Becoming Alien (35 page)

“Misunderstanding. No. Hargun,
then
you were definitely not a hostage.”

The servant came to show Hargun out while the Rector watched from his crouch. As soon as the door closed, Karriaagzh said, “Tom, Rhyodolite will be at Tesseract’s also. His legs were broken during a Gwyng secret visit to an undeveloped marsupial planet—not fit company for other Gwyngs, that nastiness toward the weak they have.” He stood and dusted his breast feathers. “That Hargun is a decent creature for a xenophobe.”

Nostrils huffing, Rhyodolite sat on Tesseract’s front porch watching the Yauntries coming in. Both legs, bruised, splinted from thigh to toe in transparent plastic, stuck stiffly out, propped up on a hassock. When I got up close, I saw that the shins looked pulpy and cut in patches, and asked, “Someone smash an ax handle against them?”

As though he’d had to explain his stupidity too often, but was too polite to refuse to tell me, Rhyo squinched his nostril slits shut and spoke slowly. “No contact intended, just watched marsupials/parallel evolvers for years—so few like us. But they caught us. One Gwyng (not me) began pre-sleep gasps so they just broke all our legs. Very parallel, those creatures. Knew we couldn’t use evasion coma with major injuries—rot sets in.”

Edwir Hargun came up, unable to understand Rhyo without a transforming computer. I didn’t translate.

“And civilized Gwyngs would never,” Rhyo continued, “break each other’s bones. Bruises and insults, yes, not bone breaks. So not all that parallel.”

“This is the one who kicked me?” Hargun asked, half circling Rhyo to get a good look as his men went into the house.

Rhyodolite’s shoulder fur puffed up, but he continued as if Hargun weren’t there. “Horrifying. They talked Gwyng-style, more sensitive to high frequency than us.” Finally, he turned to Hargun and nodded. “I couldn’t stay at Black Amber’s, embarrassment to her. She wants Karriaagzh’s crest for his move on Yauntra.”

Rhyodolite mangled
Karriaagzh
and
Yauntra,
but Hargun looked sharply at me.

Tesseract walked onto the porch as Rhyodolite talked. When Rhyo paused, Tesseract said to Hargun, “Some Federation people think our Rector overreacted to your hostage-taking. I tell you this to make you feel better; don’t try to use it as a wedge against us.”

“I’m crippled,” Rhyo continued. “No Gwyngs to sleep with me, suffocated by three different ape stinks. Tell Hargun his armpits stink like any other ape.”

“What did he say about me?” Hargun asked.

“He smells all of us since we have scent glands in our armpits, and he has delicate nostrils,” I said.

“Dump, spoiled translation.”

“Rhyodolite!” Ammalla said as she brought out lunch—steamed vegetables, protein curds, eggs, and a flagon of whipped blood and oil for Rhyodolite. She ruffled his headhair as he took his blood and oil.

“Straw?” Rhyo asked. She handed him an oval straw. “Looks like a cast,” he said before he jammed it down his throat and pumped up blood and oil with his tongue and throat muscles. Hargun shuddered.

“Ambassador Hargun,” Ammalla said gently, “we have clothes for you, styled to your custom. And we have four types of baths here—dust and three kinds of water delivery systems.” She gently touched his arm.

Hargun looked Rhyodolite over from casts to head hair. As Ammalla eased him into the house, he said to her, “He’s a rude whatever he is. I’m glad something kicked first.”

“He’s a Gwyng,” we heard Ammalla say before their footsteps and voices faded in Tesseract’s large house.

I fixed myself a plate and sat down by Rhyodolite. “So, who rescued you?”

“Your fault. Granite Grit. The Rector told him how to terrify primitives—Rector terrified as a young officer. Scared me dreadfully—hard to do at that point—thought I’d died anyway, hurt by bats. Puffed feathers and Barcons, gun robots. Whirling. People like me screaming, stunned by sonics, falling down. Huge leaping terrors—birds with whips and
torcs, firebrands and laser flashes. Absurdly scary. Heart-stopping if not for broken legs. Your birds are determined to ‘cure’ me of hard-wired bird fear.”

“Granite Grit and his lady Feldspar are coming up later,” Tesseract added.

Rhyodolite looked at his mangled legs. “I might owe him my life. But he loved frightening us/them.”

