Being Alien (16 page)

“Be careful.” She said that playfully, but her face frowned. “People make funny assumptions.”

I ran my tongue between her lips and pried at the stiff cheek muscles. Gently, she pushed me back and we got out of the car. “Semiotics,” she said and smiled.

“Don’t take me for granted,” she told me as she pulled back the feather quilt lying over her double futon. “I want to go with you halfway because I am scared. Being scared is exciting.”

“That’s why Alex teases Carstairs.”

“Carstairs really thinks Alex knows something. I’m sure that none of you could put a gate mechanism together, or you wouldn’t be allowed here.”

In the morning she said, “Do you want me to make the plane reservations for Virginia?”

“You in a hurry?”

“Yeah, I’m getting excited. Let’s do it.”

“There’s nothing to be scared about for you.”

“I met your black friends yesterday, before we went to the party. They approved of my doing linguistics work.”

“Oh.” She wasn’t going to be Support then. “I’m glad for you.”

“They tested me.” With her hands, she shaped the brain function test helmet over her head. I remembered the colored lights, shifting forms. “I was excellent.”

I’d just been high average for a cadet, but maybe the Barcons were just talking, so I said, “I’m glad.”

“You’d really rather have me three paces to the rear, like Mr. Sato.”

“No, I’m really glad. Make the reservations.”

She slithered through the bedclothes and hugged me. “We can both handle it.”

We landed in Richmond in the rain. Reeann handled the car rental, paid cash while I watched water trickling down the lower lobby’s plate glass windows.

“I’ll drive,” I said.

“Are you used to city driving?”

“I’ll drive.” We went from the airport toward the city, sliding by the brooding James River on elevated steel and concrete. Reeann called out the exit just in time. I went down the ramp between a steel hauler with plastic-wrapped girders on his flat trailer and a U-Haul that wandered into right-hand lanes as if blind on that side. Probably was an amateur driver. We ended up on a little street filled with late nineteenth-century town houses, too plain to have attracted remodelers. Reeann watched the street—mostly black women sitting at upstairs windows, their arms crossed on pillows, yelling at their children who played on the sidewalk.

“It looks like Oakland,” Reeann finally said.

We came into a fringe area—this was where the halfway house was, not in the total slum because social workers would freak, but not in a good neighborhood either. We saw signs in Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Spanish. Three black Rastafarians in grey peg-leg pants suits walked out of the Vietnamese takeout with little white cartons, their long dreadlocks bobbing as if to music we couldn’t hear.

We passed the halfway house—two bay-fronted buildings, each about three stories tall. “Not too bad,” Reeann said. “I’ll go in.”

“I’ll get some takeout, whatever.”

“Just ask for something with chili garlic sauce.”

I said, “I didn’t realize Virginia could be this weird.” Reeann laughed as she locked the car. We stood beside it a second, then walked down toward the halfway house. She went in and I kept walking, thinking that I had to look different at twenty-four than I did at sixteen when was arrested. I opened the door to the takeout place and realized I was overdressed for the neighborhood, wearing the cord pants and a white shirt. Wet, too.

“I’ll have three orders of anything with chili garlic sauce,” I said.

The man cook and the counter girl smiled at me and babbled to each other in their language as the cook scooped various cutup vegetables and chicken out of white plastic containers lying on their sides behind the wok. He splashed in oily sauce, then stirred everything up, while the woman put ladles of rice in the bottoms of each carton.

“Want it be super hot?” The cook’s accent was black, as though he’d learned English on these streets

“Do one hot, the other two mild.”

I walked back toward the halfway house and saw Marianne and Warren, yes, Warren. His face was rough, wrinkled but gaunt, like the bone was wearing through the flesh. He looked drugged, his brushy eyebrows straggly and greyed, more bald, even his still-black hairs were duller.

“Tom?” he said. “You’re still alive?”

“Yeah. Yeah. I’ve been to something like college.”

“They told me you disappeared. Tom, Tom.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant, repeating my name like he was shaking his head over me. “Here, do you eat this?”

I handed him a carton.

“I’m sick of it,” he said. “Damn garlic chili sauce or rotten fish gunk on everything at that shop.”

“Did Marianne explain things?”

No.” He looked at her as I handed her the container with the most sauce.

“That guy who helped us; the one who couldn’t talk English. His friends took me away.”

Warren seemed slow ’luded. Finally, he said, “But they treated you okay? Better than what I got?”

Marianne said “They can help you."

“Better than Prolixin shots? I’m a crazy man. I need a structured environment.”

“Warren.” I felt more numb than I could ever imagine—each finger lead bars, nerves zinging up and down my arms and legs. Flesh jumped in my shoulders, my face.

“Come with us,” Marianne said. “We’ve got a car.”

“Drove from California?” Warren asked.

“No, flew. We rented the car at the airport,” I said.

“In chips,” Warren said dully. He took the carton of takeout food and began picking at it with a plastic fork as we walked through a drizzle, hair plastered to our heads. “Little brother’s in a real deal.”

“Warren, I came back as soon as I could.” Marianne looked at me funny when I said that.

Two black women—no, two midget Barcons or made-over sapients of another kind—were leaning against our car when we got to it. “We’ll explain,” they said.

Warren goggled at them as one got in the back seat, then said, “Come on in, Warren.” The other waited until he got in, then took the other side-window seat.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“We want to talk to Warren,” they said. “Privately.”

“I don’t want to,” Warren said. I looked back and saw that he was sweating almost as much as he’d been when the drug investors bullied him into tabbing drug for them.

