Becoming Alien (16 page)

“What do you do to prepare to be boarded?” Xenon asked, legs flexing faster, as though it was running in air, feathers bouncing up and down.

“No muscle moves, no words. Strictly psychological preparation (due to ridiculous policy).” Then he said, almost to himself, “No checks for lumpy gravity and active gate interconnections anymore?” His fists almost clenched, and he said something in another Gwyng language, its analog hissing in my computer. “Were we set up? To force a contact?” I asked.

“I don’t know (who…). “ Stabbing a glance at Xenon, Rhyo continued, “If these trap-setters are not birds, spread arms loosely from sides. This is rumored (no bets) not to be any mammal’s attack gesture.” He reached for the radio and said into it, “Immediate danger of being boarded. Need higher mass to get us out of their gravity trap. Seven hundred thousand mass measure should do it.”

Xenon, beak gaping, took in a hissing breath. Our ship lurched sideways, and Rhyodolite and I gasped, too.

“Can’t we talk to them?” Xenon said.

“Say in what? We don’t know (but who’d tell a Gwyng these days) what system they (animal/non-sapient) have for radio/video?”

“So?” I asked, asshole puckered, biting my shorts. “So?” I suddenly realized I was almost hysterical.

“We go back (hypothetical) and ask for better research.” Rhyo’s fists were spasming curiously. He finally nibbled at the anger juice, his arms lifting out from his sides, the web veins pulsing. “Bird hideous, couldn’t take Amber’s complaints.”

Two space-suited figures floated toward us and looked in our ports. Suddenly, we got lots of gravity.
Wham,
the bird and I hit the floor. Rhyo sagged in his chair. The bird whimpered, an odd sound coming from something that large.

While we lay pinned, we heard aliens fussing around our airlock. The gravity eased up, so Rhyo reached for the control panel and cycled the lock, muttering, “Xenophobes, come in. Come on. We’ll be nice prisoners.”

The two figures outside the viewport continued to watch us.

“Rhyodolite, I certainly hope they use the same air as we do.”

“Red-Clay-covered-with-aliens, if not, they’ll kill us because we tried to poison them.”

“They use the same air,” Xenon said.

“You know? We get odd people/creatures in our forces these days,” Rhyo said, opening the inner door.

Five heavily armed space-suited figures swarmed in. I felt naked beside them. This has to be a test, I thought numbly.
I wasn’t trained for this.

Hackles erect on its neck, Xenon shrieked. Two aliens went to the floor, prone, guns aimed. The three others slowly knelt. The bird half danced back a step. The central kneeler fired.

As blood and stuff splattered me, I flinched. Rhyo, still strapped in his chair, said, “Your kind of ape.”

I looked at the guns aimed at me, faces shadows behind the helmet glass.

More aliens, in uniforms, not in space suits, came in. They were horrible caricatures of human beings: eyes rounder than mine and blob noses. Curved jawbones left no point to the chin. They had darker skin than mine, coarse straight hair on their heads, but hairless faces, except for eyebrows and eyelashes. Their joints bent funny.

Rhyo spread his arms, web veins pulsing, and said, “Impossible. I’ll wait.” He gasped a few times, then slumped. Like Mica, playing possum, I thought.
But they’ll think he’s dead.

A sweating alien approached me. I spread my arms out a bit and went rigid, seeing Xenon’s corpse sprawled out on the floor. Two aliens held guns on me while the sweating alien stripped me, even took off my wrist tag.

Leaving me naked and quivering, the aliens carefully unstrapped Rhyo. He slid to the floor. They laid him out and looked at me. I started crying, tried to stop.

A medical character came in to take Rhyo’s blood pressure and check his heart. Having obviously caught one beat where he expected ten to twenty, the alien leaned back on his heels, looked at me, and pointed from Rhyo to Xenon’s body. I thought the alien was asking if Rhyodolite was dying, dead. I pointed from Rhyodolite to me, meaning,
no, alive.

