by Rebecca Ore
“The Sharwan threatened them.”
“People who threaten will exploit,” Marianne said.
“Tom, what do we do with this ration?”
“Grind and microwave it in milk,” the male Hiveo suggested.
“Ersh asked for you. He’s embarrassed, though,” Wool said.
Marianne didn’t say anything—she sighed and found a laser disc and earphones and began saying odd sounds under her breath. I recognized the odd sounds in a few minutes as another language of Station 467 Charge Species, Isa Planet species. Marianne’s pronunciation improved phenomenally during the next seven hours.
“The Sharwan radio and comm pod traffic has been heavier,” Travertine said. Marianne, still listening to the tape, reached out and tweeked his long olive belly hackles. He rubbed her awkwardly around the nose.
I suddenly wished Marianne hadn’t come here—risking herself, risking my child. We waited, the gravity nets on higher than usual power, gate detection probes thrust out by the mass driver coils. A television transmission from Wrengu said that Equirew Research Facility had been closed off.
“Maybe the Federation should contact a new species when it sends out satellites,” Marianne said.
“No,” Travertine said in English. “the Voyager naked schematics aren’t enough.”
“I’m not sure most humans are ready for contact, Marianne.” She turned to me, her face so placid I knew she was angry.
We didn’t say more, just listened to the radio bursts of coded messages. Wool turned on a computer programmed to lock onto face images in over a million possible raster and scan frequency patterns. I watched images flicker on the screen—and saw us watching as the aliens.
“Some people go eat,” Wool said, “or sleep. We don’t need to be craving either when Ersh and the others arrive.”
Marianne said, “Tom, I am hungry.” Yes, what she ate now was serious for the baby. We went off to the eating area. When we were alone, she said to me, “Why don’t you want humans to be contacted?”
Self-pity? “I’d be a parole jumper loser again.”
“Tom, they’d forget about that. You could help so much.”
“I didn’t turn you in to Black Amber, did I? Marianne, I’m just not sure about humans in space. We’re such an intense species, xenoflip-flops.”
“We didn’t invent xenophobia movies.”
“And we haven’t passed the space gates test.”
“Trung. . .”
“He imitated.” I cooked a stew of the grains and bean grits in the pressure microwave while Marianne tossed a salad.
“Black Amber said I was working through the linguistics curriculum as fast as anyone with a provincial education, not that my Berkeley mentors would like that label.”
I said, “I hate humans sometimes.” She watched me while she ate, as if she really had to plan her answer to that. I felt guilty. Finally, after we finished our stew, I said, “Your parents were Weather people. You were a radical.”
“Tom, my kind of radicals believe people are basically good."
“That wasn’t…I thought, the radicals in Floyd were a bunch of elitist snobs. Something not for rednecks.”
“Oh, the Hip Drugs Klan,” Marianne said, “but I’ve never been religious, understand.”
In English, I said, “But you were a grad student.”
“Tom, sometimes you can be ridiculous.”
“We’ve got a contact to work,” I said. “And I do love you. Whatever you and Trung do…” I knew I couldn’t turn them in.
Marianne rubbed her eyes with her palms, the heels of her hands, thumbs pointing outward, fingers curled. “What do you think it’s going to be like?”
“Ersh didn’t seem impressed with us the first time.”
We put the bowls in the ultrasonic cleaner, then ran them back through the microwave to dry them before we put them up. The ultrasonic cleaner fluid didn’t get recycled often, so I liked to microwave my station dishes after I used them.
Marianne asked, “Why don’t we use paper plates?”
“Storage,” I said. We went back into the station center and found a long cushion. I sat down on it, legs crossed tailor-fashion, and cradled Marianne’s head against my thighs and belly. She twined her left hand’s fingers through mine.
“Good,” Wool said. “Your quarrel has abated. Please don’t reactivate it.”
“I’ve never quarreled with Tom,” Marianne said, neck going stiff as she rolled her head to look up at him. Wool voided pungent anal oil. Marianne sniffed and said, “Okay, I lied.”
