Becoming Alien

by Rebecca Ore

  “Do you feel comfortable with the others?”

  “I’ll like,” she said, “anyone you like.”

  When we came in through the kitchen, Tesseract was putting squatty red and silver Karst beer cans in the freezer. “Hargun’s fine,” he said. “They’re all eating mid-meal and arguing about music—even the Gwyngs.”

  I listened from the doorway. Between musical pieces, they whistled, hummed, or sang phrases and re-phrases, discussing what the composers intended.

  “Go in without me,” Tesseract said. “I don’t want Edwir to think I’m scoring points.”

  “What are the Gwyngs going to say when they see her?”

  “Be glad she can’t understand.” I got flustered, remembering Rhyo going for tits in the pond, but Tesseract put a hand on my back and said, “They’ll be gentlemen.”

  “Wrinkle-faces,” Chenla said, making a wrinkled face herself.

  When we came in, Cadmium glared at Rhyodolite, who spread his arms slightly. I introduced Yangchenla to everyone I could, not knowing the names of the three other Yauntries or the two attendant Barcons.

  The Yauntries tried, it seemed, to examine her eyelids without getting involved with her pupils. “One of my kind here, a different breed. They came a couple centuries ago” I explained.

  Chenla lowered her head and looked at them through her eyelashes, “Free trader,” she said.

  “With the funny oil,” Rhyodolite said. “Ask her if she knows a free trader Gwyng who…”

  Cadmium interrupted, “Rhyodolite, don’t get into that.”

  Granite put another disc in the system. Hargun sat tensely, but as I watched, I realized he was tense now about being right in his musical opinions. Both he and Granite took music seriously, but the Gwyngs complained this music was for different brains than theirs. The Barcons said that was Gwyng piss-in-ear, but when Granite translated the Gwyng comment for Hargun, he asked Rhyodolite to explain further.

  Chenla leaned against me and said, “Yes. How do these minds work? They speak in language I can’t understand, although we gesture and sign to each other.”

  “Why try to explain? Can’t even put our real languages into Karst II,” Rhyodolite said to Cadmium.

  Cadmium replied, “We’ll both try.”

  So Rhyodolite explained how Gwyngs heard music in chords held across time—meaning found in patterns larger than our minds encompassed, non-binary. Then the computer in my skull garbled part. Granite tried to translate what he understood, but all we could figure out was that ultrasonics and polarized light must be meaningful if Gwyngs perceived them. But we aliens survived without those senses. Rhyodolite said, “You (not-Gwyngs) have limited minds.”

  Chenla had her hand to her face, index finger beside her nose; her heart beat against my arm as she looked intently at the Gwyngs. Hargun asked Granite Grit, “Do you perceive like Gwyngs?”

  “No,” Granite said. “But I can understand. Karst II.”

  “Karst II is synthetic/limited/cut perception,” Rhyodolite said. “Karst II cripples our brains if that’s the first language we learn.”

  “Some Gwyngs wonder if the patterns do have ecological meaning,” Cadmium said. “Old Gwyng language—imperceptibly rich, isolating.”

  Odd that Gwyngs, in their plain little bodies, had minds that saw polarized sky, that heard across time in some way different from memory.

  “What is my planet’s sky like, in polarizations?” I asked them shyly.

  Rhyodolite and Cadmium looked at each other. “Red Clay, different,” Cadmium said. “Would rather not, however, reconstruct.”

  I sat there feeling odd. Granite said, “Red Clay, we have some Earth hill music for you. Would you like to hear it?”

  Uneasy, afraid of their judgment, I slowly nodded. Chenla took my hand.

  The disc held “Shall the Circle Be Unbroken,” “Fox on the Run,” and “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” I leaned back, tears in my eyes, not grimly miserable, just aching for the company of fiddlers and mandolin guys. I remembered women dancing on cars with their tits hanging out, heels dinging the hoods and tops as they teased the Fourth of July crowds. My own people, the creatures I most craved.

  “Don’t discuss them songs,” I said in English as the music ended. They all stared at me, so I covered my face.

  Chenla pulled back from me slightly. I’d stiffened, but none of the others was that subtly aware of my body posture. She’s human, too.

