Becoming Alien (13 page)

S’wam showed me through the third door from the right into a small room with two foam mattress beds. I sat down on one of them and wondered how long I had until the operation. Another pug-face came in to show me sheet samples. S’wam suggested, “Pick a fabric similar to what you slept on at home, not something exotic.” We could get harder or softer slabs, and the platforms went up and down on chromed posts. Some sleep high, some sleep low, I thought, dazed.

A flat TV screen hung from the ceiling so anyone on either bed could watch it. Just
like
a hospital on Earth, I kept thinking. I got a weird feeling that these aliens were special-effects aliens. Before this idea set hard and drove me crazy, I decided I’d better see the stars, and asked, “S’wam, is there somewhere to see the sky?”

“Not an unusual request,” he said, gently but firmly taking my upper arm. We rode the elevator up to a roof garden.

“Could you turn off the roof lights?” I asked.

“Can’t switch off global clusters.”

Huge star clusters hung up in the gaudy sky. Colors spun shimmering, not twinkling, from the largest stars. And two moons—crescents in that Karst sky.

I was the only human…not quite the only human, but I saw this all for my own first time. This was the sky Mica’d drawn.

“Where’s Earth?” I asked. The whole trip flashed through my mind as S’wam shrugged. I was here, alone. Shivering, I said, “We can go in now. I know where I am.”

The aliens put me to sleep with a pill. In the morning, S’wam woke me up and said, “I leave now. Tesseract will be in later. A health person will give you a shaving razor or remove all the hairs permanently. Then they will feed you breakfast before they anesthetize you.”

“Anesthetics after breakfast?” He looked at me furtively and left.

I wanted to follow my human routines, so I asked for a razor. They gave me a battery-operated electric one. After I shaved, I looked and looked at myself in the mirror. A human face. Then I went out and looked at all my alien colleagues. I didn’t look any more freaked than they did.

By the wall near the nurses’ station, I saw a low table without chairs, with spoons and glasses on it as if we’d eat there. One of the Barcons brought in a cart full of pillows and handed them to us. Then I saw a pug-faced nurse push in a steam table. The Barcons herded us into a line and pantomimed that we should each take a tray.

The little almost-human girl, so tiny and blond in pre-cadet white, stared at her breakfast as though it had insulted her. As I tasted the grain cereal and fruit, I thought, alien but good. The fruit was like strawberry citrus something.

Another girl-like alien, very shiny black with delicate features and a too-pointed nose, ate like a robot, jerking the food to her mouth while her eyes twitched.

The others were either like Tesseract or Barcons, close enough, except for one almost like me, but ashen-skinned with larger ears.

Then, another alien, taller than me and shiny black, sat down by the black female, who immediately reached for his hand. They were both the same height when they were seated. Mates, had to be mates. They stopped looking at the rest of us.

Finally, just to be talking, I asked the little blonde, “How long before we can talk to each other?”

The blond girl smiled and spoke back in her incomprehensible garble as though she’d understood me perfectly. Soon the whole table jabbered in alien languages, desperately talking as though the coming operations would cut our tongues out. A Barcon medical team surrounded the table and mobbed us as translators tried to calm everyone down. A Barcon grabbed me from the rear, holding me by the elbows. Tesseract came in grinning. “Time to move on,” he said.

I laughed, then started shaking. A Barcon pulled the blond­-girl alien around so she couldn’t see me, while the Barcon holding me stared at me as though checking for emotional plague.

“Too scared to go through with it?” Tesseract asked very gently.

“Tranquilizer okay?” I managed to get out. If I chickened out, they’d just turn me loose on the primitive range. After this operation, they’d educate me the way I should have been educated back home.

“Fine,” Tesseract answered. The Barcons injected most of us with a hand-held thing like half a telephone. The two black mates twined around each other and were taken out together, unsedated. The air began to shimmer.

Little White Princess watched the hysteria with blond disdain until she keeled over in a faint. As the Barcons laid me on a stretcher, I saw others bend over her.

Last thing I remembered, they put a fat tube down my throat.
So much for breakfast.

My head was wrapped in plastic. A Barcon leaned over my bed and spoke. I tried to answer in English, but…

No English! Gone!
I grabbed the Barcon as though I could shake my English out of him, but he eased me back down on the bed. When he spoke again, I babbled nonsense back. My tongue was sore and what I said was totally meaningless, but he looked pleased.

So I babbled while the staff only spoke to me in Karst I. Familiar aliens without names talked while I imitated their sounds. Alien gentleness and drugs made the business only marginally bearable.

After five days, I picked up some really basic Karst I and would hold on tight to S’wam or Tesseract when they visited, begging “don’t go” and “no, stay.”

S’wam went when he wanted to, but Tesseract often stayed until I made a grammar mistake. In another day or so, I knew pronoun parallels and joined the others each morning for lessons in the common room.

The eight of us began to talk like three-year-olds. Before a month passed, we mastered the grammar, but we still used rather childish vocabularies. Adult pride took over as most of us recovered from conceptual shift disorientation. Sedatives helped a bit, and we began more formal language study.

The language had executional categories of concepts. Concept of computer-as-mental-design and its specific execution at the nurses’ desk. The light had names for its angles, for the places the sun took in the sky. Connections formed between alien gestures. One minute, the Karst language seemed more real than English; the next like an arbitrary alien code that trivialized my human emotions even after the Barcons stopped blocking off the English in my brain.

And I noticed the little blonde was still sedated. She sat in a chair when the Barcons forced her out to be among us, and stared grimly at the wall. We all tried to talk to her, so finally she began learning, clumsily, to fend us off.

“What did the monsters do to me?” she asked me one day.

“They re-turned on the brain plasticity we’d had when we were babies. So we could all learn to speak Karst I well. We’re going to be diplomats, I think.”

