Being Alien (4 page)

What I’d thought was a railroad line was the BART, Bay Area Rapid Transport, which zipped by overhead. I hadn’t noticed that the rails were elevated. It was like a commuter tube train on Karst, but without the magnetic levitation. The foggy air was too chilly for June. Was it really June?

The San Pablo bus, wires sparking overhead, pulled up. Alex said as I got on, “Get a transfer for the Shattuck Avenue bus.” If I’d dealt with really hostile aliens on Yauntra, I told myself, I should be able to solo under cover on my own planet.

Just before the doors closed, Alex got on the bus, too. He sat down beside me and patted my leg. “Since you’re new to Berkeley,” he said, “I should show you around a bit.”

I sighed, too hugely relieved. This trip was regressing me back to my wimpy adolescent years. Alex said, “We’ll get you settled in and then hitch up to see the sunset from Lawrence Laboratory.”

What we passed continued to look like a flattened Roanoke. Denial is soothing, as I’d been told when I first came to Karst. But why shouldn’t Berkeley remind me of Roanoke? Both of them are human cities.

“You’re originally from the East,” Alex said. “I heard acid rain killed off the Frazier firs there.”

“Not where I was.”

“We’ll change soon for a Shattuck Avenue bus.”

When the bus stopped at a light, I saw a bizarre dingus whip around the corner—a ten foot long fiberglass bullet with bike wheels embedded in it, flying a flag on a pole like a fishing rod. The hull looked almost like a Yauntry snow coach.

“What?” My muscles tingled as though I was ready to jump or had started and didn’t notice.

“Vector—you see more of them since the Oil Wars.”

“Alex, what in the hell is a Vector?”

“Faired bicycle, recumbent. They made a few of them in the seventies, but they’ve only become popular on the street in the last seven years.”

“I’ve only been out of the country five years.” I closed my eyes and leaned back against the seat. The bus rumbled on for a bit, then stopped. Alex pulled me to my feet and said, “Transfer.”

We got out. Some of the people waiting for the buses wore clothes I was used to, jeans and sweatshirts, but others dressed oddly—black shiny pants that looked like exotic long underwear, men’s jackets with asymmetrical openings like a woman’d have on a dress. Berkeley humans would give any alien an odd impression of my species.

The Shattuck Avenue bus pulled up and we hopped on board. A woman and man were arguing fiercely in a foreign language. Everyone on the bus slanted their eyeballs half at them, not quite staring. Alex grinned viciously at me as we sat down.
Look at the crazy humans.

The woman was doing woman stuff, thrusting her breasts out, seducing behind the arguing; the man was running a physical bluff of another sort: fists clenched, chin up, ready to drop her with man violence. Exactly the way a woman and man argue; too typically human.

They went at it for ten minutes—I wondered what had made them so upset. Finally, another woman beside them said, “But, Yona, Demetrios, it’s only ice cream.”

All of us humans eavesdroppers giggled. Alex twitched his head as if shaking off a fly.

When he got off, he took my bag and said, “Human female and male survival strategies in the argument, yes?”

“Yeah, I guess.” I’d had those symbolic sorts of arguments with Yangchenla. Too often.

“Down to Milvia and left,” Alex told me. My building was two stories high, with balconies for upstairs apartments and tiny yards fenced with planks behind the ground floor units. In front of the building was something like a huge yucca but with thicker leaves. I scuffed away some mint by the road—the soil looked black. Maybe I could grow a garden, do something familiar even if I didn’t stay long?

Alex waited while I went up iron stairs that boomed underfoot. The super was leaning against his door frame. I said, “I’m Tom…Gresham. Guy named Alex arranged an apartment for me.” My real name would get me busted; Gresham, I told myself, not Gentry.

He asked, without shifting, “Hard drugs, dogs, more than one woman a month?”

“No,” I said.

“He tell you the rent was $700? Fourteen hundred, two months at $700 each.”

He was robbing me, I thought. I almost went down for Alex, but instead signed over $1400 in traveler’s checks. The super handed me the key and said, “Rent’s due each month. Envelope will be in the door. You been in Berkeley before?”

