Being Alien (23 page)

Chalk whistled softly, then said, “Now that you’re washed and smoked, dress and come in.”

Black Amber and the other Gwyngs stood touching sides to each other, arms intertwined, looking at the door leading deeper into the house. I heard Karriaagzh’s voice, then Marianne’s saying, “Are we ready yet?”

Sam and Lisanmarl began playing “Here Comes the Bride” on human flutes.

Karriaagzh came out carrying a carved wood sound reflecting shell. He stood it against the wall. When he turned around, it flared behind his head. Marianne, in a white silk dress that flounced around her calves, followed behind him. Black Amber clenched her feet, then stared at Karriaagzh until he covered his eyes with his nictitating membranes. The muscle lumped between her jawbones bounced as she looked away.

“We are here today,” Karriaagzh began, his harsh voice ringing off the sounding board, “to celebrate not just a human mating pair, but the start of a relationship built of mind as well as sexuality.”

Black Amber, Cadmium, and Rhyodolite immediately turned to look at me as though I had told Karriaagzh to say this. Mind, he dragged his favorite paradigm for the universe into my wedding.

Karriaagzh flared his crest a tiny bit and said, “Tom, step forward and join hands with Marianne.”

I did. Mine were sweating; hers were cool.

“Do you, Tom Gentry, agree to cherish your companion for as long as there is love in your relationship?”

I said, “I do,” stunned that my vows weren’t for life.

“And do you, Marianne Schweigman, agree to cherish Tom for as long as you love him?”

“I do.”

“And do you both swear to maintain this relationship as long as necessary to benefit your mutual offspring?”

“We do.”

“I pronounce you an officially bonded pair.”

I kissed Marianne and whispered, partly in English “When Earth is part of the Federation, we can have a
real church wedding.”

“
This is a real wedding
,” she replied, all in English. “What’s the point of ’til death do us part when half the marriages break up?” Then she nipped my earlobe almost to bleeding.

Everyone pelted us with rice, dried up bits of umbilical cords, and shed milk teeth.

“Throw them in the pool,” Rhyodolite shrieked, waving a stuffed brood beast tail over his head.

Two hours later, after we, cleaned up, I glanced at a security screen and saw Warren walking to the Tibetans’ plane. “Warren, wait, don’t.” I ran out onto the porch.

One of the Barcons came out after me and said, “We’ll continue to help him.”

Warren turned, looking old and hideously hungover, bloated, the sharp cheek and jawbone angles blurred, but not padded with healthy flesh. “Tom, give it up.”

“We’ll track him down and inject him with Prolixin every two weeks,” the Barcon said.

Trung took Warren’s shoulder and said to me, “He needs us more than he needs
vr’ech.”
Yangchenla just watched, dressed now in a knee-length Karst City tunic top, but with her legs bare, as though she’d learned more about human dressing from Molly and Marianne. She smiled faintly, her eyes slitted even more than with the epicanthic fold.

“He’ll drink himself to death,” I said to the Barcon.

“We could do a personality rebuild, but you want identity continuity. That identity?”

Brainwipe—the body lives, the person dies. “Warren, be careful.” I ached.
“Jesus,
Warren, I’m sorry.”

“I’ll still be in the city. They gave me a permit. Tom, I want to be around people. My kind. I...”

The Barcon whispered in my ear, “He had some trouble when we did the language operations—we had to isolate him for four days. Let him go.”

“Warren, you know you’re always welcome at my house.”

Yangchenla said, “Come on, Warren, let’s go.”

Chalk came to the door and said, “Tom, come in with me. Karriaagzh and Black Amber quarrel for Marianne.”

I went rigid, wedging myself in the doorway, until Warren disappeared into the plane, then I let Chalk pull me back into the house. We went into the second wing where I heard Karriaagzh say, “But she herself put Tom in danger.”

“What?” I asked. Marianne lay curled up on a cushion, her head propped up on her hand, elbow on the cushion, staring out between Black Amber and Karriaagzh.