The Barcon pair who tended the Yauntry shock case and these bat-broken legs told Rhyodolite to get up and walk. Rhyodolite gripped his chair arms and glared up at the huge Barcons. “No. I almost died. Do you understand that?”

So Rhyodolite sat. Later that afternoon, Ammalla put yogurt and more oiled blood just out of his reach. He turned distressed eyes to her, then hobbled to the dishes, sighing for every tiny step he took.

“Rhyodolite, you can get over this,” she said.

Rhyodolite was being a snit; I’d just had aliens trying seductions and guns on me, and I wasn’t fussing. Rhyo scooped up two yogurts and three flagons of blood and hobbled back to the chair, slopping blood all over the place. He put the food around his feet and looked at the Barcons. “When the splints are below my knees, then I’ll walk,” he said, stirring yogurt viciously.

“You didn’t even get those legs broken on service time,” one Barcon said as he looked at his partner. The other Barcon’s nose wriggled. Both grabbed a leg each and pinned Rhyodolite in the chair as they twisted his toes.

As one Barcon went inside, Rhyo looked off and clenched his fists. The other Barcon held him loosely, until the first Barcon came back with a wire-bladed tool.

The Barcon with the wire blade zipped off the plastic below Rhyodolite’s knee joint, shot something into the exposed tops of the calf muscles, grabbed the other leg and cut that splint—the Gwyng’s tiny body pinned by the other Barcon.

His mate eased off Rhyo, ready to grab him again if Rhyo tried to bite or hit.

“Now walk,” the Barcon with the wire tool said as he wiped the wire and peeled the cut-off plastic away from Rhyo’s thighs. “Gwyng, between our bone setting and your healing abilities, you are able to go.”

Rhyodolite beat his hands against the chair arms, smashing sticky anger juice on them.

“And now you’ve made the chair too smelly for Gwyng sitting, I think,” the other Barcon said.

His nostril slits writhing, Rhyodolite stiffly got up and clumped down the porch stairs. He stopped and raised his hands to his temples, dropped them fast. Slowly he walked back, both hands on the stair rail, and said, “Red Clay, I have to wash.”

He sounded horrible, expressionless, as though he’d gone mad. As he went inside, the Barcons talked in their own language, then one said, “Red Clay, follow him.”

Before I could, Ammalla came out and asked, “What did you do to him? He’s standing by the sink washing his hands and crying.”

I went in. Rhyodolite seemed to be paralyzed in front of the sink, hands dripping water, eyes full of oily tears. When he heard me, he started trembling. Slowly, I reached for a towel.

“Do you know which
Yangtree
those are?” Rhyodolite asked as he turned slightly and gave me his hands to dry.

“No.”

“They killed the bird cadet,” he said.

Oh?
I ran more water in the sink and gently washed his hands until I only smelled soap. “Is there any way to clean Ammalla’s chair? Or do you mind your own smell?”

“Clean it. Barcons have anger-juice odor disrupter. Breaks our pheromone molecules like legs.”

I threw the towels I’d used on his hands aside and drew fresh water to wash his face. “Your head hairs are matted. Want me to wash and comb them?” He grabbed me hard, side pressed to mine, the arms squeezing and letting go convulsively.

“Black Amber, you, Mica.”

“She kissed me when the Federation people got me back.”

“You/Mica. She tries your human gestures… We cripple our brains to be among other sapients, so please like us.”

“Are you all right?”

“No.” Rhyodolite leaned his side against mine. “I’m an officer. Lost a cadet—rescued by first-year bird cadets and Barcons. They twist here—by species. Manipulative.”

“Maybe you won’t feel too bad about birds now?”

“Always more creatures to mourn…mental world stuffed full of creatures who die/leave me alone.” He started for his room; I went along to make sure he didn’t fall.

Painfully, he crawled into a padded tube and twisted around to look at me with those bone-shielded eyes, wrinkle-grooves oily with tears. “Nearly died. A Gwyng embarrassment. To everyone else a medical problem, not their medical problem.” He breathed deeply a few times. “Walls hold names—the bright creatures are gone. Where’s Mica’s ‘promising-for-Gwyng’? And if you don’t make the wall, bring more creatures together over your hurts.”

“Do you want to resign your commission?”

“Somehow, nearly dying has to be more.” He watched the ceiling as though it might fall, eyes wavering. “Death is completely lonely, I think, worse than being sick/injured. Do your people leave you to live or die with aliens?”

“You’re not so sick now.”

“Hideous splints.”