“No, I…no.”

“Call PG&E and tell them to hook you up. Don’t know if you’ve got lights now or not.” He went back in his apartment and came back with a greasy receipt book, wrote me off a receipt that could have been for anything, and handed it to me.

I went back downstairs and asked Alex, “What is PG&E?”

“Pacific Gas and Electric.” I unlocked the door and switched on a light. “Don’t rush to get the bill in your name,” Alex added, “as long as you’ve got power.”

I looked up and saw glitter flecks in the ceiling paint, then looked around at the furniture—ruptured vinyl and chipped Formica. “Alex, isn’t $700 a month too much rent?”

“You’ve got two bedrooms.”

“I could have rented a house for a year for $1400 in Floyd County. A good house.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Alex obviously had heard about Floyd.

He continued after a pause, “Tonight, we’ll go see the sunset. Tomorrow, you can take care of business. Want to use the toilet?”

Pissing in my Terran toilet felt ceremonial. I’d expected to see a strip across the bowl: “Sanitized for your protection.” The place reminded me so much of a cheap motel. Before we left, Alex checked to see that the windows were locked and that the patio door track was blocked with a steel rod. “Being here is like living in a xenophobia movie,” he said, “almost too exciting.”

On the way back up to Shattuck, I noticed that the side streets at right angles to it had houses on them, the parallel streets apartments. The woman Black Amber wanted me to meet lived in a house.

“Smoke?” Alex said He pulled out a badge, stuck the pin though this shirt pocket. It was a Cannabis sativa grower/smoker’s photo ID permit. “Berkeley’s not like the rest of the country.”

“Man, for you to be smoking is dangerous.”

He pulled out a tiny joint, licked it, then said, “The sunset will be enough for you since you’ve never been in such a big city.” He lit the joint and took two huge hits.

“Don’t fucking bogart it because I’m being a prick. I’ll smoke some.”

“We’ll wait.” He pulled off the ID and put it and the joint away, then stuck out his thumb. “Marijuana doesn’t relax you?”

“Shit, my brother got real messed up on drugs.” I noticed I’d dropped out of the prestige dialect Tesseract trained me to.

“I’m sorry.”

A car pulled up and Alex asked, “Going to the sunset?”

“Hadn’t thought about it, buy why not.”

I’d forgotten how smelly gas-burning cars were, but I hopped right in back. Alex and the driver, a guy with weirdly short hair and a drooping moustache, talked about anti-recombinant-DNA ordinances that some guy named Potrero was trying to pass.

Shit, Alex fits right in.
But he sure wasn’t like other Ahrams I knew.

As we went through a strip of park, a huge deer jumped in front of the car, crossed the road, and hopped over a hedge.
Bigger than a whitetail, a mule deer,
I decided.

“Blacktail,” Alex said. “Seen one before, Tom?”

I shook my head.

“Maybe we’ll have a little earthquake for you,” the driver said. “Alex says you’re just back from Asia, never been in California before.”

“Nope.”

“Southern boy once, though.”

“Yeah.” I looked up at the driver in the rearview mirror, but he wasn’t concerned. Alex turned around and furrowed his brow at me as if to say,
lighten up.
The skin corrugations went up in a steeper than human V, like the brow to crown bone crest that wasn’t showing still influenced his face muscles.

Going to see the sunset was a Berkeley ritual—over fifty cars had parked along the overlook, people carrying beer cans or joints wandering from car to car. To the west were the sun and a wall of fog.

“Ocean’s under the fog,” Alex said. He pinned on his permit and started passing the joint around.

We sat on the hood of the guy’s car. The sun seemed to touch the fog with pink light, then red. I was wondering if we’d stay until dark, took my second hit off the joint, and realized Alex grew two-toke whammo weed that skidded your brain like black ice under car tires.

The sun hung fire in the fog bank, then slipped down as the planet rolled away. The sky must be patterning like crazy, I thought, almost able to see what a Gwyng sees. “Damn, Alex,” I said in Karst, too drugged to think, “you just met me and you’ve drugged me.”

