Being Alien (20 page)

“Bought sleepers?”

“No kin here,” she said. “Hotel provides fake-home warmth.” I saw one tube sofa like an emptied silkworm cocoon, the Gwyng news screen playing moiré patterns that they read as language, and an enameled box the size of a refrigerator. Black Amber found an intercom and spoke Gwyng in it then told me in Karst Two, “I asked for real food.”

“You haven’t been greeted by anyone.”

“My rank is with the Federation, not Gwyngs,” she said, pacing on the plastic floor mats, fake tatamis, body lurching side to side over her short bowed legs. She stopped in front of the tube sofa and wiggled into it, crossed her arms, and leaned her small chin on them, huge eyes fixed on me, bone protecting them, furred skin over that. Layers and layers—mentally shielded, too. I’d never known she had no rank among the Gwyngs. Or was this something new? Maybe gossip about Wy’um had gotten back to Gwyng Home.

“You don’t have
any
status here?”

“Different status,” she said, shutting her eyes.

The next morning, I woke up tangled in Gwyng limbs and gently unwound myself from them. Black Amber was up, leaning against a wall with a towel covering her pouch slit and crotch. One of the hired Gwyngs started, nostril slits flared, when he opened his eyes and saw me. He wriggled out from the sleepers, waking the others. “Did you (both) sleep well?” the largest female among them asked in Karst Two as the five of them stood up and stretched.

“We appreciated your warmth,” Black Amber said.

“The non-Gwyng was not so sleepy?”

“Before I could answer, Black Amber said, “He doesn’t usually sleep/like to sleep in heaps. I’m teaching him to be polite.”

I said, “I did sleep,” but then realized that only Black Amber could understand me.

They all filed out, two naked females and three males with covered crotches. “Is nudity common?”

“Body coverings come from the Old Ones’ ruin areas mostly,” she answered.

“Were those Old Ones’ ruins I saw yesterday?”

“Gwyngs evolved after the Old Ones died/killed selves.”

Black Amber spent most of the morning talking Gwyng on the phone, sometimes lying in the tube sofa, sometimes sprawled on the floor. About every ninety minutes, she asked me to heat bottles of her blood drink or melt butter. She sucked up liquids through her oval glass straw—big as two thumbs held side by side—pushed down deep in her throat. I watched her breathe in and out while she sucked. Then she handed me the straw and glass to wash and got back on the phone. No other Gwyngs seemed really eager to adopt a Black Amber child.

Finally, somebody must have said yes. She put the phone down and stretched, webs rippling. She told me, “I (and you) will go North. Our North has many parallels with Linguist’s city,
Barkaley.”
She got up off the floor and dressed in Gwyng rig, her Sub-Rector’s uniform in her shoulder sling.

We drove by tank yards and square gate station buildings. “Gwyngs hire out to prospect gas giants. Gas giant work (hint of danger, but Gwyngs can’t/afford to/be intimidated).” I saw three runways, plastic like all the Federation runways I’d seen, but a Gwyng crew was digging up one of the runways in sections.

I asked, “For recycling?”

“Sun and landing pressure breaks down the molecules. Makes yeast/bacterial work easier.”

“But you prefer food from animals?”

“All Gwyngs do,” she said. I saw hangars, no airport terminal, but realized that Gwyngs arranged ticket purchases by computer and didn’t carry much baggage. We went in one of the hangars where a female-sized Gwyng in a stained white shift looked at Black Amber’s ID.

Black Amber said to me, “Bump bodies sideways but not too hard. They are kin for the flight/a formality.” I touched the three Gwyng crew members very lightly, afraid they’d cringe. One stiffened and squeezed his nostrils shut.

We got on a small jet wide enough for tube sofas and a small aisle. Three cushioned tubes were on the right side, with legroom between them, the aisle on the left, then three tubes on the left and the aisle on the right, forcing the passengers into a serpentine path, and so, by threes, except for the last three tubes in the tail of the plane.

“Get in the tube during takeoff, then sit on it during the flight until I tell you to get back in,” Black Amber told me before she chattered in Gwyng to her con-specifics.

