Human to human, p.21
Human to Human, page 21
“He doesn’t even look like that really,” Carstairs said. “He’s got tentacles, green skin, a beak.”
“No,” I said. “Alex has just got a skull crest bone, here.” I drew my fingers from the back of my head toward my front hairline. “He’s bald there and the bone has muscles attached to it, skin over the top of it.”
“He’s been getting kids out of the flats, how…. Anne said he picks underprivileged people better than…”
“Sometimes, non-humans see-us better than we see ourselves,” I said.
“No,” Carstairs said, “Alex likes to prove humans wrong in their judgments about things,” I looked for Alex and saw Anne Baseman looking up at him, talking and touching his shoulder gently from time to time. From here, I couldn’t tell if he was crying or not.
Then she took a microphone from one of the waiters and spoke. “Alex, whatever you are, we’re happy to see you free. You’ve helped some of us by our blind spots about our fellow humans. And you’ve been—can I use the word human?—humane enough to seem more like us, fallible, trying, so that I don’t think humanity will be seduced into seeing you and others like you as gods come to deliver us.”
Alex was crying. I saw the human guy with the razor scar across his knuckles, the one who’d threatened the Barcons with a pool cue when he thought they were Blacks. He looked bewildered now, getting angry. I went up to Friese—not Angleton, Angleton was too smirky—and said, “Let’s talk to that guy, now.”
For an instant Friese looked at me as if he wanted a fracas, then he nodded and fell into step with me, pushing through the crowd.
“Remember me?” I said to the man. “Alex’s kind helped me.”
“You human?”
“Yeah, I’m human. From the Virginia mountains.”
“My dad was from Appalachia. I don’t know.”
Friese asked, “Do you think Alex was using you?”
The man started to get angry again. I said, “Being around humans was…is exciting for him. He must have liked you—he didn’t like everyone or every species.”
“What is this going to do to us?” he said.
“We don’t know yet,” Friese said.
“Gonna be like container ships and Korean cars, only worse?”
God, I thought, what will this do to the Japanese? Another major adaptation to deal with in less than two hundred years. “Maybe you can work out in space, getting hydrocarbons from gas giants?”
He almost said something, then looked at Friese. “You official?”
“FBI.”
“We supposed to know about this?”
“Actual physical contact is difficult to bring about.”
The man shook his head very slightly, then turned away from us. Alex’s supporters seemed divided, half touching him gently and congratulating him, the others talking among themselves. Alex pushed through the crowd to Carstairs, took Jerry’s head in his massive hands and pushed the crown of Jerry’s head against his chest—thud, thud—in some Ahram gesture I’d never seen before. Then Alex looked at the bar and said, “I need beer.”
One bartender shook his head; the other served him. Wallie wandered back over to us and said, “All my life, I thought I knew what was going on.”
The man with the scarred knuckles said to Wallie, “He help you and not me?” He looked at us all and moved away, into the crowd, then disappeared. I wanted to tell him how I’d been helped, but realized it didn’t matter how many of us the aliens helped if one he liked missed helping him. I wondered then what he did. Work around the dock repairing ship containers? Those scars across the knuckles might be honest work scars.
Alex was calling for another beer. Angleton, smiling, stared at him. Then Alex saw me looking and came toward me. He said, “You think you’re bad, don’t you?”
As if my fingers were giving me a playback, I remembered how it felt to strangle Hurdai. “I guess we’re going to be difficult people to integrate into the Federation. Almost as difficult as the Sharwani.”
He put one massive hand on my shoulder and leaned down a bit more heavily than was comfortable. “Tom, you may be a nasty little prick, but the whole human race isn’t you.” He smelled worse than drunk, fumes of alcohol and rotten meat hitting my face.
I said, “Alex, stop.”
He laughed human-style, but the face muscles slid in non-human directions. I remembered noticing that before. He said, “I’m not being very strategic, am I?”
Friese said, “Mainly, you’re drunk.”