“Indian hill dialect,” Alex explained to the driver. “Tom, remember to speak English.”

Karst, damn.
I froze in a paranoid flash as the lights came on in San Francisco’s shadow—the whole horizon like a thousand searchlights.

“Hey, Alex,” someone called.

“Carstairs, you here to see the sunset?” Alex said.

“Working.” Carstairs, short, almost pudgy, with black-rimmed glasses, had a wicked little face, like a human version of a Gwyng. He pointed to the Lawrence Lab building.

“Here, man, be inspired.” Alex offered Carstairs the joint. “This is Tom. Tom, this is Jerry Carstairs. Tom’s been in Asia, sleeping with Asian women.”

“Say something Asian,” Carstairs asked. He inhaled deeply and looked at me—he didn’t believe us a minute.

I told him, “Fuck off” in Yangchenla’s Tibetan.

“Some hill dialect,” the guy who drove us said.

“Really?” Carstairs inhaled a second toke, enough smoke to skid himself to Asia for a translation. Smoke trickling out of his teeth, he asked Alex, “Irish pub tonight?”

“I’ll pass…” Alex looked at me and laughed. “We ought to go,” I said, meaning leave.

Alex said, “Not yet, Tom.”

Carstairs sat down on a post between the car and a brushy ravine. Grinning, he winked at me.

“Mr. Carstairs, you work in the Lab?” I asked.

“What I really do is dimensional physics. You ever read a guy named Rucker?”

“No.”

Carstairs looked at Alex, then at the sky and said, “Alex has. Dimensional physics fascinates him.”

Does he know Alex is an alien? Or am I in drug paranoia?

Alex stood up, his scalp flushed where he would have had his crest. “Tom we will go now, if you want.”

“I do want,” I said in my most formal English. I felt bewildered, as if a child among adults with secrets.

The driver said, “I’d like to stay a bit longer. I’m expecting someone.”

“I’ll drive you,” Carstairs said.

“Can you?” I asked. “You’re not too stoned?”

“Oh, I can do anything when I’m stoned,” Carstairs said, smile deeply curved into his cheeks.

“Brilliant man,” Alex said. Carstairs went across the road to another parking lot for his car. He drove back, seeming suddenly sober, and opened the passenger side doors. We got in without speaking, me not quite sure what Carstairs knew.

“Could you take Tom by Milvia and Cedar?”

“Sure.” Carstairs skewed to a stop just over the next crosswalk. When the yellow went on for the cross traffic, he jammed on the gas and popped out just before our light turned green to beat oncoming traffic in a left turn. I pushed his umbrella under the seat so it couldn’t jab me when we crashed. I just knew we would.

We didn’t crash. Why I don’t know. Carstairs and Alex giggled as I got out of the car. Alex said, “I’ll drop by tomorrow to talk more.”

Blinking behind his glasses, Carstairs tapped his nails on the steering wheel and said, “And is Tom Gresham really your name? Gresham’s Law always appealed to Alex here.”

“Tom is real.” I almost added,
And I’m human, too,
but I wasn’t sure he knew Alex wasn’t.

As they drove off together, Alex rubbed the air over his surgically flattened skull.

My Ahram colleague seemed demented. I wanted to go back to Karst, but didn’t know how to contact the Barcons, so I fumbled at my door lock with the little round key, finally getting the bolt back. Difficulties of Berkeley—Federation doors opened to palm print and voice, or punched code.

The apartment was chilly, so I turned the gas heater to seventy-two. It whomped on, blue jets up and down a black pipe. No other heaters in the house, not even in my bedroom. People must freeze in the winters, I thought.

I pulled out my Terran pajamas and said to that mass of knitted cotton, “How do you like being home?”

In the morning, I woke up terrified, not sure whether dream or real police pounded at my door. I lay in bed, checking the noises—gas heater, rumbling pipes, a bed bouncing off the wall. That’s what woke me, violent fucking upstairs. I got dressed and stuck my head out the bedroom sliding glass door. Cold—I came back for a jacket and then went to get a traveler’s check cashed at the Co-op.