Being Alien (22 page)

When he closed the door on us, Marianne said, “I’m thinking about an old beat era poem, ‘Marriage.’ We’re being mated like cattle.”

“No,” I said, “like geese,” looking for a place to hang my clothes, wishing I’d bought more jeans while I had the chance.

“
Damn, Tom
,” she began in English, “the term ‘officially mated’ has bioterminological roots.” She saw me fumbling with my clothes and said, “Here, they put a closet in for us, Molly and Sam share the other half.” She pulled a wall section back into a door pocket.

I remembered that Yangchenla practically spit at me when the Barcons tried to put us in a room with too sexual a bed. “I could sleep in Warren’s room.”

“No, there are two beds. And it’s not like we’re virgins.” She smiled.

“But it’s different now. Knowing Karst One is like having a new mind, isn’t it?”

“‘Esperanto that really works,” she said.

“I’m tired,” I fell back across the bed with my shoes on and she knelt by the bed and slipped them off, then began massaging the soles of my feet. “This one’s for kidneys,” she said, mashing down on the ball of my foot.

I looked down at my toes. “For kidneys?”

“
Reflexology. Berkeley weirdness. And this is for the bladder
.”

“Speaking of which.”

“Bathroom’s down the hall,” she said, “It’s huge and very weird."

“Dust showers, cloacal slits, huge tubs, tiny hand bowls, urinals, squat toilets, sitting toilets.”

“You’ve seen it?”

“There are reliever-cleaners like that all over Karst.”

“Poor old jaded Tom.” She lifted my left foot and tickled around the base of my big toe.

“What’s that for?”

“For fun. Let’s get in the big tub together.”

“I am exhausted.”

She took both my feet and shook me. “You’re tense.”

“Okay, let’s get in the tub, but I don’t want to try anything on the velvet sexual jungle gym.” I got up and went to get my robe from the closet.

As we left our room, I saw Warren leaning against his room’s door frame, smoking a cigarette, scowling. He watched us pass down the half without saying anything. Marianne and I didn’t speak to him either. When we got into the bathroom, we locked the tub cubicle behind us. Marianne asked, “You’re worried about Warren?” She dialed hot water and opened the tap.

“About lots of things. About how contact with different sapients changes us, more than culture shock, brain pathways shock.”

“But we can all understand Karst One.”She stripped, her legs paler now than when she rode bike every day, her breasts and hips fuller. So pretty it hurts—that’s what Warren used to say.

I took off my clothes and laid them down over the robe. “Not all understand Karst One. The Gwyngs and some others can’t. And the Karst languages were formulated to make contact seem easier.”

“Sapir was wrong, then.” She sank into the water up to her chin. I stepped in and our legs tangled.

“Sapir?” The name seemed vaguely familiar.

“Man who thought language formed perceptions. Karst Languages are an example of the soft Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.”

“But not every species
can
learn a Karst language. The ones who can’t aren’t considered fully sapient. Maybe that’s not right.”

“Warren’s having trouble, but I think he’s fighting the language.” She pulled her legs back.

“He’s learning a language that said he was stupid before.”

“Tom, the language expands things. Contact with other sapients—that makes life fuller, doesn’t it?”

“They’re all what we wanted animals to be when we were kids. Tesseract, my first Rector’s Man, said the Federation was like a giant zoo without keepers.”

She said, “We’re all one another’s keepers.”

“Yeah, it can be really brutal.”

“Your life was so innocent before?”

“No, that’s why I make a good refugee. But yours was.”

“Officiator Red Clay, I was a Berkeley brat.”

“But you get involved with other sapients, then find out they die at fifty or live to 200, or get set up and killed to make someone else look bad. Some go crazy.”

“Tom, I met Alex. I wasn’t an idealist.” She climbed out of the water and wrapped herself in a bast fiber sheet. 
Get a towel, come back to the room. I’ll give you a massage.”

