Being Alien (27 page)

She took it to be a sexually charged answer. It worked out that way—get real alienated, then go push yourself into another human. It’s wonderful, sort of.

The next day, I woke up, left Marianne sleeping, and padded into the kitchen naked to fix coffee, straight earthly coffee with lots of caffeine in it. Feeling weird, I looked down at my body, pale skin that oozed under tension, hairs up and down my belly and chest, but sparse, shoulders flat, like a Gwyng's, not rounded like a Jerek's. Armpits marked with hair, bacteria cooking up what I’d always thought was a human odor out of raw armpit sweat. My face felt greasy—my hair seemed to creep on my, scalp. Arrgh, a human, a wretched xenophobic human.

The water began boiling, and I fixed up the Melita drip coffee the way Marianne showed me, wondering where we’d get more paper cones, if Karst would set up a Melita filter industry for us. No, we’d ask Alex to pick some up at the Berkeley Co-op and gate them several hundred light years.

I fixed two cups and took them back to the bedroom. “Marianne, how’d you like to stay in here all day?” I asked, handing one to her.

She rolled around and wiggled up. I looked at her skin, darker than mine, studded with microscopic sweat glands, coated in even finer hairs. And breasts. What bioprogram made breasts so attractive, I wondered as I sat down beside her, staring from them to her armpits, tufts of hair like mine. Berkeley radical women didn’t shave their armpits or legs, but bike racers shaved their legs, so she gave me the satisfaction of getting really close to her legs, getting to see all the curves.

But, looking at us as animals, we were ugly—sweaty—cursorial runners re-rigged from brachiators. I didn’t want to see anything weirder today than us.

“Tom,” she said, “I’ve got language lessons.”

“I just got back. Can’t you wait, a day?”

“Tom, you’re sweating.”

“I don’t want to go outside today. I want you with me, a human with me.” I saw my coffee began to ripple in the cup and realized I was shaking.

“Are you okay?”

“I…” Maybe we should call a Barcon, I almost said, but didn’t want to feel like a medical specimen.

Marianne put her coffee down and went to the computer terminal, calling the Barcons, I just knew it. God, I was too experienced to go through xeno-shock again. “I’ll go out. Jesus, I’ve been here for years.”

“Tom, Chalk said that we should just stay in today, then go ride the bikes tomorrow. First contact rejection hurts, they said.” She watched me while she drank her coffee. I finished mine, went to the bathroom, and took a long shower. When I got out, she’d gotten dressed in a long, silk robe her sister made for her, handwoven, worth at least five months work credit here on Karst. I put on an old pair of jeans, left my chest and feet bare

“What we need now,” she said, “is a big Sunday newspaper and melons.”

I looked at the sky through the windows—sun not as yellow as my human sun. And Karst was smaller than Earth, so we were lighter. The lesser gravity generally felt like a vague up. But now I felt heavy. The gravity in the observation station might have been less.

“The light here is more blue,” Marianne said. “I wondered how I’d look.”

“You look great, a bit greyed, if I really concentrate.”

Maybe I was imagining that. Most minds correct for spectral differences.

“Sam said the air is different. He had to re-tune the harpsichord and piano to get them to sound the same as they did on Earth.”

“Marianne, we
are
on an alien planet.”

“And nobody’s hurt us.”

“Nobody’s hurt you.” I was about to say
yet,
but caught, myself.

“You need to share some celebrations, Tom, like Black Amber’s post-mating party.”

“It’s hypocritical. She’s being forced to have open matings. She doesn’t want to be a Gwyng; she wants to be a Barcon and mate for life with Wy’um.”

“Tom, that was just an example. You want to be something other than human? We’re human, Tom, and we’ve got to show them humans aren’t xenophobes.”

“And here I am, mildly xenofreaked.”

“Tom, ease upon yourself. All the creatures who know you like you.”

