Becoming Alien (42 page)

I smiled; he gasped that I could smile. Appealing to his professionalism, I said, “I’m not quite sure what to do here. And what was that argument about?”

“Argument? For a space…man, you do speak Yauntro very well. If you eat meat, fried lightly with spice, we’re serving four dishes your medical space-hairy-people approved. Let me seat you first, Red Clay.” He found a chair and pulled up the little attached table. As Karriaagzh and boss-looking Yauntries came in, he stared at them before taking off in a gliding rush, smoother than a run. He brought back a bowl loaded with strips of fried bird meat: “And what function do you play in this?” he asked, handing me the bowl.

“We followed a satellite into your system.” The meat was too spicy, but I managed.

“The Encoral Ragar Sim asked to look at you, after he’s served,” my waiter said. “He is the Encoral dealing with you space people. Perhaps you should address him as Encoral Sim, but Ragar Sim would be appropriate, too. You seem to understand politeness levels?”

“I hope I do.”

“I don’t want to embarrass you.” He paused.

“Could I ask you which politeness level to use? The most polite forms?”

“You have such good understanding.” My waiter took my bowl and extended it out.

I looked over the rim. A white-haired Yauntry looked back at me with extraordinary gray eyes, hammered-steel gray with no black rims to them. He flicked his glance to my waiter, who said, “Let’s approach the Encoral Ragar Sim
now.
”

Sim stood as we came up. The Encoral was about six foot five, dressed in black tweed, with a fir-tree-in-snow lapel badge. Around his neck was a gold chain—big inch-long links—with a fist-sized medallion. Smaller Yauntries with Secret Service eyes and flesh-colored buttons in their ears flanked him.

“So you were on the first ship. Unarmed in our space! Both corporations and the government argue over what that meant,” Sim said. “Sit, sit.”

“Yes, Encoral Sim,” I said as the Encoral Sim’s waiters brought chairs for me and his mean-eyed guards.

“You speak Yauntro well enough,” Encoral Sim said, taking a bowl of fried bird strips from one of his waiters. “I imagine your people plan projects for you that would use it.”

He stabbed bird meat with a skewer and held it by his mouth. “But do you realize how complex this world is, even with one central government?” Then his curved jaw dropped, and he nipped the meat off with teeth that seemed too delicate for his face. His nose was almost human, high-bridged. “Wouldn’t bother
him
that we eat bird?”

“He wears down jackets sometimes.”

“If you had your face hairs removed, you could pass for North Yauntry, if one didn’t look closely at the jaw. Some have eyes almost like yours.”

I remembered face-shifting; my eyes must have flickered because Sim collected himself, alert. “Yes,” I decided to say, “but don’t I have an accent?”

“The DNA’s different, isn’t it? And the amino acids synthesis in the guts.” Ragar Sim’s eyes hunted for and found Karriaagzh in the crowd.

They locked eyes briefly. Sim turned back to me and said, “My Edwir says that your species isn’t part of the Federation? That you’re alone, very junior?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Sometimes I prefer to talk to the unranked. You say Karst treated you well.”

“Yes, Encoral Sim, they’ve rescued me when they’ve gotten me into trouble.” Yauntry had funny phrasings—that came out a bit too honest.

Sim looked at his guards, ate awhile in silence so absolute the waiters gestured to each other, like deaf-mutes. My waiter filled his lungs, about to talk, but Sim finally asked me, “Would you be offended if I touched you?”

“No.” We both put our food aside, and a female waiter brought a finger bowl. Sim prodded along my jawbone with his index finger.

“Little hard specks in there.” He ran his finger from my chin to my ear, then felt my nose. “None there.” He swirled his finger in the finger bowl.

I said, “Once, when my bird roommate was sick, I rubbed oil on where he was growing feathers—felt like
matchsticks,
thin slivers of wood, under his skin.”

“How long would that hair grow, if you let it?”

“Down to my chest.”