  “Tom, it’s all right,” Cadmium said.

  “I’d prefer that you not discuss this music,” I told them in both Karst and Yauntro. “Not right away,” I added, wiping tears away and feeling slightly foolish as Granite rubbed my arm. “Thank you for bringing them, though.”

  “I wonder if I should have,” Granite said, putting the disc away.

  “No problem,” I said. “My mammal kind cries for lots of reasons.”

  “You mammals have such strange chambered brains,” Granite Grit said. “Somehow past mental images change and go on, as though you could erase a made action, live a different reality inside your minds. “

  “For you,” Hargun asked Granite, “what’s done is never regretted?”

  “It’s done,” Granite said. He turned his head to the side and examined Hargun with one intense brown eye.

  Hargun shrugged and said, “I’m glad you didn’t have any records from Yauntra playing today.”

  “Oh, we do,” Rhyodolite said in Karst II, grabbing for a disc, finding his wrist firmly held in Granite’s big hand, scales glistening yellow at the wrist.

  Rhyo yelped.

  “You may be my senior officer,” Granite said in Karst II, so the Yauntries couldn’t follow, “but that is not your disc.”

  “You want me to be easy with you—yet you grab me?”

  Granite didn’t let go. “Rhyodolite, stop teasing.”

  Feldspar pecked Granite’s elbow. He dropped Rhyo’s wrist and sat back on his shins. Taking Rhyo’s hand gently, Feldspar wriggled it to see if her mate had hurt it, then trailed one of her fingers Gwyng-style down Rhyo’s neck. “You do tease, Rhyodolite,” she said to him.

  “Knock my hand away, but don’t grab.”

  “How? Scales on hand backs don’t bother you?” Granite said, continuing to talk in Karst II.

  Rhyo grabbed for the disc again, but Granite batted the Gwyng’s hand away with the back of his. “That’s better,” Rhyodolite said, oo’ing, spotting a new game.

  “What are they doing?” Hargun asked me in Yauntro as the two pushed wrists over the laser disc.

  “Playing a game they just invented,” I said, not wanting Hargun to know we had Yauntra music so close. Feldspar put another disc in the machine while the two guys fooled around. When the music came on, she ran a finger along Rhyodolite’s shoulder, preened Granite’s head, then pecked both of them on the elbows, almost hard.

  The Barcons prescribed beers all around. Hargun looked at a can dubiously, tasted, his round eyes vaguely misty, then told his men to limit themselves to two cans.

  Chenla sipped, then giggled. “Like from tsampa?” she asked the Barcons, “grain fermented?”

  “Yes,” one said.

  “I can have two cans, as I’m not religious.”

  Beer—practically a universal social solvent. The Barcons brought in a tub full of almost frozen beer, and disappeared with a couple of beers each. The rest of us drank and listened to music less detailed and more rhythmic than the serious lunch music. Some rhythms were damn odd, as if to different heartbeats.

  Yeah, different heartbeats.

  Beers in hand, Tesseract and Ammalla joined us.

  “Considerable strain,” Tesseract said in English. Crest pallid, he stooped down beside Hargun, who looked up calmly.

  “I’m sorry, Ambassador, if I was rude earlier. Red Clay and the Rector will return you and your men to Yauntra and negotiate with your officials. Confirmed now.”

  Rhyodolite made a little face.

  Tesseract pl
ayed the laser disc of hill music again, holding my eyes with his, probing. I felt powerfully moved, but didn’t cry. After the tracks finished, he said, “Yangchenla, will you be comfortable with these males and Ammalla if Red Clay comes with me?”

  Yangchenla looked around her, smiled back at Ammalla’s smile, and said softly, “Yes.”

  In the kitchen, Tesseract asked in English, “If you could return to Earth, without legal penalties, would you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yangchenla?” he asked, like was she suitable marriage material.

  I switched to Karst, “She’s human enough…”

  “…but she doesn’t speak the language,” he finished in English. “But does your feeling for Virginia mountains rise mostly from your fine imagination in which you also dreamed of living with aliens while you were in jail?”

  “Like Granite Grit said, a thing I’ve imagined, like an alternate past.”

  “The bird has insight into us. What, really, can you go back to?”

