Being Alien (24 page)

“Being born on Karst explains it,” Marianne said when I told her about my walking down a pheromone line to the Jerek tunnel. “Lisanmarl knows other species do things differently.”

“But what does she want? Sam?”

“She’s come onto him already. He said he didn’t want a furry girl with tits below her navel, but could Molly and I tell him how to get out of it gracefully? Tell her we permanently pair-bonded like Barcons, we said. Molly’s not sure he didn’t sleep with her.”

“Lisanmarl believes that?”

“Precisely what’s going on? Permanent heat?”

“Same as human women, they said, always in low-grade estrus.”

Marianne laughed, then asked, “Why spay her?”

“I don’t know.”

One of the house Barcons told Marianne that Lisanmarl could die of pernicious anemia in ten to fifteen years if she wasn’t spayed. Estrogen in heat quantities washes out the hemoglobin’s iron. Some Jerek steriles wait until the first effects show. Chalk and Agate didn’t want to let their daughter take a chance or live the sterile life.

Chalk came up to me a day later and said, “We thought you ought to know why we’re tense now. We may resign as Rector’s People because of this.”

“Don’t,” I told them. “I had no idea you were upset. I thought you were like the first Jerek I met.”

“That’s because you think all Jereks are tense.”

“No it’s because I was preoccupied with my brother.”

Chalk laid his hand on my forearm and said, “A problem’s shape depends on species, but we all have troubles enough. “He raised himself on the balls of his feet and rubbed his chin against my clavical.

“Will I stay here while Marianne has the skull computer installed?”

“No, you have an assignment. Black Amber sent word. Take your bicycle—they installed a device for it in the space station gym.”

7
Crocs and Pretty People

Being an officer/officiator in the Federation, I would have duties. And so, having just registered us as a mated pair, the Federation separated Marianne and me. During the last four years, I’d spent a total of seven months on Watch Species 467 Station monitoring radio and video signals from the Watch Species 467 planet, learning one of their languages. Now space-time around that planet writhed—they’d done gate experiments—so ten of us who’d learned at least one of their languages came to wait to see if Watch Species 467 would develop space gate technology during this watch.

In the language I’d learned, Wreng was one of Watch Species 467; I’Wreng meant two; Wrengin, the many; Wrengee, the people. They looked more reptilian than any creature I’d seen before. The structure of their solar system, few comets, coolish sun, should have produced birds. But, while their sun was a bit distant, the planet atmosphere was a bit high in carbon dioxide. So, sparse feathers, scales on the hands. No beaks, either. They’d never been runners. We’d seen their porn movies so we had a good idea of what they looked like—feathered heads and leathery bodies, clotted with saucer-sized erectible scales, some of them pierced and hung gold rings on.

A shiny black couple, Argon IX and Argon X who I’d worked with before, opened my transport and asked in English, “Did you bring your new wife?”

I missed Marianne and I hadn’t been gone from Karst more than an hour. “No, she’s having the second operation. Who’s here that I know besides you guys?”

They looked at each other uneasily when. I said Marianne wasn’t with me, but I thought maybe it was because someone I didn’t like was there. “I promise to behave, whoever it is."

“Barcons from before, and the ape-stock, Wool from the Institute of Science, plus a bird-stock. We don’t ask species.”

And Wool wouldn’t tell you what he was. Yes, it’s divisive to ask species, and I’d been bad about doing that. We were supposed to class people only as to temperate-zone terrestrial evolvers, cold-zone terrestrial evolvers, tropical-zone evolvers: bats, bears and birds, and apes. There was a non-obligatory bound morpheme referring to travel modality that let us distinguish apes, bats, and bears from birds. Everything except birds had changed travel modes, bats from flying to walking, us from brachiating to walking, bears from four-footed gaits to bipedalism. Bird-stock was always bipedal. “So, who are they?”

