Being Alien (2 page)

Warm here, near the equator, but not as hot as July in Virginia. Behind the airstrip, I saw the black outlines of strap-leaf trees, like palms but botanically more complex. Shreka g’Han, a four-and-a-half-foot tall fuzzy bear sapient, sat in Black Amber’s bubble top electric car, the plastic cowling slightly sand etched. Behind a fence, grazing creatures like Holstein-colored hippos stared up at us. Gwyng pouch hosts, they incubated the few baby Gwyngs who survived birth. One of them jerked around as though yanked by its tail, and a little Gwyng stared out of the beast’s pouch.

“Red Clay, Tom, come.” Shreka used both my academy and species names. “It’s difficult to tend Gwyngs. I’m so glad to see you.” He looked hot. The little fuzzy bear-stock types were weird. Perfect servants—except they served with a tinge of condescension.

I asked, “Open mating or are Amber and Wy’um still exclusive?”

He didn’t answer, but hunched his shoulders. Black Amber and Wy’um were acting scandalously by Gwyng standards. They saw themselves as a Gwyng colony of two.

Not
always
exclusive, though. Gwyng politics forced Black Amber to invite others to her breedings. And one of Wy’um’s sisters adopted Black Amber’s son—biochemically proved to be Wy’um’s true son.

“They’re teaching the child Gwyng languages,” Shreka told me, his scalp hair ruffling even though the air was dead, “and even Wy’um doesn’t respond much to Karst.”

I could almost feel my skull computer whir, getting set to give me some sequential signals out of the Gwyng languages even if they weren’t anything I could make sense of.
Garble, garble, Black Amber yourself.

The car passed herds of pouch hosts and blood beasts—all dark grey and black bulk. Normally, even at night, more was visible—the stars being so bright—but tonight was overcast, just a glowing grey, like a half-moon glowing through the clouds, but all over.

I saw light shining though the woven planks of the house—a huge house for isolated Gwyngs—with a black patch in one corner, Wy’um’s security office, a room-sized safe. Shreka ruffled his head hair again and said, “Don’t let them tire you.”

“I’m used to Gwyngs.”

“They’re being
very
Gwyng.”

Black Amber would have to discuss my trip to Earth in Karst languages. My mind wasn’t geared, even with computers, to radar-based languages that clocked time in light polarizations and embedded time and spatial relationship into all their meanings. Sometimes I thought the Gwyngs just bullshit about Gwyng languages and their elaborate brains.

We parked by the veranda as two Gwyngs came out, dressed in Gwyng rigs, collars with strips of cloth going down the center of the nippleless chests to join up with a broad band of cloth around the genitals. The vestigial webs hung like loose black crepe from their armpits to halfway down their upper arms.

My computer babbled to my speech centers, failing to transform Gwyng into sequences I could hang meaning on, then my brain squealed when they went into ultrasonics.

Black Amber and Wy’um, dressed in Gwyng winter shifts with cut-outs for their webs, came out, twined together side to side. Their little child, almost the same age as Alchir-singra, held on to Wy’um’s knee and stared at me with oily Gwyng eyes. The fur over the raised bone surrounding his eyes was paler than his baby sparse body hair, making him look vaguely like a photo negative of a raccoon.

Gwyng irises and pupils looked no larger than my own eyes, but behind the bone surrounding the visible eye was a huge eyeball, with a retina as complex as most mammal’s visual cortexes, so sensitive that Gwyngs could see infrared and polarized light, so quick they processed visual information five times faster than I did. Yet Gwyngs could be as doofus as any human.

“Black Amber; we need to talk,” I said.

She stared at me, then said, in Karst Two, “Why code babble? Know (think I do) what you (lonely male) want?”

“Granite Grit’s not all too happy that I’m living with him and Feldspar.”

“Birds (only mild disgust, except for Karriaagzh great meaning slippage/impaction in shift from Gwyng to Karst Two).” She stroked Wy’um. Another large Gwyng that I thought must be Wy’um’s sister came out, larger than the males, but not so tall as Black Amber, who was taller than me when she stood. She was standing now, defensively raised on the balls of her feet above me on the veranda steps. They talked a bit in Gwyng, then Black Amber said, “Come in (try our life).” She pursed her lips at me, her smile, like a human going
oo.