  I thought about the half-naked women who’d danced on the car tops that Fourth of July: one pregnant, another killed by her lover. And the sheriff’s deputies shooting down Warren, hauling him off screaming, wrapped in bloody wet sheets.

  And the cold steel handcuffs heavy on my own wrists.

  “Think on it?” Tesseract suggested, aping my old dialect. Sub-standard dialect. I thought about how boring linguistics work was, then how much worse it was to muck out chicken sheds and tab pills. My Karst cadet room was much nicer than my Earth house. But I paid for it by dangling unarmed in space until strange new aliens calmed down.

  “Could Barcons make Warren well without burning out his personality? Bring him here?”

  “I don’t know, Tom. Would you want to lose Black Amber’s favor?” He took beers on a tray back to the other room, leaving me in the kitchen, thinking. Hargun came in, obviously looking for me. I shrugged hugely, like the Jewish comics I’d seen on TV.

  He grinned, as though he understood. “I’m as sorry as I can afford to be,” he said finally, before reaching in the freezer for a beer, jerking the can out when he felt how cold it was. “Odd way to do it,” he muttered in Yauntro. He plucked out another beer, shook both gently to see that they weren’t frozen, and offered me one.

  I took the beer to be sociable, and he opened his, taking small sips so as not to get freezer bum. “Your Federation is just a trading union, isn’t it? Not so mysterious after all?”

  “Not quite just a trading union,” I said.

  “To have you look so much like us and then have face hair.” His round eyes narrowed, flesh around them crinkled, then he gently touched my chin. “Your woman says her breed’s males don’t grow such hairs, generally.”

  “She has weird eyes, doesn’t she?” I said.

  His shoulders jerked up and down slightly, before he answered, “Yes.”

  They’re not totally over xenophobia, I thought, but then, am I?

  That afternoon, Chenla and I rode Tesseract’s animals away from the others, she dressed in wide skirts that she’d brought with her, me in pants and borrowed boots. We rode through grass that stretched on and on, with brush in it, gold and green, toward a sunset through high cumulus—more pink than purple.

  Then Chenla laughed, at what I wasn’t sure.

  We raced back—she was good with the riding beast, hips rolling with the gallop, back straight, wrists flexing with the thing’s neck.

  After we’d cooled them down, she patted hers and said, “What are they?”

  “I never asked,” I said.

  “You don’t ask questions, do you?” she said.

  I dismounted. “May I?” I asked, reaching for her waist to whisk her off the riding beast.

  Very light, but not so soft as the girl I’d slept with when I was fourteen. When I set her down, I held her waist—we were poised like dancers—then she moved away from my fingers, to stable her riding beast.

  I followed with my animal. “The ride was so beautiful,” I said. “I’m glad they invited you.” My cock felt embarrassingly heavy.

  With her chin tucked down, she turned her face away slightly, but kept her slitted eyes on me. “We must talk more,” she said.

  Back at the house, the Yauntries had gone considerably over their planned two beers each. Even the birds and the Gwyngs were giddy, watching little three-dimensional-seeming holographic actors in a round glass tank.

  “The primitives returned,” Rhyodolite said, madly waving a beer can. “Primitive sexual behavior! Primitive staring at cheap holos!”

  “Shut up, piss-brain,” Cadmium said.

  “Oh, no species loyalty here,” Rhyodolite said, standing unsteadily and walking out. Cadmium groaned and followed him as Chenla and I sat down.

  Tesseract pulled out one of the semi-illicit xenophobia films, and we all, even the Yauntries, giggled madly as various small creatures ran screaming as a cargo ship’s belly opened.

  Then Karriaagzh got out. Karriaagzh, but younger. We stopped laughing and stared at Tesseract.

  “A classic,” he said. “Karriaagzh had his own reasons for making it—to work through his feelings about Gwyng fear, Jereks who took away his Jerek lover.”

  “A bit crude to show it to us,” Hargun said.

  “Most mammals tend to be in awe of him. He’s just a creature.”

  “Your Rector,” Hargun said.

  “Your opposite in negotiations—so you want him to be big and severe?”

  On screen, the young Karriaagzh stalked a screaming Jerek, feathers clamped tight on his skull.

