Becoming Alien (7 page)

I thought,
I’m dead.

“Don’t do that, Rhyodolite,” the blond said. The black girl one oo’ed slightly, obscenely, and lowered the knife.

They took me back prisoner to my own house. “What about Mica’s body?” the John Amber one asked me, eyes quivering, oily tears rolling down the human-styled face. They all had big, big brown eyes with lopsided whites.

“Warren preserved him. He hid the body, so you can do an autopsy and know that we were trying to help. He pulled a shotgun on Warren. My brother shot in self-defense. He tried to treat the wound. Mica could have lived.”

I opened the door and went inside between the John Amber one and Rhyodolite, the fake black girl. The blond one and Rhyodolite sat me down on the living room couch while John Amber called a number on my phone and asked for Room 18, then said in English, “You can join us now.”

Aliens looking like people terrified me, since they had to be trickier than the first one seemed to be. “You found the egg, then?” I asked. “I didn’t tell Warren to send it away from here.”

“We found it,” the little black female-shaped Rhyodolite said, “after one of your kind shot Black Amber. It told us everything.”

“Black Amber? Not John, then. I heard one of you was shot when you tried to find the egg. I’m so sorry.”

Black Amber sighed. Her hand moved over her stomach. “So vicious,” she said through her human fake mouth. She’d shaved her face, but the stubble growing back was inhuman, thin face hairs like Alpha/Mica’s.

“Can I use the bathroom?” I asked.

“I’ll take you,” Rhyodolite said, following me to the john, holding that gun-like instrument dead steady. When I finished, the alien pulled out a cock.

“God,” I said, “do your women have those?”

“I’m small. Female human fit better,” he said as he pissed thick stuff like Mica’d done. “Being among hostile aliens pisses me off, too.”

We all sat around the living room—them waiting for the others to arrive, me numb. Rhyodolite, his face rigid, held his chrome space gun out, a flat bell facing me. His arm lay flat on the coffee table and his head drooped, as though he was exhausted. The arm and fingers had been considerably shortened.

“The egg lead you back here?” I asked.

“The people who tried to keep us from it caused unnecessary delays,” Amber said. She leaned up against the blond one and closed her oil-smeared eyes.

Finally, we heard a car drive up. “Cadmium,” the Amber one said to the blond, “make sure it’s the Barcons.” The blond one went out and came back with two others, a different kind, who looked like stout Negroes with straight hair, if you didn’t look too closely. Both were taller than me, one about six-foot-four and the other just a shade shorter. When I looked closely, I realized how different their jaws were, how thin their lower faces were for such a spread of nose. And no dent between the nose and lip.

“Is that what you really look like?” I asked.

“Yes,” one said after they looked at each other, “except for seasonal hair. And this. It spread out a hand—six fingers.

The five aliens talked to each other in what seemed to be two different languages.

“What are you going to do to me?”

“We Gwyngs don’t kill sapients, but the Barcons can,” Black Amber said.

“Mica drew a shotgun on Warren.”

She didn’t answer for a while, then said, “Gwyngs don’t kill,” as if I’d lied to be cruel.

That night, Black Amber and the other two Gwyngs heaped together on the bed where Alpha/Mica had slept. Squirming around, crying, they left oily patches on the sheets and pillowcases. I tried to bump elbows, but Black Amber stiffened, and bobbed her head with that attack nod-like I’d seen Mica/Alpha bob his head at Warren. I backed to the door and asked, “Why can you talk English? He and I couldn’t figure out at all how to talk to each other.” Somehow, that she could talk English seemed a mockery—if only I could have talked, really talked to Mica.

“It’s a fake tongue manipulated by two skull computers.” She poked it out—like a human’s tongue, not flat and broad—then pulled it in and kept looking at me out of that almost human face, but her eyes were so alien.

In the living room, the rawboned black Barcons watched television while I sat in a chair, unable to sleep. A space horror film came on about midnight.
Alpha
…
Mica hated to see those,
I thought as I got up to turn it off, but a Barcon took my hand off the dial. My skin crawled to have six fingers touch it.

