Human to Human (10 page)

Weiss finally said, “Why an artificial language for him? Is he a DNA experiment?”

Marianne said, “He’s our son. We’ll explain after you talk to our friend.”

I said, “Actually, I don’t think we should give you this information. My wife wants to. I don’t think humans are ready.”

“Yeah? What if I reported you to the FBI?”

“Do it,” I said. “Marianne thought you’d like to exchange ideas with the guy. I think you ought to figure it out without his help. Maybe you’re not really prepared.”

“Physics isn’t like that. We all believe in sharing.” 

Marianne said, “That’s what my friend believes, too.”

“Can I tell people where I’m going and when I’ll be back?”

“Sure,” Marianne said. “There’s a phone in our room, or you can…”

“I’ll tell them myself in person. And what’s your apartment number? Can I come over at eight?”

“Fifty-two sixteen,” I said. “Sure.”

He whistled and said, “I’ll be there at eight. Or earlier.”

As we left the campus, Marianne giggled and said, “I almost told him we were Albanians. And you helped more than you wanted.”

“How?”

“He’s the type if he goes to buy glasses frames and the salesgirl says, ‘You might be more interested in the cheaper ones,’ he’ll buy the highest-priced frames in the shop. Oh, no, Dr. Weiss, your brain isn’t quite ready for our superhuman concepts.”

“I didn’t mean to get him to come. I meant to discourage him.”

“I know. That’s why it’s funny.”

We took the train from MIT to Harvard Square and walked around buildings ancient by American standards. Karl didn’t say much, just watched, rather like a puppy watching wild dogs. Marianne read the historic markers—worse than Williamsburg. I felt poor; this wasn’t my history. Above us, I saw two girls sitting behind a third-floor window. They hardly moved, looking down at us with sculptural faces: immobile but not stiff, cheekbones so angular they reminded me of Sharwani, hair bronze-colored, clipped at just below their earlobes. One noticed me staring and moved slowly back into the room.

Marianne said, “Radcliffe wenches, Harvard wenches. Too much.”

“Too much what?”

“Money, self-confidence, lack of insight. They’re impossible.”

I’d never seen her intimidated by anything much on Karst, so this surprised me. “Did you have a good education?”

“Berkeley doesn’t quite…it’s a social thing.

“Well, let’s get away then. These people work for the government a lot when they finish?”

“Yes, a lot.”

“Well, we ought to observe them.” I felt cockier now that I’d seen Marianne intimidated, too.

Marianne ground her toe against a maple leaf on the sidewalk, reduced it to cigarette-tobacco-sized bits. Karl picked up another leaf and asked in Karst One, “Why don’t the trees have colors at home”

“The air doesn’t chill enough,” I told him.

Marianne muttered, “University of South Carolina.” I wondered what she meant until I remembered her advisor urging her to apply for an opening there.

We went back to Boston. Marianne went out walking while Karl and I watched cartoons. She came back at around seven with take-out Chinese: chicken and nuts with vegetables in a fiery hot sauce for us, bean curd and snow peas for Karl.

We heard a knock at seven forty-five, and then Joseph, on the other side of the door, said, “I know I’m early. I almost didn’t come at all.”

Marianne got up and let him in. He looked at us and said “After you left, it sounded stupid.”

I called Travertine’s number and spoke in Karst One, “He’s here, reluctantly, but I’m going to feel odd luring him into the closet.”

Travertine’s tongue beat against the receiver—at least that’s what it sounded like—then he said “I’ll come there. Seal the closet.”

I went to the closet and sealed the pod that fitted inside it, then closed the closet door. About five minutes later, blue light flashed around the door edges; I opened the closet and unsealed the pod without looking at Joseph. I heard him panting.

“Relax,” Marianne told him.

Travertine—unmistakably alien—stepped out of the closet, hocks lifted high. He raised his feathers, then clamped them down against his body. “So, you’re telling me I’m close,” Joseph said “Am I too close, so—”

Travertine said, “I’m here to help.”

“You’re a scientist?” Joseph said, his right hand slipping under the bottom of his sweater—armed, a very nervous physics professor whose daddy had been military or CIA and whose mamma had been an Indian.

“No, but I can explain the further steps you need to take.”

“How can you speak English?” Joseph looked quickly at us, then back to Travertine. “Oh, my God.”

“I was taught by people who’d spent time here.”

“So you’ve been observing us—not sharing your technology with us.” Joseph eased his hand back out into plain view, but sat down heavily on a couch, his muscles tensed. “So, why now?”

Shit. Marianne looked at me and shook her head slightly. Travertine said, “Because we thought you needed to discover the gate theory and technology for yourself, but the group of people we represent—”

Weiss said, “There’s something wrong here.”

I realized that more than Marianne and Karriaagzh’s charity was involved here. Leaking to nearly developed species was strategic, could block the Sharwani. I blew my breath out hard.

Marianne looked at me and said, “We want to bring Earth into the Federation before another group tries to dominate it.”

“So Earth’s the stellar equivalent of
nineteenth-century Africa, huh?”

“Look, Dr. Weiss,” Travertine said, settling down on his hocks and massaging between his eyes. “We don’t want to do anything to you other than make sure you don’t try to dominate space outside your solar system. We’ll keep others from trying to dominate you. We all try to work together in…the best word for it is the
Federation,
but that sounds so space operatic.”

“Strings are attached.”

Travertine said, “No, except that if you use established trade geometries, we do regulate those.”

Marianne looked almost cross-eyed at Travertine. Joseph said, “The British used the idea of free trade against the Ashanti. And your Federation doesn’t trust humans enough to send a peer, another physicist. They sent a Terran cultural specialist, didn’t they?”