“Ah, Friese, the master FBI hard-ass. Have you ever considered that I’m faking out how badly you got under my-skin?”
Friese said, “Did you think everyone was going to love you when they found out you were alien?”
“Anne’s pissed.”
“But, what she said.” I realized after I spoke that sometimes people overcompensate for prejudices and then wondered how far around that could go.
“She…”
“Alex fucked her,” Friese said.
I sat there, shocked, wondered if he’d bonded to her, why she committed adultery.
“Lot of that going around, Tom,” Alex said to me.
I said, “Don’t you pair-bond for life?”
Alex shrugged and said, “Humans made me flexible.”
Anne came up to us around then and we went dead silent, then she realized what we’d been discussing and said, “Alex, I should have been told. Carstairs knew. Couldn’t you have trusted me?” Her lips and jaws worked up and down as if she imagined biting something.
Alex bent his head then, scars outlining where the crest had been amputated. Then he said, “I’m sorry. I wanted to be as good as human for you.”
Anne said, “There was always a difference. I thought maybe you had just been really hurt once, more than physically.”
“That’s what it was. We overlap with humans, really.”
Anne shook her head slightly and said, “You have experiences that I’ll never have.”
I said, “Do you want to have them?”
She looked at me and said, “Is Marianne doing interesting work?”
“Very,” I said, then felt like I was taunting her. In my head I kept switching between thinking of her as Anne, Alex’s lover, and Dr. Baseman, Marianne’s mentor.
“Well, my field’s suddenly enlarged. Is what I know worthless?” She turned to Alex with that question, but I doubted he knew any more about the institute of Linguistics than he did about space gate theory.
“Ask Tom.”
“Marianne said what she learned from you was valuable.”
“I was afraid I’d been turned into an interesting primitive.” Dr. Anne Baseman began crying, then she added, in a school-teacherish voice, “Alex, you’re drunk.”
Alex said, “You officials, Friese and the other one, why aren’t you bullying Tom?”
“They did already,” I said.
Angleton said, “Wrong. You were treated very kindly. Alex, we didn’t bully him because we knew we could.”
Alex said, “You feel less intimidated because you can bully me? I’m a dipshit, gone native.”
Angleton said, “The Federation wouldn’t have sent a retard here, even if you have been in the field too long, at least by human standards.”
Alex found a chair and sat down. Anne said, “Still, I wish I’d known.” She reached for his head and rubbed around his scars.
“Must tell you the significance of the crest someday,” Alex said.
“Do you miss looking like your real self?” she asked. Friese, Angleton, and I looked at each other. I, for one, felt like an eavesdropper.
Alex said, “I’m scarred. This is my real self now.”
“Why did they leave you in place?” Angleton said.
Alex, eyes red, tissue around the eyes swollen as if mosquitoes had chewed him up there, looked up at Angleton and said, “There was a faction that wanted you to know. You’re not that terrible. Tom’s problem is that the aliens he first met were unusually xenophilic. Us xenophiles get pissed when you phobes react, but…” He shrugged again and took Anne’s hand. She looked like she didn’t know if he should have it or not. He said, “It’s an informational black hole out there, Angleton. You’re going to go nuts if you’re not careful. Where’s my beer?”
Friese said, “Come on, Alex, we’ll take you home.”
Alex stood up, towering over us and swaying. “Getting arrested was bad for my lease.”
Anne said, “To my house, Alex, for now.” I wanted to ask her what happened to her husband, but couldn’t quite manage to say that now.
As we drove away in our various cars, Angleton asked, “What did he mean by falling into an informational black hole?”
“You know how complex Earth is? Well, you’re talking about a hundred thirty-seven or whatever times Earth, plus whatever complexities arise from contact with all the other planets.”
Angleton sighed through rounded lips and said, “Okay. We had an officer who lost it trying to get the absolute facts about who in the Politburo made what decision about Afghanistan in nineteen eighty-seven.”
