Human to Human (26 page)

I said, “Sam plays with humans. On Karst, it’s okay to be a merge-humanist musically.”

Nancy said, “Warm little fuzzies. Nice, reassuring.”

Within the week, Lisanmarl, Angleton, his anonymous colleague, and I were lounging around on broken-down green velvet couches in a television studio ready room, drinking coffee dripped, not perked, from grounds Angleton brought with him. Lisanmarl had bleached her fingers and was afraid that coffee would stain her fur. She stood up, her leathers falling around her knees, and said, in English, “Tom, before the broadcast, come out in the hall with me.”

I looked at Angleton, who nodded, and went out. We were waiting to go on the late-night television show after our rehearsal. She said, in English, “I resent this a little.” Her leathers, belted at the waist with the groin breasts concealed, covered more of her than usual.

“Why? What?” I said.

“Being treated as if I were harmless.”

“We want you to seem non-threatening.”

“But don’t I threaten even you? Just a little?” She swayed slightly, moving first in an alien way, then moving more like a human woman. One palm rose up, fingers wriggling.

“And how is your health?” I asked, instantly feeling nasty for bringing that up. A side effect of low-grade constant heat is pernicious anemia—Jereks are in heat unless pregnant or nursing, not as insistent as a dog or cat heat, about like human adolescence forever. And being sterile? The Barcons are working on it.

She lowered her nose, then said, “Don’t tell James. It would be de-romantic. Dis- …unromantic, correct?”

“Maybe he really cares about you?”

“So interesting to have a lover whose hair doesn’t insulate his blood circulation patterns.” She stopped talking and ran one fingernail around a jewel set in the thick nailbase on her thumb. Her nails were rather more like modified claws than flat like mine; only at the tips were they as thin. I wondered if Jereks filed them to keep their fingers from ending in real claws. She asked, “Are you prejudiced against Jereks?”

“I didn’t like Carbon-jet. I like your parents.”

“Carbon-jet thought you were really curious enough for our Institute, but you’re a coward. Angleton is what I’ve been looking for.”

I just knew that Angleton would read this conversation if he wasn’t hearing it right now. Before she said more, a man poked his head out of the Green Room and said, “We need you in five minutes.”

“Angleton knows about your feelings?”

“Of course. We are professionals.” She lowered her nose at me again.

“But he doesn’t know you could come down with pernicious anemia from staying sexy, does he?”

“The Barcons have improved the stabilizing techniques.”

“You’ve got it?”

The man stuck his head out again and said, “Come in, now, don’t make us nervous.”

We went in. Lisanmarl, eyes fixed on me, slowly moved her nose up, then she swiveled and whistled at Angleton. I thought about Jerek eyes and the usual chill of their environment. Did they see infrared, more complex expressions of the body than we could read ourselves? No Jereks ever put that data in the Federation computer. I wondered if Lisanmarl had slipped.

Was I a coward not to have joined the Institute of Analytics and Tactics? No, I hated Carbon-jet’s style.

A light flashed, and we went onto the set, cameras on all sides popping up and down out
of
the floor. Angleton didn’t follow us, but stood for a second at the door.

Lisanmarl made a sound like a giggle, a fake human giggle, and began dancing with one of the horn players.

The host, Jake Soko, who was thin and red-haired like his mother, Nancy the media woman, said, “So, Mr. Gentry, aliens like her rescued you from a life of crime?” He sounded just like we hadn’t said all of this before.

“Lisanmarl is just one of the many intelligent species out there. They’ve been good to me.”

“You have tapes?”

“
Yes.” We watched a blank wall as if we could see what the optics lines were feeding our homeviewers. A camera popped out of the floor aimed at our eyeballs. “Amazing,” Jake breathed. “And that’s the beginning of the contact process?”

Well, actually, the broadcast showed tapes of renewed linguistic-team work with the Sharwani, who, like the Jereks, fit the little warm fuzzy bill and were mostly blond, to boot. “Yes, that’s how we start with new species, now. The beginning five thousand years ago was different.”

“So the Federation is older than recorded human his history?” Jake said.