  “Granite Grit,” Ammalla said. Granite and Feldspar had squeezed their eyes shut.

  “Sometimes,” he said, dropping his lids, but guarding his eyes with the nictitating membranes, “fear makes me angry. But mostly I’m scared—terrified creatures can be so dangerous.”

  Feldspar touched him, bent down more, and gaped her beak. He looked around, found a bit of cheese, and dropped it in her mouth. They sat beak to beak while she reached up and rubbed his nares.

  We watched as much of Karriaagzh’s rebellious youth movie as we could take, then switched to something really funny when the Gwyngs came back, desperate for more company.

  Chenla and I looked at each other, not as drunk as the others—not really drunk at all, but I was half tense and half lethargic, an odd combination. “I’m going to bed,” I said.

  “Alone?” Rhyodolite asked.

  As if she’d understood, Chenla stared coldly at the Gwyng before we got up and walked down the hail toward our side-by-side rooms, me thinking about my double bed.

  But she went into her room, and I went into mine, wondering if I should have at least kissed her. I should have, but I was afraid to reach for her.

  I heard her shower, and footsteps back and forth as she muttered in her language. Then she walked to my door. My cock began rousing itself as I went to open it.

  “So don’t ask,” she said, dressed in a bath sheet. “Let me in quick before the wrinkle-faces find me here.”

  We both giggled like kids—she found the double bed hilarious. I grabbed her and bounced her onto it, then slowly unwrapped the sheet from her as she giggled behind her hands, eyes slits.

  Human female. Human. Female. She sat up and undid my pants’ drawstring. Almost hurt as she pulled them down.

  After I recovered from the first time, she tickled me. “This time, slow.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  As we lay in bed together in the morning, I touched the birth control implant ridge. Not the dominant species here, I thought, still glad to be human, with her, warm in a bed we’d made sticky.

  Her Oriental eyes opened slowly, and I rubbed the sleep out of the comers the way Feldspar had rubbed Rhyodolite’s eyes, only Yangchenla didn’t flinch. “I never slept with anyone after,” I said. “You know, after…”

  “With non-species women?”

  “No. Close, but never.”

  “Faithful to kind,
at least. How did you get here?”

  “I tried to help a Gwyng, one of the wrinkle-faces. My brother caught us trying to escape and killed him. Very complicated story.”

  “We were supposed to be trained—my father’s seen the old records.”

  Did she expect me to do something? I explained, “I had trouble finding a sponsor. Finally, the female Gwyng whose pouch kin I tried to help took me. Now I’m in the middle of her quarrel with the Rector.”

  “Pick a side, make sure it wins,” she said. “Then come help us. My brother wants to be a cadet.”

  “How did you get to be free traders?”

  “My grandfather and grandmother—very ambitious. Sent my father to school—weaving night and day for a handwoven dealer. Handwoven is like live servants with the Federation people. Machines are quicker, but pay to creatures is calculated on city living, so the rich wear live-made cloth to prove their money. But the dealers think they can cheat primitives.” She leaned up on her elbow and said, “And you can cheat most primitives. Most are stupid. But when we found out we were being cheated, we sued the handwoven dealer. From the settlement, we bought a shop.”

  “Do you cheat primitives, yourself?”

  She laughed.

  “Yangchenla!”

  I’d have asked her more, but the Gwyngs burst into the room, saying, “Your female, not in her room/missing.” Then they twined around each other in mock shock as she slowly pulled the sheet up over her breasts.

  “Tom, you lied. You sleep together,” Rhyo said.

  “Only pairs,” I said. “Get out so we can dress.”

  Cadmium brought in a box from the hall. “New clothes for Red Clay,” he said as he dumped the box out on the bed. Rhyodolite went out for two more boxes.

  “We tried to trick Hargun into coming in,” Rhyodolite said, “but he was very cagey/non-cooperative. Since you’ve seen Black Amber mate, then we should see you.”

  “I didn’t watch Black Amber mate,” I said. Yangchenla looked like she was trapped under the sheet. “They won’t hurt you,” I told her. “I’ll get your things.”

  “Hurt you? No,” Rhyodolite said, hopping up by her feet. “We’ll keep off the Yangies. Protect ape-eating-ape/female who calls us names.”