Telegraph Avenue was still filled with people this late at night, neon signs and light flats glowing through the slight drizzle. I saw someone who was either deformed or another alien in surgical disguise.
After we’d turned west, Angleton said, “You told us the Gwyngs don’t develop all their mental abilities if they didn’t learn Gwyng languages, if all they learned was Karst Two. That bothers me.”
“I think humans develop more abilities than we’d have otherwise.” I wondered if we were going to San Francisco.
“That, also, bothers me.”
“Well, Angleton, I hope your informational black hole rotates.” We passed a brothel zone, and he laughed as though I were saying something that made more sense than I knew. I remembered that he’d met Lisanmarl and that she reminded him of a human woman. Seemed to me that he was projecting his own patterns on aliens. Me, I’d been more confused by the landscapes than by the people.
People, though. I always thought of them as people, except times like when Granite couldn’t tell a bad Sharwani surgical copy from the real me. “Angleton, or whatever your real name is, all we can hope for in the Universe is accommodation, not complete understanding.”
“Red Clay, you’re proof they don’t kill helpless people. The Tibetans…” He stopped and smiled. “Yangchenla proves they don’t kill argumentative humans.”
“Yangchenla?”
“The Chinese have been talking to her. In English. Tough bitch, asking about the riot in nineteen eighty-seven.”
“I know her. We were lovers for a while.”
“She doesn’t think much of you, of the Chinese, or of the Russians. I think the Dalai Lama wants to talk to her.”
I said, “She’s not religious, either.” Angleton didn’t reply, just smiled, teeth catching another car’s headlights.
Then we started over the Bay Bridge. Bridge wires lit by the cars flickered by like strobe flashes. Angleton said, “I don’t expect Yangchenla and her people will cooperate with any Earth humans. But what about our nations? Are we going to be forced into a single human state?” Before I could speak, he waved his hand and continued, quickly, “You don’t know enough to answer that.”
“There’s not one answer to what’s going to happen to us. Every individual, much less every species, takes contact differently.”
“What we’re afraid of is that every nation is going to take contact differently.”
I said, “The Federation doesn’t allow cadets and officers to bring home wars to Karst. But what you do on Earth, on any species planet, is your business.”
“Not yours?”
“I’m Federation. Beyond that, I’m Karst.”
“A multi-species culture that feels superior to single-species cultures. A multi-culture single species is lower yet.”
I almost said, yes. We went up a hill and stopped in front of a twelve-story hotel with three uniformed doormen waiting outside.
“Tom, you’re not a prisoner, but I’d prefer it if you didn’t go out without an escort.” As Angleton spoke, three men dressed in suits and mirrored glasses with strange distortions in the lenses came up. It was almost funny to see humans wearing high-tech security garb. One of the doormen took Angleton’s car, and we all went in together, looking like a minor presidential candidate with his secret Service guards.
“What’s amusing?” Angleton asked in the elevator.
“I’ve been through all this before, but with other species. The Yauntries had their media people work on our image. You guys wear the same gear as Barcons, Yauntry guards, walk almost like them. It’s kind of neat.” I sounded a bit adolescent to myself with that last, but one of the security types smiled slightly, too. Then I wondered if he believed me.
Angleton smiled now.
The media team met in the hotel suite. While we drank coffee, Angleton pulled the window shades back. I saw a giant television tower patched and still being worked on by tiny crews so dwarfed by the thing they might have been in space switching freight pods on gate nets.
“Isn’t that obsolete?” I said, thinking about fiber-optic cables.
“Historical monument,” said the media guy, Rick Sutter, a short stocky fellow with a bald patch at the very crown of his head. “Sutro Tower. Stars in a lot of media.”
“What are the aliens going to bring us?” the woman, Nancy Soko, said. She was a skinny, red-haired, leathery 45-year-old with gold chains around her neck and threaded-through holes in her ears. “Spinal cord reconstruction, retrovirus cures, better birth control?”
Angleton said, “Sexual entertainers and digital hologram horror flicks starring real aliens.”