Warren had shut his door. Sam and Molly were giggling behind theirs. I remembered that this wing of a Rector’s People house was bugged.

Back in our room, Reeann spread a mat on the floor and said, “Lie down on it and relax.”

“Naked?”

“Yes, naked. I’ve seen your cock before. Massage, really, just a massage.”

I started to say I was a massage virgin, but I remembered the Barcons rubbing down my legs, Rhyodolite and Karriaagzh, on different occasions, massaging my shoulders and back. “I’ve never been massaged by a human before.”

“California deep body massage. Tell me if I’m better than an
ech.
” She poured oil on her hands and then dug her thumbs in on either side of my spine, almost fiercely, leaning her weight into me.

“I want a ceremony,” she almost chanted. “Wedding ceremony. Human wedding ceremony.”

Ceremony, yes, but it wasn’t what I’d have called a wedding back in Virginia. Cadmium and Rhyodolite took me away to their Gwyng officers’ quarters while the others prepared for the wedding at the Jerek Rector’s People’s.

Rhyodolite didn’t say much to me during my stay, just oo’ed when he looked at me. Once he said, “Perverse, placental, fake pair-bonding (and human snob).”

Cadmium brought me back to the Jerek house for the wedding. As I came walking from the airfield to the house, I saw Sam and the girl Jerek Lisanmarl on the porch. Both knelt, drums between their knees, and shook big wooden tubes Sam rigged up and called African rainmakers that sounded like they ought to go with a lava lamp and LSD. They sat on either side of the door, she in Jerek leathers with her little breasts beginning to show on her lower abdomen, Sam in freshly tie-dyed tunic and pants. As I came up, they began to play alien fertility music. Does it matter whether it was human or non-human? The music was alien to me. The rainmakers made sounds like sand brushing tight wires while they tapped the drumskins with their fingertips, squeezing the drums between their knees to change the tones. Lisanmarl whistled from time to time, brushing her nose, then playing more.

Another plane landed. Karriaagzh got out awkwardly, then stalked up in his gold-threaded Rector’s uniform, only his head feathers showing. Sam stopped playing and just looked up and down at the yellow eyes, the scaled forearms, the odd booted feet.

“Is Black Amber here yet?” he asked Sam.

Sam said, “No,” and began playing again.

“Good. I want to talk to Marianne Schweigman.”

“She’s in back, dressing,” Lisanmarl said, crinkling her facial skin.

Karriaagzh went in. I was about to follow him, but Sam said, “Bad luck to see the bride before the wedding.”

“What does he want to see her about?”

Sam played and shrugged. Warren came out with a bottle of raw, unaged alcohol, and said, “Here, grooms need this.” He drank first himself and handed me the bottle.

“Sure it’s not rubbing alcohol?”

“No, I distilled it from the beer.”

“Warren?” I drank a slug and felt it etch out my esophagus and sit in my stomach like a small fireball. My eyes watered. “Warren.”

“Good, huh,” Warren said, taking the bottle back.

“I don’t want to be drunk.” The Karst word for that commented medically on the brain physiology involved.

“One swallow.” He took another pull on it.

“Warren, stop.”

“Shit, Tom, it’s a wedding,”
he said in English. A Barcon that I didn’t know was at the Jerek house popped its head out the door and glared at Warren.

We heard another plane coming in. It looked bigger than the others. Cadmium said, “I hope Rhyodolite didn’t… (embarrassment if he did—I wish to disassociate).”

The plane landed and I heard Tibetan. Seven Tibetans got out. As they approached, I recognized Yangchenla’s voice. Who would have invited them? Rhyodolite. Hips moving more than seemed biomechanically necessary, Yangchenla strolled across the yard in a new bottle green dress like the one she’d worn when we first were lovers, with six of her Tibetan kin in multi-colored Karst City clothes following her. She stopped about twenty feet from me, then came some closer. A wind fanned the dress back against her legs.

“Why did you come?”

“I heard. Will you throw me out?”

