Human to human, p.5
Human to Human, page 5
“Tell us about your species’ behaviors,” the Barcon said. He pulled a tuft of fur off his forearm, exposing more dark skin.
Thridai looked at the bare patch, moved his arm as if he wanted to touch it. He said, “We gather information by touch, sight, hearing. Taste is for pleasure or warning.”
The Barcon held his arm toward Thridai and leaned its body away. “Here, then.”
Thridai reached out with a finger. I noticed that his nail curled up slightly and the fingerpad seemed swollen. I wondered what precisely had been the significance of the female scratching at the clear restraining wall and tried to remember what her hands looked like.
The Barcon sat patiently while Thridai tweaked a bit of Barcon hair between thumb and forefinger. Thridai leaned back, and the Barcon started breathing normally again.
“I’m sorry,” Thridai said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have demonstrated touch.” He leaned back in his chair, hair surging up slightly as he closed his eyes, then opened them, looking around the room. “The polycarbonate walls. We can’t see properly through them, nor can we feel. Heat images are diffused.”
Porphyry raised his olive feathers until they stood out like a muff around his neck and shoulders. The Barcon asked, “What restraints do you suggest if we let them out?”
Before Thridai could answer, one of the furrier people added, “We want them to learn Karst One or teach us your own languages. Common ones.”
We were almost mobbing Thridai. He said, “Perhaps if I talk to them? Do you know where each pair come from?”
“Off-planet administrators, we think,” the Barcon said.
I said, “Mine know some Wrengu. Your people attacked just as we were contacting the planet species. The female seems to be going insane.”
Thridai pulled out his stone box and took another cigarette out of it. The Barcon coughed; Thridai put the cigarette back in the box, but didn’t put the box in his tunic pocket again, just held it on his thigh, fingers stroking it. He finally said, “They all have children?” We all cupped our fingers and brought our hands down. He seemed to recognize the signal for “yes.” I felt frustrated. What kind of help was he giving us?
He said, “Let the children get together some. You must.”
“We want them to play with our children,” I said.
“We have mixed-species nursery groups.”
Thridai’s fingers gripped his stone cigarette box. He said, “I’d like to talk to some of them.”
“Mine,” I said. “See if you can help the female.”
Porphyry shook his feathers, then settled them. The others looked around at each other, then the Barcon said, “Officiators, perhaps some of you can bring your Sharwani couples to the next meeting.” He stood up and spoke in another language to Thridai, who immediately put the stone case in his tunic pocket.
“Red Clay,” the Barcon said to me, using my Academy name, “you and Thridai can go right now.”
“You and he could stay for dinner,” I said to the Barcon. I wanted another person with Thridai and me.
The Barcon said, “My mate. I have other duties.” Thridai was picking at his tunic sleeve with his broad fingertips. He stared at the threads, running a nail over them. Well, then, maybe he was nervous about me, too. I said, “Thridai, do you want to come with me?”
He looked up from his tunic sleeve and said, “I will.”
“I don’t want to be cruel to anyone,” I said.
“I am in agreement,” he said.
Don’t show fear, Warren’s voice called from memory. I remembered a yellow dog coming at me on his belly, snarling and cringing. Sharwani did remind me of yellow dogs, maybe because of the furred cheekbones. I said, “Do you know the bus system?”
He pulled the tunic back from his wrist to show me his ID bracelet and transportation pass. “I’m trusted more than perhaps seems reasonable.”
We walked to the elevator. “Did you have the language operation?”
“Yes.”
“With the computer?”
“Yes.”
“Then we can track you through that.”
“So your people aren’t foolish.” His head bent forward, chin to his neck. The elevator doors slid apart, and we got on. As the doors closed and the machine began to sink, he asked, “Can they monitor everyone?”
“I think the computer can screen for key words, maybe test for blood substances, but we’ve never been bothered.”
He touched his head, not the same spot in the skull where I had my plate, and said, “I feared that they would damage me.”