“I start feeling sorry for you and you go off into a Gwyng snit.” I half meant it. “I thought I’d go crazy when the, Yauntries held me captive this time. And wasn’t I being used, set up as bait?”

He oo’ed faintly. “Set up by Karriaagzh with all the male hormones raging. So you like birds?”

“We were both rescued.” I sat down beside him, tired myself now, and stroked his skinny shoulder. “Little Gwyng who loves alien women.”

He giggled. “Now I am obligated to birds. You’ve intensified the quarrel between Black Amber and the Rector. And you must go back to Yauntra—so not to develop serious xenophobia.
Ed’twing Hapoon
may not be trusted on
Yangtree
himself after capture by us disgusting monsters.” He closed his eyes firmly, and I sat by him until he appeared to be sleeping. Then I went to ask the Barcons for a spray to kill the Gwyng thumb-gland odor.

Ammalla and I wiped up as best we could.

“Nothing more cranky than a Gwyng bullied by his own,” she told me. “Those aliens were too closely related for him to accept their violence, as if his own Gwyngs went mad.”

When Rhyodolite woke up, he stiffly walked to the porch and announced, “I was/am a terrible officer.” I hobbled to his chair, sat and stared into infinity, his big eyes glazed, the facial folds drooping. Hargun came out on the porch, saw Rhyodolite, and grunted.

Rhyodolite rolled his eyes toward the Yauntry, saying,
“Ewing Hargun,
we don’t need to search space. At Tesseract’s, all our nightmares come to visit us.”

“Translate that,” Hargun said to me.

“He and you probably are both each other’s nightmares.”

“Not a complete translation,” Rhyodolite said. “Ask him how I could have kept the bird Xenon from being killed.”

“Rhyodolite?” I asked. Why did he want to aggravate himself and Hargun? He
had
been a shit toward the bird when Xenon was alive.

“Ask him, Red-Clay-dung. Ask.”

“He asks how he could have kept the bird from being shot.”

A Barcon snarled at me and shouted to Tesseract, who came out at a fast walk.

“Tom translated,” Hargun said. He pointed to Rhyodolite. “He wanted to know if he could have saved the bird. He can understand me if I talk Karst?”

“Don’t answer him, Hargun,” Tesseract said quickly, looking down at the Gwyng, “Rhyodolite, why?”

Slowly, Rhyo explained, his fingers twisting on the chair arms, “I was relieved (guilt now burns) briefly, when they shot him. I’m still terrified (gut-way) of birds. But he was my cadet. I was cruel. The Barcons say my reaction to birds can be muted.”

“Oh, Rhyodolite,” Tesseract said, then he translated some of this to Hargun, who blinked as if space had complications far beyond simple militaristic ones.

“Red Clay, you should feel bad, too,” Rhyodolite said, gripping my hand hard. “You weren’t friendly to Xenon either. If we’d been kinder, he might not have panicked. Now I owe my life to Granite, because he likes you.”

I felt sick. Tesseract said, “Rhyodolite, we’re going to leave you alone for a while. Tom, go in and help Ammalla.” He said to Hargun, “I’d like to show you my livestock.” The Barcon padded along with them, a medical pouch on its hip.

“Rhyodolite, you should have set a better example on your ship.” I felt hideously guilty as soon as I’d said that.

“Go. Help Ammalla,” Rhyodolite hissed. I went. Ammalla, polishing a carved glass tray, smelled of soap and mamahood. I leaned against a cabinet near her and sighed.

“Rhyodolite will be okay,” she said. “Bad luck broke his Gwyng cockiness, but once he’s social with Gwyngs again, he’ll be himself, as irritating as that can be on occasion.”

“I don’t know about me, Ammalla. I’m so alone. Cadets, officers of the Federation, we’re like test
pilots,
aren’t we? I had no idea.”

“Sapient tamers, young Red Clay. Tom, you don’t need to be quite so alone.”

“I met a free trader
human
woman. Yangchenla.” I was almost crying.

She set her glass tray aside and rolled me around in her arms, half playfully mauling, not too sweetly hugging. “Ah, you need a hug? A woman?” I felt foolish, but Ammalla felt like a mother, smooth-faced, soft. She gave me a real hug as I leaned into her. Awkwardly I pulled back. “Too old for a mother’s hug, hey? Like our boys after all, despite not-so­ sexy head bones.”

I hugged her back. “Thanks, Ammalla.”