Granite Grit came out. “Tom, Red Clay, so we’re separated from our females for a month. The space warpage here has been in the wrong direction. The gates self-catch, so don’t fall into gravity wells or our nets.”

Argon X, the female, said, “Wool doesn’t think the Wrengee are gating out. Someone else is trying to gate into this space-time.”

Wool said, “Red Clay again?” He wore only pants, a thin creature that would have looked almost human except his skin was thick, mottled browns and greys, face almost immobile, and the eyes solid brown, no white showing, with a crepuscular creature’s slip pupils. He was yawning, too mid-day for him to be up, stretching a body that showed more ribs than I had, scratching the hair that covered his head, neck, and shoulders. “Maybe this watch won’t be so boring.”

“I want it to be boring. I’ve got a wife now.”

“And didn’t bring her with him,” Argon IX said.

“Some of us can live without our mates,” Wool said.

To change the subject, I asked, “How are we dividing the watches?”

“You’re limited to sixteen hours up, as usual, although I think it’s foolish,” Granite said. He settled down on his, hocks. “Take some of the dark part of the rotation.”

Wool said, “Karriaagzh sent a message pod. If the creatures making the gates aren’t Wrengee, check to see if they are Sharwan. If they’re Sharwan, we call in the Institute of Control and contact the Wrengee immediately.”

The station, like all observation stations, was huge, studded with holowalls and digital sound systems, multispecies bathrooms, room to avoid the others if one’s companions got on one’s nerves. Fake lights, tunable as to frequencies and intensity, gave the place a strange sense of spaciousness. Research on humans indicated that I’d be happiest with windows on at least two walls, so three bright fake windows played Virginia scenery, with artificial sunlight timed to match the station’s cycles.

Granite and the Barcons shared this space with me during the day. The Argons and Wool, with different light needs, tended to communicate by holophone, although they liked my light at some times of our rotation.

In his cubicle, Wool monitored the twitches in space-time, then wandered out at odd hours. He had two sleep periods a rotation and woke up desperate to talk.

The Federation wants you to be as happy as possible in the observation stations, get plenty of rest, don’t get too bored, because at any, minute, you may have to come face to face with folks who had no idea the universe had any other templates for sapient beings than theirs. Or people whose worst nightmares were distorted versions of themselves. Or people who were just plain hysterical.

Marianne sent me a letter:

Dearest Tom, Loved Red Clay, wha’Fran Rock Flour Red,

As you know, I’m at Black Amber’s house on the beach just north of Karst City, missing you. Molly and Sam are with me, but not Warren, who seems to have taken up with a Tibetan tribal woman.

Black Amber—strange to think she ever passed as John now, she’s so alien. Once I began to read the computer auditory input as language, she began haranguing me. While she loves you and me, the whole business of looking for new planets is dangerous, the watch stations provocative. Tom, I can imagine the fury the Air Force would have if their first space probe was captured by aliens who then told them humans would have to join a union or avoid whole categories of space.

Do you know Rhyodolite, her pouch kin (adopted child, I take it)? What can he do, sexually? Sam goes around muttering about alien sexual exploiters, but Molly still thinks he slept with the Jerek kitten.

We are back at the house for a few days while Black Amber has her baby and goes through heat. One of the Barcons explained it to me. I met Wy’um, who stayed around even after Cadmium, the blond Gwyng who seems sort of “puritanical,” ordered Wy’um off.

Black Amber’s son by Wy’um is neat, a brash little daredevil. I feel a biological pressure to breed—like there aren’t enough humans here. I’m a bit frightened by the urge, though.

Come back soon, I miss you. It’s bad to be the only single human female on the planet. I’ve been studying more Karst Two with Ewits, who aren’t quite as weird as Gwyngs, but, Tom, they are all aliens here.

