Being Alien (39 page)

“Not at all,” Ersh said. “I was rude myself, but then you were afraid of me.”

For the rest of the party, I stayed around the fringes of the party, with the Barcons against the wall, while Marianne talked to everyone, fascinated. I was glad she liked it.

When we got home, Bir’s son had his forefeet up against Karl’s crib, sniffing through the bars, while Bir explained, “They’re born utterly helpless, not strong boys like you.”

I almost expected him to bark he looked so much like a puppy with his face beginning to pug up.

“So you’re back,” Warren said. Moolan stood holding the door, as though she was thinking about pushing me back out. Warren was stretched out on his mattress, back and one elbow against the rear wall, operating a pump that loaded needle cubes. Odd how quickly he’d adapted to some of the new technology.

“I brought you something. I guess you’ll think it’s an unsophisticated drug now, marijuana.” I opened the box for the first time since I’d gotten it from the Barcon at the party, tilted it, all dark green sticky buds with visible resin beads, toward Warren. Moolan sniffed the air and shut the door.

“They even packed paper,” Warren said, getting up off the couch and taking the box out of my hands.

Moolan sighed and picked up a bone she was using as a biting stick. She said, “I want to detox for a while, but there’s a waiting list. Everyone in Karst City wants to detox for a while.”

I remembered dopers talking like that, as if everyone in Southwestern Virginia was using, just the good folks being secretive about it. “Can you use tetrahydrocannabinol?” I asked.

She raised her hand and rocked her fist, neither yes or no, almost the fingers out, palm down rocking that was the human sign “ifsy-shitsy,” then went and curled up by Warren, her furred skin not touching him, he being too hot-blooded for her comfort. They’d compromised on the room temperature, too cold for him, really, with his bare feet.

“You want to smoke some with me, or is this a pure gift?”

“One last time,” I said. We locked eyes, and I looked away first. He laughed as he rolled a small tight joint, popped it in his mouth, and drew it through his lips. I suddenly didn’t want to smoke with him. Warren, I didn’t know Warren really, I realized. Nor had I realized before this moment how much I’d changed—so straight, so hardworking, so middle class, but not a human middle class. But then Warren paused in the ritual and stared off at the door, not his 1,000-yard war stare, but something else, softer.

He looked back at me and said, “You know, here there are just a hundred more ways to get into trouble.”

Moolan bit her stick. Warren lit the joint with an electric heat point and sucked in deeply, then handed me the joint, his fingers clammy against mine.

The Barcons grow extremely good shit. Instantly stoned into tunnel vision, I was sorry I’d done this. Warren said, “My,” and took another hit, then breathed the smoke into Moolan’s mouth in a drug kiss. She shivered and left for her room. “Stare at the wall for days,” Warren said after she’d closed two doors, the noises of them battering against me. I didn’t know if he was referring to her or us. He was still bigger than I was, but I suspected I was in better shape if I had to beat him up. The Barcons, of course…

“The Barcons?” Warren asked, coiled against the wall.

I stared at him, seeing his wrinkles as places where he’d begun to die under the skin.

He got up and put on some Jerek stone chime music—I braced myself, but it was in tune. “Relax,” he said. “Maybe I do need saving?”

Who was Warren? I didn’t know if he was taunting me or agreeing to whatever the Barcons would do. “Only if you want help,” I replied, wondering where I’d drawn that cunning from. I sounded sincere, even to myself. He kept looking more and more like a stranger, like a fifty-year-old druggie with amphetamine-dried muscles, Alkaloids and acids etched his skin. An old degenerate ape, my brother. I managed to say, “
I remember you from when I was eight, ten
.”

“
You didn’t even know what was going on.”

“
I suspect not, but you’re still my brother
.” We were talking to each other in English, but not in country dialect, formally from my days here and from his social workers.

He took another hit from the joint—how could he do that much cannabis—and said, “
Shit, we’re not having any fun, are we? Can you get out okay?”

“
I can call
…” I was about to say one of the Barcons, who knew I was making this visit, but managed to mangle that into “…
a cab
.”

“
Shit, not a cab?
“ Warren began to laugh.

I had to walk to the street and find a call box, feeling most hideous. The Barcons came for me quickly and even more quickly detoxed me. I know they were waiting close. As soon as I was straight, I thought I remembered that Warren seemed resigned to whatever procedures the Barcons would use to help him.

A few days later Marianne was telling me about the nursery her child-bearing group planned to start. “We need enough of each species of child to make sure the sexual socialization will be generally species normal. Yangchenla finally agreed to put her daughter in the group; we’ve got two other Tibetan women interested.”

The phone buzzed. She, thinking it might be a call she was expecting from her birth group, answered, stiffened, and looked at me, then said, “No, we must tell him. Yes, it’s our custom. We aren’t at all like Gwyngs.
Shit
.”

I got up and took the phone, adjusted the earpieces for me. A Barcon voice said, “Your brother died of a drug overdose. We are still with his body. His Jerek found him."

“Deliberate?”

“We aren’t sure.”

“Let me come down there.”

“We can bring you in fast. Go to the roof of your building."

“Warren’s dead,” I told Marianne, but I realized they’d told her that.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re going down there?”

“Yeah. His Jerek… why didn’t someone?” I felt so responsible and so helpless.

“Karl and I will come with you.”

“They’re picking me up off the roof.” I remembered seeing a few helicopter-type craft around, not many, not big ones. It isn’t safe for a woman and baby, I wanted to tell her, but then that neighborhood wasn’t safe for anyone—Warren died in it.

“Maybe you should wait until they bring the body in?”

“No, I want to talk to his Jerek.”

Marianne sat down and curled up in a little ball, then said slowly, “Don’t blame her. Or yourself.”