An anonymous government man, in a suit the color of an official gray Ford, blinked and frowned.
I said, “Except for the space gates, mainly faster computers and better medicine.”
“The Japanese and Chinese don’t like hearing about extraterrestrial computer improvements,” the government man said. I remembered my research and wondered if the Japanese would approach the alien technological challenge as intensely as they’d approached the Western challenge in the nineteenth century. Now, not even a whole two hundred years later, aliens brought in laser matrixing, chemical gates responding in gradients to various colored lights, fiberoptic glass that could isolate one photon and wave it to one precise molecule.
“It’s our problem, too,” Rick said.
“Our surveys don’t indicate any sign of public panic, but I’m not sure why,” Nancy said. She moved one of her ear chains until a short bar in the chain balanced across the hole.
“Earth wasn’t attacked,” Rick said. “Why don’t we assume nobody’s going to hyper-V over aliens? Start showing a more human-looker on talk shows?”
“Then move on to the little warm fuzzies,” the government man said. Angleton seemed a bit uneasy.
“They did that on Yauntra,” I said. “But people there trusted the alien-looking aliens more. I looked like a slightly deformed Yauntry to them.”
“Warm fuzzies? Small warm fuzzies?” Rick asked.
“Does Lisanmarl speak English well enough?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” Angleton said. “Could Yangchenla be bribed to speak positively of how her people were treated?”
“She’s a businesswoman,” I said.
Nancy frowned slightly. Rick said, “Nancy could talk to her.”
“What about my wife?” I asked.
“She’s unreliable,” the government man said. Angleton twisted his left hand in a gesture that seemed to mean lighten up, because the man added, “We haven’t talked to her recently. Perhaps she’s changed.”
“Scholars all love it,” I said. “How we work to come to semiotic accommodations, where bare mind fails. The real thing we learn is the meaning of meaning.”
“Your wife loves that?” Angleton said.
“I love it. It’s like the fantasy of talking animals—intelligences that don’t get involved in our species’ status games, people who tell us, without being snide, when we’re acting like chimpanzees deluxe.”
Angleton said, “And who don’t really care what your status was among your species.”
“Not if you’re bright,” I said. “Their tests are value free.”
“Perhaps,” Angleton said, “but they chose to measure certain brain functions and not others.”
“I found out on Karst what my real values were, and they weren’t Warren’s.”
Angleton said, “We’re not sure you’re the most objective witness.”
“Back to marketing aliens,” Rick said. “Warm fuzzies, shorter than we are, who speak English. Let’s get one on ‘Night Fringe,’ blur the real a bit and poll the viewers.”
“Jereks may be short and fuzzy,” I said, “but one bit me once.”
Angleton said, “You must have deserved it. I’ll talk to Lisanmarl. And we’ll see what Yangchenla is willing to say and for how much. Maybe Sam Turner could bring in a multi-species jazz trio?”
I said, “Sam plays with humans. On Karst, it’s okay to be a merge-humanist musically.”
Nancy said, “Warm little fuzzies. Nice, reassuring.”
Within the week, Lisanmarl, Angleton, his anonymous colleague, and I were lounging around on broken-down green velvet couches in a television studio ready room, drinking coffee dripped, not perked, from grounds Angleton brought with him. Lisanmarl had bleached her fingers and was afraid that coffee would stain her fur. She stood up, her leathers falling around her knees, and said, in English, “Tom, before the broadcast, come out in the hall with me.”
I looked at Angleton, who nodded, and went out. We were waiting to go on the late-night television show after our rehearsal. She said, in English, “I resent this a little.” Her leathers, belted at the waist with the groin breasts concealed, covered more of her than usual.
“Why? What?” I said.
“Being treated as if I were harmless.”
“We want you to seem non-threatening.”
“But don’t I threaten even you? Just a little?” She swayed slightly, moving first in an alien way, then moving more like a human woman. One palm rose up, fingers wriggling.
