Becoming Alien (45 page)

He didn’t look at me, but called up a new graphic. “Overwhelming…” he murmured. He seemed to be punching stuff up at random.

“They’ve just had longer to get all that stuff,” I said. “They aren’t particularly smarter.”

“Have you met them all?” Hargun asked, eyes on a spun-gold wire basket on a turning pedestal.

C-j started to carry a stick—black dented wood—which he bit from time to time. When certain Yauntries guarded us, he slipped out to talk to the Yauntry who’d visited him earlier.

“There’s a strange Yauntry with Carbon-jet now,” I said to Hargun after lunch. “And Carbon-jet wants to know what we’ve been doing. I told him we haven’t decided anything.”

Hargun yanked out the cartridges we’d been working with and clenched his jaw. “I can’t stop this. We’re going to the Encoral Sim’s. Let him see what alien technology is like, then he’ll know why the corporations plot.”

“Should I get my clothes?”

“I’ve had a plane ready for days. Don’t stop for anything. I have snow clothes ‘styled to your custom.’”

“What about Carbon-jet?” I asked.

“He’s safe enough for now.” Hargun got very polite with me, almost eerily polite, as though he really wanted to be angry. When we left, Hargun walked faster and faster until we were almost running toward the estate garage.

As we started across open space between the main house and the garage, I heard a bullet— that crashing sound—and threw myself flat, twisting.
Keep movin’ while they’re shootin’,
Warren had taught me.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hargun plant both feet in shooter’s stance, raise a gun, and fire. I kept twisting around, terrified, even of him.

“Tom,” Hargun said. “Why didn’t you shoot?”

“What? What?” I quivered, still moving.

Hargun held the gun up as he took careful steps to a body lying half out of the bushes. I stood up slowly and followed him. “It’s the Yauntry who talked to me three days ago,” I said as Hargun rolled him over.

Hargun knelt by the body, checked the pulse in the neck.

“I killed a Yauntry for an alien.” He stared up at me as though I’d just been captured: “Why didn’t
you
shoot?”

“I’m not armed!” We were shouting at each other—very dangerous. “You’ve got a plane waiting. Come on, let’s go. Now.”

Hargun stood up, blood on his knees, looking like he was going to faint. “Yes, we must,” he said.

Hargun and I landed on a rolled snowfield surrounded by dark fine-needled evergreens, shorter than pines, the size of red cedars—millions of them as far as I could see. A Yauntry guard, breath a white cloud, stood by a snow coach, like a large snowmobile, red with black racing stripes, totally enclosed, though, with plastic windows. We got in, and the snow coach whipped us through the Yauntry spruces, down by willow thickets, the coach almost bouncing as the Yauntry driver rushed us across the taiga. The coach noise made talking impossible.

Suddenly, as the coach went over another hill, I saw the lodge—a golden log fantasy, high-pitched roof, big dormers with stained-glass panels in the windows.

The coach pulled up to the lodge and stopped. In sudden silence, Edwir Hargun and I pulled out our bags and stepped on crunchy snow. Logs can’t be machine-laid, so those irregular, monster pines, hauled in from considerably farther south, dovetailed and squared off, made a considerable statement to this country boy. If Tesseract’s place said money made nice things to share, Sim’s lodge sneered, “Permanence isn’t important. The Encorals will keep the power to build again.”

No one came out to meet us. Hargun waited, hunched over, breath fog wisping off. He looked terrified, so I knew I should be, too. Finally, almost shivering, he picked up his bag and went into the house.

The main room was a huge hall with a balcony running around three walls, heated by a boiler-sized wood stove in the center. Despite the stove’s size, the hall was chilly.

Then, under a balcony, I saw Karriaagzh crouched on a leather pad and Sin sprawled in a hide-covered sofa. “Ah, Edwir-who-belongs-to-me, afraid they’d corrupt you?” Sim said, as though to a child.

Hargun stood, his round eyes blinking at Sim, chin down and shoulder up. Then he said, “I’m not corrupt, Encoral. We needed help. I shot someone trying to kill this alien.” He lifted his hand limply toward me.