“In your case, they’d try very hard to do everything right.” Was that a twinge of jealousy I felt? Really, I told myself, Barcons never wanted to screw up. But they had when trying to rebuild Warren’s personality and brain, a darker part of myself replied.
Thridai said, “I’m honored.”
I laughed. He stiffened and said, “What is that noise to you?”
“Amusement.”
He made a sound that sounded like big rubber bands twanging deep in his throat—bo’ing, bo’ing—and touched my chin. “Good, amusement.”
When we reached the ground, Thridai looked around as we walked out of the building. Thin clouds hazed our star, and the temperature was about in the mid-sixties Fahrenheit. Thridai asked, “Heavier or lighter for you?”
“My home planet was bigger, but I don’t notice it now.”
He said, “Heavier for me. Do you have children here?”
“Yes, a son.”
“I should have brought my mate.” He didn’t say any more about her. We walked out the Academy gates and he asked, “Are they functional?”
“We like to keep the cadets under supervision at first. I suspect one could get out if one wanted.”
We waited for a bus that wouldn’t require transfers. Around us were cadets and officiators, in feathers, fur, and bare skin of all colors, buying snacks from vendors, waiting for buses, leaving buses. Thridai hunched his shoulders slightly as he looked around. The bus pulled up; we got on and rode through Near-Institute District’s weird mix of high-income domestic and commercial architectures from over 120 planets. As we passed a stone building with a rose window, clear glass leaded in lace patterns with green glass diamonds at the perimeter, I heard Thridai make that twanging rubber band sound.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
“That building reminds me of home. For a second, I was afraid.” He looked at me, and I saw that the tissue around his eyes was very puffy. I wanted to hug him—he seemed so small and lost—but instead put my hand on his knee, carefully. He seemed to relax slightly, then stiffened again when we came to the platform houses of the birds, all of them going about their household routines exposed to view and the heights. Karst Sun intensified the shadows as it began to set.
“Aren’t they embarrassed?”
“No, they’re completely feathered and, see, the toilets are opaque. We get off three parks from home, but they’re just small parks,” I said. “Are you okay?”
“I think so,” Thridai said. “The domesticity bothers me.”
I thought I understood. As a bird mother chased down and whacked a youngster about ten stories overhead, we reached the bus stop and got off. Again, the rubber band sound.
We walked into Lucid Moment District, Thridai not saying anything more. At my apartment building, I went into the ground-floor provision shop run by a city Gwyng woman, Awingthin. Thridai stopped at the threshold, then came in the shop himself.
“Hi, Awingthin,” I said. “Do you have any extra Sharwani foodstuffs?”
She looked over at Thridai and said in Karst Two, “(Out free) he’s allowed?”
Thridai’s throat bo’inged again and he said, “Yes.”
“Sorry/didn’t know you’d had a computer installed. Well, yes, I have food for you. Red-Clay, how is Cadmium?”
“I haven’t seen him in a while.”
“He should visit soon.” Her nostril clapped and the muscles under her facial wrinkles shifted. “And for you, this.” She handed me a slab of plastic-wrapped chocolate.
I gave her my credit card and she subtracted the purchases, letting me see the reading before she pulled out the card and handed it back to me. I’d just gotten another first-contact percentage from Yauntry duties, about two hundred minimum-wage days.
Thridai and I both reached for the food package, but the Gwyng put it in his hands. When we were on the elevator, he asked, “Don’t you have small elevators for the food? You’d never have to go into the shop.”
“We enjoy going in the shop,” I said. “Awingthin is a friend of ours.”
“Are my conspecifics angry?” he asked, his eyes puffy again.
“What behaviors show anger?”
He groaned and asked, “You can’t empathize?”
“We’re semiotic animals. If we know what a behavior means, we certainly can empathize.”
“How do you learn what it means?”
“Thridai, it’s like your amusement sound. You have to explain sometimes. We’re not like lower animals; our empathy isn’t innate.” We got in the elevator.
