Becoming Alien (10 page)

“Oh.”

“Mica was nearly insane, by their standards, before he died.”

The Barcons brought in a strange un-Earthly tea. I felt more relaxed after I drank some, then realized it was drugged.
Well, this is it,
I thought. Tesseract waited for the tea to loosen me up. I felt tranced, worried as hell, but the body odd, like the fear didn’t register. Slowly, I lay back on the bed.

“So Mica was her baby?” I said. “I remember when I was five and Warren was a god.”

“I met Mica once,” Tesseract said. “Charming for a Gwyng.”

The tea loosened hideous memories: the shotgun noise, the gunshots, Alph/Mica crying on the porch, legs full of bird shot. I rolled belly down and mumbled, “I miss him.” I almost forgot Tesseract wasn’t human, then looked at him and saw that crest, skin, and flesh over a bony skull ridge, the big jaws. “The tea’s drugged,” I said.

“For relaxation purposes,” he said.

“Sure,” I said. “It doesn’t make me feel…” I started shaking with sobs, missing Mica worse than I thought, missing Warren. Tesseract touched me, and I pushed him off and asked, “What was in the tea?”

He stared down at me, eyes hazed slightly, and I
remem
bered he’d drunk tea with Black Amber.
What a
univ
erse!
I wondered what came next, then he stood up, stretched, reached at the ceiling curiously with his fingers. Smiling, he said, “This tea is difficult, but we have better teas.”

I said, “I’m sorry I didn’t get him away. Was he really going crazy? Warren said cats lived among humans and didn’t go crazy.”

“The Gwyngs are unique sapients.” He sighed. “We try, in our Federation, to smooth over the differences, but…”

I cut in, “Cadmium says Black Amber doesn’t like losing.”

“Be kind to her. You’ll spend some time together while we turn her back to Gwyng-shape. We’ll do it at the observatory station, since she’s dominant for a Gwyng and would be uncomfortable in your shape among her own people.”

But what did becoming-a-cadet mean? Later that afternoon, I got Tesseract away from the others and offered him a beer, if he could drink on duty. He smiled. I smiled, and we drank together in the kitchen while the Gwyngs and Barcons loaded their souvenirs in the ship.

“Very strange business,” I told him as he leaned back against the kitchen counter, sipping beer like a real man. 
“What do cadets do?”

“You smile almost like we Ahrams do,” he said. “Do you come from tree-dwelling stock that evolved into walkers who had to become intelligent to protect their awkward locomotion? Very social, but with sexual activity constant, high male aggressiveness, at least before intelligence became a major factor in social organization and technology?”

“Yeah, and another teacher said God made us out of clay.” He hadn’t answered me as to what cadets do. That was, I realized, a kind of answer. I wondered how much 
Mica had really liked me.

I got in touch with Warren’s lawyer and sold Warren my share of the farm with life-tenancy rights for me. The trip to the lawyer’s was quick-—then I felt truly cut off from Earth, a stunning feeling, as though I’d been flash-frozen. Later that day, I sold all the hens and the cow, knowing if Jenkins heard, we’d have to rush.

Tesseract took me aside. “The xenoreactiveness of your species,” he told me gravely over another alien nerve tea, “might be latent in you. Our two Karst languages have similar slang terms—xenofreak in English, more or less. The Academy warns all potential cadets. Someone brought a few of your species to Karst several hundred years ago. Most are primitives in a reserve. If being a cadet is too stressful, or if you hurt one of us, you’ll have to go live with them.”

I drank his tea, feeling it slow me up a bit, but not quite like pot. “I could just go plain crazy, like Warren,” my tongue said despite me. Not the best answer, I realized in the following silence. “But aren’t we more alike than not,” I asked, “if this tea affects both of us the same way, and you didn’t even evolve here?”

“How do you know it’s affecting me the same way? The Rector thinks we’re all inevitable expressions of one universal mind, but you should see
him.”

“What does he look like?”