The medic broke a glass ampule under Rhyodolite’s nose, but Rhyodolite wasn’t coming around.

The aliens also checked Xenon, but he’d been very dead from the first. They went through the ship, looking at me from time to time, seemingly a bit more embarrassed with each weaponless locker they checked.

My kind of ape.
I was freezing, utterly naked. Finally, one of them came up to me and spoke a couple different languages at me. I said in Karst, “We only came to see about the satellite we thought you launched to go out beyond your solar system.”

The alien pointed at the computer and said, “Fluist?”

“Computer,”
I responded in English. This language thing hadn’t worked with Mica, but if they had Karst I-type minds, we might be able to understand each other. I’d teach them English—didn’t want them badassing around space luring other Karst speakers into traps.

“Kampootir. Fluist.”

They seemed to be understanding. Okay.
I stood trembling as they wrapped cloth around my waist and loaded me down with chains. “Fluist?” I said as they cut the computer out of the ship with torches and whirring metal saws.

“Fluu-ist.”

“Fluu-ist,” I repeated again.

“Hum.”

“Tom,” I said, wiggling a finger at myself. “Tom.”
You guys don’t know how bad it can get if we can’t communicate.

“Tom,” the alien who’d stripped me said, then pointing to himself and all the others, “Yauntry.”

“Yantry?” I tried.

“Ya
u
ntry.”

“Yauntry.”

“Hum,” went the Yauntry.

I wasn’t sure if
Yauntry
was nation, species, or squad name. Abstractions get you into trouble.

What ugly assholes,
I
 
thought, trying to blind myself with fury as they led me into their ship and put me into a cell after taking off the chains. No windows, unpainted metal walls, one light bulb on all the time under a wire grid. I got furious, which abruptly switched to fear.
Jail again and nobody to talk to.
I had to shit, from terror. There was a bucket in the cell for wastes.

After the ship moved around, gas hisses and all, two guards came in, grabbed and re-chained me, fixing my hands so I couldn’t raise them above my waist. They stood back and a gray-suited guy came in with a glass of water. I moved toward him to take it, but he pulled back and said, “Huh-na.”

I waited. “Hum,” he said, putting the glass up to my right hand and watching me bend my head down to my chained hands, contorting for a drink. I wondered why the fuck he didn’t hold the glass for me if they wanted me chained.

He did take the glass then, and held it while I sipped, and finally put a hand on my shoulder to steady me.

“Gwyng hum?” I hoped rising tones implied a question. He asked one of the guards for something, got a metal tag that unlocked my hands. Then he handed me a drawing pad with a felt-tip sort of marker, too blunt to stab with.

Like with Alpha/Mica,
I thought. Suddenly very afraid, I drew Rhyodolite. I pointed to myself and said, “Tom, alive. Yauntry alive.” Then I touched him slowly and said, “You alive.”

He flinched. The guards stirred.

“Huh-na,” I said, waving my hands, then I drew the dead bird, saying, “Bird dead.” I pointed back to the drawing of Rhyodolite and looked the Yauntry official in the eyes.

He pulled out a pocket recorder and played a tape of all the things I’d said when they first trapped us. After looking at me for a long moment, the alien said, “Ging alif-dad. Tom?”

I looked up at him. He pointed to himself and said, “Edwir Hargun.” Sounded almost human. Xenophobes, too. My kind of ape.

He unchained me and shut the cell door. Through the walls, I felt the ship twitch as it accelerated.

For two days the aliens fed me rations from our ship: mine, Rhyo’s, the bird’s, and changed the waste bucket, but left me otherwise alone. I spent those days trying not to go mad. Terrible questions rose in my mind:
Was I working for the good guys or interplanetary thugs? Had we been set up?

The ship twitched again as it began to brake. On the bunk, I gripped the mattress edges until we were down.

Three aliens put leg irons and a waist chain with manacles on me. As I went out, blinking into their nasty sun, I saw Rhyodolite lying naked and chained on a stretcher.
Think hillbilly,
I thought,
think survival.

