cadmium oo’ed.

∞ ∞ ∞

At breakfast on the porch, Hargun stood coughing, slowly eating from a bowl. He stared off at the plains, ignoring the birds and Gwyngs chattering in Karst II. The other Yauntries watched him.

I said hello in Yauntro, second politeness, to the Frisbee-playing Yauntry. Instead of replying, he looked down at his food bowl, then at Hargun.

Rhyodolite said, “Rather be fed in a cage than see us.”

Granite replied, “Don’t be rude,” before he dropped a morsel, bill to bill, in Feldspar’s mouth.

Edwir Hargun flicked his eyes at the birds before looking back at the horizon. Granite stepped closer to Hargun, bent his backward knees to be on eye level with the Yauntry, and asked in Karst I, “Do you like music, Ambassador?”

Hargun’s face softened, then stiffened again. Hoarsely, he said, “You’re the birds who thought force held this thing together.”

Granite rose stiffly erect. “Fighting between my people’s nations may continue—but why fight space? The others are competitive over different things.”

Hargun coughed hard, then said, “You like us monsters?”

“Stop. Do you like music?” Granite almost bounced.

“What music could
I
have in common with a feathered lizard?”

Feathers rose on Granite’s neck as he drew his head back, eyes covered by nictitating membranes. Feldspar very softly touched his neck. He flashed the third eyelids back into his eye corners and settled his feathers in nervous little jerks. Muscles tight around his eyes, Granite Grit said, “Tesseract’s house has lacked music lately, so I’ve asked for my discs.”

“I’d prefer not to discuss music with you, bird.”

At the comers of both birds’ eyes, membranes twitched. Granite crouched down low on his hocks and looked up at Hargun. “Music goes around walls, sir, so you will be forced to hear.”

“Without facing us terrible monsters,” Feldspar added. They both stalked away, hocks raised high.

Hargun coughed up phlegm, then asked, “Was I about to get attacked again?”

Rather nervously, Cadmium moved away from Hargun and said, “Now I know why Rhyodolite kicked. Ask him why he’s being so stupidly insulting/insultingly stupid.”

“Sir, you insult us, then wonder why we get mad. Why?”

Hargun sat down in a chair, blew his nose, and wadded the napkin up on a plate. “Insults? I’m a prisoner. I hope
you
catch this virus. The Barcons told me mild viral infection, best to let run course…stress makes disease from resident viruses. Like I deserved it.”

“I know what captivity’s like,” I told him. “At least you’ve got other Yauntries here.
We
won’t murder
you.”

Tesseract came out and told Hargun, “Ambassador, your species has asked us to send the Rector Karriaagzh to Yauntra for discussions. The History Committee has to decide whether the Rector is expendable.”

Hargun sagged and began breathing hard. Then he said, “Expendable?”

“Well…” Tesseract fixed his own breakfast and sat down close to Hargun, who backed up against the far chair arm. Tesseract ate some eggs, then asked, “Do your people know anything about Karriaagzh?”

“He’s intimidating, stern…”

“To you, Hargun. Karriaagzh, as an isolate, depends on mammal social flexibility. His own people won’t deal with us, and they’re too technologically sophisticated for us to kidnap a social group for him.”

“Xenophobic.”

“No, initially they were calm, according to the records. Karriaagzh came back with the First Contact team when his species refused to join the Federation. I’d enjoy seeing him negotiate with you. Birds have one-track minds. Consider how implacably the birds work to cure poor Rhyodolite of his fear of them.”

“Am I going back? Soon?”

“We’re still talking to your people. And we need to determine how severe your xenophobia is.”

“I’m sicker from being held captive than I am afraid of you monsters.”

Tesseract’s face stiffened, then he said, “Relax, listen to Granite Grit’s discs.”

“Is the prisoner ordered to do this?”

Tesseract asked me in English,
“Tom, would your people
still be so hostile? Most students with xenoreactions would be reasonable by now, except hard-wire cases.”

“Tesseract, you’ve been dealing with too many kids. This one’s a fully grown-up man.”

Tesseract smiled at me and said to Hargun, “Karriaagzh is right. One does get tired of being treated as though one were biologically wrong.”

“We’re trapped here, Rector’s Man,” Hargun said. “Can we believe anything you’d say?”

Tesseract began eating furiously, the skin over his skull crest flushed, then he threw down his spoon and said, “First I agreed to help the birds with the Gwyngs, then I’m assigned your group. Plus Tom.”

“Tesseract,” I said, shocked to hear him angry.

“Do you know how far away I am from everything I know, love?” Hargun asked. His eyes fluttered in his gray face.

“I’m sorry. But Tom, Red Clay, is infinitely more isolated. Yet you baited him brutally. Then your people ask for Karriaagzh as a negotiator—another isolate. I only feel sorry for your squad men here. Let them fraternize with us monsters.”

Suddenly, aliens nauseated me.

Tesseract massaged his crest as if pushing the blood out of it. “I’m sorry, Tom, Edwir, if I was rude.”

Granite Grit came out and bobbed down, watching Hargun a moment before he said, “Ambassador, your men are listening to the music. Please come in and hear my discs.”

