Being Alien by Rebecca Ore Published by Aqueduct Press PO Box 95787 Seattle, WA 98145-2787 www.aqueductpress.com Digital Copyright © 2012 by Rebecca Ore All rights reserved. First publication: Tor, 1989 Digital ISBN: 978-1-61976-001-1 Cover illustration “Interspace” courtesy Cheryl A. Richey © Cheryl A. Richey http://www.cherylrichey.com/index.html 1 “Easing Back to Earth” The human woman, Yangchenla, lived with me on and off for three years while I learned what the Federation wanted me to know about dealing with other species of sapients. I was better, though, with the non-humans, even with difficult people like the Gwyngs, skinny, long-armed former bats with wrinkled fox faces—nervous, hypersocial—than I was with my own kind. I was afraid of my own kind, especially those descended from Tibetans, who’d been stranded on the Federation capital planet, Karst, five hundred years earlier. Asian rednecks. I was a Virginia redneck, so I’d been told when I was growing up, so it was a bad match. After I kicked Yangchenla’s drunk uncle Trung out of our quarters, she really left me. Or did I leave her? Perhaps she would have come back again, but after two weeks alone, I couldn’t stand the space we’d shared: her Tibetan bed furs, her almost subliminal human female odor fading away from the clothes she’d left behind. Granite Grit and Feldspar, two birds, let me move in with them and their son, Alchir-singra, who was still too young for a Federation working name. They were seven feet tall, wingless, feathered, with scales from elbow down to the hands, softer fingers than you’d expect, and different enough from me not to read my expressions closely. Another mobile-faced ape would have. Yangchenla found me. I came back from a meeting with cadets I was supervising and saw her waiting in front of Granite’s door. “May I come in?” she asked, her flat face not really looking at me. She’d wrapped her body tight, band squashing down her breasts, two layers of clothes over that. “Or don’t you associate with humans now?” “I couldn’t take any more, Yangchenla.” I went to the refrigerator and pulled out a package of villag strips like a cloudy bean aspic, more translucent and firmer than Terran bean curd. Feathers and scales littered the other alcoves of the T-shaped officers apartment, flecks of food, bill parings. She probably wouldn’t want to eat in this mess. “Would you like some Yauntro villag?” “No.” “I got tired of you leaving and coming back, the arguments, so I moved here.” I sat down on a bird table, wiping aside slightly smelly feathers and flecks of rock churned crop food. “Hiding from me?” I didn’t answer that for a while, then said, “We weren’t officially mated.” Yangchenla tightened her lips back. She brushed a bill paring off a hassock and sat down firmly. I said, “Children are messy, whatever the species.” She answered, “But most creatures do want them.” “Yangchenla, what kind of a life would this be for a human child?” I speared a strip of villag with a human fork. “Would you want him to be another second- class human hustling handicrafts?" “I was born here.” She cut short what she was going to say. I’d told her several times that she was grasping and her drunk uncle a pest. They wanted me to get them privileges I hardly had for myself. Granite Grit came home then with his son Alchir-singra. When Granite Grit saw Yangchenla, he became flustered, face feathers slightly roused, haws flicking translucently across his brown eyes, scaly fingers grasping Alchir firmly by the wrist. He looked at me and asked, “Should I come back later?” Alchir said, “Nervous creature. Afraid of us?” “Not of you,” Yangchenla said. “Of Tom.” “Mammal squish brain,” Alchir replied before he picked up a bill paring knife and trimmed his beak. “He’s bright for three, I think,” Yangchenla said. Granite Grit’s face feathers puffed up even more, then he smoothed them down. "Alchir, come with me.” He grabbed Alchir’s pale yellow wrist. Alchir stiffened, still staring at us mammals, until Granite Grit stroked his beak. He crouched and gaped at his father, begging for food, then ruffled his feathers, embarrassed. Alchir-singra’s parents got orgasmic pleasure from regurgitating into his gaping maw, and he was old enough to want no part of that. Granite, humming down low in his crop, preened Alchir’s head feathers, then pulled him along through the door. Yangchenla thought the Federation had favored me while