“Good for cold weather, I think,” he said with a smile. “Your Karriaagzh asked to be taught Yauntro, but he knows more than he admits.” The Encoral Sim ate more, then looked at me again. “And no sense of humor, except to make very big jokes with planets and blockades.”

“Birds say our sense of humor is cruel.”

“His is. Mine’s not.” Sim paused, then said, “Would you play with a flying disc and talk to our young people while we videotape you?”

“For a broadcast television show?”

“We have to make you seem less monstrous. If we can.” He smiled again, and my waiter took me away.

∞ ∞ ∞

After dinner, Karriaagzh told me on the intercom, “I’ll come by and explain how to clean my feathers.”

When he came in, he put a sticky gray plate on the window, then plugged a red plastic cylinder into it. “That should take care of taps through the window or through your skull computer.” He spoke in Karst II. “Has Carbon-jet tried to make us look vicious here?”

“I don’t know,
sir.
He wanted me to be a link between the Intelligence Institute and Yauntry spies.” I sat down on the bed.

Karriaagzh loomed over me, smelling of feathers and dust.

“Tell me more.” He hunkered down on his shins and looked up at me. “They want to charge you and Carbon-jet with espionage.” When I gasped, he added, “The penalties aren’t harsh, jail for a few years.”

“When Filla approached me, I asked the senior Federation officer what to do. If I was being tested…”

“A test, yes. But…” He looked down at the floor and flicked out his tongue a few times, a flat-bladed tongue like a Gwyng’s, but not as broad.

My leg muscles coiled as if I were going to run. “Sir, Rhyodolite said I’m a token in the quarrel between you and Black Amber. That I owed both my ‘testing’ and rescue to that.”

Karriaagzh jumped up, crest erect, and made a terrible sound with his bills—like two timber slabs crashed together, only repeated. I’d heard a wounded great horned-owl make a similar sound, but the owl’d only startled me. This paralyzed me.

With a shaky hand, he touched his mandibles, then smoothed down his crest. “She insulted me when I first saw you, talking like a lactating submissive. Bird females never need to play such fools.”

“I thought she’d insulted you with the fists and by not wearing the uniform you gave her.”

“I gave her? I’d
never
have made her a Sub-Rector. Gwyng Wy’um and Warst Runnel did that.” He slowly lowered his body again and said, “Body bribes.” The yellow eyes blinked slowly, fixed on me. “And who are you, Cadet, that I can’t use you? Must you be rude to me?”

“I think I’ve been polite. You scare me a little.”

“You do try to be polite,” he said, somewhat calmer.

I decided never to tell Karriaagzh that Tesseract and Ammalla thought his policies would involve the Federation with people who might genuinely fear they dealt with demons. And what
was
Carbon-jet’s attitude toward the bird? I wondered.

Mindful that the Yauntries could hear, I said, “Do you know the Yauntries are going to videotape us, to get their people to see us as less monstrous?”

“That’s a good idea,” Karriaagzh replied in Yauntro.

But the afternoon I was scheduled to be filmed playing with a Yauntry Frisbee, I got dizzy. The Barcons ran cerebral tests, then Karriaagzh’s chief attendant asked, “How do you feel about Yauntries?”

I had a gut-negative reaction about being alone even with Hargun. “Could Carbon-jet come with me?”

We left in a car with a Yauntry driver and two guards. Another car, horn wailing like a siren, led off. I sighed. C-j whistled through his sharp nose and said, “Nothing worse than bureaucracies processing novelties.”

The cars swept through the estate gates and drove through the country to a small city electrically glittering in the on­coming dusk.

“Don’t use me in your intrigues anymore, Carbon-jet,” I told him in the analog Karst II language. “They want to charge us with espionage.”

“Talk about intrigues, the Rector manipulates Gwyng death fears. He forced you on Black Amber because you’d remind her of Mica. But she fitted you into her life, even though you have no brain by Gwyng standards. Then he snatched you away.”

I managed to keep a slight smile embedded on my face along with my incipient whiskers while a Yauntry woman interviewed me, furry Carbon-jet on my shoulder. Then she asked, “Do you grow face hairs like your companion here?”