Travertine said, “I hate to think of myself as less valuable than a colleague from the Institute of Physics, but humans are a touchy species, dangerous at times, yes.”

Weiss said, “I know what happens to primitive cultures when superior cultures drag them into outsider quarrels. We’ll get run over.”

Travertine’s beak went up, slashed down. “You’re working in ways we haven’t seen before the energy conservation. Not only do we need that, but it has implications for more accurate non-paired gate generation.”

“Great. When we get out there, we’ll discuss it.”

Marianne said, softly, “Joseph, when I worked in linguistics, what was happening to primitive cultures made me very sad, but these people aren’t like that.”

Weiss said, “I saw the groups I worked with either assimilate into the lower classes or rot
of
diseases. Miskitos, they weren’t stupid people, just caught between the Soviets and us. Like the Tibetans.”

Tibetans. How did he know? I stiffened before I realized he was talking about twentieth-century Terran Tibetans. Marianne sat down. But now I did feel strange about how the Federation had treated the Tibetans for four hundred years before I came, only a few families moving into the middle levels of Karst life. Travertine whipped his beak back and forth across one narrow shoulder, then picked at his fingernails. 

Karl asked, in English, “Why sad?”

Joseph said, “Boy, I hit a nerve there. You’re not telling me everything.”

Travertine asked, “You can read my body language?”

“No, theirs. They are human, aren’t they?”

“We know of Tibetans on Karst,” I said. “How they got to Karst is a long story.”

Marianne said, “They’re Asians who’ve been on the capital planet for over four hundred years. Rather like Gypsies.”

Travertine said, “I wouldn’t claim that being part of the Federation is easy, Joseph Weiss. The alternative could, however, be more degrading.”

“Did your people make their own discovery of this gate system?”

“Yes. We were disconcerted to find an organization waiting at the edge of our system to take us in.”

Weiss said, “I bet. But you did discover it for yourselves. How would you have felt if some featherless biped had come down and handed you the thing?”

Travertine drew his neck down, his feathers rose. “If you don’t want it, we won’t force it on you.” His voice was distorted by the odd position his neck was in, twisted down against his breast.

Marianne said, “But…we can’t just leave.”

Joseph looked at us and said, “Yes, you can. Go back. I’m glad to know it’s possible. We’ll meet your organization in space, then see if we want to deal and find out what the other organization’s options really are.”

Travertine said, “You humans will have to live in an alien universe. Not all, however, are as different in appearance as I am. Perhaps you would have been less cold to them?” Travertine’s beak gaped open, almost in a food-begging gesture.

Weiss looked at us and gripped his chin with one hand, thumb behind the left jaw bone. Travertine got up and walked to the window, pulled on the blinds cords until he exposed a view. He looked out, then said, “I’d like to be able to walk down there, some day, without facing panic and xenophobia, Dr. Weiss.”

“May I leave now?”

Travertine dropped the blinds and shut the slats. He looked over his shoulder, the long neck bent so that his head faced directly backward. “Certainly. I’m not a kidnapper.”

“I want my own species to do it without getting help from one side or the other. Obviously, we are talking about two sides out there.”

“Yes.” Travertine opened the closet door, but didn’t get in, yet.

Weiss picked his coat up off the couch and said, “Maybe I’ll regret not accepting your help, and maybe we are xenophobic, but it is my planet. And if there are two sides, lord, will anyone believe me?”

“The Federation capital planet is my planet now,” Travertine said. “Perhaps you will understand some day.”

Weiss stood silent a second, then he asked us, “And do they treat you as equals?”

I said, “Yes. There was some teasing about my refugee status as a cadet, but…”

“Space-cadet? It does sound like a fucking joke.”

“That’s one way of translating the term,” Marianne said. “We do well compared to what we were doing on Earth. Karst is our planet, too.

“Karst, that’s the human term for
a limestone region—caverns and caves under soluble ground?”

“Perhaps in a metaphorical sense,” Travertine said, “but it’s just an arbitrary noise that happens to resemble an Earth term.”

Weiss said, “I will try to get out as soon as I can.”

“It’s a great place for, well anthropology isn’t quite the right word,” Marianne said.

“Alien, can I ask you one question?”

“Surely.”

“You have to protect against vacuum?”

“You have to protect against dimensions that don’t allow your geometries to exist in viable forms. You’re sealing a tiny fragment of your geometry in order to push through the hyperbole and back into time-space again.”

“I hadn’t thought about the engineering problems,” Weiss said. He raised both eyebrows and slid out the door.

Travertine slumped to his hocks and said, “He rejected us. Can I stay with you for some minutes?” His feathers rippled on his back. I wondered if anyone had seen him looking out the window. What might he have been mistaken for a child’s toy?

Marianne looked at me, her face very pale, the incipient wrinkles around her nose and on her forehead almost grooved in now, as if the incident had aged her ten years. She said, “Yes, Travertine, but please don’t talk about it. We picked the wrong person.”

I said, “Weiss knows it can be done, and he heard about the need to protect against hostile environments. How did you fail?”

Karl said, in Karst One, “Can we go home now?”

“I wanted contact now,” Marianne said. “I am so lonely for real colleagues, human colleagues.” She began crying.

Travertine picked at the thick skin around his nostrils and said, “What if your people chose to go with the Sharwani?”

I remembered when the Wrengee decided to go with the Sharwani rather than the Federation, remembered how rejected I felt. “Travertine,” I asked, “can you drink the same type of alcohol that we drink?”

He blinked all four eyelids out of phase and said, “Alcohol is more depressing than we need right now.” Marianne nodded. She said to me, “You talk to him. I’m going to take Karl out for ice cream.” To Karl, she asked in Karst One, “Want some cold treat?”