“Translate (correctly) for me, Red Clay,” Black Amber said. Her feet were writhing, her arms flicked out once to help her balance. “Tell your female that your people are xenophobes, that we’re now facing another xenophobic group.”

I translated for Marianne. She said to me, “Does she understand what I say?”

“Her skull computer transforms our sequential signal to something hologramistic, only done in sound, like sonar.”
 

“Black Amber, Karriaagzh, when you quarrel, you make me very nervous,” Marianne said. “Black Amber, you’re afraid of Karriaagzh.”

Black Amber hissed. Karriaagzh raised his face, feathers, but not his crest. “The fear can be managed, Black Amber,” he told her in Karst Two.

Black Amber crouched and turned toward him, eyes gone blank, non-sapient. Marianne said, “Black Amber, no. Karriaagzh, you both ought to separate now.”

Karriaagzh pulled his feathers tight, the membrane slid out slightly over his eyes, looking like a thick tear in each corner.

“I’m still getting used to
vr’ech,
Karriaagzh, don’t be as bad as she is,” Marianne said.

“Uhyalla,”
Karriaagzh said, muscles bunching around the eyes to pull the membrane back. His feathers jerked stiffly.

Black Amber looked down at her hands, fingers curled, sinews rigid, and said, “Red Clay, Red Clay, so difficult.” She spread her arms and pulsed blood through the webs, then slowly began to topple over. I ran up and caught her, the webs hot and sweaty against my arms, her head dangling.

Karriaagzh hopped over, a gait I’d never seen him use before—terrible gait in these circumstances—lowered his body and took Black Amber’s left web between his beak mandibles, crouching. He tightened slowly, his eyes closed, stiff quills erected over his rigid brows.

Black Amber opened her eyes and shrieked, He dropped her web and bounded backward, arms thrown out for balance. I tried to hold her as she began thrashing, but ended up falling with her to the floor.

“You stupid whore,” Karriaagzh said to her. “With Wy’um.”

Black Amber said, “The last
was
open. Contact with your crippled brains contaminates, perverts.” She rolled to her back and touched her left web with fingers that jerked back. She wouldn’t look at Karriaagzh.

Marianne said, “I can’t stand this. Get out, both of, you.”

“They’re both high Federation officials,” I said.

“If I can’t get them to go away now when they’re upsetting me on my wedding day, this Federation is a farce.”

Karriaagzh said, softly, “She would have damaged her embryo with a coma now.”

“They’ll all die from now on,” Black Amber said. She closed her eyes and hugged herself, webs stretched over her chest, head thrashing. “Translate that. She’s female.”

“I’m leaving,” Karriaagzh said. “Tell Black Amber I am willing to desensitize her.” Karriaagzh walked out of the room, wiping his beak.

“Shit,” Marianne said. “Shit. Black Amber, you had better get desensitized if you’ve got such a problem with him.”

Black Amber’s body quivered, then she tried to get up, floundering. “Cold,” she said. I turned around and saw Chalk and Agate watching.

“We’ll bring hot water and a vasoconstrictor skin rub," Agate said. “So she can’t trade off her nymphs anymore?”

“It’s more than web-creeping predator with him. He pursued me with his policies,” Black Amber said.

“You like snakes, spiders?” I asked Marianne.

“I get startled weirdly when I see a snake suddenly.”

“Yes.” Black Amber said, “Karriaagzh is my snake.”

“For her. Karriaagzh represents a primordial threat the way snakes threaten monkeys. We react to fingernails on blackboards—primitive monkey alarms…” I felt dizzy myself and went over to a cushion by Marianne. Chalk came up and gently stroked me across the eyebrows with his thumbs. In English, I said,
“I’m caught here between Black Amber and Karriaagzh.”

“Terrific,”
Marianne replied. Chalk touched her hand gently. She just blinked, moved her hand up on her lap.

I continued in English,
“Just because they’ve got more technology, you expected them to be morally superior?”

Agate came back with the hot water and skin rub, heating Black Amber’s body core with a warm drink, closing the peripheral veins to send the blood back to the major organs.

