Becoming Alien (47 page)

I looked over at him. “Actually my own family was behind that.”

“I thought becoming involved in our space explorations would give me status. A place where virtues mattered, courage, intelligence. Well, I’ve become very good with aliens.”

He put his hands on my shoulders in the Yauntry gesture between an Earth handshake and almost every other creature’s body embrace. I raised my hands to his shoulders. “Good to have met you, Edwir Hargun.”

“We’ll be working together for many years,” he said, “since neither of us was disgraced.”

“It was work, wasn’t it?”

He smiled, dropped his hands, and went to turn off the computer. “I’m as sorry for the deaths as I can be, considering that I’m most honest with Yauntra.”

“Your people were conquered by Sim’s?”

“He says we went against them.”

“Eventually…”

“Dominance and submission fades into order.”

I thought about the Jews—nobody’d beaten or assimilated them; killed them, yes, which turned the survivors into the Israeli Army complete with Uzis. I wouldn’t want to be conquered and assimilated. “Different from my kind,” I said.

“It seems your species leaders would be tempted to continual cruelty. Yet we do have the corporations,” he said with a smile. “Are you hungry yet?”

I was. When we went into the lunchroom, I saw Carbon-jet, standing in a leather breechclout, one curved strap of leather low around his hips and softer strips hanging in front and back to his knees, all the leather tooled and painted. He was reading and picking at his food. God, his fur was a mess, clumps out and the rest not combed.

Sim watched him as though he always wanted a Jerek. A Yauntry guard stood beyond both of them holding what looked like a Federation stun-gun. Probably the safest thing to use on a prisoner that had to be held alive. Carbon-jet finally looked up from what he’d been reading and said to Sim, “This isn’t what I was told would be the treaty.”

“Karriaagzh didn’t cheat your Federation,” Sim said. “That is the treaty we worked out.”

Carbon-jet slipped his curved shoulder blades around and hissed faintly. Karriaagzh came stepping in. “I apologize,” Carbon-jet said to him, then said to Sim, “This contact will change your planet’s economic life, despite all the safeguards we could ever impose.”

“Our species is very adaptable, and strong.” Sim drained a cup and stared at the Jerek as though challenging him. Carbon-jet shuddered his mobile skin. He had two nipples, just above the hip strap, and he reached down and scratched around them. Breasts like a human woman’s 34 double A, smaller around, but there. Sim touched Carbon-jet’s forearm fur. “Nice,” he said in his boss-Yauntry tone. “But don’t you need to comb it?”

Carbon-jet swayed a bit. “The follicles aren’t tight, shock. Don’t want to shed more.”

“Jerek females,” Karriaagzh said, his eyes off-focus again, “have fur like down over the buttocks.”

Carbon-jet hissed. The Yauntry guard looked sympathetically at him and asked, “Carbon-jet, would you like to go back to the cooled room?”

“Lead me out.”

I didn’t see Hargun at the final press conference in the red-velvet theater where camera lenses and optic fibers glittered for hours. I missed him.

When we finally closed the ship doors, Karriaagzh pulled down a mirror and took one long final look at the feathers he’d grown on Yauntra, rousing them, laying them flat. He fluttered his fingers over them, then pulled on the Rector’s rust and gold uniform. Leaning against a bulkhead, he closed his eyes.

“How did you get all the ships on the moons?” I asked. “Carbon-jet said it was impossible.”

Karriaagzh rippled his crest. “Take us out,” he told his pilot. “And stop at the orbiting gate.”

We left the gate and went by one of the Yauntry moons. The ships suddenly appeared, and I took a closer look at the thick windows.

“Computer graphics,” he said.

“Won’t they be mad when they find out?”

“I told them the first day.”

We were both falling asleep before the ship reached another gate to jump to Karst. I slumped down in a chair, too tired to get up and go to my bunk. Even the Barcons were yawning. We all looked at each other—a wonderful bounce of eyes looking at alien eyes.

The next morning, I stared at the Karst far-planet freight yard—the transports and cargo bellies sitting in gate nets lit by such tiny lights stabbing against all the black of space. I’d gotten so involved in all this space…no, not the space so much as the creatures between the spaces. Karriaagzh came up behind me—I saw his reflection in the thick glass.

The ship surged through another gate and fell into planetary orbit. “I have to do the best I can,” I told him, “as honestly as I can. Not be yours, not be Black Amber’s.”

He turned me around gently. “Ah, I thought you belonged to the Gwyng, to be aroused by her.”

“Me, I don’t belong to nobody,”
I said in tough English. “My kind doesn’t like belonging to others.”

“But will you have contempt for Hargun for his belonging to Sim?” he said.

“No, I can’t,” I said, remembering the first time I saw Hargun, when he was afraid of me but was trying to be kind. “He is what he is.
Sir,
you acted differently when you talked with the Yauntry. Different with other species. What’s the real bird?”

“I’ve been rather a long time among mammals.” He wiped his beak with his hands. “If I’m alone for a few days, then re-join you, it’s strange all over again.” He shrugged as I would have.

Then jets hissed and turned us into a night re-entry path. Karst City traffic lights below us moved like a galaxy on fast frame. My body surprised me—reacting as though I’d come home, relaxing, the dryness gone from my mouth, my lungs light with alien air.

“So we’re all Mind together? I don’t know if it is true, but I can believe it right now.”

Rebecca Ore was born in Louisville, KY, out of people from Kentucky and Virginia, Irish Catholic and French Protestant turned Southern Baptist on her mother’s side and Welsh and Borderer on her father’s. She grew up in South Carolina and fell in love with New York City from a distance, moved there in 1968 and lived on the Upper West Side and Lower East Side for seven years. Somehow, she also attended Columbia University School of General Studies while spending most of her energy in the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. In 1975, she moved to San Francisco for almost a year, then moved to Virginia, back and forth several places for several years, finished a Masters in English, then moved to rural Virginia for ten years, writing sf novels and living in her grandparent’s house after they died. Next came homeownership of a small house in Philadelphia with a walled garden, one wall stone and brick, one wall stone against a hill, and the west wall not there, since the neighbor and she shared the space.

She’s been mostly an academic gypsy and has been variously an editorial assistant for the Science Fiction Book Club, a reporter/photographer for the Patrick County Enterprise, and a assistant landscape gardener. She left Philadelphia after 12 years and ended up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, for a time. She is currently retired and living in Nicaragua after working for government sub-contractors for over a year.