neglecting her own people. But the Tibetans couldn’t hack sophisticated interspecies culture when the Federation brought them to Karst 500 years ago. After one of them murdered an official, the Federation moved the whole Tibetan village to an undeveloped area on Karst Planet. Later, a few, like Yangchenla’s people, gained skills enough to be allowed to live in Karst City. But I wouldn’t let her have another baby. She’d had a son earlier with a Tibetan and had been implanted with a birth control device. If the son died, she could have another. Her ex-husband had the son, off in the wilder parts of Karst. I refused to let her have my child. God, she’d exploded when she found out. Yangchenla said now, “Gwyng lover. Black Amber, your wrinkled-faced blood drinker sponsor bitch.” The full accusation stayed unspoken this time. Black Amber didn’t approve of Yangchenla. Yangchenla didn’t approve of Gwyngs either, the wrinkled faces who couldn’t speak her languages. It took massive transforming to make even Karst Two, the Gwyng communication code, comprehensible to most species And Yangchenla was a xenophobe. “You’re a xenophobe. She’s my sponsor. And I told you I only helped keep the suitors in line at her matings.” “I am not a xenophobe. She lets her babies die.” “Yangchenla, I’ve got work to do. You’ve got a shop to run.” “You’re a little boy, what serious work do you do?” “I’ve got to keep a planet from bankrupting itself over advanced technology.” She stood up slowly, her arms wrapped around her body, fingers dug into her upper arms. “We have lived without you for centuries.” Her body scents thickened in the room. “You looked me up, Chenla.” She went, “bah,” a sound she’d gotten from me, and left. I’d expected her to scream and throw things. Now, as she closed the door, I felt even more anxious, guilty. I had private office space in a building originally designed for crepuscular sorts, now re-rigged with bigger windows and stronger lights, the retrofit not quite as highly carved as the original exterior and interior trim. I was there, half afraid Yangchenla would try to talk to me again, so lonely in some obscure way that I wished she would find a Tibetan like me, an isolate. Then Karriaagzh called me to his office. Karriaagzh was over eight feet tall, all hollow bones and mammal clothes damaged feathers, utterly alien. He sat on his backward bent hocks, reaching down under his tunic to pull loose a feather sheath from a new feather. He wasn’t Granite Grit’s species, but he shared a non-mammal single-mindedness. He was an isolate, truly alone yet so able to cope that he ran the Federation’s Contact Officiators Academy. I tended to be intimidated. First Karriaagzh’s nictitating membrane swept his yellow eyes clean, then he stared at me as if memorizing any changes—Karriaagzh, eighty now, would outlive me, and mammal aging was said to fascinate him. I said, “I was promised time on Earth once I finished the training.” “We hoped you’d be happy with Yangchenla instead.” “Yeah…” “Your own people embarrass you?” I didn’t say anything. Karriaagzh’s pupils contracted, eyes fixed, before he loosened his focus and said, “Tom, we’ll send you to do research on Earth. There’s a country there, Japan, which faced high-tech challenge.” The yellow eyes looked up at the hanging light piece in his high office ceiling: twenty feet up, retrofit scars in the paneling showed the ceiling had been lower. He looked back at his desk terminal and wrote an entry with his light pen. The terminal display flashed maps and figures at him, so fast I couldn’t make them out. “What can human experience have to do with Yauntra? They’re much more group-oriented than humans,” I said. Then as his display continued flashing, I babbled, "Actually, I don’t know if I should really go back to Earth.” Going to visit Earth was my getting back on a horse that had stomped me. Bunch of primitive xenophobes in the Virginia hills who’d discarded me, left me for aliens to salvage. Feathers around his beak twitched. “We have an observation house in Berkeley…California, but Berkeley isn’t rural Virginia, Tom, or Karst City." He gaped his beak at me slightly and rocked on his keel bone, the one that never anchored wings. “You can do research on how Japan reorganized itself to deal with machine culture, reacquaint yourself with your own species. Someday there’ll be official contact.” “Maybe Black Amber would object to me going to