Marianne watched Agate, then asked me,
“The hippies were right then? Technology fucks you up?”

Chalk said, “If you continue to speak in that language, I will call Travertine to translate.”

I didn’t think a bird in here would be a good idea, so I spoke in Karst. “Some species have been technological longer that we’ve been. But technology just makes life easier, not perfect.”

“Brings us in contact with much complexity,” Agate said, sitting by Black Amber, rubbing the Gwyng’s nippleless chest. “Most of us find a few species to work with, leave the other ninety alone. None of us understands all of one another.”

Black Amber sat up. She said, “Nothing can make me desensitive with that one.”

“You need to walk around,” Chalk said. “You could begin desensitizing with Travertine.”

“Not today,” Black Amber said as Agate and Chalk, both much smaller and lighter than she, helped her to her feet.

“Oh, Tom,” what did she say?” Marianne asked when Black Amber and the Jereks had left the room.

“She wouldn’t work with Karriaagzh on desensitizing her aversion to birds.”

“I’ve already figured out that Black Amber doesn’t work with Karriaagzh period. Tom, Karriaagzh said he could teach me Karst Two. After my skull computer is installed.”

But Black Amber wanted my humans with her.

The next morning, while Marianne still slept, I walked into an open elevator with speakers softly playing Brahms. If I shouldn’t be here, the machine won’t work, I decided as I pressed the down button.

But the door slid up, the compartment sank, then the door slid down again. I stepped out into a tunnel lit with glow tubes, some twisted and dropped on the rough stone underfoot, others hung in wire baskets. A spring ran down between black stones, faint light glittering on its ripples. Down the hall, I heard water dropping, echoing against stone, then something hollow and metallic hit stone, a tube chime down in the darkness that pivoted forward when water trickling into it filled it beyond the balance point. Empty, it pivoted back, hit the stone, and caught more water.

“Agate, Chalk?” I began to see doorways off either side of the tunnel and stone Jerek figures in a niche at the end of it.

“Tom, you came down,” Chalk said from the first room.

Agate added, “He’s curious. That’s a human trait, isn’t it, Tom?”

“Agate? Did you want to be alone?”

“Come satisfy your curiosity. You’re cold,” Chalk said. He was right. The water in the hall was nearly ice-cold. I slipped off one of the stepping stones.

The three of them, the parents and the young daughter, were playing silver flute-like instruments blown like bottles, not held transversely like human flutes. They put the flutes back under their noses, mouthpieces pressed against the shark-like lower jaws and played. Lisanmarl lowered her flute and said, “I wish I was a Gwyng or a Barcon.”

Before I could ask why, Agate said, “Don’t.” I didn’t know whether she meant that I shouldn’t ask or that the young Jerek shouldn’t elaborate.

“Maybe...” Lisanmarl began. She picked up her flute and blew out discordant notes.

“I’ll leave,” I said.

“Make them leave me alone,” Lisanmarl said. “I don’t want to be spayed now.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, beginning to move back.

“Lisanmarl is sterile,” Chalk said. “Don’t tempt her. Watch your brother around her, and Sam.”

“I’m sorry I came down here if…”

“She’s maturing fast. You needed to be told. Steriles are always in low-grade estrus. Please don’t take advantage of her. We know you’re not happy with Jereks, but please.”

“Human women stay in low-grade estrus, too,” Lisanmarl said, “so he won’t want me.” Her black facial skin began to gleam in the cold light.

Chalk said, “We invited you down with human music and pheromones. Maybe you think Jereks can be too oblique. Here’s your pheromone disrupter.”

Lisanmarl played human music at them. I felt very awkward and slightly angry. “I’m sorry,” I said again. “Should I lock the elevator when I leave?”

Chalk and Agate looked up with blank Jerek faces, naked skin over their noses wrinkled. “We don’t like blocked exits.”

“Blocked exits,” Lisanmarl said, “remind my parents of avalanches, but I was born on Karst.”