We’d timed it just right in rehearsal. I countered with, “But just a microsecond in the Universe’s history.”

Jake faked a wince as though I’d punned and said, “You say five races built the planet, the base…”

“Not base. The trade and information center.” We hadn’t quite rehearsed this and I was a bit flustered.

“Okay, but I was thinking that maybe this Karst was the planet referred to in Genesis. You said something about a sense that all species reflect one—can say it?—capital
M—
Mind?”

“I’m not sure about Genesis, but yes, there are those who believe that we’re all reflections of a universal force too complex to be completely represented in one species.” I hadn’t liked this when we were discussing it, hadn’t liked the flip manipulative way Jake handled it in rehearsal. I wondered if the Gwyngs were right about the Universe being created and destroyed every time a gate opened and closed, because now seemed an odd distortion of the time I’d left behind. Time, not universal deaths and reconstructions, could have distorted this present Earth from my past one, but I wondered if I’d know the difference.

The camera was on Lisanmarl. She finished her dance with the saxophone player and came toward us, cameras sliding up and down on their pistons, uber-weird phallic symbols.

“Lisanmarl,” Jake said, holding out both his hands to her.

“Welcome to the rest of the Universe, Jake.” It sounded so natural, so slightly sexy. Jake had been afraid to touch her at first.

“Do you find us hairless people odd?”

“No, you’re not ugly.” This wasn’t what we’d planned. Jake stiffened. Lisanmarl continued, “You bare your expressions through more than the face key-hole. Beautiful to see the mind working under the skin.”

Keyholes in Jerek country were T-shaped, like the bare patch of facial skin across their eyes and down their noses.

“And what do you like best about Earth?”

“The stalactite chimes in Luray Tunnel, Cavern. A love of the enclosed both our species share. Beautiful stone music.” She looked at Jake and whistled softly. Jake hadn’t believed her when she told us in planning that she was fascinated by our interest in caves.

“So, what does Earth get from contact with all these other species?”

“You get me.” Angleton had to bribe Lisanmarl into saying that with emeralds for her nails. Now she said what she’d wanted to say, “You get lessons in arts you never dreamed of, arts that will expand your mental capacities. You will find out what is really your animal past expressing itself, what is shared by all of us.”

“Could you and a human man have a child?” Jake threw this in unrehearsed. Lisanmarl gnashed her teeth, and I threw back my own head slightly.

“No,” she said, without elaborating.

Angleton opened the door between the ready room and the studio and shook his head. Jake said, “Well, I’m sorry if I was rude.”

“I accept.” Lisanmarl sounded like she wasn’t going to forgive him ever.

“Well, folks, you’ve met the aliens on ‘The Jake Soko Show.’ Telephone in if you think we’re pulling your leg, or if this is real as well as live. And now, a message from our sponsor, who builds cars fit for alien planets, roads or no roads.”

A man in the control room cued us that the commercial was running. Lisanmarl turned to Jake and said, “I can’t conceive children, a crippling condition for a Jerek.”

“Sorry, okay?”

“We had rehearsed so carefully.” She was beginning to remind me of Black Amber at her most implacable.

“Tom, are they all like this?” Jake asked.

“No. Isn’t the commercial about over?” I said. I’d wanted to add,
Some of us strangle each other with our bare hands,
but that wouldn’t be fun television.

The closest camera flashed red. “Tom, did you have a hard time adjusting to aliens?”

“Well, actually, Jake, they were as nervous about me as I was about them. My roommate, now a great friend and a member of the team working out the Earth contact, first thought I was a giant lactating rat.”

“He doesn’t, now?”

“Now, he knows I’m male and my wife is a giant lactating ape.”

“Will we be able to take vacations in space?”

“Jake, the Federation has resorts for people like us. Creatures who like thrill rides generally come from brachiators—tree-swinging people. So the Federation built a resort called Tenleaving with hanging bridges and treehouses, even a roller-coaster.”

“So, contact is going to radically expand tourism.”

“Right, Jake. We’ve got worlds of resorts. As soon as the trade treaties are signed, see what your local travel agent has to offer.” As I said this, I felt like gagging.