Karriaagzh said, “Where’s Carbon-jet?”

“Relax, Edwir,” Sim finally said. “Carbon-jet’s safe for now, Karriaagzh. I thought some corporate
ze’eshi
might try to kill
you,
bird, to make an incident. So I brought you to where I run things, not the corporations.”

Karriaagzh puffed up his head feathers.

Hargun shuddered and looked around the lodge as though he’d never been there before. Karriaagzh stood up and stretched, thick-feathered now after two weeks of running around in the cold without a uniform. “We can talk in the morning,” Karriaagzh said: “You both should unpack now, see your rooms, adjust their temperatures. Carbon-jet would have been happier here, in the cold.”

“Karriaagzh,” I said, “a Yauntry tried to shoot me after he asked if I’d like to go home.”

“I shot a Yauntry to save…” Hargun said

“Go to your rooms, now,” Sim said. Hargun’s face seemed to shrivel. “On that balcony,” Sim added pointing, “first and second…”

After we climbed the stairs, a Barcon came out of another bedroom, clucked, and took our bags. A Yauntry servant brought me a thermos of hot wine.

As I sipped the wine to get warm, I looked at my room, paneled in bird’s-eye wood—a waste of cabinet veneer, which was, I guessed, the point. A fur rug covered the floor. My bed, high and fluffy, stood on it. I climbed into the stack of quilts and furs and tried on my Yauntry-made arctic clothes, almost shivering. Padded Yauntry cloth and earth suit styles blended into something a trifle exotic.

Night now, the room was chilly and the wine strong, so I stripped, rolled up in the quilts, and went to sleep.

In the morning, we sat around eating small grilled animals that Sim and Karriaagzh had shot. “There is a cartel of lithium planets,” Karriaagzh rumbled. He swallowed his animal whole, followed by coarse gravel to rub the meat off the bones.

“Would we be required to join this cartel?” Hargun asked.

He seemed sane again this morning.

“We don’t force you to sell your lithium to anyone, at any price. Nor do we force you to join the Federation.”

“The list,” Hargun said to Sim, “is overwhelming.”

“Some species stayed out of space once they saw that list,” Karriaagzh said, rubbing his bottom mandible with both hands, then wiping his hands with a hot towel.

“Protected from other species, though?” Sim asked. He looked sleepy, gray hair tousled; even the steely eyes seemed a bit softer.

“Yes, we protect those species,” Karriaagzh said.

“I was intimidated by the list, too,” I said.

Sim smiled at me and said, “But you’re not connected to any space-going species, are you?”

“No,” I said.

“They keep a watch on your planet?” I remembered all the clothes that had come from Berkeley. Sim saw my eyes wobble and added, “Very close watch, I’d imagine.”

“We can’t promise that your economy won’t be disrupted,” Karriaagzh said. “You’ll have to work hard.”

Karriaagzh’s chief Barcon came shambling up, fur short, still growing out, but thick. He loaded a tray and said, “Or find a specialty.”

“Like the Institute of Medicine,” Karriaagzh said.

The Barcon went back with the bones on his tray.

“They’re equal members of your Federation?” Sim asked. “I can’t tell if you’re their pet or master.”

“Not either,” Karriaagzh said, “but equals.”

Sim looked at Hargun and said, “We’ll get a computer from the South.”

∞ ∞ ∞

Sim stared at the computer screen a whole day, switching back and forth from the short descriptions to motion graphics.

Karriaagzh sat away from the fire, reading from a Yauntry module screen, feathers puffed up, staring at me with his yellow eyes from time to time.

Sim called up a chromium-looking spidery industrial robot. As it rotated through its routine, he said, “My people in the North conquered everyone who tried to conquer us. Now the whole universe invades Yauntra.” Sim turned his steel-gray eyes to Hargun. “Load the economics program, Edwir.”

As Hargun and I worked with the program, Karriaagzh and Sim watched. All the models showed at least one corporation falling. Karriaagzh suggested, “Send your young to train on high-tech computer planets—better to get the computers slowly and really know them than to be dependent on another species. No one will force concessions.”