Black Amber is right. We must be more careful.

Then an alien covered Rhyodolite up to the chin with a blanket and felt his wrinkled little face.

Others draped my handcuffs with towels as they jabbered to each other, then one bent and took off the leg irons. “Thanks,” I said. He looked at me, then at the others, and shrugged.

As I walked where I was led, camera lenses glittered in the alien air. I could imagine the headlines, “Alien Invaders Captured.”

Edwir Hargun offered me food while the soldiers tried to sneak my handcuffs off so the cameras couldn’t catch them.

The food looked like cheese. I
kept my face still and reached, slowly, for it. Camera aliens crawled around, butted into each other, lifted lens machines high in the air. Hargun tightened his lips; it seemed a smile to me.

Another headline came to mind: “Wild Space Beast Fed by Local Dignitary.” He watched while I tasted the curd stuff, feeling blood rush up under my beard stubble.

“Tom,” he said. I looked at him.

The press aliens went absolutely flat-out wild, the guards tried to chain my hands again; but I said “huh-na” and hung on to my cheese. A curve-jawed devil stuck a microphone in my face, holding his body as far away as possible.

Speaking in respectfully toned Karst, I said, “You are a stupid bunch of shitheads, shooting down an innocent diplomatic ship that picked up your cannibalistic fucking decoy satellite. Rhyodolite should piss in your cheese.”

Aliens with microphones asked gibberish questions, but I just said “huh-na,” like no comment, and started crying.
If Rhyo dies…
, I kept thinking, imagining Black Amber’s face, needle teeth bared.
Someone set us up because she was nasty to the Rector.

Edwir Hargun watched me so closely I wanted to hide. When the guards chained me again and hustled me into the back of an armored vehicle, he sat just in front of the steel mesh and stared at me.

What shits, I thought, trying to prop up anger against rolling panic, but then I raised my eyes to that weird alien face, round green eyes and round jaw, an otherwise almost Oriental head. Short blobby nose. Edwir Hargun flinched back as though I was coming at him through the mesh.

No beard, although he had wrinkles around the eyes enough to look to be about forty. And the head hair didn’t look cut. And his jaw was wrong, damn wrong.

We pulled down a car tunnel. Hargun watched as the troops unloaded me, then disappeared down one corridor as I was led, again, to another cell. Jail, forever, whether I was on Earth or among aliens.

Panic, no point to panic.
If I pulled my hands down against the waist chain, I didn’t shake.
Horribly embarrassing
panic.
Shoving my hands down, I grew light-headed and stayed on the verge of fainting for what seemed hours, in a cell with neither windows nor bars, just dull gray concrete walls lit by lights shielded by milky plastic.

The floor had a smelly slit in one comer—the toilet. I hobbled to it and managed to get the cloth they diapered me with away enough.

Finally, Edwir Hargun and several guards brought in parts of the computer and navigation instruments, still showing the digits from the satellite trajectory calculations. “Computer?” he said, pointing to it. Then he held up another instrument—the space-holes topology generator. I didn’t know what to call it in English, even though I knew in Karst.

Then he noticed that all I had on was their stupid loincloth, and sent me out with two guards to shower. As I stepped out, they handed me a pair of my pants and a towel.

“Thanks,” I said.

Hargun said, “T’nks,” and led me to an office with a table. Still no windows.

An alien guard brought food while Hargun drew a grid of blocks, eight across, eight down. He drew three little squares above the grid and put a single figure beside them, then drew nine squares and put down two digits. Then he passed me the pad.

Base eight, I realized. They never learned to count with their thumbs. I began sketching for dear life and Rhyodolite. These creeps couldn’t push us around; we represented over a hundred planets. Ten squared, ten down, ten across.

The pencil tip broke, flew off the pad. One of the guards started as though I’d tried to assassinate Hargun with a pencil tip, but Hargun said something and put his hand on my shoulder.
Steady, boy.
But his fingers squirmed to be actually touching this thing that I was.