“We’re all tense,” Wool said.
The Barcons shambled in as if drawn by the anal gland odor. One of them sprayed the air; the odor disappeared.
For the next hour or so, nobody said much. Wool showered and came back with a portable drier in one hand. He ran it over his body while he lifted tufts of fur with the fingers of his other hand. When a gate probe alarm rang, he yanked out the hair he had between his fingers.
“Let’s make sure it’s Ersh,” Travertine said.
Wool wiped the hair off his fingers and said, as he pushed a button on the console, “ReContact for Planet Station 467.” Travertine was speaking Wrengu through another microphone. Wool put earphones on his small round ears. Marianne sat up, still holding my hands.
“Is it Ersh?” Wool asked.
Travertine said, “Yes.” His head feathers rose, then settled. He blinked all of his eyelids across both eyes, one eyelid at a time. “He wants to speak to Tom.” Travertine’s upper bill rose, muscles between his eyes tight, bulging, then it fell in a soft click, not as loud as Karriaagzh’s anger clap, just a snick sound like a ballpoint pen point being retracted.
“Well, let’s bring them in,” Wool said.
Travertine said, “They’d prefer that we try to speak only their languages, but I explained that some of us don’t know them.”
Marianne said, “Tell them I’m eager to learn from them directly.” She said something choppy in the language she’d been studying.”
“Better be,” Wool said. “He’s here.”
“Now?” I asked.
Travertine sent docking procedure schematics. Finally, he said “In about three and half minutes. They’re gating a capsule into our station. Ersh and one other.”
We walked back to the capsule receiving area. The air turned blue, then the alien capsule popped into our space.
The capsule was white with a sealed door not unlike our own capsules. The creatures inside pushed the door out and it fell on the deck, tilting and rocking.
When it stopped rocking, Ersh and the other dinosauroid stuck their heads out, arms behind them. They stared at us, their ear wattles pale, then they stepped out, knees bending like human knees. The second one forgot to leave his gun in the capsule, stared down at it as if his hand was embarrassing him, if that’s what a sudden earlobe wattle blush meant.
Marianne said, in soft Wrengu, “Hello.” Ersh went up and cautiously loosened her headband, then ran scaled fingers through her hair, lifting it at right angles from her head.
“It drapes,” Ersh said as Marianne laughed. He still held Marianne’s hair out. “Do you breed for this?”
“Do we breed for what?” I said.
Not completely understanding Wrengu yet, Marianne asked, “Did he want to know if we bred for long hair?”
“You must,” Travertine said. “It’s an ecologically unreasonable amount of hair.”
I signaled yes flippantly.
The other Wreng ran his finger up Wool’s tunic sleeve and asked, “Why do filamented ones mask their bodies?”
“You need help, Ersh?” I asked, trying to get the Wreng on track. For a creature who’d been so blunt before, Ersh wasn’t bringing up issues now. “You embarrassed to have allied with oppressors?”
“Yes, I’m not here to play with strange hair. Help us now, Red Clay. We made a mistake, but still don’t know if you represent a worse one”
The ot
her Wreng laid a hand across Marianne’s waist and whispered in her ear. She said something in the other language. He whispered again. She, paler than usual, moved his hand a bit lower and gestured yes, then murmured.
“Are the Sharwan on your planet? “ I asked.
“Yes,” Ersh said. “We want them off.”
Wool said, “Control doesn’t like to fight house to house.”
Marianne and I both were sent to bed after twelve duty hours, regardless of the continuing discussion. Ersh was obviously amused, wriggling his mouth flaps at us as we shuffled off to bed.
When Marianne woke up, she vomited hard as if her body had been invaded by something she could expel this way. “I don’t understand. I want this baby.”
A Barcon opened our toilet door and said, holding out a package of dry crackers, “Don’t drink liquids in the morning.
“I feel sick, too,” I said.
“Not uncommon,” the Barcon said, squatting down beside us. She touched me; my skin was clammy. “Many males acquire nausea when mates are pregnant.”
