Being Alien (25 page)

“We got the Institute of Control message away,” Wool said, shoving himself back from his terminal. “Now, in about twelve hours, we should hear from the Wrengee, if the Sharwan assholes let us.”

“But why should we trust you?” the Wrengee signaling us asked. “You only chose to reveal yourselves when…” He shuddered, then continued, “…when the other space creatures broke into our signaling pattern. I understand this signal has to travel six hours, return six hours. Don’t let your reply come faster.”

Granite patted his hands on the floor where he sat, body tense on his thighs. His hocks moved out from his buttocks, lowering his body slightly. Still with his feathers clamped tightly to his head and body, he said, “Well, at least they understood me.”

Wool said, “Tell them if they don’t come to terms with the Sharwan, we’ll give them the gate technology.”

Granite muttered in bird, then transmitted to the Wrengee, “If the Wrengee do not deal with the single species group that broke into their communications, this multispecies group gives them matter transfer. To move matter from one space point to another almost instantly. We do this if you need proof.”

The video screen pattern shivered. A Sharwan face baring teeth in a grin or grimace formed from the visual static. In terrible Karst One, the Sharwan said, “Federation, too much control.”

They’d learned some Karst One from Rhyodolite’s linguistics team before they fled. They’d been listening to us now.

Great, we had some serious waiting to do. Granite tuned in one of the Wrengee television stations. After the first scene, I realized it was a rerun. Wool and the Argons began hiccupping. Granite switched the channel.

“Another rerun,” Wool said. “They’re trying to figure out what to tell their people.”

I said, “I imagine we look like monsters to them.”

Granite fixed an eye on me and bobbed his head once. “Speak for yourself, Red Clay.”

We were all too tense. I said, “Okay, okay,” but realized I snapped it out.

“Granite, were you joking?” Argon IX asked.

“If you don’t think I was joking…” Granite rose up, almost to tiptoe, then slumped, hocks braced against each other. “We’ve got eleven hours and forty-nine minutes to wait.”

We had a big gym room in each of the thousand-some odd observation stations around the galaxy, including the one at Earth and this on. I went in—we had a problem here and I had a wife, there, on Karst—and in the gym, I put my bike on the windstand and rode, closed my eyes and pretended Marianne was with me, that I wasn’t alone here dangling out in a vacuum waiting for intelligent neo-dinosaurs to decide whether they trusted us or not while savage pretty people propagandized against us.

The Wrengee gave me a slightly creepy feeling. I hoped I’d be okay when I met them in the scaled flesh. Snakes and spiders—well, they weren’t much like snakes, really.

Eleven hours and five minutes to wait—I couldn’t ride the bike anymore. I’d dripped sweat all over it. Roger had told me his paint was very durable but don’t push it, don’t leave sweat on it. I cleaned the bike, then greased the chain, not spraying it because the propellant couldn’t be diluted in a planetary-sized atmosphere, would muck up this enclosed one. My brain kept coming up with odd little items like that. Ten hours and fifty minutes to wait. I blanked my watch face—let it keep time without reminding me.

Wool called me over the intercom, “We’ve got reinforcements. Institute of Control.”

“From Karst?”

“They have their own stations. Don’t ask coordinates.” 

The gate had brought us twelve sapients, all masked with visors down to their noses, lower faces naked grey and brown and pied skins, different species, but without facial hair or stripped of it. As I came in, the squad leader took off his visor—species something like a Jerek, but bigger—and said, “We brought a Control station half this volume full of robot devices.”

Wool said, “We don’t know what the Sharwan want.”

“We are only here to control,” the squad leader said. His men took off their visors—a wide range of people—and went wandering around the station.

We waited. I went into the food storage area and fixed pork and beans, comforted to have home food at a time like this. “Maybe,” I said to Wool when he came in, “we should give the Wrengee the gate formulas and technology whether they want it or not.”

“Maybe,” he said. He found a bag of nuts with thin pistachio-like shells and began splitting the shells with his teeth, flicking the hulls onto a tray with his tongue.