“Surely, Granite Grit,” Hargun said. As he passed by, I noticed his eyes were red.

When we heard the music begin again, Tesseract led me to the back of the house, by the pool.

“Yangchenla!” She sat in a deck chair, wearing an American dress the green of old Coke bottles, belted with a brocade scarf. Awh, she looked so good. I ran up to her.

Smelling of musk and warm skin, she took my hand and said, “I was invited to the country for you.”

Her hair was up in a bun—very glossy, as though she’d oiled it. “Are you used to these kinds of people?” I asked nervously.

“I sell
yak
milk oils to the wrinkle-faces who can only listen, and handwovens. I’m not such a barbarian as some seem to think, those…”

“Free Trader,” Tesseract interrupted, “perhaps you and Red Clay would like to take a walk. I’ll be in the kitchen when you come back. Let’s give Hargun time alone with Granite Grit and the Gwyngs—see what happens.”

“Okay,” I said, heart jammed in my lungs.

When Tesseract was almost to the house, Yangchenla said, “That one did not make corning here a raw sexual proposition, even if he dressed me like this.”

“I didn’t ask for you directly, but it’s nice seeing you again.”

We walked to see the riding stock, which was bedded down on dried ferns. She leaned against a wall and smiled slowly, watching my face, her smile deepening as I began to smile, too. “We ride things, too,” she said. “So much the same, despite the surface differences.”

“Where are you staying tonight?” I asked.

“The rooms are next to each other, yours and mine.”

My face heated up. “Oh,” I said.

“No double sex bed prepared as the Barcons did.”

I had a double bed in my room. “See enough of the riding beasts?”

“Yes, let’s go to the house. I’ve always wanted to see how the Federation authorities live.” She fluttered over some things my surgically contrived tongue and vocal cords got correctly.

“Do you feel comfortable with the others?”

“I’ll like,” she said, “anyone you like.”

When we came in through the kitchen, Tesseract was putting squatty red and silver Karst beer cans in the freezer. “Hargun’s fine,” he said. “They’re all eating mid-meal and arguing about music—even the Gwyngs.”

I listened from the doorway. Between musical pieces, they whistled, hummed, or sang phrases and re-phrases, discussing what the composers intended.

“Go in without me,” Tesseract said. “I don’t want Edwir to think I’m scoring points.”

“What are the Gwyngs going to say when they see her?”

“Be glad she can’t understand.” I got flustered, remembering Rhyo going for tits in the pond, but Tesseract put a hand on my back and said, “They’ll be
gentlemen.”

“Wrinkle-faces,” Chenla said, making a wrinkled face herself.

When we came in, Cadmium glared at Rhyodolite, who spread his arms slightly. I introduced Yangchenla to everyone I could, not knowing the names of the three other Yauntries or the two attendant Barcons.

The Yauntries tried, it seemed, to examine her eyelids without getting involved with her pupils. “One of my kind here, a different breed. They came a couple centuries ago” I explained.

Chenla lowered her head and looked at them through her eyelashes, “Free trader,” she said.

“With the funny oil,” Rhyodolite said. “Ask her if she knows a free trader Gwyng who…”

Cadmium interrupted, “Rhyodolite, don’t get into that.”

Granite put another disc in the system. Hargun sat tensely, but as I watched, I realized he was tense now about being right in his musical opinions. Both he and Granite took music seriously, but the Gwyngs complained this music was for different brains than theirs. The Barcons said that was Gwyng­ piss-in-ear, but when Granite translated the Gwyng comment for Hargun, he asked Rhyodolite to explain further.

Chenla leaned against me and said, “Yes. How do these minds work? They speak in language I can’t understand, although we gesture and sign to each other.”

“Why try to explain? Can’t even put our real languages into Karst II,” Rhyodolite said to Cadmium.

Cadmium replied, “We’ll both try.”

So Rhyodolite explained how Gwyngs heard music in chords held across time—meaning found in patterns larger than our minds encompassed, non-binary. Then the computer in my skull garbled part. Granite tried to translate what he understood, but all we could figure out was that ultrasonics and polarized light
must
be meaningful if Gwyngs perceived them. But we aliens survived without those senses. Rhyodolite said, “You (not-Gwyngs) have limited minds.”

Chenla had her hand to her face, index finger beside her nose; her heart beat against my arm as she looked intently at the Gwyngs. Hargun asked Granite Grit, “Do you perceive like Gwyngs?”

“No,” Granite said. “But I can understand. Karst II.”

“Karst II is synthetic/limited/cut perception,” Rhyodolite said. “Karst II cripples our brains if that’s the first language we learn.”

“Some Gwyngs wonder if the patterns do have ecological meaning,” Cadmium said. “Old Gwyng language—imperceptibly rich, isolating.”

Odd that Gwyngs, in their plain little bodies, had minds that saw polarized sky, that heard across time in some way different from memory.

“What is my planet’s sky like, in polarizations?” I asked them shyly.

Rhyodolite and Cadmium looked at each other. “Red Clay, different,” Cadmium said. “Would rather not, however, reconstruct.”