Becoming Alien (40 page)

Yangchenla nodded as she groped around the freezer, asking, “Have you heard of the Gwyngs who lure stray males into robberies using an in-heat female and her consorts?” She handed me a beer.

“I like Gwyngs,” I said, hoping Ammalla and Tesseract were having more fun than we were.

“And you’re going to another planet, with those people who were prisoners here.”

Slowly, I sipped the beer, dodging any attempt to even think out an answer to myself. Finally, I
said, “I’m assigned to do it. Being a cadet’s not as neat as you think, Free Trader. We get shot at.”

“Transfer to Institutes if you’re afraid,” she said.

I felt odd, standing there in my human jeans and Lacoste shirt like I was a college kid. I remembered Hargun’s eyes watching me in the van from the free side of stout wire mesh. “But they’re more afraid of us.”

Yeah, we’re out here and we do not look like you.

Yangchenla re-folded her arms in front of her breasts and said, “Some individuals, species aside, are problem characters.”

That afternoon, we played chess with folded paper chessmen and a board Yangchenla drew up. The rules had changed somewhat in five hundred years, if I’d remembered correctly what I’d read earlier, bored and fiddling through the Floyd County high school’s encyclopedia. She beat me until I learned to think out moves in advance.

Tesseract and Ammalla came out briefly to make sure we weren’t killing each other. But we stayed polite, sexual energies drained off by both my tension over returning to Yauntra and the mad one night we’d already had together.

In the morning, Tesseract, wearing a shift that seemed to be the uniform tunic’s ancestor, looked at me as though he hadn’t quite planned for me to be there. He looked more alien, as though he’d never talked English. “Ammalla told you we had trouble with
humans
earlier.”

“Yes, I’m sorry,” I said. Yangchenla looked tensely from the chessboard, crouched over it.

He sat down heavily on the sofa. “When you came in with Granite Grit…” His voice faded.

“After I’d cut classes. Bet you wanted to deal with one crazy cadet at a time.”

He smiled. “I talked a long time with Hargun. We’re three different social types, you, me, and the Yauntries, regardless of how much we look alike. They beat each other up, by groups like your nations, but then assimilate very quickly. Ahrams—we’re more independent even than humans. Odd.”

I thought about the Civil War—blacks. Yeah,
we’re not good assimilators.
“If you Ahrams are less social, then how come you got to space before we did?”

“Accident.” He laughed slightly. “Let’s not talk about species. Tell you this, though. Black Amber thinks you’re good luck. She pouched a nymph.”

“Has it been fifteen weeks?”

“Five months. You were on Yauntra quite a while.”

“Cadmium and Rhyodolite must have been excluded from the mating scene again. That’s why they were such assholes.”

“Is it hard to keep up with all the different manners?” Tesseract asked, sinking deeper into his chair.

“Yeah. Want a beer?” I replied.

“You
humans
read minds?” he asked. Ammalla came out in a long shift, looking tired and sleepy.

I got out four beers, and we all sat around the frosted-glass holo tank watching Ahram movies, the behavior not quite human enough to
follow emotionally, but Tesseract and Ammalla looked so wasted I didn’t have the heart to ask them to explain the obscure points—why did the heroines trade children when their men were killed?

The next morning, Tesseract, dressed in his Rector’s Man clothes, woke me. “Pack all of it,” he said. “Here, I’ll help you.”

When we left the room, Yangchenla was waiting on the porch with her bag. She looked a bit fragile, a lone woman making her way in this world.

Nah, she had family. I was the lone human here; the men of her people wouldn’t accept me. That’s the way humans and chimps are—hard to break into a new social group.

We loaded our things in the plane and sat down behind Tesseract to go back to Karst City.

Suddenly I was exhausted. I wished I could relax a few days more with people I knew,
human
people.

Yangchenla looked out of the plane windows, her eyes fixing on each hill range, then looking over the plains to the next set of mountains. “I’d like to keep in touch with you,” she said to me. “Perhaps you’d tell me what has happened to my people since we left?”