For a flash, I wanted a mother, then I stood up and went back to the kitchen and stared at the food in the refrigerator: Gwyng-raised Jersey milk with half a pound of cream floating on top of every quart, sliced meat,
villag
and bean curd, pods filled with triangular seeds, horizontally striped fish like trout crossed with aquarium zebra fish. My food was alien. Hearing her come up behind me, I said, “Know where we can get an ice cream churn?”

“We can fake it,” she said. “I’ll get eggs downstairs. A Gwyng sells food on the ground floor.”

“I’ll stay here.” I planned to stay inside until I was too embarrassed to stay inside. Do other
uh’yalla
have attacks like this after years of living on Karst, I wondered, or am I just a xenophobe? Or am I just afraid of getting killed by human or
ech,
not being allowed to fight back. I’d explain the Federation until some
vr’ech
 
didn’t like what they heard. They’d kill me and another explainer would take my place, millions, billions of us.
Here we are and we won’t go away.

The Sharwan had said,
So what if we shoot and you won’t defend anyone.

I went prowling around. Molly’s looms were in her room; Marianne’s room was full of books; Sam’s room looked ridiculously neat, a fitted green corduroy bedspread over a twin-sized mattress, shelves full of music, his piano and harpsichord both with keyboard lids down, a big plant in the bay window, a glass case of strange musical instruments against the left-hand wall. I recognized a dulcimer, then a fiddle. The others were strange to me, but somehow I recognized them to be human instruments.

When I heard the elevator in the shaft, I came back around to the common room.

“Twing’s going to be closing for a few days,” Marianne said, “but if we need anything, one of her pouch kin will be with her on the second floor and could open for us.”

“That’s her name?”

“That’s what she recognizes as being close to a configuration of it. She seemed restless.”

“She’s going into heat, I bet,” I said. Great, the building would be infested with pheromone-dazed Gwyngs, koo’ing and screaming on the elevator.

Marianne frowned at me for being an embarrassing xenoflip and said, “She had a freezer blender for sale. It should do the trick.”

It did. We rigged the computer to print us behavioral illustration narratives as if they were news items, headlines and dot-matrix photos on big sheets of paper, and lay around on our bellies eating ice cream and reading about Barcon brain worm operations, bird-mating battles, and nervous system response to tonal patterns—music—in sequential and patterning system-brained creatures.

Marianne got the giggles when she read, about an ape-type species represented by two refugee cultural groups that claimed to have both permanent and temporary pair-bonding. I felt even more depressed—our mating habits, our xenophobia, our other behaviors, and our literature, all common gossip. And the Federation couldn’t stop one bomb against Isa.

The next morning I didn’t want to go out yet, but as I drank my coffee, I heard the elevator coming up the shaft. Marianne got up and unlocked the door to our flat. The cab stopped, the door slid down, and there stood Karriaagzh, his head slightly cocked, body and legs slouched, a non-uniform tunic covering his body feathers. “Tom, I heard you were a little tired of us non-humans?”

I didn’t say anything.

Karriaagzh came in, looked at Marianne, then stepped, hocks flexing very high, around the main room. Then he sat down beside my chair, head lower than my shoulder.

“‘What bothers you the most?’

“Losing Isa, being half glad of it. Waiting years and making only two first contacts, one of them a failure, the other nearly lethal.”

“We’re going to expand station operations. Black Amber protested, but we must protect other species against the Sharwan.”

I drained my coffee cup, then said, “So we’ll be busier?”

“Yes. Marianne will go on station watches with you.” Marianne nodded; I realized they’d arranged this earlier. Karriaagzh touched my wrist, rubbed the protruding wrist bone with his thumb. “We’ll listen to music for a moment.”

I realized Sam and Molly hadn’t come back in the night before. “Where did Sam and Molly go?”

As Karriaagzh padded over to the player and looked through our human and alien digital discs, Marianne said, “Sam’s playing for Tibetans who can’t come into Karst City.”

