Being Alien (5 page)

The Co-op was like a Southern States for city people with a grocery on one side of Shattuck and a regular gardening and hardware store on the other. I felt most at home walking through the hardware store—washers, drills, and mattocks were like what I’d used in Virginia. “Hi,” a bearded dwarf clerk about sixty years old said.

“What can you grow around here?” I asked.

“Where do you live?”

“On Milvia.”

“Well, you
can
try greens and herbs, if you’re willing to poison the snails.” He stressed “willing,” like I really shouldn’t do that. “Soil’s heavy, black adobe.”

I’d never heard of black adobe, but I decided I’d get some gardening tools after I got situated. Across the road, I got orange juice, eggs, and biscuits, a notepad, and toilet paper, then realized I had no kitchen stuff, and I bought a frying pan. The checkout girl fingerprinted me on the back of the traveler’s check. I tried not to wince—and prayed the graft glue held.

“Have a nice day,” she said as she packed my stuff. “The ink fades in a minute if it’s not fixed.” She rolled the prints with a damp rubber roller.

Back to my apartment, I spread all my stuff out on the burn-scarred Formica table and jotted down notes for what I had to do:

1. Set up bank account

2. Get library card

3. Get computer

4. Get PG&E to put the bill in my name

5. Get phone set up, phone book.

I rubbed my eyes, then stopped to fix eggs, sloppily poaching them since I’d forgotten to get butter or oil. No salt.

6. Buy salt, oil, pepper, flour, beans, cornmeal, frozen greens, fatback, bread.

7. Find out more about Carstairs.

I wasn’t sure about that last.
Maybe I’d better not meddle?
If he suspected Alex wasn’t human but had no proof, he’d be considered nuts if he babbled about dope-smoking aliens watching the sunset from Lawrence Laboratory.

8. See how lonely I had to be before I’d look up Black Amber’s Berkeley contacts.

For a moment, I wanted to get caught, ease the tension of leading a false life. But my brain threw me a quick memory of two guys fucking in the prison bunk beside me—nobody doing a thing even though it was almost a rape. Warren’s friends had watched out for me. And I had to kick hard once.

Most of the time, I blotted out my jail memories. Sitting in Berkeley with a new past, I shuddered—
no,
I don’t want to do prison again and—
checked my list over before I went out.

Yucko weather, fog a fine mist in the air. I’d never seen such summer weather on Karst or Yauntra. I found the bank, on Shattuck down from the Co-op buildings going toward the campus. The woman smiled hyper-friendly at me once she punched in my social security number. I thought I was about to get busted, but she said, “Tom, you’ve got $25,000 in electronic transfer funds waiting. Do you need a credit card?”

“I’ve never had one before.”

“Well, I’ll take your application.”

I pulled out my passport to fill out where I was supposed to have lived during the last four years. But my alleged past hurt my credit rating with even a liberal bank. No VISA card, but I could get guaranteed balance checking, as long as I kept $5,000 minimum in savings.

So, phone deposit $250, PG&E $200. I could see that $25,000 in Berkeley wasn’t altogether much.

Computer and radio. I decided I really needed a radio, company-like. Maybe hook a voice reader recorder into the radio, so I’d be warned if any radio program announced the arrest of aliens—
hey,
maybe get a police scanner.

Maybe Carstairs is another one of us?

I doubted that. And voice readers, that was a bit paranoid.

About noon, I cut up Hearst toward the campus, walked through a redwood grove, and continued on, just looking at things—the old university buildings, brick, and the new ones, pastel metal and glass. The students looked like any alien students with backpacks and pocket computers, maybe weirder face hair, agitated like Gwyngs.
A provincial university,
I thought in
Karst I. Nah, it’s bigger’n Tech,
a Virginia educated lobe of my brain replied in low English.

Suddenly I only noticed women—guys faded into the bricks—and got a hard on for all the human women, visible and invisible. My cock would explode if I walked farther.

I thought about Yangchenla’s nastiest crack about me and Black Amber.
No, Yangchenla, I never slept with an alien.
The blood backed out of my cock. I asked a girl in a long blowing white dress “Where do I get a library card?”

Her face did a subtle freeze shift—
oh,
he’s not a student.
She pointed to a huge, obvious building about a hundred yards away and walked off.

“Thanks anyhow,”
Bitches, human women.

The library crew fingerprinted me again, with clear jelly that only made prints on treated paper, and took a mug shot for the ID card. Then after their computer checked me for outstanding fines, they gave me a booklet that explained the various libraries all over campus on all the subjects that I could use. I asked about computer compatibility with the library’s software.

“Go to Computer Mart,” a woman said, “and tell them you want UCal compatibility. It’ll be seventy five dollars a month for modem linkup. Call in when you’ve got your system.”

I looked at my fingertips to see if the graft lines were visible. Nope, the Barcons had done good work. Why hadn’t the bank printed me, I wondered until I realized they’d had
my
money.

After I’d dealt with the library, I was really hungry and so crossed Sproul Plaza, headed toward Telegraph Avenue. First thing, I ran into a bicycle-truck selling tempeh sandwiches.
What the hell?
I asked, “Can I see some?”

The guy handed me a strip of tempeh. I sniffed it—smelled like paint—then looked down Telegraph and saw a Shabazz Soul Food sign. My brother Warren had told me about a Black Muslim place called the Shabazz Bakery. Shit, Black Muslim food had to be better than tempeh “Thanks,” I said to the tempeh dealer, handing him back his little strip of moldy beans.

They can’t be racists here,
I told myself.
It’s California.
The door didn’t look threatening—beveled glass in bluepainted wood. I looked inside, saw that I wouldn’t be the only white boy, and smelled the cornbread.