As the elevator doors closed, he said, “Language is innate to the Universe.”
“What about the Gwyngs?”
He said, as we got out on my floor, “The computer does faster what we could figure out with time.”
“Gwyngs claim Karst Two doesn’t begin to convey the meaning they can express in their own languages,” I said. “We eat in the back room.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I can’t get into a Gwyng’s brain and prove they’re lying,” I said. As we passed down the south hall going toward the kitchen, I saw people with Marianne across the atrium shaft in the other hall. Thridai didn’t seem to notice anything, but I smelled something like a dog’s smell. Marianne waved, and she and the people with her joined us in the kitchen.
Then I saw the lion. Not a lion, but maybe a cross between a lion and a large ape, with a bobtail. It stopped and crouched. Behind me, Thridai squeaked.
One of the people with Marianne said to the beast, “No. Okay.” I looked up from the beast to the ungainly sort of bipedal ape creature, with motley fur, giving this thing orders.
“Marianne, this is Thridai. He’s here to help us with the other Sharwani.”
Marianne nodded to him and said, “I’m here alone half the time, so I’ve hired a Quara. These people are his handlers.”
The Quara sat down and nibbled off a claw sheath—huge claws—and then looked back at its handlers as if asking, who do I eat first?
“Can this one leave the apartment?” the handler who’d settled the beast said, pointing to Thridai.
“Yes,” I said, thinking maybe this would be better than having Karriaagzh, who’d lusted after even a Jerek, hanging around Marianne.
“This one, smell, memorize. Not like others. Don’t control him.”
The beast shrugged and padded up to Thridai and snuffed hard at his crotch, then his fingers. Then it said, “Yes.”
I said, “How intelligent is it?”
The Quara looked at me, then at Marianne, who said, “His name is Hrif. He’s intelligent enough.”
Hrif looked back at me and said, “Yes, Hrif-self.” The handlers talked to each other in their own language and then to Hrif. The one who’d been talking said, “Keep the sentences simple.”
Hrif said, “Go sleep?”
Marianne said, “Yes.”
“Miss you,” Hrif said to his handlers.
“Smell this one,” the second handler said, coming up to touch me. “He also gives orders.” Hrif swung around and snuffed at me and then padded back down the hall.
Thridai asked Marianne, “Why do you think we’re so dangerous?”
Marianne said, “The female tried to claw out a friend’s eye.” She didn’t seem too happy about Thridai being here, her arms out from her sides, her legs bent slightly.
“Easy, everyone,” I said. “Let’s go talk to the Sharwani.”
Marianne said something, and Thridai answered her in the same language. She said, “So I am speaking correctly.”
“Maybe the wrong language for them,” Thridai said.
“No, I’ve heard them talking. That’s why I got Hirf. I’m not a xenophobe, really, but the female is very angry.”
There was, I realized, a difference between xenophobia and the sane practice of caution around strangers, regardless of species. Thridai nibbled at his fingertips, narrow thin tongue tapping out between his teeth, then said, “Let’s see them, then.”
We walked up the north hall and saw Hrif lying over the threshold of my room, his massive paws out in front like a Sphinx. At the polycarb wall, the three Sharwani strained to see him.
Thridai whistled air against his teeth. The female turned and grabbed her mate’s shoulder. They began talking Sharwanisa to him, hands scrabbling against the glass as if they wanted to touch him, the female’s wrist cast bumping against it.
Marianne said, “I hadn’t noticed before, but they all have big fingertips.”
“Yes,” I said. “They like to touch, and they see infrared. A polycarb wall is sensory deprivation to them.”
Thridai said, “They’re only minor officials in the occupation. Why don’t you let them out?”
I said, “We can’t let them go just on your word.”
Thridai talked to them some more. I wondered if we could trust him. He turned back to me and asked, “Won’t the guard beast protect you? And you have control bracelets. I wore one before they installed the skullbone computer.”