“Big Bird, like on
Sesame Street,”
Tesseract said, sounding slow and sloppy. “With fingers,” he added, wriggling his own, “instead of wings.”

“Real
alien,” I said, feeling conspiratorial, ape to ape. “Not more or less normal-looking, like us.”

Tesseract smothered a giggle in his big hand, then looked at his teacup and said, “I drink too much of this. But all you little alien cadets…”

“What else?”

“Black Amber’s been promoted to Sub-Rector. She demands an apology, in public, for your not escaping with Mica. And she wants you to learn a more educated dialect of English. I could teach you.”

I nodded.

“If you can’t manage our language, we’ll have doubts about your sapience.”

Fast, very fast. We packed clothes, books, VCR machine, tapes, and the rest of the cultural relics. Then the Barcons raided the refrigerator for food samples. I brought several plastic razors, wondering if any other species shaved their beards.

One of Mica’s cats who’d stayed to play with the search crew rubbed up against Black Amber as she unhooked the VCR from the TV. “Did this one know Mica?” Rhyodolite asked, reaching over to stroke it. Black Amber picked up the cat, which went snuggling limp and purred. The alien rubbed her face against the cat’s mouth and spoke to it in Gwyng.

“She says it should evolve into a wonderful sentient,” Cadmium translated. “Reserved enough on first contact, then genuinely friendly.”

I said, “I guess they’ll go wild again.”

Black Amber looked at me as though I’d showed her my hideous alien-shooting side, then spoke in Gwyng to the Barcons, who picked up the cats and checked under their tails. The male Barcon went out, to the ship, I supposed, and came back with something like a pencil-sized cattle prod. “We can fix,” the female Barcon said.

Yowh,
right to the balls. My own balls shrank up in sympathy. So three Earth cats, the freshly sterilized male and two females, went with us.

When the Barcons began packing up the cable net, I noticed the Gwyngs twining together and dabbing out with their feet. Tesseract said, “I promise I’ll get us out of the well and into the net without geometry failure.”

We went on board ship. No windows, nothing. How long was this going
to
take?

“Put your suitcase under the bunk,” Tesseract said as he sat down with a steel cap on his head, wires leading to a computer with flat displays, not liquid crystal, something better. He squeezed his eyes closed and sat there for seven minutes, then asked, “Ready?”

We all sat down, then the ship lurched.

“How long will this take?” I asked.

“We’re ten light-hours out, at the first switching point. Wait until the station crew checks the airlock,” Tesseract said, “then we can get out in the station and stretch. We’ll be here awhile, Tom, so you can meet the crew. They’ve seen months of your television, but haven’t ever met a human before.”

I heard clunking on the outside of the hull. More aliens who traveled millions of miles in no time flat. Superior aliens. “Where’s the john?” I asked.

Tesseract got up and swung a small basin down from the wall, looked at me, and adjusted it to fit. My bladder jammed with all them looking. They were amused.

The airlock doors slid into the walls, and I stood there gaping up at two big hairy aliens.
That’s what Barcons look like with the hair.
Black coarse hair, like, well, almost like bear’s fur. They talked alien at the guys I’d traveled with, then one said to me in English, “We keep the station rather cool. Less parasites that way.”

“Get me out of this body,” Black Amber said as we went with the new Barcons into the station. “Most painful body I’ve ever been molded into.”

I was surprised at how roomy the space station was, but it didn’t have windows except two thick ones in a little observatory room. Instead, the aliens had walls of holograms: all kinds of landscapes, even cartoon holograms, composite holograms of impossible landscapes. And the walls without holograms were carpeted or covered with semi-hard plastics, which deadened all sounds. The furniture wasn’t fixed to the floor either.

Tesseract showed me to a room bigger than my bedroom at home. “God, the station is huge” I said.

“People live here for long terms. We don’t want social friction. So space enough to avoid each other.”

He unfolded my bed, a mattress attached to a shelf hinged to the wall, while I checked out a padded tube, like a cocoon sofa, covered in a funny cloth almost like velvet. The inside was obscene, squishy. “Gwyngs love that,” Tesseract said as he watched me scramble back out. “Reminds them of the pouch, I guess.”