“Tibet,”
Tesseract said. “Got conquered in a war. Many fled to
India,
became religious leaders in Tom’s country, but he probably doesn’t know about that.”

“No, I don’t,” I said glumly.

“Does our kind have planes now, computers?” she asked. “I know they don’t have space gates, but holo tanks?”

“No holo tanks,” I said, “but planes and computers.”

“Perhaps I should try for an interplanetary trade contract,” Chenla said, almost to herself. Slumped down in her seat, she was quiet awhile. “I think,” she finally said, “that other sapients’ opinions bother me too much. I’m not like you Ahrams. “

“Worse for the Yauntry on that, Yangchenla. For them there’s terror in either making us monsters or trying to merge with us,” Tesseract said. “Humans can be bothered by alien opinions without wanting to be like all of us.”

“You must have a place where you can be an Ahram among Ahrams, but we can’t escape being primitives.”

“Being a refugee,” I added. “Expendable, ripe for the name wall.”

He reached back and thumped my shoulder. “Tom, was being a
parolee
better?”

I shut up, body swaying with the little motions of the plane, tired, tired, tired.

When we landed, Yangchenla refused help with her bag and walked by herself toward her bus. A guard asked to see her I.D.—suddenly, I remembered seeing a black guy carded at a bar, no one else, just the black guy.

Primitive
…
refugee…nigger.
I felt sorry for both of us, but my cadet uniform got me by the guard without a twitchy glance. Tesseract in Rector’s Rep colors was right beside me.

Yangchenla waved timidly from the bus steps, as though she wasn’t sure waving had kept its meaning for five hundred years. I shouted, “I’ll see you again.” She smiled and waved back more vigorously through the bus window by her seat, and I flapped my arms at her as her bus pulled out. “But what’s next?” I asked Tesseract.

“I need to talk to you, in my office.”

“Yes, sir,
” I said in English.

“Don’t take that tone with me, son,”
he replied in the same language. I sort of laughed.

We loaded the bags in the car and drove up to the chrome pillars of the Rector’s offices. I wondered what I’d feel if I saw Karriaagzh. Such a monster—no wonder the Yauntries thought he ruled us. “Leave the bags in the car,” Tesseract said. I walked with him to his office.

A little bear sapient with short all-over curly body hair had one of Tesseract’s relax-’um teas waiting. Tesseract sat down in the armchair near his desk. I sat on a wood seat and pulled a little table close for my teacup.

Tesseract rubbed his crest and then drank, both hands on the cup, a huge draught of tea. “The situation on Yauntra,” he began, but didn’t say more for a few moments, staring into his teacup until the little bear brought the teapot over, but Tesseract waved him away. “Tom, Yauntra’s corporations don’t want their trade balances destroyed by new alien technologies. That’s what Hargun told me. Be careful. Stay with Hargun or Karriaagzh. Unorthodox the bird may be, but he’s not stupid.”

“It’s gonna be dangerous.”
I started speaking in English.

“Now come with me, you’ll spend the night in the dorm.”
By myself?
I didn’t ask, though, just followed Tesseract out to the car again, feeling like a pawn from the chess games I’d played with Yangchenla. I must have sighed, because Tesseract patted my shoulder.

He carried one bag; I carried the other, back into empty dorms, our footsteps echoing in the long hallway, no sounds of anyone else around. Seems they could have put me up at the Lodge again, but I guessed Karriaagzh wanted to remind me I was just a cadet.

Alone again.
I opened the door.

“Surprise,” Rhyodolite and Cadmium said. All sorts of young aliens stood up for me. I came in dazed while Tesseract took my suitcases and pushed through the crowd to put them in my alcove. Gwyngs, birds, Ewits, Jereks, two pairs of shiny black people, and a pair of Barcons with a drug dispenser.

A curly-haired bear-stock person came forward. “I’m Dioran Ferrite 4, your hall monitor. Sorry I didn’t help you more, but the authorities around you intimidated me.”