I sweated in the tube—no air-conditioning on Gwyng jets. But I guess the tubes were safer than seat belts in case of a crash.

The jet landed twice—passengers got off and others got on. One baby Gwyng burst into those oily Gwyng tears when he saw me.

Then we landed in chilly fog and went into a private room inside the hangar. Black Amber stripped off her Gwyng clothes and put on her Sub-Rector’s uniform. Among other Gwyngs, she looked disguised in long pants and tunic.

“And you wear yours,” she told me.

I dressed in the Academy uniform for the first time since I’d left Karst to go to Berkeley. The tunic dangled below my knees like a large hobble. “Do I need the sash?”

“No.” She brushed her head fur against the grain, then dabbed a gel on it before brushing it back. Then she used a lighter bristled brush on her face fur, neck, and backs of hands. “Brush your head hair, and the visible hand hair.”

I used her brushes, then slid my wallet in my tunic side pocket. Black Amber moistened her fingers against her tongue and smoothed down my eyebrows.

Then we went out; her contacts were waiting—seven Gwyngs in shifts with armholes cut deep for webs, three large Gwyngs, three medium-sized, one of them Cadmium, Black Amber’s pouch child. They stood on the sides of their feet, toes curled inward. A big one, a female, said in Karst Two, “You brought a stranger, Black Amber zh’Wringa Vel.”

“Only half stranger, zh’Wy’um Eshing. Red Clay is serviceable.”

“Your herds have been sterilized?” They switched to a Gwyng language. Cadmium just looked at me, not speaking, his blond-streaked head hair slightly erected. Then zh’Wy’um Eshing, kin of Wy’um’s, I guessed, said to me, “Come with us, Red Clay.”

We got in a stretch limo that looked like a stolen 1930s Mercedes, but it had no driving wheel, accelerator, just a computer pressure pad. Eshing wrote a pattern on the pad, saying to me, “We’ll get something you can eat.”

“Fried blood cakes would suit him fine, with honey,” Black Amber said. They talked Gwyng again. Eshing looked at me as though she suspected I understood, but all my computer did was squeal when they talked. Black Amber took a small curved plate out of her sling and laid it over my computer, saying in Karst Two, “Now it won’t record.”

Oh. I leaned back and watched the fog. Then we passed over a cattle guard, no, a blood and pouch beast guard, and drove through pastures, by sudden juniper-shaped trees, to the zh’Wy’um house—stone this time, built on a cliff edge, with the usual wraparound Gwyng porch. The stone was pierced with many long oval windows, no glass in them. We went into a gloomy, great room, cold with splashes of light coming through the stone windows.

“Do you chill easily?” Eshing said to me.

“Give him some blankets and put plastic over his windows.” Black Amber said.

“He sleeps alone (mild shock, not wanting to be rude)?” Eshing asked.

“Alone and he’s tired. Show him to his room, now,” Black Amber said.

“Could I walk around a bit?” I asked.

“I’ll go with him,” Cadmium said, “I have the skull computer.”

Black Amber’s nostrils slowly squeezed down into narrow slits, then she said, “Yes (reluctantly).”

We went out of the great room onto the side porch overlooking the ocean, which I could hear below banging into the rocks. “Late at night, the fog rolls back,” Cadmium told me. “In the morning you can see refractions—no, you can’t. The sky will be fogless, more clear.”

“Blue sky when clear?”

“As on any planet with the right air. Black Amber’s new pouch child—is it Wy’um (possessive).” He stumbled over that construction; I barely made out the name. He added, “The History Committee Person.”

“The matings have been open.”

His long finger caught my wrist, one finger on the pulse. “I don’t know if you lie or not. Black Amber, is she angry with the bird?”

“I haven’t seen her in a couple of months.”

“We need to work better together, Black Amber thinks (I’m not sure). Hard with others, brains different. How are you perceiving this?”

“Correctly, I think.”

He koo’ed. “Uneasy-don’t-be-rude. Come.” He began descending stairs cut into the rock. I followed him, afraid he’d lose me in the fog. We went down the cliff and onto a small crescent beach, mostly cobbles. Several large black animals wiggled back into the water.