Berkeley?” “She is still your sponsor, isn’t she?” He spat air. “She’s with History Committeeman Wy’um again. If she were my kind, her sexual behaviors might be moral, but as she’s not, they aren’t.” Back at my office, when I keyed up my mail, a message crawled down the screen JOIN ME. I AM HERE. BLACK AMBER, SUB-RECTOR, ACADEMY AND INSTITUTES. The printer spat out a map. Amber was on a Gwyng island halfway around Karst. The only way to get to that particular Gwyng island was by the Karst equivalent of air taxi, gate travel being blocked over most of Karst’s surface, so I went to one of the outlying airports and hired another brachiator, one of the ones with tri-colored head hair, to fly me in a narrow powered glider that Black Amber would pay for. I flew across Karst’s empty spaces at night, dark below me, the sky lighter, glittering with star clusters and miniature suns. Most of the planet was just there to physically support Karst City; an artificial planet requires less maintenance than a space station. Dotted across the black were lights where various high Federation types like History Committee Members and Sub-Rectors had outlying residences. The farms were closer to the city. For five thousand years plus, the ecosystems, the carefully placed oceans and landmasses, managed themselves with minimal grooming by us intelligent beings. Each time I flew across Karst, I thought of what a massive thing it was, how small the life forms that built it. The plane landed at an airstrip on what would have been the planet’s Pacific Ocean, if I was oriented correctly. I don’t really know—Earth is probably upside down as well as backward in relation to Karst. Warm here, near the equator, but not as hot as July in Virginia. Behind the airstrip, I saw the black outlines of strap-leaf trees, like palms but botanically more complex. Shreka g’Han, a four-and-a-half-foot tall fuzzy bear sapient, sat in Black Amber’s bubble top electric car, the plastic cowling slightly sand etched. Behind a fence, grazing creatures like Holstein-colored hippos stared up at us. Gwyng pouch hosts, they incubated the few baby Gwyngs who survived birth. One of them jerked around as though yanked by its tail, and a little Gwyng stared out of the beast’s pouch. “Red Clay, Tom, come.” Shreka used both my academy and species names. “It’s difficult to tend Gwyngs. I’m so glad to see you.” He looked hot. The little fuzzy bear-stock types were weird. Perfect servants—except they served with a tinge of condescension. I asked, “Open mating or are Amber and Wy’um still exclusive?” He didn’t answer, but hunched his shoulders. Black Amber and Wy’um were acting scandalously by Gwyng standards. They saw themselves as a Gwyng colony of two. Not always exclusive, though. Gwyng politics forced Black Amber to invite others to her breedings. And one of Wy’um’s sisters adopted Black Amber’s son —biochemically proved to be Wy’um’s true son. “They’re teaching the child Gwyng languages,” Shreka told me, his scalp hair ruffling even though the air was dead, “and even Wy’um doesn’t respond much to Karst.” I could almost feel my skull computer whir, getting set to give me some sequential signals out of the Gwyng languages even if they weren’t anything I could make sense of. Garble, garble, Black Amber yourself. The car passed herds of pouch hosts and blood beasts—all dark grey and black bulk. Normally, even at night, more was visible—the stars being so bright —but tonight was overcast, just a glowing grey, like a half-moon glowing through the clouds, but all over. I saw light shining though the woven planks of the house—a huge house for isolated Gwyngs—with a black patch in one corner, Wy’um’s security office, a room-sized safe. Shreka ruffled his head hair again and said, “Don’t let them tire you.” “I’m used to Gwyngs.” “They’re being very Gwyng.” Black Amber would have to discuss my trip to Earth in Karst languages. My mind wasn’t geared, even with computers, to radar-based languages that clocked time in light polarizations and embedded time and spatial relationship into all their meanings. Sometimes I thought the Gwyngs just bullshit about Gwyng languages and their elaborate brains. We parked by the veranda as two Gwyngs came out, dressed in Gwyng rigs, collars with strips of cloth going down the center of the nippleless chests to join up with a broad band of cloth around the genitals. The vestigial webs hung like loose black crepe from