Becoming Alien (46 page)

Sim said, “You didn’t need to do that. The beaters manage the wounded beasts.”

“We handled prey like that,” said Karriaagzh in a voice that passed beyond being without accent into something flat, almost mechanical.
Alien.
He slid nictitating membranes back and forth across his eyes as though rubbing his eyeballs warm. “How did Carbon-jet fall into a Yauntry trap that Red Clay evaded?”

I saw Hargun look at Sim, heard clothes rustle as the Yauntries shifted, moved closer together. Karriaagzh and I’d both turned into aliens again. Neither answered.

The beaters field-dressed the game, then loaded the carcasses into snowmobiles. Sim stared at Karriaagzh, groaned, and said, “Edwir, snow coach.” Hargun unglazed his eyes and went out to start it. We drove back to the garage and went silently into the lodge to change into other clothes.

Sim and Hargun were downstairs when I finished changing, but Karriaagzh, who didn’t wear clothes, came down last, pausing on the stairs to really tower over everyone.

The bird said softly, “You could kill the Federation people here, but that’s no matter. Aliens will always be out-there,
k’fang.
A word of my first language.” He didn’t twitch anything on his eyes or ruffle a feather, but continued awkwardly down the stairs. Then he crouched in front of Sim and said, “Why Carbon-jet? Why not Red Clay?”

Hargun, who’d backed away as Karriaagzh came down the stairs, answered, “I didn’t want…”

Sim chopped his hands through the air, and Hargun stopped, and the Encoral Ragar Sim, all the rank, whatever it meant to Yauntries, spoke: “No, my Edwir, if we’re masters in our house, we don’t prove it by jailing powerless people. I don’t prove my power if I take Red Clay into captivity: Tom is better as our intermediary, no political connections to more advanced species.”

“What will this mean to Carbon-jet?” Karriaagzh asked.

Sim said, “We’ll allow conjugal visits, keep him in house rather than jail.”

Karriaagzh stared at me—an utterly alien stare that seemed to consider me as a potential wall trophy. His feathers went erect, then settled in quivering jerks. “I trust Jereks. I still…bonded with one, once.”

“Think again, bird,” Sim said harshly. “Some Yauntrous convinced the Jerek that you didn’t offer honest terms.”

“What corporation?” Hargun asked.

“Star-and-Garden,” Sim replied in an utterly conversational tone. “Are the rest of you hungry? I’m calling the waiters.”

I couldn’t eat; how horror-movie alien they all could be.

Later that night Karriaagzh came to my room, bobbing his head, and crouched down on his hocks at the door, hands full of combs and feather oils. I closed the book on Yauntry corporations that I’d been reading.

We stared at each other. Angry, yet afraid, I stood up before him and said, “Rector, you and Sim are such
bastards.”

“Odd creature,” Karriaagzh said sadly, “no need for such hostility.” As though
I
upset
him.
Suddenly very self-conscious, I pulled my left leg closer to the right—less spraddle-legged fight posture.

“May I come in?” he asked.

“Certainly,” I said.

“Am I likely to be attacked?”

He stood, crouched over his hocks, head bent slightly to the side, still in the doorway.
“Oh, my God,
Karriaagzh.”

He straightened up slightly, walked in, and spread his combs and oil sprays around on the carpet. Then he sat in the middle of all that feather-cleaning stuff, eyes fixed on me, rolling slightly up as he sank down. “Do I intimidate you?”

“You’re bigger than I am. You feel free to send me out to
be shot at, jailed.” I sprayed him with oil and got to work, feeling under the glossy new feathers the muscles he’d gotten from snow-walking.

He looked over his shoulder with those fierce yellow eyes. “I beat Sim in the shooting.” The bony ridges over the eyes, I realized, made him look fierce. I couldn’t really judge his expressions.

“Congratulations.”

“They’ll join the Federation and test us for a few years.” He didn’t seem to care whether the Yauntries heard that or not, sitting between my feet in that ornate little room surrounded by taiga, Yauntries, and a universe that didn’t often make brains in shapes like his.

“Were your first years in the Academy difficult?” I finally asked him. Muscles under my fingers shuddered and loosened, then tightened again as he twitched his feathers.

