Human to Human (5 page)

“Some of them just make mistakes.”

He, put down his carving knife and looked down at the beef tongue strips he’d cut for himself. “I bet Jersey lactators think we’re bad people.”

I was about to tell him that Jerseys weren’t people when I remembered we had Buddhist relatives, more or less. Nearest next of kin. “They don’t suffer as much as sapients when we kill them. And they wouldn’t have been born except for us.”

Marianne said, “If you don’t want to eat meat, Karl, we can fix you vegetarian meals. Then you can be a good guy to the Jersey people.”

“If they can’t use language, we can own or kill them?” Karl asked.

“If they never use language in their life cycles, we can own them if they tame to us,” I said.

Karl looked at me and said, “That’s tricky.” Marianne pushed her napkin against her lips and rolled her eyes at me. Then she stiffened and asked, “Are you afraid of the Sharwani in our house?”

“If you are brave, I can be, too,” he said.

“Well, let’s both try to tame them and teach them our language,” she said. “You can help us by working with the little one.”

Karl prodded strips of tongue with a finger and said, “I bet he bites poison.”

That night Marianne lay down beside me in my room, flat on her back, not touching me for a while. Then she said, “Did you sleep with Molly?”

“No.”

“I hope you turned her down without hurting her feelings.”

“I hope you…Black Amber said Karriaagzh was here.” I didn’t know if I wanted to ask her if she slept with Karriaagzh or not.

“Karriaagzh is just a friend.” She rolled over and put her cheek against my shoulder, began running her fingernail around my nipple. It almost stung.

I, too, hated being a jailer. The next morning, when I brought in the cart with their first-meal bowls, the Sharwani female was standing with her shoulders at a forty-five-degree angle to the barrier. She slowly moved the first two fingers of her left hand, nails skating the polycarb surface. Her eyes were half-shut. She only wore the pants bottoms and had an almost flat furry chest with naked skin around the armpits and on the belly. The fur tapered into a V going between her flat nipples.

She looked up at me, finally, and then almost unhinged her jaw to scrape her lower teeth across the plastic.

“Marianne,” I said. I took one bowl off the cart. Marianne and Karl came in and stared. The male finally came up to the female and pulled her away from the glass. He shrugged. Marianne took a bowl off the cart and slid it in to him. He took it and backed away, using his fingers and the flexible plastic disc to shovel the food in.

The female sat down in front of the food slot and called in her language. Her son came out of the toilet cubicle with wet hair and spoke to her in Sharwanisa, their language. Karl said,
“Ouvootriyala.”

I looked at him, and he said, “It means
I’m sorry
—in their language, Dad.”

The child took a tentative step toward Karl, but his mother grabbed him and rocked him up against her belly. I slid two other bowls. Marianne said, “I think she’s going crazy. We need help.”

I went to my terminal and typed in a message about what was going on. The computer flashed back at me:
A SHARWAN WHO IS \``\COLLABORATING CAN HELP. SCHEDULED YOU FOR GENERAL MEETING THIS AFTERNOON, 4TH TIME BLOCK, 2ND TOWER, 19TH FLOOR.

When I told Marianne about the meeting, she said, “I don’t want to be prejudiced, but maybe we need martial arts lessons?”

“Or handguns?”

“Too redneck,” she said.

The Sharwani collaborator slumped in a chair, fur over the cheekbones trimmed, tissue around the eyes puffy. He didn’t watch us aliens come in. He held an herbal cigarette wrapped in brown paper in his left hand, palm against his knee, and stared at the coal. His eyes flicked to the right, then he lifted his cigarette to his mouth, closed his eyes, and sucked smoke in.

I sniffed, wondering how strong a drug he had there, and sat down three seats to his right. Beside me was an olive bird, Porphyry, who took the cushions off his chair, put them on the floor to cushion his hocks, and leaned his elbows against the chair frame as though it were bird furniture. The seat immediately to the right of the Sharwani collaborator was empty. To his left sat a Barcon, half in fur, half shed. Other than the skinny nose and the jaws joined between the chin and jawbone point, if he’d been completely shed, the Barcon might have looked like a black human.