We had, fortunately, decided not to take live calls over the air. Fifteen of the twelve hundred calls threatened the Federation with legal action over abductions, thirty-seven percent believed the aliens were real, thirty-three percent felt this would have been officially announced, and twenty-nine percent had no opinion.

Near the end of the show, after more Jerek dancing and a band that called itself High Warp, Jake read the summary, minus the lawsuit threats, over the air and said, “But we scooped the
New York Times
with this one, folks.”

His mother gave us to him. Nepotism, like in Southwest Virginia. I hoped that by morning most people would consider Lisanmarl a hoax.

∞ ∞ ∞

In the morning, Angleton came in grinning, still dressed in pajamas, smelling of Jerek musk: “Get up, we’ve got on a wonderful morning show.”

I said, “I thought I could lock my door.”

“Tom, get up and come watch.”

I dressed in pants and a shirt and followed Angleton back into his suite. Lisanmarl sat in a chair, looking almost prim, legs tucked up under her, leathers falling to the floor, nose slightly tucked down as she watched a bank of six televisions, one with colors skewed, really pink, the others adjusted more to normal but wired so that the blues registered as blacks.

“Can’t you see blue?” I said to Lisanmarl, not quite focusing in on any set until saw my own image.

“Easier this way, on my eyes.” She pushed a button, and the blacks turned back into blues. A morning talk show host was interviewing my old teacher from Floyd, the hippie one who’d thought I was so awfully colorful as a renegade hillbilly.

The teacher was graying, beard almost all gray, head hair thinned, bald at the crown, still wearing wire-rim glasses although corrective vision surgery had improved a mile and a half since I was last in Floyd. He said, looking at me as if he knew I was beyond the camera, “Tom Gentry was bright, but he wasn’t counterculture and he resented my attempts at friendliness. Maybe he thought I was being patronizing, but…well, sometimes, you have to go away from home to find out who you really are. So, now, he’s back. I’d like to see him again.”

I said to Angleton, “Am I going to?”

“Wait.”

My old teacher went on, “He was so loyal to his brother. Misplaced loyalty, we felt, but some of the more conservative teachers hesitated to teach Tom to his full potential. They were afraid they’d only be educating a smarter drug dealer.”

“We weren’t just dealing it,” I said. “We were making it.” But we were nobodies to the Atlanta guys.

“Repackagers,” Angleton said. He sat on the bed, long skinny frame hunched over, looking tired, not as spruce and utterly High WASP as he had looked when I first met him.

The host said, “Do you think we can trust Tom Gentry?”

The teacher took off his glasses and wiped them with a lens paper he pulled from a pack in his shirt pocket. Then he put them on and said, “I hope so. I wish him well, and if the aliens found a better use for him than drugs and jail, then I’m glad they’re out there. Maybe they can help more of us.”

Lisanmarl said, “We’re just here to be here.”

“I understand that, darling,” Angleton said, almost drawling, “but we’ve got to avoid panic among the common folk.”

Lisanmarl looked at him and tipped down her nose. Angleton got off the bed and said, reaching for her, “Would you bite if I raised your chin?”

She rolled her round shoulder blades and said in Karst One,
“Perhaps we should be panicking to have you humans in.”

Angleton said, “You said what about humans? I’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”

I said, “She says we make some of the Federation nervous.”

“Shush, Tom,” Angleton said. “We’re missing something really important about you.”

On the screen was the deputy who’d gotten his wife to take care of my stock while I was in jail, only now he was sheriff. I realized how much time had passed, how little. This guy hadn’t aged like the teacher; he’d become a man, not a young kid deputy. I tried to think about how much time had passed, but Sheriff Deitz was saying, “He almost didn’t get tried as an adult. Lots of us were against it. He should have maybe asked for help. Maybe we should have stepped in, but Warren’d worry you worse than a holiness preacher about his rights to Tom when we’d say how he wasn’t taking good care of Tom. People here were concerned about Tom, but I guess we shouldn’t have gone to Warren about it. No, Warren was quick-tempered and moody, but Tom was always a patient boy.”