When Wool and I went back out, the Control Squad leader was watching a Sharwan face, up on the screen. I didn’t know whether it was an actual on-time Sharwan transmission or a stored image. The squad leader pulled out a portable computer and began writing on its screen, looking up from time to time at the Sharwan.

“Can they block Class A gates?” the squad leader asked.

Wool said, “Yes.”

“We’ll trap one or two of those little blond boys, show them that we’re nice brainy
uhyalla,
too.”

“What are you called?” I asked the squad leader.

“Just call me Squad Leader.”

Nine hours and an eternity to wait.

* * *

“We haven’t had anything to do since the Yauntra blockade,” one of the Control squad people was saying, waving a beer in his six-fingered hand, nostrils sort of loosely writhing around the edges. “Nothing except drills.” He was playing a game with square cards and eight-sided dice with the others, sitting around a table. “But we’ll” wait to see what your guys sunward have to say.”

I remembered when I was a kid, I snuck speed away from Warren, doing it to study for a test and then having to wait, wider than wide awake, for morning and then the school bus, just like now, each minute buzzed into hours.

“How’d your people take it?” Squad Leader asked me.

“We haven’t been contacted yet.”

“Refugee, huh.”

“Give us an apparatus and operator, coordinates to your whatever you’re signaling from. You’re close.” The Wreng sounded aggrieved. He lowered his eyelids halfway down, exposing a tattoo or natural design, then his hand snaked out to cut off the transmission.

Everyone turned to look at me. “I don’t have any nonaligned people with me,” Squad Leader said. I almost said I was neuro-programmed to avoid snakes, but didn’t. Wool and Squad Leader took my elbows like I’d bolt and led me into the gate room. The Barcons had already laid out the cables and the Control guys were dragging up a shiny white transport pod.

“You know how to set coordinates?”

“Yes, Rhyodolite taught me.”

“We’re sending you into the Wrengee transmitting station. The closure bolts will be under your control.” Wool tucked a stack of bound printouts in the capsule, then a couple of the white and black boxes.

I crawled in beside the boxes and printouts. “Don’t let the Sharwan get me instead.”

Squad Leader said, “If they do, we’ll bust their little blond asses.”

I dogged down the wing nuts and watched the transit dogged. It flickered, then the arrival diode went on. Just where was I? Cautiously, I undogged the hatch and swung it up. Sighing with relief, I watched the Wrengee twitch their scales and head feathers, scale rings on some of them tinkling.

Please, God, Mind, Universe of Biodiscourse, give them teeth. One of them spoke. “You can take me to the broadcast spot?” No teeth in front, just a curved blade of tissue going around the front of the mouth, flaps of tissue dangling from the roof of the mouth modifying that noise, a thick tongue that only pushed food.

“Yes,” I said, telling myself they were as nervous about me as I was of them. Maybe mammals ate their eggs? No, they were viviparous. This was my first First Contact in a vertical position, not as a captive. “We want you to join us in a Federation that protects the rights of all intelligent animals.”

“You’re crippled in the mouth,” the one who’d spoken to me said.

“No, born this way. Sorry. Can you understand me?”

“Something about a Federation and all intelligent animals. You’re alone in that?”

“Alone in the transport? Yes.” I felt like crouching and bowing, chattering like I used to do when I chased snakes off the road, saving them, but nervously. Then I wondered if I was offending them with my fear.

“Why were you spying on our planet?”

“Waiting to see if you were ready to deal with us, able to…” I didn’t know their word for conceptualize, so I continued, “think about intelligent species beyond your planet.” I was about to add that the Federation required gate technology as the entry into system, but remembered just in time that we’d promised to give them that. Wouldn’t give it to humans—no, we were too xenophobic—but the Federation would give it to these guys.

“Slow down. Speak clearly,” the one I’d been talking to said.

“I apologize.” I felt like I was going to faint.

“Speak bluntly.”

Why? I said, “Want to meet some of the others?”

“Can I take a weapon?”

