Human to Human (18 page)

For days at the Earth Oort Cloud station, I watched time-lagged television coming off my home planet. In a three-inch-square window in the upper left of the screen, analogs of instrument needles wobbled as my conspecifics played with gravity, looping it against space-time. Soon, I’d be facing them.

Besides myself, there were five of us officially waiting: Travertine, Granite, a pair of half-shed Barcons, and Wool, who squelched comments on species, especially his. He was a giant creature with thick, blotched skin and a hairy head and shoulders, probably with either Analytics and Tactics or Control. Except for the Barcons, we’d all done in-station waits together before this one. By the second day, I realized the Barcons were Jackie and S’wam from Berkeley, but
not de-haired to human norms.

Besides the five of us, Control rotated squads through to familiarize them with humans. Control would be prepared in case of trouble.

One night I watched Japanese gun master digital broadcasts that our own computers cleaned up and projected on flat screens. Figures, ambiguously either sinister or heroic, attacked robots and died speaking Japanese, shot down by factory machines. I identified like crazy with the dying humans. Maybe the official humans would shoot me down? I could imagine humans murderously angry that I had defected to aliens—my blood floating in red globs in free-fall. The globs would wobble like giant soap bubbles.

Travertine watched me, still suspicious of humans. Why had I imagined my death in free-fall while he watched? I’d seen Xenon killed in free-fall, and my blood image was too vivid to be merely imagined.

Blood globs in free-fall drift up to cloth and soak in by capillary action, oozing down the fibers as if drawn by gravity, but in all directions, patterned by grease smears that resist blood stains.

Travertine said, “Your face is pale and sweating. Do you need sedation?”

“I’m afraid of what the humans are going to think when they see me with you.” I feared human anger more than the xenophobia. I knew how I’d felt when I strangled Hurdai. Now distanced from that killing anger, I was sick of being human if that doomed me to a lethal temper.

But here I was, waiting for a whole planetful of them, all twitchy on the triggers. What was the Federation going to offer them? Sharwani were on the verge of civil war because of the Federation; the Gwyngs sold surplus population on labor contracts; the Yauntry spent all they earned from lithium on education for their young, working furiously to stay in place. This was going to look bleak to the folks who thought space was the final frontier, open range, homesteading, strip mines, and all that. Travertine said, “We are fortunate there are no strong leaders now. Strong leaders seem to drive humans crazy.” He plugged in a digital movie player, cutting off the program coming in from Earth, and began watching a collage copy of old Hitler newsreels. Stalin and Hitler grinned at each other, dividing up Poland. Whoever put the images into a digital medium had cut in images of death-camp corpses.

“Stop that,” I said.

Travertine’s feathers rose off his body. “You’ve been up too long, Tom. Go to bed.”

Wool came in, looking unkempt, his face covered with white cream, and said, “Travertine is right. We should put you on twelve-hour shifts.”

“What are you doing to your face?” I said.

Wool didn’t answer, but wiped with a towel. His face was rose-tan under the hair. The white cream was a depilatory. I looked at his thick skin, mottled gray and brown, and his slit pupils, and thought that de-hairing his face didn’t make him look significantly less alien. The grey skin patches along his shoulders and arms seemed slightly moist, with short stiff hairs coming out of them. The other parts of him were more densely furred. The comfortable lies that my brain fed my vision centers lurched and I saw him as a naive human would have seen him: cat eyes, blotched skin that looked diseased, the face so artificially stripped of hair. Then my mental maps skewed back and I felt ashamed of myself. That was Wool I saw as an alien. I looked over at Travertine. Karriaagzh chose us well: tough, very alien. Humans would freak or not. Wool, Travertine, Granite Grit, the Barcons, me—we’d take care of them either way.

“Bed,” Wool said again, his oval pupils contracting slightly, not to the slits they’d been in full light, but still like cat’s eyes.

“I’d just lie there worrying,” I said.

“We’ll sedate you. And unsedate if your people come.”

I sighed; he sighed back in imitation. We looked at each other, an unknown meaning in his dilated eyes, the slight twitch of his nostrils. I pulled up my tunic sleeve and asked, “Will you wear a top when my people come?”

“I have one that breathes properly. Will I look more presentable without face hair?

I looked at his pupils, then at his muscular lips, the top one that turned down at the sides. He shifted his face muscles, and I realized his facial expressions were close to human, bared by the depilatory cream for our reading. “Yes, we’ll be able to learn your expressions faster.”

“Well,” he said, preparing the sedative for me, “I didn’t do it foolishly then.” He laid the cube on my forearm, but stopped. I guessed he felt a bit embarrassed. “Can you sleep without this?” he asked me.

“Yeah,” I said.

“You are tired, aren’t you?”

Actually I was seeing how concerned Wool was about being readable by us humans relieved me. “Yes, I’m more tired than I realized,” I said. He stood up and took the cube out with him. I turned on a hologram wall, rain on a jungle, and watched until I saw the scene begin again: twelve-minute repeats. Sometime after the third one, I fell asleep and dreamed of Marianne in a green silk dress, and Karl’s sister, who asked me why she hadn’t been born yet.

I woke up once, startled, maybe thinking the Americans had come, and lay in the dim light wondering whether the humans would be American, Russian, Chinese, British—whatever. Arabs, maybe Africans. A huge, diverse planet, yet weren’t life-bearing planets always that way? How could I represent all human beings to the Federation, much less all the Federation to Earth?

Wool said, “I see light
on
your eyeballs.” He was sitting in the dark, a shadow-form speaking language, but I knew he could see me as well as a cat could have.

“They aren’t here, are they?”

“Not yet. You are nervous, which makes us more nervous.”

“It’s personal,” I said.

“You will be quite valuable to them.”

“But I’m Federation,” I said.