“Are you going to be okay?” I asked Marianne.
“Yes. Let’s go talk to the feathered lizards.”
“They are warm-blooded,” the Barcon said.
We went out to the meeting room. Ersh asked, “What can you do for us?”.
“Do you want to have us kill them all?” Wool asked.
I knew it was a testing question, but Marianne stiffened.
“No,” Ersh said, “some don’t steal from us. And, worst, some of us help them steal.”
“What’s your status on your home planet?” Marianne asked. She’d memorized questions in Wrengu or else picked up the language fast. I was a little intimidated.
“My own status now—affected by coming to you.”
“We can’t get rid of the Sharwan instantly now that they’re in your system,” Wool said. “Not without destroying all of them. We think we can persuade them.”
Ersh’s face flushed red, blue, yellow, then he said, “If we’d gone with the Federation, a barricade would have been simpler?”
“Much simpler,” Wool said.
“They’ve bombed us more anyway.”
“Changing their minds will be a long process. Are they exploiting you that badly? We dislike direct attack. Conflict creates its own dynamics.”
“I can give you contacts with those of us who are resisting.” Ersh said, “Red Clay, I apologize.”
“Apologize to his wife,” Wool said, “because you’ve probably committed her womb’s child to help you. It will be a long struggle. Maybe not that many of your people are resisting?”
“Or you could abandon us to them,” Ersh said. “Perhaps that would be proper. We are nobody’s parallel here.”
“No,” I said, “we don’t abandon anyone,” Travertine looked at me and raised his shoulder feathers.
“I am to be killed if captured by the Sharwan,” Ersh said. “May we stay with you? I’ve brought many texts. Between us both we know all our major languages.”
The Federation people stared at one another, then Wool said, “If we get back soon, we can put you in language operation group next week. Refugee cadets can be very useful.”
Ersh’s scales shook slightly, but he had no rings in them to jangle. His con-specific said, “The whole universe has collapsed in on us.”
We gated the whole station into the Karst Oort Region and transferred to a smaller transport.
“This is fast,” Marianne said, her knees between mine.
As soon as we gated into a Karst terminal, three waiting Barcons began punching bioassay holes in Ersh and his companion. Wrengee? Isaian? What would they call their species? One of the Barcons fingered Ersh’s mouth tissue.
As we watched, Black Amber came in and said to Marianne, “Why didn’t you stay in Karst City like most (hint of sensible) pregnant placentals?”
“I’m not most pregnant placentals,” Marianne said. “And I like the work. I’m going to continue to do it. My child will be part of it.”
Black Amber said, “I’ll drive you home, I want to be with you both (intense undifferentiated feeling).”
“I need to translate for Ersh,” I said.
Wool came up, stopped ten feet away, one knee bent, his fingers picking through his fur. “Sub-Rector,” he said as though identifying her, not greeting her.
Black Amber said to Wool, “I need want Red Clay (and his pregnant one). You translate for those.” She curled up a foot at Ersh and his companion.
We went to Black Amber’s beach house, but all the children were older now and very aware that we were never going to be Gwyngs. Two days later, Marianne said that she missed our apartment and our neighbors, and so we left Black Amber. When we said goodbye, she stalked out toward the ocean, not speaking.
We took a bus home—home, yes.
* * *
Marianne’s birth group was a bunch of high-powered women of whatever species, all amazed that they couldn’t just high-power along now.
“Pregnancy,” Marianne announced when she came back from the first meeting, “is why women don’t do as well as men. We lose energy in pregnancy. It adds up, especially over a thousand years or so.”
I was feeling queasy myself and didn’t think much of her theory right then. Was she going to make me feel guilty the whole time? “I’m not going to take advantage of whatever’s going on with your hormones.”