Marianne said, “They have to learn Karst One.”
I thought about being in jail and looked at the female, who quivered, hands pressed on the glass over her head.
“Only on this floor,” I said, then went to lock the elevator.
As I passed him, Hrif got up, heavy hips swinging from side to side, and padded up. Marianne said, “Stop fast moves.”
“Him, too?” Hrif said, gesturing with his head at Thridai.
Thridai said, “I’ll accept that.”
Marianne said, “Yes.”
Hrif said, “Nervous. Dumb.” He lowered his haunches first, then his forelegs and shoulders, and peeled another claw. I came back and unlocked the door to the clear wall we had the Sharwani behind.
When they came out, trembling, clutching each other, I felt like a bully. The female said in Wrengu, “Go we outside?”
“We want you to learn our language.”
“Your female knows our language.”
“Some,” Marianne said. She spoke a few words of Sharwanisa then, and the female looked down and stroked her son’s back with her fingers.
Thridai said, “Her name is Chi’ursemisa. He is Hurdai. The child is Daiur.”
“Why us?” Chi’ursemisa asked in Wrengu.
“We need to understand your species so we can calm it down,” I said.
Hurdai said something and bo’ingd deep in his throat. Marianne whispered to me, “He said, ‘I told you we are samples.’”
Daiur said, in Karst One, “Where’s Karl? I’m hungry.”
I was as surprised as I’d been when the guard beast had Spoken. Marianne said, “Karl’s visiting friends tonight.”
“We’ve got enough for everyone,” I said.
Hurdai said something. Thridai translated this time, “He’d like to cook.”
“I’d rather he didn’t get near the burners,” I said. Thridai spoke again in Sharwanisa, then Hurdai said something more and they talked a bit without translating.
Hrif moved his joints and legs again and came after us, head down, sputtering about duty, his bobtail swinging like a club. I wondered if his kind naturally knew speech or if a computer translated animal sentiments into speech. He settled by corner cabinets we didn’t use that much. Marianne said, “Fine. Good.”
“Hungry, too,” Hrif said, without raising his head.
Thridai asked, “Is this a standard living quarters layout?”
“Yes,” Marianne said. She went out, leaving me with all these people, and brought back Quara food like dog kibble in a plastic can. Hrif ate while she ran water into a bowl for him.
“Shouldn’t you feed us first?” Chi’ursemisa asked. Thridai talked to her and then said, “We’re from the same group Shar. Shar means The Planet, but I expect everyone calls their planet that before space travel.”
I wondered if they knew each other before capture. “Who will cook?” Marianne asked, beyond caring whether the Sharwani knew each other before or just went to the same museums.
“If you’ll let me, I will,” Thridai said. “We need an oil suitable to us and a shallow pan.” He took the food that we’d been feeding Hurdai and Chi’ursemisa, with the same oil, and did entirely different things with it than we’d been doing, crisping vegetables I’d boiled, leaving the meat almost raw, and rolling out their bread into big floppy wafers much like the plastic discs they’d used to pick up their food. When he made tea, he left the leaves in.
Marianne said, just to me, “Obviously, what we’ve fixed for them has been like prison fare.”
Worse, I thought. I wondered what Ahrams or Barcons would have done with corn meal and beans if they’d tried to feed me what I usually ate back in Virginia. Beans baked hard as stones?
Chi’ursemisa took the first plate and touched the food with her fingers, then began babbling to Thridai between scoops of food on her flat bread. He looked at us, hair flaring on his head slightly, then handed Hurdai and Daiur their plates. Chi’ursemisa kept talking.
“What is she saying?” I asked Thridai.
“She’s just talking,” he said. “Nothing strategic.”
“We didn’t mean to fix their food wrong,” Marianne said.
“I told them you didn’t,” Thridai said. He fixed his own plate, and the Sharwani all sat on the floor to eat. He looked up at us and said, “The platform you have is too high and not big enough.”