The Institute of Linguistics gives its candidates names almost everyone can pronounce, so I’m Ree now here, too, but I’ll always be Reeann for you. People without high-bridged noses tend to muff nasals. I asked why then did Karst One have nasals, and a Barcon who does language operations says they enlarge the nasal cavities and install a valve if needed, then neurologically tie all that into the speech centers. What, I asked, about people who don’t have tongues. We’d install them, he said, but we haven’t run into those people yet.

Love,

Marianna, Ree

I wondered who had read her letter and felt a bit annoyed that she said humans would be angry if we had to deal with other species on Federation terms. And the biological pressure to fill the sapient niches with humans?

Space was empty without humans. Pressure, maybe the same pressure, built up in my cock. I locked myself in my toilet to jerk off, but realized as I groaned and spurted that someone was probably watching me. Dizzy, I sat down on the toilet seat and put my head down between my knees until my blood re-circulated.

I went back to my room and lay down on the bed. Obligingly, clouds rolled through the sky in my fake windows, dimming the sun. I wondered if they’d ever be programmed to fake rain. Granite Grit called me on the intercom, saying, “Did you get a letter from Reeann?”

“They call her Ree just like her Berkeley friends.”

“You can continue to call her Reeann. Need company?

“You need company, too?”

“Yes.”

“Come in then. Are all the rooms bugged?”

“If they are, Wool watches.”

“Shit.”

“Excremental times again? I’ll be there soon.”

I sat up slightly, but the clouds thickened. Big fat rain drops plunked down on the illusionary tin roof over my head. When Granite Grit came in, I was a bit startled that he wasn’t wet, then I laughed.

“Very realistic,” he said. “Does it soothe you?”

“What do they give you?”

“Snow. Muffles all the sounds.” He cocked his head so that one earhole pointed at the ceiling.

“They spent a fortune on special effects here.”

* * *

I was asleep, dreaming of a Reeann who sometimes seemed to be Yangchenla, dream breasts swelling and shrinking, eyes developing epicanthic folds, when the intercom broke through my sleep.“ Officers, we have company. Officers, we have company.” Tangled in my sheets, I woke and tried to get my cock to subside, the dream excitement and the contact excitement making that doubly difficult. Finally, I managed to dress and went into the command room.

“They aren’t Wrengee,” Wool said. We had a transit pod, a big one, trapped between a double artificial gravity net, rigged like the Yauntry one that had trapped Rhyodolite, me, and the bird Xenon. A crew from the trapped transport crawled out in space suits and began cutting the cables around their vehicle.

“Robot camera?” I asked.

“Send,” Wool said.

I maneuvered it up to a space-suited figure. Before the space-suited figures swarmed over the robot camera and dismantled it, we saw blond mammal faces behind helmet glass. That visual and their radio signals proved they were Sharwan.

“What are those little shrimps doing here?” Wool said. I thought they were beautiful, golden furred with human faces, only more delicate, their angular cheekbones almost geometric, big blue eyes.

“Who contacts the Wrengee?” Granite asked.

I said, “What do we tell them? They’ve been watched by Federation people for years, but now they’re being invaded by another species that we don’t control?”

“Granite, you contact them. You’ve got the most scales,” Wool said, handing Granite a microphone.

Granite Grit sent out a radio message in what he hoped was good Wrengu. “We are from another solar system and would like to make contact. If this is agreeable to your government or governments, please contact us on this frequency. 
We will send a visual signal scanning 600 lines in the units of times between the beeps.”
Beep, beep.

Granite wouldn’t look too weird, except he had a beak, too many feathers. All of us were going to be alien to the Wrengee. The Crocs, I’d been calling them to myself.

“We’ve got to send Karst a message, too,” Wool said. “By pod.” He keyboarded data into a crystal and loaded it into a small message pod, set the gate for an Institute of Control destination, tried to send.

The message pod wouldn’t leave. “Someone’s jamming us,” Wool said. He brought out additional boxes and rigged them into the line. The box pulsed out.

“We’re getting incoming signals,” Granite Grit said. One of the beautiful Sharwan guys stared out of the set again, then the signal stopped.