their armpits to halfway down their upper arms. My computer babbled to my speech centers, failing to transform Gwyng into sequences I could hang meaning on, then my brain squealed when they went into ultrasonics. Black Amber and Wy’um, dressed in Gwyng winter shifts with cut-outs for their webs, came out, twined together side to side. Their little child, almost the same age as Alchir-singra, held on to Wy’um’s knee and stared at me with oily Gwyng eyes. The fur over the raised bone surrounding his eyes was paler than his baby sparse body hair, making him look vaguely like a photo negative of a raccoon. Gwyng irises and pupils looked no larger than my own eyes, but behind the bone surrounding the visible eye was a huge eyeball, with a retina as complex as most mammal’s visual cortexes, so sensitive that Gwyngs could see infrared and polarized light, so quick they processed visual information five times faster than I did. Yet Gwyngs could be as doofus as any human. “Black Amber; we need to talk,” I said. She stared at me, then said, in Karst Two, “Why code babble? Know (think I do) what you (lonely male) want?” “Granite Grit’s not all too happy that I’m living with him and Feldspar.” “Birds (only mild disgust, except for Karriaagzh great meaning slippage/impaction in shift from Gwyng to Karst Two).” She stroked Wy’um. Another large Gwyng that I thought must be Wy’um’s sister came out, larger than the males, but not so tall as Black Amber, who was taller than me when she stood. She was standing now, defensively raised on the balls of her feet above me on the veranda steps. They talked a bit in Gwyng, then Black Amber said, “Come in (try our life).” She pursed her lips at me, her smile, like a human going oo. All the Gwyngs oo’ed at me. She wanted to embarrass me, I realized, but I was used to Gwyng teases. “Life and honors,” I told her, having translated that out of an Earth science fiction book some Terran observer had smuggled out of the Berkeley Public Library. “He (sleeper alone in his dreams) gets along with birds," she told the other Gwyngs in Karst Two so my computer would transform what she said into comprehensible phonemes, “and (almost) with us.” Sleeper alone in his dreams—Gwyngs thought being trapped unconscious alone in a bed was most peculiar. Black Amber’s little son looked at her hands, nervously. She wiggled her long thumbs at him, no anger juice in the glands at the base of them. Wy’um stirred away from her, and their son tried to pull them back together. “The Federation is our home/life,” Wy’um said. “We don’t distort policy over sexual…” His voice trailed away; his facial wrinkles deepened. “Tom, I consider as crippled but social Gwyng.” Black Amber came down the veranda stairs and stroked me with the furred backs of her knuckles. “Come in. We plan to tease you about sleeping alone except after sex. Only wild pleasure tames humans to each other, then not for life.” The little Gwyng went to his aunt, hugged her knees and stared at me, then said something to Amber. “No, you won’t be able to understand him until your skull can take/get implanted with the computer,” she told him. “No loss.” I bumped my body against her lightly as I passed her. She koo’ed slightly and took my elbow to steer me inside. The five others followed us. I sat down cross- legged on one floor mat while Wy’um and his sister twined together with Amber on another. The other two adult Gwyngs, males by the size of them, sat down on suspended swing chairs balanced at knee level with counterweights. One said something to the other, got out of the chair, and crawled into a tube sofa. Amber’s child watched him before crawling into a smaller tube that looked more obviously like a host pouch. Don’t watch them as though they were zoo specimens. I looked up instead at the pattern playing on the Gwyng flat screen on the wall, something they read as language. When everyone was settled, I said, “Black Amber, I think you’ll sympathize when I tell you I want to be among my own people for a while.” She stopped and looked at me with eyes like greased black rock. “You went to Karriaagzh first.” “He was in Karst City. I’m sleepy,” I told her. “Separating from Yangchenla.” “One hundred rotations of this planet ago,” she said, but she got up and led me to a tiny room set aside for alien guests—pretty rare on this island, I took it. Her son came to the door and leaned against it, stroking his stomach, web