I wasn’t sure what I saw. “Hands?”

“Yes.”

“What are they?”

“Maybe the next sapient. The Gwyng name wouldn’t register in the computer.”

A small diurnal bat flew overhead, peeping, then going into ultrasonics as it flew into the fog. My computer picked up the lower fringes of that. I asked Cadmium, “Do we have to stay outside?”

“Black Amber has business to tend to."

"She always wants the Federation to do more with the present sapient members.” 

Cadmium said, “Contact dislocates years after initiation. Even 400 years after. Do you want to swim?”

The air temperature was about fifty degrees; I didn’t know if the water was warmer or colder. “I’m a subtropical brachiator.”

“I’m not.” He rolled his shoulders and took off his shift, then began wading out. One of the large seal-like creatures spy-hopped out of the water two feet from him and bugled through an inflatable nose.

He hit it on the shoulder and it dove and brought up strange lentil-sized things, gigantic shelled unicellular animals, parallel to something extinct on Earth. Cadmium passed several to me and bit into one of those lentil creatures himself.

Edible. Like sucking eggs.

* * *

When we went back up the cliff, the other Gwyngs except for Black Amber were on the veranda. They all were watching a barn off about a quarter mile. The doors opened and Black Amber, her Sub-Rector’s pants draped over her arm, ambled out. As she got
closer
,
I saw that her wrinkles were slack and her lips pursed in an oo.

Black Amber said, “Pouched. Female (satisfaction).”

Eshing said in Karst Two, “When she is twelve we’ll send her to Karst to become Rector if you can’t manage.” Black Amber looked stunned, lips parted, not oo’ing now. Eshing continued, “The bird threatens to outlive-you.”

“Karriaagzh refuses to age or resign,” Black Amber said. She came up the veranda stairs, and I saw she was damp, sweating. Drying her head with her pants, she asked, “Do you mind if I take suppressants?”

“No alien crudities here,” Eshing said. “We’ll provide your assistance.”

“Cadmium and Red Clay can assist.”

Eshing said, “We are not on Karst now, protégé. And this mating will be (I insist) open. Witnessed by us.”

Black Amber threw her arms apart. Veins throbbed in her armpit webs. Eshing pinched a web and spoke in Gwyng, but I knew that she’d keep Black Amber from chilling down into an avoidance coma. Her web between Eshing’s fingers, Black Amber shuddered, then she said, “Tom, Cadmium, leave.”

“Can I go back to Karst?” I didn’t want to be alone on this alien planet, but I didn’t really want to witness another one of Black Amber’s matings—her in blind heat, the males shoving each other, a pre-pubescent or three trying to keep the Gwyngs from damaging the female.

Eshing went eyeball to eyeball, belly to belly, against Black Amber, and talked Gwyng to her, then said, in Karst Two, “We want Red Clay to tell Karst we are still Gwyng here. You will stay close but will not be a visual witness.”

Cadmium looked at me and shrugged like,
I’m sorry, I had no input,
a gesture he’d learned from me. Only Black Amber, among the other Gwyngs, could understand a human shrug.

* * *

Cadmium pitched a tent for us near the barn, but we still heard the noises. “We both spoilt by Karst,” Cadmium said. He moved stiffly, aroused by the pheromones.

“Eshing says Gwyng systems work best for all Gwyngs.”

“Black Amber really loves Wy’um.”

“That, in us, is perverse/selfishness.” He spread his arms as if he, too, wanted to evade this stress with a self-induced chill-coma. “She won’t impregnate fast (old).”

“Old?”

“Forty, forty-five planet cycles. Old.”

“How many planet cycles do you live, using Karst cycles?”

“Sixty is beyond intelligent life. The body may wiggle."

“Oh. Oh.”

She didn’t settle for two weeks.

Cadmium and I went to the post-heat party. Black Amber was an ungracious hostess until Eshing took her outside. We pretended not to notice the screams.

On the flight down to the space-gate city, Black Amber stayed in her tube sofa, eyes tightly closed, beads of oil leaking out from between her eyelids. Other Gwyngs would glance by the tube, but their eyes never stopped, never really looked at her.