Hargun and Sim flashed their teeth at each other. Hargun looked at the bubble graphics again.
Information in illegally acquired systems can be drained or purged, the devices confiscated.

Yauntry had to deal through the Federation for giga-megabit computers, architectures with minigates that skipped information around inter-molecular space.

“I hate being inferior. But enough.” Sim finally said. “Time to hunt.”

Sub-zero out on the taiga, even Karriaagzh wore elbow-length mittens and down mukluks on his lower legs. The snow squeaked under my borrowed boots as I paced to stay warm while Hargun brought the red snow coach around. Karriaagzh puffed up his feathers and blinked rapidly. Only Sim seemed used to the cold, standing in furs smiling at us.

The snow coach engine shattered the silence as it came toward us like a fiberglass bullet, its huge central tread kicking snowballs behind it. When it stopped, Karriaagzh climbed awkwardly in back. I sat beside him while the Encoral climbed in by Hargun. The noise kept us from talking as the machine kicked forward and careered through the short firs.

We drove up through a cleared killing ground to a round stone hut, its walls pierced with slits. Hargun parked the snow coach beside it, and we climbed out. Hargun and I carried the guns in, pushing the quilted leather door flaps aside. Sim listened to the beaters on a radio as I helped Hargun fire up the stove—a huge circular thing with fins on top.

“Karriaagzh,” Sim said, “I have no idea what some of those industrial robots do. What cultural level do we appear to be on?”

Karriaagzh hunkered down on his mukluk-covered shins and looked at the gun he’d been given and didn’t answer for so long, I wondered if the Rector
would
answer.

“You’re a species in transition,” Karriaagzh finally said, shifting his two feet out from each other, then pulling them parallel and standing up.

“Come on, bird. Species must always be in transition.”

“Early, when intelligence first erupts in a body, the new brain tries to glorify itself. Eventually, the brain settles to being support for just another superior animal. Do we mature? Or do we lose something? Space travel generally evolves in the transition.”

“You think we’re barbarians,” Sim said. “I shouldn’t have shown you the hunt.” The big Yauntry was teasing, but only slightly. He sat down by the stove, his gun between his outspraddled knees.

“No,” Karriaagzh said, voice slighter than usual, “I hunted on my home planet before I left. I’d love to contact species just before the space jump stage—to approach them just when they’ve realized the universe could be populated by different intelligences, not by gods. To build the Federation into a Family of Mind, with all ages, all cultural levels. Find a way to work even with primitives.”

“Yet you’d sacrifice Tom,” Sim said as he passed the bullets around, “to make us feel less powerless.”

“You want certainty? Tom may be killed by the next First Contact species; I might be assassinated by mad Gwyngs.”

Just then the beaters told Sim the game would be driven across the killing ground in three minutes, so
we loaded the guns and took positions at the slots.

“By the way,” Sim added, “your Carbon-jet Jerek was stupid. We have to arrest him.”

Karriaagzh snapped his beak softly. “Jereks are difficult when offended.”

“So am I,” Sim said. “And you, Karriaagzh, should be the most offended. Silence now, the game’s coming.”

White animals and birds fleeing the beaters cast shadows on the blue-white snow, fell in red patches as the bullets hit. A large antlered thing, almost white, thrashed through the snow, breaking the crust.

Sim held his fire and touched Karriaagzh’s feathered shoulder. The bird shot the big antlered mammal in the throat, but it leaped and ran almost to the woods before collapsing.

The radio told us that the beaters were approaching the clearing, so we set the guns aside. “Everyone’s gun used different bullets,” Sim explained to me, “so we can tally the game.”

Karriaagzh took off his boots and waded through the snow to where the deer-creature lay. He circled it, hocks raised high behind him, then slashed into its neck with his hoof nails. I heard a gasp and turned around. Hargun, hands stiff on his gunstock, was looking at Sim, whose face seemed icy, lips tucked in.

Karriaagzh wiped the blood off his lower legs with a handful of snow, then walked back to his boots, leaning against the hut wall so he could use both hands to put them on.