Being Alien (32 page)

Just as they got off, the elevator went back down. “The others said they’d meet us here,” Chenla’s mother said. “That must be them.”

“Are there not-us, here?” her father asked.

“No,” I said.

“We’ll have to get them to cooperate sooner or later,” Marianne said. “I hope you aren’t bigoted.”

Karmapa sighed. He had a funny rolling sort of walk, almost like a Gwyng’s, and he went over to the table and began prodding among the barley grains as I’d done earlier. “Tsampa, I suppose, cooked alien style.”

“From what your country became after your people left it,” Marianne said.

“You’re funny-looking people to be our kind, both paler and darker. The
vr’ech
 
don’t consider you primitives?”

“No, Red Clay and I are being trained. We thought that all the humans should be offered Karst City educations.”

Instead of answering, he pulled out some instrument I’d never seen before, blown like an oboe, with a reed, and played music more complex than any I’d heard among the Tibetans. Sam relaxed, then listened intensely, one ear tilted slightly toward Karmapa. But I could tell that Sam didn’t recognize the music as particularly human either. Karmapa pulled the reed out of his mouth and said, “We are people who’ve been affected by time passed among strangers. We have not been static."

“No,” Marianne said softly. I did tend to think the Tibetans were sixteenth-century time travelers, then wondered what that village was like if it helped aliens stranded in the last contact war. Maybe not so primitive?

The elevator came up with the other Tibetans, including Yangchenla’s younger brother, the one who wanted to be a cadet. Two were women, the third adult was a man. The man wore Tibetan clothes as did one of the women; the other woman wore Jerek leathers over her pants as a belt, higher up on the waist than a Jerek would have had the body strap, with front and back panels in tooled leather that went down to her calves. Her face was less broad than Yangchenla’s, the cheekbones more angular and the nose more pointed. The elevator doors closed behind them, and we heard the elevator sinking in the shaft.

Yangchenla’s uncle Trung and her brother went up to each other and whispered, then looked at me. Both seemed annoyed.

Karmapa meanwhile had looked around the front room and down both corridors. He asked, “Is this for humans?”

“For us,” I said, remembering that Yangchenla’s kin tried to move in with me when I had a smaller place. “For me and my wife, my brother, her sister and her husband.” Sam pressed his tongue against his parted teeth. Whoops. Ugh. Yangchenla had wanted her brother and her parents to live with us. Karmapa smiled at me.

“It comes with being Academy and Institute,” Marianne said. “We’d like all humans to be able to take training in those places, to be educated and tested for that training.”

“Dung hole,” Trung said in Tibetan to Yangchenla’s younger brother, “he sure has one if the wrinkled-faces don’t.” Did they remember that I knew Tibetan?

Warren came out then, his feet bare, shirt unbuttoned, listening while Karmapa said, “I represent the hill people to the city people and have worked with the other sapients in Support and Free Trade. We need to get to know one another better, Red Clay Tom.”

Warren laughed.
“My little brother, he’s saying you ain’t boss of the humans,”
he said in English. I

“My brother, Warren Gentry,” I said.

“Older,” Karmapa said.

Warren said,
“But not even Support, yet!”

Karmapa said, “Warren has been with us, so we know there was madness in your family. Thank you for sparing Yangchenla the mothering of a difficult baby.”

Marianne flushed. I said to her in English,
“This was your idea, bringing in these people.”

She replied in the same language,
“Well, actually it is an insult to an older man to find a younger guy has rank over him for reasons he never agreed to. You aren’t a hereditary noble, you know.”

Warren laughed again. Karmapa kept his face still, then said, “We know much more than you realize, some of us. We…”

Yangchenla clapped her hands once. Marianne turned pale, her lips moving as though she was almost speaking. Karmapa smiled and bowed to the walls. “To the others listening,” he said, “we mean you no harm; we want to improve our own situations.”