“More than you can imagine,” he said.

“It’s very difficult for me, too. “

He looked back at me again. “You have your
human
woman. I heard about her.” He switched then to Karst II as though Karst I couldn’t say what he wanted. “We (all sapients) (and you and me) must not twist nervousnesses between each other, does emotional damage/hurt.”

“Black Amber’s afraid of you—something innate in Gwyngs,” I said. “And Gwyng minds are different, so what overmind do they reflect?”

He took my hand and rubbed it, then gathered the feather-grooming things. “Overmind isn’t limited to what we can know, bare-minded, about each other. No one species is as comprehensive as the universe.”

After he left, I fell across the bed, face up, and rubbed my eyes, feeling vaguely ashamed.

∞ ∞ ∞

In the morning, as the Yauntry servants fried liver from the big animal Karriaagzh had killed, Karriaagzh said to Sim, “I want to be there when you arrest Carbon-jet.”

“I can arrange that,” Sim said.

After breakfast we left in the snow coach for the airfield. Once we were airborne, the taiga disappeared below us—the snow coaches, the wood castle of a lodge, and all the game animals that had escaped Karriaagzh and Sim. When we landed near the estate, the Yauntries had the van waiting.

Sim rode along with us, talking to Karriaagzh about the way the Yauntries would hold Carbon-jet. “Conjugal visits?”

Karriaagzh asked. “Would you mind if they had young?”

“Radio the house to make sure Carbon-jet’s indoors,” Sim told the driver, then he asked Karriaagzh, “Young? How many at a time?”

“One, eight months’ gestation.”

“I don’t know. Conjugal visits are customary, but…”

“He’d be more tractable. He nurses the baby, too. Hard to fight with an infant dangling from your tit or with your beak down its throat.”

Sim went “hum-ph,” almost a laugh. Karriaagzh’s head bounced back a bit.

“You don’t want the whole Jerek species against you either,” Karriaagzh added.

We waited in the hall while one of the Barcons went for Carbon-jet. The Jerek came out dressed in his uniform blues with his awards sash, fur brushed back, dwarfed by the Yauntries and Barcons flanking him. When he saw us, he stopped, nose down, as though he’d expected this.

Sim asked, “Are you Carbon-jet, a Jerek who has been in contact with Tellian Wert of Sun-and-Garden?”

“I am Seezat Rentral Awik, of Tunnel Awikkar. The Federation of Sapient Planets calls me Carbon-jet,” Carbon-jet replied, swaying on the balls of his feet, nose tucked down. “I am utterly loyal to that Federation.”

Sim looked at Karriaagzh, then told Carbon-jet, “You’re under arrest for conspiring against trade negotiations between the Federation of Sapient Planets and Yauntra, a planet that wishes to join that Federation.”

“I was trapped!” He swayed faster, then screamed, “Tom!” He leaped as he screamed.

I tried to pin my forearm under his chin, keep him from biting. Horrible to fight a Jerek. They’re loose inside their skins; the fur sheds in your hands. We tumbled over, and I managed to get on top of him, staring into those dark eyes, at that black crinkled face skin.

His heart fluttered, and he closed his eyes and screamed like a caught rabbit.

“Tom, get off,” Karriaagzh said.

As I rose, Carbon-jet whipped his body around and sunk his teeth into my thigh. Barcons pulled us apart, and Karriaagzh’s big one held Carbon-jet Seezat’s head while the Jerek cried “eek, eek, eek,” almost choking.

“Seezat,” the big Barcon said softly, “we’d like to sedate you. Encoral Sim, would you permit this?”

Sim stared down with his gray eyes at Carbon-jet, who writhed, shedding fur, on the floor. “Yes,” he mumbled, realizing that arresting an alien was different from arresting a Yauntry.

Karriaagzh nestled down by Carbon-jet as the Barcons went to get their Jerek sedatives. “You’ll have a breeding permit,” he told the Jerek, stroking him, fur pulling away on the bird’s fingers. “Zharr can join you. Seezat, why didn’t you trust me?”

Carbon-jet’s musk odor thickened. “My biting stick,” he said, body quivering. A Barcon went for it.