I watched the Sharwan smoke—very odd. He looked over at me, a flash of eyewhite, then lifted his shoulders slightly. He? She?

The Barcon leaned over and whispered in his ear. Tissues around the Sharwan’s eye deflated slightly, and he pulled a stone box out of his tunic and gently stubbed out his cigarette on its top, then put the butt into it. Not much of what he smoked left, I speculated, seeing the care he took with it.

The last of us filed in, all the larger sex in sexually dimorphic species. In the non-dimorphic-species, I suspected the bigger of the pair came. The Sharwan looked around at us, then said, in perfect Karst One, “I’m Thridai. You can’t think of us as pure enemy.”

Porphyry took out a box and dabbed a finger into it, the nail thicker than mine, and spread it over his face feathers, rubbing it into his nares. When he’d finished and no one had spoken, he said, “We’re more sophisticated than that, but we have these unhappy people in our houses.”

Thridai looked around the circle, then said, “Many of my kind feel a need to reduce the complexity of this Universe.”

One of the non-sexually dimorphic skinny fuzzies said, “To be less complex, the Universe would need less life.”

Thridai turned both hands so that his palms faced the fuzzy creature. “But you don’t go away.” I remembered Karriaagzh saying as much to another species that didn’t quite trust the Federation.

Nor could we exterminate, with any certainty, a single space-going species… The Universe was huge, and the jumps between its space-times infinite.

I asked, “Is a need to understand everything a neurologically determined trait in Sharwani?”

Before Thridai could answer, Porphyry added, “How much ambiguity can you Sharwani take?”

The Barcon next to Thridai seemed to want to restart this discussion group, but Thridai looked around and saw all of us staring at him. He reached into his pocket as if he planned to smoke, but then brought his hand out empty. “I can manage the Federation’s ambiguity,” he said, his voice rasping from deep in his throat.

“Tell us about your species’ behaviors,” the Barcon said. He pulled a tuft of
fur off his forearm, exposing more dark skin.

Thridai looked at the bare patch, moved his arm as if he wanted to touch it. He said, “We gather information by touch, sight, hearing. Taste is for pleasure or warning.”

The Barcon held his arm toward Thridai and leaned its body away. “Here, then.”

Thridai reached out with a finger. I noticed that his nail curled up slightly and the fingerpad seemed swollen. I wondered what precisely had been the significance of the female scratching at the clear restraining wall and tried to remember what her hands looked like.

The Barcon sat patiently while Thridai tweaked a bit of Barcon hair between thumb and forefinger. Thridai leaned back, and the Barcon started breathing normally again.

“I’m sorry,” Thridai said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have demonstrated touch.” He leaned back in his chair, hair surging up slightly as he closed his eyes, then opened them, looking around the room. “The polycarbonate walls. We can’t see properly through them, nor can we feel. Heat images are diffused.”

Porphyry raised his olive feathers until they stood out like a muff around his neck and shoulders. The Barcon asked, “What restraints do you suggest if we let them out?”

Before Thridai could answer, one of the furrier people added, “We want them to learn Karst One or teach us your own languages. Common ones.”

We were almost mobbing Thridai. He said, “Perhaps if I talk to them? Do you know where each pair come from?”

“Off-planet administrators, we think,” the Barcon said.

I said, “Mine know some Wrengu. Your people attacked just as we were contacting the planet species. The female seems to be going insane.”

Thridai pulled out his stone box and took another cigarette out of it. The Barcon coughed; Thridai put the cigarette back in the box, but didn’t put the box in his tunic pocket again, just held it on his thigh, fingers stroking it. He finally said, “They all have children?” We all cupped our fingers and brought our hands down. He seemed to recognize the signal for “yes.” I felt frustrated. What kind of help was he giving us?