“How?” Marianne asked, her eyes on Karmapa. He was in charge. “Have you petitioned them?”

“You might,” I said, “begin with Karriaagzh if you haven’t done so already.”

“The bird’s position is unsteady,” Karmapa said.

“Might we not approach the History Committee? You could introduce me to one.”

Warren kept smiling at me, leaning up against a wall with one bare foot braced against it, his right hand on his chin. He said in English,
“Tell him to get dressed in city clothes if he wants to make a good impression.”

I couldn’t tell Karmapa any such thing. Marianne said, “Rimpoche Dorge Karmapa, do you have any sense of whether humans are as law-abiding as Federation species?”

He smiled and said, “Unfortunately, my dear, one of ours has put a name on the Memorial Wall within living memory.”

One cross-species murder, recently. Not necessarily so recently, just within living memory, maybe his memory? He was old. Warren was the one who asked, “What were they trying to do?”

“Barcons were doing their duty.”

Sterilization, birth control, injections of Prolixin, brainwipe—Barcon duties. I asked, “So what happened and how long ago was it and what happened to the killer?”

“Twenty-seven cycles back. It is not important,” Karmapa replied while looking at the floor, eyes averted even from my shoes.

Yangchenla said, “But others, Federation spies, have killed across species line for stupider reasons. They were going to expel all humans from the city. Rimpoche Dorge and his father won us the right to stay.”

Trung said, “They sent the man back to our former place. In the middle of a riot.”

“What were the Barcons doing?”

“Trying to control his births,” Karmapa said. “But they have always done that.”

“All Federation species can only have so many young on Karst,” I said. “They limit everyone. This isn’t just something they do to us.”

“Some get unlimited breeding permits,” Yangchenla said.

“Black Amber herself doesn’t have one. She has to take her nymphs off planet to get them pouched now.”

Yangchenla’s lower lip jutted out, and she drew her head back. Everyone else shifted in their chairs or finally sat down except Yangchenla, Sam, and Karmapa. Warren eased himself down the wall and sat cross-legged, back against it, and picked at a callous on his big toe. Karmapa shifted his pelvis slightly, spread his legs, weight evenly over them, and folded his arms on his chest. “I don’t say the Federation is unfair to us in that. They are unfair in other things.”

“We don’t have a sponsoring planet,” I said.

“Yet you and your new woman are getting the training, without growing up on Karst.”

“Maybe that’s a plus for them,” Warren suggested. “Not growing up here, getting warped by being low-status.”

Then we heard the elevator doors open. Black Amber, all alone in her Sub-Rector’s uniform, stepped off the elevator, lips pursed. “Red Clay, (im) power(ment) gift. You can appoint two
humans,
your people, to either Academy or an Institute each year. The bird and your Rector’s People, old and new, agree.”

She signed at Karmapa and pulled her lips back with her index fingers, turned, and showed her teeth to Yangchenla, then touched Marianne’s hand.

Warren looked at the Tibetans explaining the hand signs to each other, their faces suddenly more ethnic, less simply human than they’d been before Black Amber stepped off the elevator; He said, “She must have pissed down their backs.”

“She just gave me the power to appoint humans to the Academy or an Institute,” I told him.

“Sure did piss on ’um, little brother, unless they’ve got leverage on you,”
Warren said in English.

“Warren,” Marianne began to say.

But Black Amber interrupted her, “Marianne, go easy/don’t judge. I preserve Tom as alpha male human.”

My belly muscles went rigid as if I was going to fight. “Black Amber, you could have helped earlier?”

“No agitation earlier.” She shrugged one of her fake human shrugs, pulled up her lip comers to give me an imitation human smile, and backed into the elevator, but held the doors open. “If it makes you feel better, I did not to help h’mins in general (killer xeno flip-flops), but for you. And for the Linguist.”

Marianne said in English,
“I’m
so
thrilled.”

Karmapa stared at Marianne, then smiled.