But I shaved after dinner.
I touched my chin to see if I’d sprouted any since then, and she flushed. I explained, “Mine are coarser than Carbon-jet’s, so to stay clean, I shave them off.”

“When are you broadcasting this?” Carbon-jet asked.

“Soon, if no corporations protest.”

The T of bare Jerek face skin crinkled slightly.

An official took Carbon-jet and me aside into a room with a VCR. He ran the tape of Karriaagzh bending over Hargun’s children, crop surging. “He’s perverted.” Carbon-jet said, “but he wasn’t thinking of eating them.”

“He wanted to feed them,” I explained. “They gaped at him and they’re probably the size of bird babies. Bird stocks, male and female, get pleasure from feeding their mates and young.”

The Yauntry said, “We will format this so the throbbing organ doesn’t show.”

“He really loves little sapients,” I said.

“Tried to marry a Jerek woman,” Carbon-jet added.

The Yauntry’s expression was almost comic—those big eyes, that dumb round chin. He decided we’d go out and tape me and a young Yauntry playing with a plastic flying disc.

“Fantastic idea,” Carbon-jet said.

“Do you also play with these discs?”

“No, we didn’t specialize in grabbing. My people evolved from diggers and biters.”

“He had what ships hidden behind what moons?” Carbon-jet said on the ride back, after I’d explained what I’d seen. The Yauntries continued to tape our weird code-talk.

“Covered an eighth of the big moon’s surface.”

“That many ships? How far away was the moon?”

“Filled a third of the viewport.”

“No wonder they want retroactive waiver of immunity. He faked it. What will they do when they find out?”

“Are you sure he faked it?”

“Offense isn’t a Federation specialty. Let me know how he did it, someday, if we survive. You’re closer than I am to the devious thing. ‘Poor old Karriaagzh, pitied for his loneliness, about to die’ for nearly twenty years.”

“Tesseract extrapolated from the other bird sapients that he could live to be 150, 200.”

“Oh, extrapolation from non-sapient birds is enough. We told the History Committee not to be fooled by rumpled bent feathers and gray old looks
.”

“Isn’t he a good Rector?”

“Is he going to explode the Federation by bringing in too many raw species, xenophobes, primitives? That’s the important question.”

“So, it isn’t just Black Amber he has to worry about?”

“What do you mean, ‘worry about’? The Yauntries won’t hurt
him.
”
Carbon-jet shifted nervously in the car seat, and a musky odor filled the car. “Sorry,” he said, “He’s so sly. He speaks Karst languages without an accent when he’s drunk.”

“And he feeds toilets?”

“Disgusting. I wish he’d take a baby bird from another species, but he probably suspects we’d consider he took a bribe. His posture is aloof disinterested concern for all species, for the Federation.”

I remembered the Rector’s awful sighing in the men’s room after he’d fed the toilet, Rhyodolite’s glazed eyes. Why didn’t the Federation let him adopt a baby bird—ease him?

Three days later, the Yauntries showed the TV production. Karriaagzh asked Sim if all the Federation aliens could watch it in his room, without Yauntries present. The Yauntries agreed, so the linguistics people who’d stayed on Yauntra and the people who’d come with Karriaagzh gathered there: Barcons, Jereks, the old ape senior officer, a couple of bears, all sitting on backless Yauntry folding stools or on Karriaagzh’s suede-covered mat.

On the screen, Hargun fed me at the landing field, the cheese curse cut. Then the scene shifted: I was trying to rouse Rhyodolite—how odd he looked.

I looked around the room.
All the bodies seemed more alien. But when I looked back at the screen, I was unsettled to see myself the odd one, among the Yauntry faces.

When shots of Karriaagzh appeared, we all looked between the screen and the actual creature, so obviously alien on screen, yet both more and less alien in the flesh. His mandibles parted, Karriaagzh watched himself, keeled breast rising and falling, eyes trembling faintly as if he focused on the screen, then looked inward at his mental images. The Yauntry camera caught him bare-armed, with Hargun’s girl touching his scales