Hope I’m not drooling.
I sat down in a booth. A black woman in a long dress, head covered with a kerchief, came up and said, “Yow.”

“I’d like pinto beans and cornbread. Glass of buttermilk if you have it.”

“Cornbread with jalapenos, ginger, or plain.”

“Plain cornbread.”

“Home food?” She smiled at me.

“Yeah, originally. I’ve been away.”

“Glad you aren’t a Voudonist. We hate Voudonist here, especially druggy white Voudonist.” She went off to get the food while I looked further at the menu. They had tempeh here, too, and I read the fine print on the beans, no pork, flavored with beef or spices, depending on the cook’s mood.

Funny, I could eat anything compatible to my proteins if it was labeled alien. But on Earth, I wanted familiar food. Tempeh wasn’t too different from Yauntro
villig
—that’s what was so
bad
about it.

But I’d never seen all the variations of any planet, just city blocks and country acres here and there—and now I was being provincial about the west side of my own continent.
Planets are huge, thrust into variations of space.
The universe suddenly expanded exponentially around that Terran soul food restaurant, and the edges of all the variations overlapped.

“You been thinking?” the waitress said to me as she set down my buttermilk.

“I have,” I said in my most formal English.

“Enjoy the food. The cook was in a good mood today, white boy.” She put the cornbread and beans down, then poured some water. “Beef in those beans.”

I was just a tiny truculent creature moving through immense space, invisible at any reasonable scale, bitching about the food.
Scale can’t be fixed; got to work on that truculence,
I told myself in English, digging into the beans. Not homestyle, but good.

Back at my apartment, someone knocked while I was setting up the computer system the store clerk guaranteed would be compatible with the UCal system, plugging the phone jack into the modem. I jumped, wondering if the fingerprints hadn’t worked, then heard Alex say, plaintively, “Tom.”

I unbolted and unchained the door. His face and bald scalp across the top of his head were sweating and pale, his eyelids puffy as though rows of mites had been chewing on the eyelashes. Puffy eyelids seem to be a pan-specific sign of debauchery or viral infection. He came in and peered at the modem, breath hissing through his big teeth. “Tom you and I need to walk in Tilden Park.”

“I’ve walked already.”

“Now. Right now” He hulked over me in his red nylon human jacket, caught in some bleak Ahram emotion. I realized he wanted to talk where no humans could over hear us.

“Okay, Alex.”

“Carstairs,” he said, “works in a classified section of Lawrence Laboratory. I didn’t find out when I first met him. He doesn’t talk about that at all. Someone else let it slip.” He touched the wall and his ear.
The walls might have ears.

Shit.
Smoking dope with a weapons designer. We must already be under Federal surveillance.

Alex drove an odd car, license plate X-KALAY. When Alex opened his car door, it flexed. I closed it carefully. The whole car looked homemade, seats from an old VW, round dialed instruments, lawnmower type gear shift, plastic and fiberglass body.

“What kind of car?”

“Berkeley eco-deco. Gets about seventy-five miles to the gallon, bums alcohol.”

“Okay,”

“Would you prefer pedaling a Vector?”

“Not up hills like the ones we went up last night.”

“I moved here after they passed restrictions on gasoline cars. More paperwork to get a gasoline permit than a marijuana user’s permit, that’s Berkeley.”

The little car didn’t stink as did the gasoline burner we’d ridden in yesterday, but it threatened to balk in the hills.

“It’s a real obvious car,” I told him, meaning he could be followed easily.

“I didn’t drive it to pick you up yesterday, did I?” He sounded annoyed, like I’d challenged him in spy tradecraft. “Even these pollute some.”

The oaks had shrunken leaves, small oaks—I was sure they were oaks, though, by the acorns. I didn’t speak, just looked at the weird vegetation. Alex parked in a lot with signs pointing to various hiking trails, giving their distances in kilometers.

We began walking through sage plants, weird scrubs, things with twisted orange bark. Finally Alex plopped down on the ground and said, “Sit down.”

“Are you going to smoke?”

“Never smoke in chaparral during the summer. Fire hazard.”

“Man, I don’t want to get busted here. Carstairs suspects something.”

“He can’t prove anything. Not a thing.”

“If he did a DNA type on you, he’d
know
you’re alien.”

“He hasn’t.”

“But he’s a fucking weapons engineer.”

“He never talks about that. Just the theoretical stuff, the dimensions stuff, worm holes.” Alex sighed and nibbled at some sage. “Tom, I want to know when Earth makes gate contact. He’ll know. I’m not a security threat, really. He doesn’t even know where I live. You don’t either. And he’s exciting. Am I like other Ahrams?”

“No, most of you guys are calmer.”

“Being around humans did it, almost like neural re-wiring.”

“If Earth made contact, would Karst hand you over to the Feds?”

Alex looked disgusted, muscles rippled around the big jaw. “I don’t want to be surprised. Jail is horrible, isn’t it?”

“I’m Academy. I don’t like sneaking around. And you’re teasing Carstairs, some way, and putting me in danger.”

“You’re a prissy little human. “ He got up.

I scrambled to my feet fast, suddenly aware of how isolated this trail was today; how big he was. “Do the Barcons know about Carstairs?”

“They’re lucky; they don’t need friends. Humans are enough like Ahrams to be…” He stopped talking and bit his lower lip.

“You made friends with a
weapons
designer? The Feds know he’s got a big blond friend—you better believe it.”

“Judging from the reports, I like humans better than you do.”

“So I had terrible fights with the Tibetans.”

We began walking down the trail toward his car. He asked, “And how is Black Amber?”