He said, “Let the children get together some. You must.”

“We want them to play with our children,” I said.

“We have mixed-species nursery groups.”

Thridai’s fingers gripped his stone cigarette box. He said, “I’d like to talk to some of them.”

“Mine,” I said. “See if you can help the female.”

Porphyry shook his feathers, then settled them. The others looked around at each other, then the Barcon said, “Officiators, perhaps some of you can bring your Sharwani couples to the next meeting.” He stood up and spoke in another language to Thridai, who immediately put the stone case in his tunic pocket.

“Red Clay,” the Barcon said to me, using my Academy name, “you and Thridai can go right now.”

“You and he could stay for dinner,” I said to the Barcon. I wanted another person with Thridai and me.

The Barcon said, “My mate. I have other duties.” Thridai was picking at his tunic sleeve with his broad fingertips. He stared at the threads, running a nail over them. Well, then, maybe he was nervous about me, too. I said, “Thridai, do you want to come with me?”

He looked up from his tunic sleeve and said, “I will.”

“I don’t want to be cruel to anyone,” I said.

“I am in agreement,” he said.

Don’t show fear,
Warren’s voice called from memory. I remembered a yellow dog coming at me on his belly, snarling and cringing. Sharwani did remind me of yellow dogs, maybe because of the furred cheek­bones. I said, “Do you know the bus system?”

He pulled the tunic back from his wrist to show me his ID bracelet and transportation pass. “I’m trusted more than perhaps seems reasonable.”

We walked to the elevator. “Did you have the language operation?”

“Yes.”

“With the computer?”

“Yes.”

“Then we can track you through that.”

“So your people aren’t foolish.” His head bent forward, chin to his neck. The elevator doors slid apart, and we got on. As the doors closed and the machine began to sink, he asked, “Can they monitor everyone?”

“I think the computer can screen for key words, maybe test for blood substances, but we’ve never been bothered.”

He touched his head, not the same spot in the skull where I had my plate, and said, “I feared that they would damage me.”

“In your case, they’d try very hard to do everything right.” Was that a twinge of jealousy I felt? Really, I told myself, Barcons never wanted to screw up. But they had when trying to rebuild Warren’s personality and brain, a darker part of myself replied.

Thridai said, “I’m honored.”

I laughed. He stiffened and said, “What is that noise to you?”

“Amusement.”

He made a sound that sounded like big rubber bands twanging deep in his throat—
bo’ing, bo’ing—
and touched my chin. “Good, amusement.”

When we reached the ground, Thridai looked around as we walked out of the building. Thin clouds hazed our star, and the temperature was about in the mid-sixties Fahrenheit. Thridai asked, “Heavier or lighter for you?”

“My home planet was bigger, but I don’t notice it now.”

He said, “Heavier for me. Do you have children here?”

“Yes, a son.”

“I should have brought my mate.” He didn’t say any more about her. We walked out the Academy gates and he asked, “Are they functional?”

“We like to keep the cadets under supervision at first. I suspect one could get out if one wanted.”

We waited for a bus that wouldn’t require transfers. Around us were cadets and officiators, in feathers, fur, and bare skin of all colors, buying snacks from vendors, waiting for buses, leaving buses. Thridai hunched his shoulders slightly as he looked around. The bus pulled up; we got on and rode through Near-Institute District’s weird mix of high-income domestic and commercial architectures from over 120 planets. As we passed a stone building with a rose window, clear glass leaded in lace patterns with green glass diamonds at the perimeter, I heard Thridai make that twanging rubber band sound.

“What’s funny?” I asked.

“That building reminds me of home. For a second, I was afraid.” He looked at me, and I saw that the tissue around his eyes was very puffy. I wanted to hug him—he seemed so small and lost—but instead put my hand on his knee, carefully. He seemed to relax slightly, then stiffened again when we came to the platform houses of the birds, all of them going about their household routines exposed to view and the heights. Karst Sun intensified the shadows as it began to set.