“Yangchenla, I don’t want to disturb the occasion.”

“I wanted to see what happened to humans over the past 500 years.” Then she saw Sam drumming and frowned. “He’s not a Barcon?”

“No, he’s human like us, just even darker skinned.”

“Perhaps he’ll give me a child.” She smiled at me.

“He’s mated officially.”

“I don’t know what that has to do with children.”

“Who told you about my wedding?”

“A Gwyng, through signs.” She wiggled her hands.

“We Free Traders can communicate even if we don’t have computers for skull bones.”

Damn Rhyodolite, he probably thought it was funny.

Warren, sweating, drunk now, came out and overheard more of this than I’d wanted. “I’d give you a child,” he said in Karst One, offering her the liquor.

She sniffed at it and said, “Where did you get this?”

“I made it.”

In Tibetan, she said something about this skill being useful, and her kin laughed. One of the younger uncles came up to Warren and asked, “You only let women drink with you?”

“Hell,
no.” Warren offered him the bottle. “You from
Earth?”

“From Karst City.” Despite some murmuring from one of Yangchenla’s grandmothers, the young uncle drank after he answered. He squeezed his eyes shut tight and pursed his lips.

“The original stock is Tibetan,” I said.

“Next war,” Warren said, breaking his sentence with a small swig and handing the bottle back to the uncle, “is going to be over Tibet.”

Chenla’s grandmother said, “Trung, stop it.”

“My brother had me stolen from
Richmond.
Brought me here with a bunch of freaks.” Warren had acquired an amazing amount of Karst slang, probably from the Jerek adolescent, and sounded like himself even in Karst One.

The Barcon finally came out and took the bottle away from Warren. My brother looked as if he’d tried hitting a Barcon earlier and still wanted to try again regardless, but then he shrugged and said, “He’s going to refill it.”

Trung laughed and embraced Warren while Chenla’s grandmother clapped in irritation. Yangchenla asked, “Does the bride need help?”

“Karriaagzh is talking to her.”

The other Tibetans went inside when Agate called to them, all except for Chenla, who said, “Everyone seems so interested in the new humans.” She smiled for half a second, then walked up to Sam and stood by him, listening to the Jerek/Human music.

Another plane landed then—Black Amber and Rhyodolite, who came running up in that lurching from stumble to stumble Gwyng way with his lips pursed. Oo, oo, oo, what a joke to tell Yangchenla about my wedding. Cadmium looked embarrassed. Yangchenla locked eyes with Rhyodolite and went inside
the
Jereks’ house.

Rhyodolite brushed his side against my arms and said, “Yangchooshao didn’t bite new woman?”

“I didn’t appreciate your telling her.”

“Me? I didn’t make a sound.”

“I understand.”

“Humans need to socialize together, like post-heat party. You all have mated.”

Yangchenla came out of the house with a dish of spiced nuchi and black Terran beans, a full protein for us Terran types even if nuchi evolved under completely different conditions. Picasso-grain, like too large buckwheat kernels with gaudy colors on them.

I went inside. The Tibetans didn’t get too close, but made their eyes even beadier and the grooves in their faces deeper. Warren and Trung were squatting in the corner, making liquor talk.

Black Amber looked at me from a doorway of a guest wing. Chalk and Agate cupped their hands and brought them down, then the Gwyngs and the Jereks grabbed me and wrestled me outside, down the stairs, koo’ing and whistling, and dumped me in the now heated pool. Chalk and Agate stripped off their uniforms and came in with me—pulling my clothes off and washing me with bristle brushes while Rhyodolite and Cadmium splashed at us. Black Amber backed well away. Chalk chanted in Jerek as he and Agate helped me out and dried me.

Then, while I was still naked and beginning to freeze, the Gwyngs ran off back into the house. Travertine and three other olive birds came out waving brass pans full of smoking incense. They weaved around me once, hocks lifted high, feathers roused, beaks parted, tongues dangling, then went back into the house.