She squinted her cold blue eyes and fleered her lips back off the pointed teeth.
Alien,
I thought, backing away.

Refugee.
A funny, hurtful word. The root in Karst was
refuse/d. set aside.
The little blonde, whom the Academy named Calcite 2, and I were refugees.

Three sapient bears, like slender Barcons but less hairy and much more friendly, came to the hospital, “Hello, Red Clay 5 and Calcite 2,” the male said in Karst I, speaking slowly. “I’m Shir, and my female is Gerris. We are support-class people. This is Klip, our oldest son. You are to live with us now and learn more about Karst customs.”

They’d had previous experience with refugees, the female, Gerris, said as they showed us to the transport stop in the hospital’s basement.

We walked through a tunnel lit with softly glowing panels and waited for the train. When I looked down the tunnel, I couldn’t see tracks, just hoops of cables. Then the train came floating through the hoops, swaying slightly in mid-air, and my nape hair began to rise.

“Magnetic train,” Gerris explained. We waited for the train to settle, then got on. The cars were molded sections of grey opaque plastic, a little dirty, with clear windows. Gerris showed us how to adjust the stools.

The train rose gently. I looked over at Calcite. She had her eyes closed tightly, throat muscles in spasms as though she was strangling screams back.

We got off underground and took an elevator to the bus stop, where we got into a red bread-loaf-shaped bus with the number equivalent to Earth 8 on it. “This will always get you to our neighborhood,” the mama bear Gerris said, “red number 8 bus. Keep your pre-cadet wristbands on, and you can always get a free ride home.”

Calcite looked out the windows, her small face heavy, and said bitterly, “Home?”

The house we lived in was plain, no strong sense of being for a particular species. Both of us had our own rooms, with a tub in mine with new pipes leading to it. I still shaved with the electric razor, but this one worked better than most Earth electric razors.

Calcite and I left the house each morning and walked. For a couple of days, me pretending she was human, we explored the neighborhood. On most corners, aliens had put up statues. By the sculptures were covered benches where we’d huddle together and watch all the strangeness pass by.

Bench sitters, by custom, were ignored, so nobody looked back at us. Like we’re invisible, I thought.
Or they don’t
want
to look at us.

“They’re not too odd,” I said to Calcite. I’d expected really exotic things; but all these guys walked on two legs, had two arms, head on top, none larger than a really big Earth basketball player or smaller than Calcite: “If I grew out a full beard, I’d be as exotically haired as any of them.”

“Some have feathers and beaks,” she said. “And look at that one. It bends its knees backward.”

Mammal, in loose baggy pants, but the knees did bend toward the rear. Totally ignoring us, it stopped and waited for a bus. Calcite stared at it until the bus came and it stepped up. Face was funny, too, expressionless, but ridged with muscles.

Calcite said, “I confuse myself with this language. This planet stupid, makes me stupid with heat.”

I didn’t think it was too hot or chilly, except some mornings were cool when the wind blew down from the mountains, which were visible like an alien Blue Ridge on clear days, off to the west. “Sorry,” I said.

“My language,” she said, slumped on the park bench, eyes not looking at anything. “I can’t think as we did at home. This Karst language—I distort myself.”

“Like refugee meaning
trash kid?”

“Worse,” she said, giving me a quick look. Her own rough language accented her Karst regardless of the work done on her speech organs, and her grammar was poor. “You and I will be put in a zoo. Or sent on most dangerous missions. These monsters—so civilized they don’t need to be brave. They find primitives who’ll take risks for them”

“You saved a bird?” I asked, embarrassed that I’d failed to get Mica back.

“We sent out prayer rockets to impress service classes, who had no idea our technological people weren’t magicians. A bird crew brought one of our prayer rockets back to us.”

“I thought they were only supposed to approach new species who had gate capacity,” I said.

“We knew no space tricks,” she said. “The bird…I ran away with it. I killed for it. I didn’t think they were demons or gods;
I
understood that. I can’t make…even you, refugee. You speak this vicious code better than I.”

The house had a video room, with a flat-screen TV and a round plastic holograms tank, except that someone had scratched it and the images wobbled.

One day, in the video room, Calcite asked, with sad boredom in her voice, “what do you look like, Red Clay?”

“Come on, Calcite,” I said in equivalent Karst slang.

She grabbed for my white tunic top and pulled up. My armpits, all that hair, startled her. “We do not have such tufts of fur in our arm-body joints, freak.”

I pulled the tunic back down, but she grabbed for the pants. “Yeah, and what do
you
look like?” I asked, wrestling with her.

“One who bears babies. Are you truly intact? A fertile male?” She pulled my lips back, touched my teeth. “Our intact males have bigger teeth there.”

“Nobody’s messed with my balls, but I wouldn’t be fertile with you.”

“I should get you some teeth, false ones, except I’d know. Big male teeth are so exciting.” She quit trying to pull down my pants and began trembling. Her other language clouded her Karst again. “Let’s kill and eat these
shchargree.”

“If I were back on my planet,” I said, “I’d be just another ex-criminal. Aliens saved me from that.”

“This language code en-stupids me inside my own head. Do you know what happens if you refuse language operations?” she asked.

“I wanted to be able to talk to them.”

“I asked. If you can’t speak Karst languages, these monsters don’t consider you intelligent. My bird showed me those who refused, who couldn’t learn. The non-Karst speakers are loose in fields, allowed to come into Karst City when they learn ‘better habits’… Genetic samples. The Barcons manage their fertility.”

She took my head in her hands and stared at my face. I saw a fine line of fuzz around the lips that angled down toward the chin, no dip under them, and the pupils were slightly oval, not round. I thought about horses with mule babies and pushed her away. She crumpled up, holding her knees against her little breasts, staring at the wall and shuddering.