All the cadets looked pointedly at Tesseract.

“Have a nice party,” Tesseract said, leaving. “We’ll pick you up in the morning, Tom.”

After Tesseract left, Cadmium said, “We have a song for you. Tesseract suggested.”

“Our brains must be overridden, but it’s for you,” Rhyodolite added. They put curved plastic plates, almost like Carbon-jet’s memory enhancer, over the computers in their artificial skull bones, and began singing, in English.

∞ ∞ ∞

Gentlemen songsters out on a spree,
Lost from here to Eternity,
Lord, have mercy on such as we,
Baa, Baa, Baa.

Chills ran up and down my spine—that’s what cadets were, and greatly in need of mercy. I wondered if Tesseract had translated the song for these other cadets. “Any others going out?” I asked.

“Gypsum’s coming back from Ewit home,” another Ewit said archly.

“The rest are friends-of-friends,” Feldspar said in Karst II, “or went through the operation with you.”

“Or will preserve order,” a Barcon on the drug box said.

Cadmium and Rhyodolite twisted together when I came around to them, and Cadmium said, “Black Amber told us you did not witness. She asked that we apologize.”

“It’s okay.”

They rolled me between them, and said to the party at large, “And we can sing his throat.”

I looked at Rhyodolite’s little wrinkled face, the nostril slits quivering in and out as he breathed, felt both Gwyng hearts beating in their bodies. We’re all in this together, I thought, then said in Karst, “We’re all aliens together.”

Granite and Feldspar came over, their long feathered thighs lifted high, hocks bumping people who weren’t used to the way birds walked. Feldspar rubbed her nares against Rhyodolite’s chin. He didn’t flinch, but reached up to tickle the thick golden flesh around her nostrils. I was proud of him and felt much less lonely.

Lost from here to Eternity.

Lord, have mercy on such as we.

One of the other Gwyngs said, “Bird presence always increases the pulse, but we can re-interpret that physiological reaction.”

“They’re exciting to be around,” Cadmium said.

Gypsum came in, babbling in Karst II and Ewit. He looked around at the party and threw his baggage on his bed. “We’re all refugees here,” he said.

“Ewit home do something to you?” another Ewit, dressed in officer blue, asked.

“Yeah, they aren’t too fond of brain-contaminated colonials.”

The Barcon at the drug box said, “I recommend Terran hash oil for the Ewits.”

We filled all three alcove floors and most of the center section with mats from the vacant rooms. They were covered with sleeping cadets and young officers—too emotional, too wasted to go back to their separate rooms.

“Red Clay. So they had a seeing-you-off party.” The harsh voice didn’t seem too thrilled. I opened my eyes—Karriaagzh, with an injection cube in his hand.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Sober you up,” he replied, “if you need it.” I saw Edwir Hargun standing by the disc player, staring at the alien bodies. “I only did alcohol last night,” I said, blinking. A couple of the others sat up grumbling, but went very quiet when they saw Karriaagzh.

“The Rector,” someone in the back murmured.

“Your bags still packed? Shower, change into a uniform, and come with us.”

“Could you wait outside?” I asked.

“Yes, we’ll wait outside. I remember these parties, dimly.” After I had a shower, I realized I did have a headache, which got worse when I changed to fresh clothes. I found a uniform, my sash folded on top of it, and dressed in the whole works. My dirty clothes—jeans, shorts, shirt—I wrapped in a sheet and stuffed in a suitcase.

When I came out, Karriaagzh said, “Bit much,” fingering the sash, “but why not?”

“My head does hurt,” I admitted to him.

Squinting his yellow eyes, he pulled up my tunic sleeve. Hargun cringed as Karriaagzh pinched my human flesh in his bird fingers and pushed the cube against it.

“Ready now,” he said, throwing the cube into a hall trash can.

“Yes.” Hargun and I both looked at Karriaagzh, huge and gray beside us. Those yellow eyes could have been amused, but they were totally unfathomable to us mammals.