The shape shifted. I heard him suck his upper lip and remembered how he liked to talk after he woke up from one of his short naps. He had no fixed sleeping time. I asked, “Is your home planet’s sky bright at night?”

“It varies,” he said.

“What happens to Alex when the contact is made?”

“Alex?”

“The blond Ahram with the skull crest cut away, who lives in Berkeley.”

Wool said, “The Barcons told me about him. He should have been rotated out. We’ll turn him over to your authorities as a goodwill gesture.”

“He wanted to know when contact was going to happen. He’s afraid of jail.”

“Do you think your officials will announce to the general population that we’re out here? Contact is sometimes secret among the officiators.” He used the Karst One term that I usually translated as
officers,
then said, in English,
“Among the rulers.”

“Is that good?”

“Not unless the rulers are significantly different genetically.”

I remembered the Jersey cows among the Gwyng pouch hosts and blood beasts and wondered if the cows had any idea of how far from the Channel Islands they’d gone. “Not the same species?”

“What is species?” Wool said. He got up and left the sleeping room.

I wondered if I’d been asleep long enough and checked my watch. Not quite. Odd Universe to move us around so much, stars whirling planets, planets moving people, people moving animals and each other. Maybe I would be too valuable to be hassled by the FBI or the Virginia law?

Suddenly, I wished I had a banjo, knew how to play one, almost hearing the Statler Brothers. “Oh, Elizabeth,” not a banjo tune, but one of the things the radio had played a lot just before I left Virginia with Black Amber and her pouch sons. Then I remembered Bach’s harpsichord music as Sam Turner played it, mocking the simple country tune, almost as alien to me as Granite Grit’s home planet discs.

If everyone here on this station, including me, could stop thinking of my people as capital
 -
H
Humans, the contact would go better.

But I couldn’t stop thinking of myself as a capital-
 
H
Human. Self defense didn’t seem awful, but… Did the Sharwani see what they were doing against the Federation as self defense? Could we ever see around species bounds?

I wondered if I should get up and sedate myself; then turned on a night view of Floyd, the one traffic light blinking through the cycles, cars going by on a five-minute loop. Had it been too boring or too dangerous to stand filming traffic long in nighttime Floyd?

What loop was my brain stuck on to keep throwing me these rhetorical questions?

Lorda mercy, I’m acting like a spooked human,
I thought in substandard English. Was I going to revert to mountain dialect when my conspecific officials arrived?

Arrgh, the questions.

I dreamed questions, thinking I was awake, because the room had shifted when I opened my eyes. The Floyd holoview was off; the diurnal wake cycle lights were on. Granite Grit said, “Could you help me oil my feathers?”

“Are they here?”

“Not yet.”

“Soon.”

“Soon,” Granite said.

“I’d better shave, then I’ll fix you up.”

“If we have time,” Granite said.

I sat up fast, my heart racing.

“Travertine says your fear of humans scares him,” Granite said, muscles in the corners of his eyes bunching up. “And the Barcons are no help, talking about being mugged in Berkeley.”

What was the right explanation for my fear? There were several socially expedient explanations, none of them precisely and exclusively true. I said, “I’m afraid I’ll embarrass them.” Well, yes, and the other way around, too.

Wool’s voice came in over the intercom, “Get ready.”

I said, “Are they here?”

“Not yet, but…” Wool broke off. I pulled on my pants and went to the toilet to wash my armpits and shave. Granite came up to me with my tunic top and contacts-and-honors sash. I looked at him and wondered if I’d have time to groom him, too. The electric razor hummed. My pulse was pounding.

After I shaved, I rubbed my fingers over my chin and cheeks to see if I’d missed any stubble, then splashed water on my face. After I toweled off, Granite handed me the rest of my clothes and said, “You can oil my feathers in the common waiting room.”

“They’re more likely to kill me than you,” I told him.

“That’s not reassuring, Officer Red Clay.”

We were on formal terms, were we? “I’m sorry.”

He reached out and straightened my sash, then backed out of the toilet cubicle. I suddenly needed to piss and adjusted the urinal to my height. When I came out, Granite was wiping his beak, his nictitating membranes a quarter out over his dark-brown eyes.

“Let’s get you fixed up,” I said, awkwardly reaching for his shoulder, patting the emerging quills—in moult, no wonder he was edgy.

He flicked the transparent films back into the eye corners near his nares and rubbed his beak against his arm scales. “You make us more nervous about your people than the Tibetans do.”

“Sorry.” We started for the common waiting room.

“Make us feel it will go well.”

“I’m sure it will,” I said. “The Barcons, Travertine, Wool, you, and I all speak English. Wool speaks Russian and Chinese. The Barcons speak Spanish and Portuguese.”

“Marianne knows Quechuan.”

“Granite, I don’t think we’re going to have to speak Quechuan any time soon.”

“And she knows French, but Karriaagzh wanted her to stay behind,”

I thought, I was sent out because I was man enough to take them. We reached the common waiting room. Everyone except for the Ewits and the present Control Squad was there. I supposed that the Ewits were asleep and that we were keeping Control out of sight, but then I saw that the Control Squad leader Pulse sat with Wool. Pulse was a bear-stock creature as hairy as a Barcon, but smaller and thinner, with honey-colored fur. Me and Wool watched an oscilloscope. I started to groom Granite’s feathers, my knees on either side of his hocks.

The oscilloscope line went jagged, spikes off the top and bottom of the screen.

“Now,” Wool said.

So fast, too soon. My pulse began racing. Granite looked back over his shoulder at me.

Wool began talking in English and Russian, a steady stream of “Don’t worry,
nyet boyatsya, horoshee ludee,
we’ve been waiting for you to make contact with us.”

“How do you know English?” an American voice, a man, said. Someone in the background murmured Russian, but the accent seemed wrong.