“Hormones?” For a second, I thought she’d explode; her eyebrows went up like a mad cat’s back, and her face around the lips looked like a shucked clam, white and all the rest of the metaphor. She shrugged and went to the terminal. “Yangchenla’s not in a birth group. She’s got Tibetan midwives. Agate’s in my group. It’s weird, Tom. Really weird. They seem even more alien now, like some human maternal defense program has kicked in, but we’re all having babies the hard way."
Black Amber came over a week after Marianne’s first pregnancy meeting, almost slinking around Marianne. Black Amber finally sat down on one of our sofas, legs curled under her, arms hooked together at the thumbs, a nervous Gwyng for some reason. I looked at Marianne; we twitched our eyebrows at each other. Black Amber’s brow hair rose slightly, then she said, “Linguist, why risk yourself/the nymph?”
“I’m back now.” Marianne wrapped her arms around her own waist, low as if protecting her womb from Black Amber’s eyes or ultrasonic voice.
Black Amber muttered to herself in Gwyng and walked around Marianne, then said, “Linguist, couldn’t you have had a primitive human bear it for you. The Barcons can do gamete implants.”
“I wouldn’t ask other women to carry Tom’s and my child.” But Marianne looked distressed as if she’d never known she had an option.
I said, “I didn’t know we could do that.”
“Not now/too late,” Black Amber said. “Shershee mink in cooler?”
Jersey milk? “Yes,” I said. Black Amber went back to the kitchen.
“She acts like she owns us,” Marianne said.
“I thought you liked her.”
“Tom, did you know that I could have hired one of the Tibetan women to bear my child?”
“No. Would you want to do that next time?”
“No, of course not. No. But I wanted to know. I didn’t want you making decisions about this for me, okay.”
“Marianne…”
“You wouldn’t cooperate with Yangchenla.”
“She was manipulative.”
“Black Amber approves of me, and didn’t approve of her.” She smiled bleakly for all that Black Amber didn’t know about Trung’s gates.
“She accused me of having sex with Black Amber.”
As I said that, Black Amber ambled toward us with milk in a glass. She rolled her tongue into a tube and began sucking at it noisily. When she paused, she said, “Red Clay too stinky for sex. Loyal in body to you—mind to me. We who share should be friends.”
“Honest, I didn’t know about gamete transplants.�
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Marianne said in English, “It’s all right, Tom. I’m going to go through with it.”
“Not to exclude with language,” Black Amber said.
But Marianne didn’t translate.
About two months into Marianne’s pregnancy, I tried to get assigned out. “Rector’s Man,” I said to Chalk in his clammy tile walled office, “I’m going through what Marianne’s going through—vomiting in the mornings."
“Not everything as much as she, though,” Chalk said. I noticed him scratching his lower belly. His breasts were swelling. “Wouldn’t it be inappropriate for you to go on watch now? Doesn’t she need you?”
“She’d be jealous, but…”
“Better stay with her. The Barcons aren’t sure whether you’re competing with her or sympathizing with her.”
I said, “I’ve never heard of a human male getting morning sickness.”
“The Barcons say your condition is described in the human anthropological literature.“ Chalk whistled slightly and raised his nose. “So, you may both study. And you both can help me with cadets.”
At least I didn’t develop breasts, I thought as I stared at his, the way Barcon and Jerek men did.
One day during Marianne’s pregnancy, I brought home a third-year cadet, a pugfaced male with a barrel-round body and pied head hair. We’d been talking about the impact species had on each other, beyond the technological changes, and I invited him to come home with me.
The elevator door rose, and I saw Marianne slouched on a sofa by the window and around her, in the dimly lit room, two other shapes—Agate’s shiny face skin caught the elevator light. The other one groaned. They were all huge bellied—Marianne, the nonhuman women. I asked, “Is it all right for us to come in? I’d asked a cadet…”
The cadet said, “I think we can talk another time.” His face was moist around the eyes, as though he had sweat glands only there.
Marianne looked at me—face pale, her baby visibly moving her belly. “We were saying about men…”
The one in the chair interrupted, “But you don’t need them after impregnation.” She turned into the light—another pug face. The cadet closed the elevator and went down.