Black Amber koo’ed softly and the elevator doors closed in front or her, sliding up in a greasy hiss.

Yangchenla’s brother squared his shoulders and looked at me like a young bird dog. I said to him, “Let me tell you what they’re going to put you through.”

“He knows,” Yangchenla said. “Operations, body dehaired, non-con-specific roommates.”

I said, “And he’ll still be a refugee,”

Marianne said, “But that won’t last long.”

Sam, who hadn’t said much since he came in, said, “Yangchenla’s pregnant.”

I looked at Marianne. She stared a second at Chenla as if my old lover had challenged her, then went up and embraced her.

Karmapa said, “We need more of us here.”

“So everyone’s been telling me,” I said. “Marianne and I have a breeding permit, but…” But what? Knock her up. Give in to the ache of those empty spaces. Become a parent forever.

9
Babies

Actually trying to knock up Marianne seemed both great and horrid.

The Barcons washed the birth control hormones out of Reeann’s system, conditioned her ovaducts with a treatment they’d perfected on Tibetan women, checked my sperm, and turned us loose “Don’t think about it,” one said, “Just continue your typical sex behaviors.”

So we’d sat in bed one day watching rain streak down the outside windows. All the other humans were gone, our door to the courtyard hall stood open, and we shivered with the prospect of becoming parents.

“It would just be one child at first,” Marianne said. “We don’t twin in my family.”

“Nor in mine,” I said.

She looked at me as if to say something, like, silly, I supply the eggs, but just stretched out on the bed and hummed.

When I came, sweating and shuddering, she reached out with hot hands, ran her fingers through my hair, and held my head. “It’s the right time,” she said.

“Marianne you were an independent woman all your life, and now you’re going to become a mother.”

“It’s all right, Tom. You’re going to be a father.”

“Yeah." And that rainy day must have been the time, because within a week Marianne came back from the Barcons with her test results.

* * *

Pregnancy had privileges—Chalk and Agate told us to take off three days vacation on top of the week break days. We went on a long bike ride on the electric cart trails. Both of us were as skittish as teenagers, me thinking how alien our baby would be, growing up here. Marianne claimed to be nervous about dislodging the fetus, but she still rode bike at twenty miles per hour.

“Nothing’s changed,” she said, eyeing a straight section free of other traffic.

“Nothing has changed yet,” I said, hands clammy, skin shorts actually chilly as the wind beat the sweat out of them.

She began pedaling faster and faster, soon too fast for her to talk. I could keep up with her now—maybe I was in better shape, or maybe she was deconditioned. I still had enough wind to tell her “Don’t overdo it.”

Wind whipped tears out of her eyes. Or was she really crying? We reached the next curve and slowed down. “Marianne, you’re not sorry, are you?”

“What, that I’ve given up bike racing?” She looked over at me, and her bike wobbled. “Or your attitude about humans?”

“I’m sorry” I said. “Sorry I asked.”

We rode on at a more reasonable pace, faster though than the quadrapeds a couple of Ahrams rode on the trail. The animals started, puffing through their nostrils at us.

“Are you staying at Tenleaving?” the female Ahram asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Beautiful place” she replied, “for exbrachiators.”

We began the uphill climb, pedal cadence dropping, downshifting. “I should have thought about touring gears,” Marianne said, her face red, sweat trickling down into her eyebrows.

Tenleaving was set in cliffs and trees, a multileveled resort with swinging bridges and spectacular views of waterfalls, a little train that went swinging around the cliffs like a roller coaster, a real ape playhouse.

When we reached the base of Tenleaving Mountain, an elevator opened its two huge doors, each sliding sideways. I spotted the electric sensors, but the thing did have a Wizard of Oz effect. We pushed our bikes up into it. The cabin was big enough for two electric carts or a half dozen pseudo horses. The lights came on, the doors pulled together, and the elevator lifted us into an octagonal glassy dome.