“Sam told me about this group,” Karriaagzh said as he put on a Grateful Dead album. The Dead played about “Vitamin C and cocaine” as Karriaagzh twisted his head to catch the sounds with one ear, then the other. The Grateful Dead always reminded me of Warren, but I kept quiet.

I got three days more leave. Marianne and I went wandering about in Karst City—fourteen million aliens of 103 different species spread out over what Reeann figured was equal in land area to from Sausalito halfway to Sacramento then down to San Jose. Big city, dense in patches.

We took a maglev train in a clear tube to the Upper Preserve Gate, then took a bus through in-city agricultural lands: odd farms with mechanical tractors, multi-story greenhouses, sewage sludge processing plants, Gwyng herds that included Earth cows among the bigger alien beasts, plastic reprocessing factories.

“The species run together. Some I can’t tell whether they’re weird Barcons or fat people of our shiny black neighbor’s land,” Marianne said.

“Federation over species. Rude to draw distinctions that might be
alienating.”
The last word was in English “Like Alex?” After she said that, Marianne got up and, asked the bus driver, a pug-faced creature, if we could tour one of the plastic reprocessing factories.

Without looking back, the bus driver told her, “I know one where the manager shows Academy and Institute curiosity seekers around, for a bit of credit. Get out when I say, but you’ll have a two-hour wait between buses.”

The reprocessing factory was in a huge concrete and plastic building in a field of bone thistles all white stems and green spines. A boardwalk went up over them to the front entrance. Behind the building ran a maglev track, not enclosed. The building seemed ominous—white in a field of bone thistles.

We walked over the bone thistles to the front door and went in. Three Gwyngs sat in front of a bank of switches, diodes, and analog gauges. I said, “We’re curious about touring the facility.”

A male said, “Boring/need break, so come for fifteen basic hour units.”

“Can’t afford that,” Marianne said. “I’m still an apprentice.”

The Gwyngs chatted in Karst Two, “questionably poor apprentice greed herself,” as if we weren’t there, then the male told Marianne, “Doubt/boredom (my greed) (sorry about greed) For ten units?”

“Say five for both of us,” I said.

The Gwyng stared at his panels, then rolled his shoulders.

“Acceptance/bored too much.” He nodded slightly at the two females—bored with them, too, I bet.

We, followed him up on a catwalk above machines grinding plastic into chips as fine as sawdust, then walked over conveyers that carried the plastic dust to vats. The hot air rising from the vats stank of yeast and rotten plastic.

Fine screen skimmers dipped and twisted through the culture surface, then rose and whirled the yeast globs onto a moving trough. The trough, lined with leaky membranes, carried away the yeast in huge clots. The noise rose with the hot smelly air.

“Who eats that?” Marianne shouted at our guide.

“Creatures who fail their examinations,” the Gwyng said, “or Gwyng host animals.”

Marianne looked down, gripping both catwalk rails.

“Yeast cake,” she said. “Plastic recycling.”

“Very high in proteins, hydrocarbon chains re-arranged by the bacteria and yeasts,” the Gwyng said. “Automatic factory except for breakdowns (rare and, dangerous/machines rule).”

“Very interesting,” I said. “Gwyngs go out to mine hydrocarbons in space?”

“Make structural plastics, then eat plastics when bored with buildings and toys,” the Gwyng said.

Marianne said, in English,
“The store downstairs doesn’t even sell yeast cake. We’re pretty far from the bottom of the social heap, Tom, refugees or not.”

“Processed further for Gwyng artificial food,” the Gwyng added, “but not here. Barcon checkers necessary.”

I said, “But Gwyngs make their own artificial food on Gwyng Home.”

“Gwyng Home is a myth.”

“But I’ve been to Gwyng Home with Black Amber.”

“For Karst-born, Gwyng Home is not attainable.”

I asked, “You don’t know Gwyng languages?”

He didn’t answer, just took us back to the office. We walked over the bone thistles to the bus stop and began to wait, in silence. Then Marianne said, “The Federation certainly isn’t perfect.”