“I wasn’t afraid of just one alien,” I said defensively.

The smaller one said, “Our Federation used to get very upset with xenophobes, but we’re gentler now.”

The other Barcon stretched and said, “Well, he’s not irrationally xenophobic. The Gwyngs do want to bruise him.”

“What kinds of aliens are you?” I asked.

“Barcons,” the biggest black said, “and Mica and these are Gwyngs. The closest thing you have to us is bears. The Gwyngs evolved from marsupial bats, let another animal carry their young in its pouch.”

As we watched the show, I told them about
The Day the
Earth Stood Still,
so they’d understand we didn’t always make aliens out to be the bad guys. “The alien was a saint from space.”

The two Barcons made rough coughing sounds. The big one turned to me and said; “Holy from space? Xeno flipflops.” They wiggled their noses at me and each other and talked their language again. I heard something made out of almost human sounds. It sounded like
Karst.

“I’m awful tired,” I said. And I was scared, so scared.

“We’re more tired than you,” the smaller one replied, “and not a little frightened ourselves to be among xeno flip-flops. Very tiring to be among a species with extreme ideas about us.” The one talking was just a little bit smaller than the other one, but with wider hips. Female?

Slowly, I got up and as slowly got a blanket out of the closet. The bigger Barcon yawned and followed me to the closet, looked up at the quilts stacked on the top shelf, and pulled two down. I started for my bedroom, but he said, “Bring your sleeping things in here.” Together, we dragged in the mattress and moved the coffee table so it would be in front of the couch.

“You will sleep tonight,” the smaller one said, grabbing my arm and pressing a needled cube against it. I half about fainted onto the mattress. When I woke up, the taller Barcon was asleep in the other’s arms, but the one awake nodded at me.
Space cops, have to be space cops.

In the morning, we all got up, stretching muscles cramped from being slept on in unfamiliar ways, and went into the kitchen. The Gwyngs, already in there, sucked on lumps of butter. Black Amber took the teakettle off a burner and nodded tensely at me. I knew Gwyng nods were hostile.

The Barcons talked to her, and all three Gwyngs pursed their lips and koo’ed that giant demented dove noise I knew was their laugh. I supposed that the big black Barcons had just told them about
The Day the Earth Stood Still,
because Rhyodolite lipped off, “Bunch of xenophobic-philic twitch brains. Why should we save your nasty species from atomics?”

“Look, I quit school to help Mica,” I said.

“You failed,” Black Amber said.

I looked hard at the Gwyngs for traces of the alien I’d known. Black Amber was wider-hipped than most human men, but heavier in the shoulders than most women. Surgery, or her natural body shape? Rhyodolite was delicate. With longer arms and shorter legs, Cadmium could have been Mica’s brother. Not Alpha, Mica.

Cadmium, Rhyodolite, and Black Amber—Gwyngs. They’d probably kill me soon.

Black Amber slumped in a chair with a teacup in her hands. She looked at me through almost human eyes as she drank whatever was in the teacup.
Tea.
I noticed they had brought alien tea bags.

“I know where the bones of two of your kind are,” I told her.

“Have a Barcon go with you,” she said. “I can’t…” and her voice broke.

We went out to the barn where the Barcon immediately fitted the skull bones together. Then he looked closely at the finger bones, pulled out a plastic bag and put the bones in it, then sealed the top. “Evidence,” he said.
Oh,
I thought.

The other aliens stepped out on the porch. The little black girl one, Rhyodolite, pulled out a gun, a .357 magnum.

Black Amber took the bones out of the Barcon’s hand. We all went inside where she put the plastic bag on the kitchen table, reached in, and pulled out bones, crying again.

“Are you…you going to kill me?” I asked.

“We
don’t kill sapients,” Black Amber said, lips tight, tucked in as if their fullness embarrassed her. “I want my true child’s body, the remains of the others, pieces of the ship. Despite what you did, we found the emergency recorder. So stupidly vicious.” The fake mouth twitched. “No officials know?”