“I brought him here.”

“Don’t do that to yourself,” she said. “You have me, you have Karl."

I kissed her on the forehead, then went upstairs. The small helicopter was waiting, too small for Marianne and Karl to have joined us. We rose, bouncing in the updrafts between buildings and parks, all the different architectures rolling away under us, alien trees whizzing past.

“We will come back with you,” the Barcon pilot said. “There are some options for the body.”

“If he wanted to be dead, let him stay dead,” I said, suddenly feeling almost angry with him, then guilty again.

“We will observe you, sedate if necessary.”

“It’s customary in my species to grieve,” I said. "And I better
goddamn well
be allowed to do it.”

“I understand the implications of the expletive,” the Barcon said. We dropped down on top of Warren’s building and went spiraling down grim clanking iron stairs. Rust like blood was rotting them.

Warren lay on a Barcon gurney, eyes open and glazed, stains around his ears and neck where I could see the skin fresh ashes in the wrinkles on his forehead—smeared there? His feet were so white the sores were barely visible.

I turned and saw the little Jerek, Moolan. She bent her body and rocked slightly, then pulled at her pelt. Huge tufts of fur came out, even where she wasn’t pulling. Then I saw the words Warren had scrawled on the wall, in English. FUCKERS I’VE OBLITERATED YOU ALL.

When I gasped, one Barcon grabbed me while another cut around the words and peeled the layer they were on away. The walls were paper, laminated paper and plastic, I thought, numb in the Barcon’s hands, staring at the clean void in the dirty wall.

“Mourning in moderation, we permit,” the Barcon holding me said.

“Why didn’t you bring him in?” I said to Moolan.

“He was beginning…happy. We were going to get well.”

“We were fooled,” the Barcon said. “One of us who specializes in humans warned us that sudden cheer without good reason could be lethal.”

“We were lethal to him,” I said.

“No, he was lethal to himself,” the Barcon holding me said. He pushed his knuckles against my throat pulse point, then let me go.

“Should I die now?” Moolan said.

“What tunnel?” one of the Barcons asked. She looked away, not answering them.

“Is it too late to spay her?” I asked, desperate to save someone now.

“What motivation for continued medical stabilization?” the Barcon who’d asked her about her tunnel said.

Moolan shivered and wouldn’t look at any of us. One of the Barcons handed her the bone biting stick. She put it in her mouth and nibbled gently. I, not knowing what would become of her, went back to Warren on the gurney, pulled his eyelids down. They felt like chicken skin.

Then I heard Karst Two—Cadmium. He seemed to move into the room as if his body were a puppet controlled by his will. He came up and embraced me, rocking side to side, murmuring sounds my computer simply transformed into other murmurs. I heard the Barcons talking, recognized their word for Gwyng.

“Why do you come to a death, Gwyng?” the pilot who’d brought me asked.

“He’s friend/pouch kin equivalent,” Cadmium said as I found I could finally cry.

“We will sedate fiercely if you Gwyng-freak on us,” the pilot replied.

“He’s all right,” I said. Cadmium rubbed the tears away from my eyes with his long thumbs.

Moolan moaned from her comer and cried out, “Am I worthless?”

Cadmium turned to stare at her, eye assault between two species that knew precisely how to do it. I said, “Maybe she could try detox?” She was shedding so much fur I expected she’d be bald within a day.

Cadmium asked me, “What ceremony do you wind around a death?”

I looked at the Barcons by the gurney and realized they were waiting. “We have a memorial service, a funeral, and do remembrances at the burying.”

“We’ll take you to your house. Agate and Chalk ask that we bring the Jerek, too.”

“No,” Moolan said, “not to Jereks.”

A Barcon grabbed her by her loose neck skin and lifted her by that and the skin at her hip. She twisted inside her skin, almost scratched him, then dangled limp in his hands. He took her out to the street. Cadmium and I followed, he touching me, from time to time, on the face with his knuckles

The Barcon pilot took off in his helicopter above us while the other Barcons loaded Warren’s corpse. Cadmium said to them, “Let us follow alone/Red Clay with me (in my care).” I saw Amber’s electric car then and nodded.

The Barcon in charge grabbed his groin tits, rubbed them, and said, “Be sure to follow. Be sure to arrive. No Gwyng tricks."

“No,” Cadmium said, flexing one thumb slightly. He sucked at the gland hole and got in the driver’s seat. I got in beside him, staring at the Barcon ambulance, not crying now.

As he pulled out behind the Barcons, Cadmium said, “Ersh feels like he betrayed you, advising against the Federation at first contact.”

“I feel like I betrayed Warren.”

“We need you for this, not to follow unliving meat.”

“That’s harsh, Cadmium. I messed him up.”

“Made him take drugs?”

“Let the Barcons work on his brain. He was afraid he wasn’t going to end up being human. I wanted him to still be Warren.”

“Who was Warren?”

“Who was Mica?” I said, regretting ever having saved him even for a little while, then hating myself for that.

Cadmium said, “I don’t know with any more certainty than you know who Warren was.”

“Are you trying to say we didn’t know our brothers?”

“All of us deliberately don’t know things about our own species that are transparent to others. And even the Barcons can only map a brain at part of its time.”

Had I really known Warren? Maybe I’d tried to have the Barcons rebuild the forty-eight-year-old ex-con into what I thought he’d been at nineteen, before he joined the Army.

He’d thought it was the Barcons making him alien to himself when it had been me. “Cadmium, I feel so guilty “

“Do you need to feel guilty for a while? I can stay with you if the Linguist would permit.”

How oddly put, I thought.

“You are so good at joining together,” he said. “You helped me re-evaluate my being stimulated by birds—not so xenophobic now.”

“Warren killed Mica.”