I hadn’t cleared that with the guys back in the station, but what with armed Control people there, I wished he wouldn’t. But anything to make the new sapient feel at ease. “Sure.”

He flicked his tattooed eyelids at me—a gesture I couldn’t read, but it seemed negative. I asked, “Should I stay here?”

“Your Federation put you out front to absorb the shock. You’re our hostage either way, aren’t you?”

They had an amazingly blunt way of talking, pretty sharp-witted, too. I said, “Yes. May I call you a name?”

“I’m Ersh. Who are you?”

“I’m called Red Clay. Having names that translate into almost all languages is a
Federation
custom,”

“Wet and sticky,” he said. I tried not to shudder or sweat when he climbed in the transport with me. He saw the printouts in the transport and asked, “What are these?”

“Space transforming guide book and boxes to make the transitions.”

“We’ll take those now.” He handed them out and watched me close the dogs and turn on the gate generator. This trip, I controlled it from the inside. The transport jerked. When I rolled against him, his skin was softer than I’d expected, dry.

“He said, “Scared. Afraid I’ll find a lie?”

“Ersh, you’re not nervous about my appearance?”

“Aliens
should
look alien.”

I began to worry about Granite Grit. He said, “You’re incapable of reading my body language, aren’t you?”

“Yes, now.” The arrival diode went green, and I began to undo the hatch again, my hands sweating.

We had company—Sharwan. One, not holding the station crew hostage, or fighting the Control unit, just standing away from the Federation types, its own transport like a coffin behind it.

Its
. Our guys had sex, at least in my private language; potentially dangerous strangers were
its.
I just noticed this as Ersh-the-Wreng and I climbed out of the pod. “What is the Sharwan doing here?”

“Hasn’t said,” Squad Leader said. He looked down at a grey box he was holding in his hand. “Your guy is armed with a metal projectile weapon.”

“Yes, I said it was okay.”

The Sharwan stayed close to its transport. “Federation over boundary,” it finally said, rippling its blond fur. 
“This ours. Work for us.”

Work,
the Karst One term, implied work smoothly together and didn’t take a subordinating preposition, but the Sharwan used the word it learned for its own purposes. The golden alien jumped back in his coffin transport and gated away.

“What did he say?” Ersh asked.

“Do you want to be their underlings?”

“No, not yours either.”

“All are equal in the Federation,” Granite Grit said.

“You’re deformed,” Ersh told Granite. “Feathers, beak. We exterminated your kind on this planet before we were fully evolved.”

Squad Leader slammed his hand against a bulkhead, and we all jumped, including Ersh, and turned to him. He spoke in chopped Wrengu, “Wrengee, protection us from Sharwan, no, yes. Get answer radio signal turnaround time plus tenth.” In a little over thirteen hours, my mind translated.

Ersh stared at him and sat down, joints going the way my joints did, but with an extra hinge in the hip region. He trembled, then his eyes rolled up. We thought he’d fainted, but no, his eyes rolled back down out of his head, glistening now, “I can’t make the decision for the whole planet. The whole planet can’t make a decision that fast. What does this mean? What did that one who traveled in the oblong mean?”

Squad Leader said to me, “Tell him that we have to act fast, because we’re assuming the Sharwan are already setting up their own blockade of your planet.”

Ersh lowered his eyelid marks at me after I translated that and shook his scale rings. Then he radioed his own people. We duplicated the message and sent it to Isa in a mini pod.

Dear Marianne,

I’m sorry I can’t come back now, but we have had a first contact. The situation is complicated by the Sharwan who’ve threatened to bomb Isa, that’s the Wrengee planet, if the Wrengee and others of their species join the Federation. We’re rigging defenses for Isa. But the Wrengee and other Isa governments aren’t committing themselves to the Federation without a trial of the defenses. If we can keep them from being bombed, then they’ll join us. If not, not. Since we wouldn’t threaten to bomb them to get them to join the Federation, that would be that. If the situation wasn’t so tense, I’d wish you were here. I miss you.