“What are you?” Marianne asked “Where do we go?”

“We’re members of the Federation. Drive, we’ll direct you. Barcons, we thought, would be too intimidating, but we’re somewhat medically skilled ourselves.”

“And Karriaagzh sympathizers,” the other one said, speaking for the first time. “Marianne, you’ll appreciate that Karriaagzh wants to make contact with Earth.”

“Don’t you have any central leadership?” Marianne said.

“There’s no one correct solution when dealing with composite entities,” the first one said.

“You influence the good, discourage the bad,” the other said. “Turn left at the next light.”

Marianne and I went to Maymont Park while the two Federation fake-humans talked to Warren. The rain had quit but it was still grey.

Marianne asked, “When should we go back to them?”

“They’ll find me. I’ve got a computer in my skull.”

“Oh. Will they do that to me?”

“I don’t know about the Institutes, and don’t tell me I don’t ask enough questions because that’s what my first human woman said.”

“I don’t know what this is going to be like.” She sat down on a bench and looked at the James flowing down below us. Her head twitched once, faster than shaking it no. “Am I just a misfit?”

“No, my God, you have PhD, a house.”

“All my friends have PhDs. Hiding out in Academia.”

I almost asked her why she didn’t do something with it, but realized how bad that was going to come across. I felt very protective of her. And, in sneaking way, I was glad she had some weaknesses.

“Tell me, how many other humans are on Karst?” she asked.

“About 200.”

“Can we come back for visits? They let you come back.”

“Yeah, to find someone like you.”

“Would you have just left Warren here?”

“I don’t know. He haunts me, but he’s more like the Tibetans than a modern person, I think. Except he was real high tech with drugs”

“Here, Rehab is training him to be a lathe operator."

I remembered the grounds crews with their automatic garden machines. “He can find work on Karst.”

“Did he do a lot of drugs, or was he crazy before that?" She almost crouched as she asked the question, looking very European, Jewish. I suspected how serious the question was for a woman.

“No, not before drugs, but he was restless. And he started doing drugs when he was in grade school. Some.”

“Well,” she said, straightening up a bit, “if we have children, it’s a real outcross.”

“Are you afraid?” I asked her. “People are pretty decent there, even if there are political squabbles.”

“And the Barcons told me that people do get killed in first contacts,” she said. “Don’t try to reassure me too much.”

“Does the idea of aliens fascinate you?”

“Yes it does”

That’s all that really matters, making a mutual zoological city with others, different ones, all those complex lives touching, diverging. “You’ll do great, Ree.”

“Zoosemiotics,” she said, quoting her professor’s topic.

“Karriaagzh says that just because we can’t half understand each other bare-minded there’s no reason to quit working together. He said that all life aspires to capital M Mind.”

“I’ve heard other arguments on Earth,” she said.

The two fake-women brought Warren down to me. The largest one said, “Marianne, the brothers need to talk.”

She got off the bench and went walking off with them. When I looked away from her, I saw Warren watching me. “Nice,” he said. “You gonna steal her from Earth, too?”

“Warren?”

“Joking. Drugs screw the tone.” He leaned his hips against the back of the park bench, one leg bent, foot on the seat, the other stretched out. “Do I have any choice?”

“We can help you better than Virginia Rehab.”

“Everyone in the whole fucking universe thinks I need help. My brain.”

“They can regrow brain tissue.”

His eyes widened slightly, but I saw the pupils pull to points. “But would it still be me?”

I didn’t know how to answer that. He said, “What I did, then, was for money for you.”

“That wasn’t all of it, Warren.”

“Yeah, maybe not. We should have taken your little bloodsucking buddy and just dumped him down a mine shaft.”

“If he’d been alive when his kin found me… Warren, they wanted to brainwipe me until they found his will.”

“Decent of them not to, considering that
you
didn’t kill him” Warren drew his other leg up and crouched on the bench and stared at me, the wrinkles shifting on his face.

“They know he pulled the shotgun on you when you stopped us from escaping. Warren, he didn’t know shotguns could kill.”

“You should have explained, maybe. While we were all communicating so well. Did you ever understand his kin?”

“By computers. But some of the other sapients you can understand bare-brained.”

“What I really want to know is do I really have a choice? Can I stay here?”

I didn’t answer right away. I wanted him with me if Black Amber wouldn’t attack him, if he’d still be Warren or become again the Warren I’d known when I was just a kid. “I don’t want to leave you here.”

“Like I have a choice,” he said. “Got a smoke?”

“No.” He looked down at the ground, eyes going side to side, and I felt sick, afraid he’d grab up a butt. “Warren, I can’t leave you here. I want you to share what I’ve got the way you shared what you had when I was younger.”

“You’re still my
younger
brother, boy.”

“Yes, Warren, but my luck’s up now.”

Warren stood up and cuffed my ear. “You a man now, ain’tcha? Get me off this damn Prolixin, it bloats my brain.”

The fake-human women came back with Marianne then, and the biggest one asked, “Is he okay about it?”

“I’m okay,” Warren said. “What do you look like when you’re not in human drag? Screaming tentacles?”

“I guess he’s willing,” I said.

“Go back to the halfway house for now. We’ll take you out later. Kick and scream if you want to.”

“Shit,” Warren said. “Either you bitches have a cigarette?” The smaller one brought out a pack of Kents from her purse.

We drove back together, Warren on the window this time, and waited until Marianne signed Warren back into the halfway house, then the smaller fake human said, “Marianne and Tom, you go now. Visit Williamsburg, have a good time, then be back in Berkeley next week.”