All the Gwyngs oo’ed at me. She wanted to embarrass me, I realized, but I was used to Gwyng teases.

“Life and honors,” I told her, having translated that out of an Earth science fiction book some Terran observer had smuggled out of the Berkeley Public Library.

“He (sleeper alone in his dreams) gets along with birds," she told the other Gwyngs in Karst Two so my computer would transform what she said into comprehensible phonemes, “and (almost) with us.”

Sleeper alone in his dreams—
Gwyngs thought being trapped unconscious alone in a bed was most peculiar. Black Amber’s little son looked at her hands, nervously. She wiggled her long thumbs at him, no anger juice in the glands at the base of them.

Wy’um stirred away from her, and their son tried to pull them back together. “The Federation is our home/life,” Wy’um said. “We don’t distort policy over sexual…” His voice trailed away; his facial wrinkles deepened.

“Tom, I consider as crippled but social Gwyng.” Black Amber came down the veranda stairs and stroked me with the furred backs of her knuckles. “Come in. We plan to tease you about sleeping alone except after sex. Only wild pleasure tames humans to each other, then not for life.”

The little Gwyng went to his aunt, hugged her knees and stared at me, then said something to Amber.

“No, you won’t be able to understand him until your skull can take/get implanted with the computer,” she told him. “No loss.”

I bumped my body against her lightly as I passed her. She koo’ed slightly and took my elbow to steer me inside. The five others followed us. I sat down cross-legged on one floor mat while Wy’um and his sister twined together with Amber on another. The other two adult Gwyngs, males by the size of them, sat down on suspended swing chairs balanced at knee level with counterweights. One said something to the other, got out of the chair, and crawled into a tube sofa. Amber’s child watched him before crawling into a smaller tube that looked more obviously like a host pouch.

Don’t watch them as though they were zoo specimens.
I looked up instead at the pattern playing on the Gwyng flat screen on the wall, something they read as language. When everyone was settled, I said, “Black Amber, I think you’ll sympathize when I tell you I want to be among my own people for a while.”

She stopped and looked at me with eyes like greased black rock. “You went to Karriaagzh first.”
 

“He was in Karst City. I’m sleepy,” I told her. “Separating from Yangchenla.”

“One hundred rotations of this planet ago,” she said, but she got up and led me to a tiny room set aside for alien guests—pretty rare on this island, I took it.

Her son came to the door and leaned against it, stroking his stomach, web veins slightly distended although he hadn’t spread out his arms. She spoke to him, then said, “He wants to touch you.”

When I knelt he came up, fingered my head hair with tiny long fingers that looked almost brittle, and spoke Gwyng to her.

“Yes you’re perceptive,” she said in Karst Two. “He cut it short as our head hair.”

“What can I call him?” I asked her.

“He won’t understand you. Amber-son, if you have to name him something.”

Amber-son leaned against me as she explained, in Karst Two, that I’d be calling him various weird sounds. “He does understand Karst Two, then.”

“A little,” she said. “I spoke Karst to not exclude.”

“Red Clay,” Amber-son said, almost ultrasonically.

I cupped my hand and brought it down in the Federation signal for agreement. He squealed and koo’ed in a fit of Gwyng giggles, then curled up on my bed, not touching me, his head propped up on his left hand, web stretched and pressed against the mat covers.

“Is he going to stay here all night?” I asked Amber.

“Problem?” she asked, thumbs curling out slightly as the glands at their bases engorged with blood or anger juice precursors. I looked away quickly before she could notice me watching her hands.

“Well, will he be comfortable with an alien?”

“If you let him, it will relieve his fear.”

I thought about her fear of Karriaagzh and said, “Then it is good not to be afraid of aliens, Black Amber?”

“Of mammals,” she said smoothly before speaking Gwyng at him. She smiled at me as if she’d been waiting years to demand this of me. “Sleep with my true child and you can go to your planet afterward.