“I wasn’t expecting that stuff inside,” I said.

“You might want to be left alone for a while, but if you don’t, tell me.” He showed me a flat pressure switch on the wall above a marble-sized intercom pickup so I could call them. “Or just come on out.”

Desperate for privacy, yet not sure I really wanted to be alone, I nodded. “And the toilet adjusts,” he said, pulling the wall toilet out just like the one on the ship. “Tilt it to suit.”

I smiled grimly. He touched a wall stud, and Mabry’s Mill popped out of a wall, but I felt almost physically ill to see something from home. “No.”

“Would you prefer New York City?” he said.

Maybe, I thought, nodding very slightly. The wall began playing a reconstruction flat movie from some TV show, a weirdly edited New York. “How do you turn it off?” I asked.

He showed me, and I sat there, alone, after he’d left. Suddenly, I felt like a microbe in vast space. Very tired, I crawled into the bunk.

The next day, after I shaved, Tesseract introduced me more formally to the other aliens who watched us humans: no names for the Barcons, which seemed odd, and various chemical and rock names for the others, more Gwyngs, just like Alpha/Mica, the same webs, funny goat nostrils. Only one Gwyng spoke English.

All the Gwyngs wore pants like gym pants and vests with deep sleeve holes. The Barcons just wore pants. Either the Barcons were all females with breasts on the lower trunk, or both sexes had tits.

While Black Amber went through surgery, I wandered around the space station, turning off holograms. All that alien scenery made me nervous: funny beach houses made of woven planks, carved stones marking a tunnel in front of a glacier, alien jungles. In all of them the light seemed wrong. But when I left each room, I switched the hologram back on, so the aliens wouldn’t complain.

The next day, I went to the hospital room to see Black Amber, who lay wrapped tightly in plastic film.
She’s a big Gwyng,
I realized, seeing her now with the legs and arms back to normal size and comparing her to the other Gwyngs at the station.

Tubes went through the plastic at various points—eyes, nose, mouth, shoulders. Some flushed liquid over her skin and drained it off, plastic pulsing. I thought how this must hurt, worse than gunshot. She rolled her eyes toward me, slowly, as though the tiny eye muscles were freshly re stitched.

Her face wasn’t so wrinkled, but I supposed that was post-surgery puffiness. I couldn’t see her tongue, but she raised her head and I saw the muscle lump under the chin.

So much like Mica.
I ached for all that surgery she’d gone through, in and out of human form, the gunshot, trying to get her son back.

A Barcon took me by the arm after a few minutes and led me out. “She isn’t in any danger,” one of the hairless ones who’d been on Earth said. “We stop the pain. She’s been through it twice before.”

One of the Barcons, a few days later, decided I needed something to do and asked me to help tend Black Amber. Unwrapped from the plastic, she lay under covers pulled up to her nippleless chest, two triangular heating pads ready beside her to warm her webs. On her lap, she held a machine with five finger-operated toggles, like little chrome joysticks. “I hate humans,” the box said for her. “Conditioned by the gunshot, deaths. And your hatred of aliens.”

“Out of all you met, they were all bad?” I asked, holding up a glass of Gwyng formula with the broad straw they used.

She twitched her fingers against the language machine’s joysticks. “Maybe,” the machine said for her.

Taking care of her was eerie, as though she were the large ghost of Alpha/Mica. The two others in human face visited her, but stood off, as though the surgery and her weakness made them nervous.

“When the Gwyngs feel comfortable around Black Amber again,” Tesseract told me, “we’ll have a formal ceremony, investing her in her new Sub-Rector’s uniform.”

“Why don’t they feel comfortable around her now?” I asked.

“Gwyngs can’t stand weakness,” he said. “I guess since they live so densely in their colonies, they had to isolate the sick to avoid illnesses wiping out a group. But they don’t get sick often. They trance out to escape social friction, but otherwise they’re healthy and totally social.”