“The sentence is not terrible,” Sim said. “House confinement.” He sounded as though he was apologizing.

The Barcon brought Carbon-jet’s biting stick, put it in his mouth. Gritting down on the stick, Carbon-jet rolled to face the wall. Another Barcon pulled out the Jerek’s left arm, took his pulse, then injected the sedative.

Moments later, Carbon-jet sat up, slumped against the wall, clots of shed fur around him. He brushed his dark hand against his nose and looked up at Sim. They both gravely regarded each other; Carbon-jet said, “Don’t put me anywhere hot. Don’t confine me to just one room. I’ll die. Or do you want to kill me?”

“My lodge might suit you.”

“Long time since a Jerek’s felt this way,” Carbon-jet said, speech slurred. “Like an alien.”

“We’ll arrange a quick magistrate court—either Hargun or I can officiate,” Sim said. “Do you need a stretcher?” Carbon-jet looked around the room, then said to Sim, “I’ll surrender to you. You’re the boss. I’ll walk.”

A Barcon helped Carbon-jet to his feet. Sim said, “Come with me, then,” and led the Barcon and the tiny Jerek down the hall.

“You limp,” one of the Barcons said to me, leading me into the kitchen.

I took off my pants and sat on a high table in my shorts as the Barcon and I looked at my thigh where Carbon-jet had got me. Huge bruise—the size of my hand—but the skin was scraped, not punched. “Is he poisonous?” I asked.

The Barcon checked a computer, and my skin tightened as I waited for the answer. “No allergic reactions likely. Sit, calm down.”

Sim came in and stared at my hairy exposed legs. I resented him and Karriaagzh then, and it showed, because he said, “You can’t surrender, can you?”

I remembered the bird cadet shot in space and Carbon-jet shrieking in the hall. And how terrified I’d been. “So you think I’m harmless,” I said.

He came closer and touched the bruise. “Seezat has sprains. No, what I like about you is that you’re honest. But don’t try to make Edwir Hargun into a ’
uman…
”

“Maybe your people don’t surrender to your world government as neatly as your theory says they should,” I said. “Your corporations…” I felt embarrassed to be sitting there with my hairy legs sticking out at him, so I pulled on my pants.

For the rest of the afternoon, Hargun and I wandered around the estate, picking at books, listening to music and shutting it off, while Sim talked to Carbon-jet. Karriaagzh nestled down on a leather sofa, sitting toes and hocks parallel to the back, eyes rigid and unfocused, as though he were in a trance, as though he were wishing we’d all arrest one other, disappear.

Hargun came up to me at dinner. “Thanks,
man,
for “saving my life,” I said to him as we served our plates off the buffet. “But you always tried to be kind, didn’t you?”

He looked at me as if suddenly aliens overwhelmed him with their cries and resistance to Yauntry ways. I thought about Mica, desperate to leave, with the shotgun in his hand, then dying on our kitchen table.

The next day, Hargun woke me up and stood in my room watching me dress. “We still have work to do,” he said. “All the equipment for looking into your fantastic shopping list is here.” He sounded kind of puckish. He looked happier today, all glittering round eyes and so-serious round comic chin. “We’ll work things out,” he said. “And the Jerek seems better and contrite today.”

“I was never contrite,” I said, “but I had no idea that we were being sent into your space against your wishes.”

“You were just suddenly there,” he said, “and scared us.”

“It’s very dangerous to scare creatures.”
Mica, oh, Mica, if you’d just not pulled the gun on Warren.

Hargun and I looked at all the industrial machines, bio-molecular brains, black boxes for gates, and the thousands of varieties of lithium-powered watches and flashlights. Then we worked on a draft of the proposed conversion rates between Yauntry currency and Federation val-unit. “We’ll have to sell some of the lithium,” Hargun said sadly, as though that would strip a moon from his sky.
Maybe it would.

Finally, I sighed and pushed myself away from the terminal. Hargun pulled out the bubble memory pack and hefted it in his palm—odd lines on the palm, not like mine. Funny, I hadn’t noticed that before. I stood and stretched, sight blurred, seeing letters and numbers when I closed my eyes.

“Your people are twenty years behind mine?” Hargun asked.