Black Amber had other pouch children, but Mica, stranded on Earth, killed there, was, had been, her only other true child. He’d scared me the first time he tried to sleep with me—odd, now I realized how he’d felt, alone among aliens. He must have complained about my coldness in journals Black Amber read after he died and the aliens found me. Well, I decided, Amber-son is small; it will be like sleeping with a big dog. I reached over to him and stroked his side.

Black Amber took my head in her long fingers and kissed me on the nose. Then she left, body rocking slightly over the bowed Gwyng legs.

Bats—they’re excessively complicated flightless bats.
Amber-son trembled slightly when I thought this, empathetic to the tension in my own body.
Poor baby.

He whispered, “Red Clay, be good/kind (anxiety).”

I nodded my cupped hand slightly, then stretched my fingers toward him. He scooted over and curled up beside me before I could change into my Earth-style pajamas.
Oh, well; the tunic and pants are loose fitting enough.
I eased my hand down for the covers—he sat up with a start, then must have remembered Amber explaining this strange alien custom and wiggled in beside me again. I took off my tunic top and he twisted his little fingers through my chest hair and sighed. “Need more (sleepers),” he whispered to me.

“Um,” I said, suspicious.

“Can you-sleep-if-not-willing, not-Gwyng?”

“You know more Karst Two than Black Amber let on.” He still couldn’t understand Karst One, though, and stared up at me, then touched my unwebbed armpit.
He’s just a little kid,
I thought, rubbing his back. Fortunately, I was tired and fell asleep quickly, didn’t insult him or Mama Black Amber with restlessness.

During the night, though, he woke me, whimpering in his sleep, hands locked around my wrist. I hummed, remembering how two Gwyngs once awakened me, and he opened his eyes and said, “Won’t push me out?”

I shook my head, then signaled
no.
As I stroked him along his side with the backs of my knuckles, the way Gwyngs like it, I wondered what a four-year-old Gwyng could have nightmares about.
Maybe me?

But he cuddled closer, fingers still tight around my arm, and went back to sleep. I managed to fall back asleep and dreamed of when Mica was with me on Earth, of Black Amber’s anguish over losing him, her hostility toward humans.

In the dream after Mica died, gut shot by my brother, I turned to Amber and said, “Even if Warren is nasty and crazy, he’s my brother.” 

In the morning the adult Gwyngs of the house hummed us awake and Amber-son laughed, koo’ed.

“Did he have uncomfortable dreams?” Black Amber asked.

Amber-son looked over at me, breathing through his mouth. I shook my head, then said, “Is that, why you made him sleep with me? Because he has bad dreams?”

“Know his non-sound symbol,” Amber-son said in Karst Two. “Shakes head no. No. No-bad-dreams-no.”

Black Amber told him, “Shook head because he didn’t like/feared the question.” She said to Wy’um’s sister, “You’ve been teaching him Karst language (troubled).”

“He lives on this planet, not Gwyng Home,” Ghring’urn said.

“I thought he was having terror dreams over me,” I said, anxious about my own dreams.

Amber wrapped her long arms around her thin body and hooked her hands behind her neck, thumbs bent, veins pulsing in the webs stretched over her chest. Then she stretched her hands toward her son, but didn’t touch him, just held her long fingers near his face. They opened and closed like a hypnotist’s. She asked, “Would you rather be back in the pouch?”

Amber-son watched her thumbs and, wiggling slightly, didn’t say anything. Wy’um crouched slightly as though Amber had scolded him. Then they talked Gwyng, excluding me.

Finally, Black Amber spoke to Amber-son and then said to me, “Take him for a walk among the herds. We have some of your planet’s food animals. Then find your food in the stale food room.

“Do you have a
cow?”

“Horned milk oil animal from
Sherrsee?
Yes. And some egglayers,” she said.

“What about a flat iron pan to fry eggs in?”

“Walk him
now,”
she told me. When I began to move, she nibbled her thumb glands to suck out the anger juice.