“No,” I said. “Warren didn’t want them around.” I felt sick as the other Gwyngs took Black Amber in their arms.

Humans were the monsters…they were the monsters… My brain twitched…my breathing was ragged, like the alien’s after Warren shot him. I stared at the aliens, half expecting their human-shaped flesh to run off their bones. But even the bones had been re-worked.

The Barcons put one skull on the kitchen table where it glared at me with its big eye sockets and thin V’ed chin. One Barcon examined the fingertip bones with a magnifying glass, then said, dropping the bones back in the plastic bag, “Definitely burned.”

“We didn’t mean them any harm,” I said again. “Even Warren tried to help Mica in the end, but he died anyhow. Of shock. We didn’t make the ship crash.”

The Barcon touched the skull plate over the left ear hole and stared at it. I noticed that it looked plastic. “We hear the last sounds from this,” the Barcon said. “Computer.”

Rhyodolite, the black face strangely stiff although tears dripped off the chin, stroked the arched bone, thicker than in a human skull, on the outside of the eye hollow.

“We want to get Warren,” the blond Gwyng, Cadmium, said.

“He’s insane now, in a jail hospital,” I said.

“How convenient,” Cadmium replied.

I slowly stood up. “I’ll give you Warren’s map. He hid Mica’s body in an old copper mine.” Mica’s three kin and the shorter Barcon went-off with the map in their human car.

I sat with the other Barcon and finally asked, “Does this happen often, a ship crashing?”

“Not precisely a ship. Often enough the transformation geometries crash. Their field collapsed in transition. How did you manage with a Gwyng for so many months—so social?”

“I liked him being friendly.”

“You, your small predators, dogs, cats, social squirming all day, all night. Yet xenophobic.” The big alien, all dark on the couch, muttered more in its own language, and I felt I was more a thing to be watched than a person.

“I miss him. We were going to go to California together, look for the locator egg.”

The Barcon drew back, startled. “He…of course, he couldn’t explain exactly. Do you think we watch you?”

In California, I realized, there was an alien safe house, like spies have.

Then he said, “The Gwyngs are almost lethally empathetic with each other.”

“I liked him because he wanted me to come to space with him, but you’re not friendly,” I told the Barcon.

The alien just sat, not replying, in a house built with drug money, with another alien’s skull on the kitchen table. Finally, I turned on the TV and exposed more human follies on the six o’clock news.

The aliens’ car, the left door removed, came back with a big wooden crate wedged in the back seat. My guard and I went out on the porch to watch the others put the crate in the barn.

After the Gwyngs put the crate up, the Barcons rigged up a net of one-inch cables in a thirty-foot circle. Sighting to the horizon, tightening wires, testing voltages, hooking cables in and out of our house current, putting black and white boxes in and out of the electrical circuits, the aliens fooled around for a good three hours before the smaller Barcon spoke into a microphone.

Enough more time passed for them to hook in another box, test it, take it out, and put in a box that finally was satisfying.

Black Amber, wearing some of Warren’s old clothes, came over to me. Taking my wrist gently in her fingers, she found my pulse, which gave away my heart’s humping. “We always leave,” she said, “accounts hidden from untrustworthy people. If he left accounts you know about, then he trusted you. Despite…”

That last word was bitten off. Despite what? “Yeah,” I told her, “we hid his diaries and drawings really good. He did a drawing even as he lay dying. I was only a kid when he was here, still in regular school.”

“Did you tell others?”

“No. Even the law didn’t find the diaries when they busted us.”

“You’re under legal supervision here. Why?”

“I helped Warren with his business. Your kin, Mica, did too.”

She dropped my wrist and raised her hand to sniff the shirt sleeve.

The air over the cables turned blue, shimmering, and a small spaceship, more like a diving saucer than an aerodynamic plane, popped into the blueness and thumped down on the cables. All the lights flashed off and on as though lightning had struck a transformer somewhere. Then a ship light flooded the barn with a greenish yellow glare.