Human to Human Read online

  Human to Human

  by

  Rebecca Ore

  Published by Aqueduct Press

  PO Box 95787

  Seattle, WA 98145-2787

  www.aqueductpress.com

  Digital Copyright © 2012 by Rebecca Ore

  All rights reserved.

  First publication: Tor, 1990

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-61976-002-8

  Cover illustration: “Migration,” courtesy Cheryl A. Richey

  © Cheryl A. Richey

  http://www.cherylrichey.com/index.html

  1

  In the eighth year of the Sharwani Problem, my wife, Marianne, my son, Karl, and I lived on the sixth floor of a building in Lucid Moment District in Karst City, on an artificial planet light years from Earth. We were odd, even for humans, her with her radical parents, me a parole breaker. Humans would have blushed to know we represented them in space.

  A few days after our son Karl’s seventh birthday, he spent the night with his nursery group. It was our first day together alone in weeks. Marianne woke up first and dressed slowly, wrapping her long black hair in a headscarf. She said, “The Sharwani remind me of my parents. They’re busy bombing and occupying planets, but we’re too morally massive to just crush them.”

  “You think we’re being repressively tolerant?” Marianne had got me to read Marcuse the year after Karl was born, and I thought the idea was slightly hilarious.

  The Sharwani, like terrorist bombers, killed people in small bunches. The Institute of Control simply kidnapped Sharwani families to study. The Sharwani thought they were fighting a war. The Federation was studying a fractious new mammal.

  “Tom, so the working conditions are better, the people whose languages I study don’t have lice. The Sharwani…I want to do more. Just being a linguist is so ordinary, even here.”

  She’d come from Berkeley where all sorts of oddnesses coexisted, but even so. “Isn’t the ordinariness something our minds make from the data?” Berkeley, when I first saw it, reminded me of Roanoke.

  She didn’t answer, just walked out of her bedroom to the front room. I followed her and watched her fingers touch our imported Terran furniture, as if seeing if the feel matched what her eyes saw. We had two huge rooms front and back, six bedrooms, three to a side, off the central atrium. She went to the window and looked down. “Okay, it’s different here. The streets are plastic.”

  “Do you sympathize with the Sharwani?”

  “I gave up planning to kill people for causes when I saw what that did to my parents.”

  “You’re bored,” I said, as if our whole conversation had been a puzzle that I’d just solved.

  Marianne said. “They ought to change the tires on that bus.” Plastic electric buses rolled on tires muffled by our street’s soft pavement. Now that the bus companies had switched to what Marianne called jelly rubber, the bus support crews put on fresh tires when the old ones picked up too much dirt to be translucent. Then she said, “Karriaagzh would like to house a Sharwani couple here, make over one of the rooms into a secure space. I’m going to talk to Karriaagzh today if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Marianne, don’t you think having kidnapped Sharwani move in would be upsetting to Karl?” Karriaagzh was the Academy Rector, a huge grey bird with yellow eyes, mangled feathers under his uniform, legs that bent backward at the knee, totally without any sense of species. Since his own people decided not to join the Federation, he was an isolate, so lonely he fed toilets as if they were his babies. Without Marianne, I could have become a human Karriaagzh. I didn’t really want dangerous duties, but didn’t want my wife to think I was a coward.

  “Karl thinks all sapients play together perfectly. He ought to learn there can be friction.”

  I said, “Okay. If you want to get more involved.”

  The day after Marianne talked to Karriaagzh, my computer terminal dumped three small books on the Sharwani into my printer. I could almost feel my skull computer—the one that normally translates from Karst Two to sequential languages—being tapped, bio pressures noted.

  We were the perfect household for a captured pair of Sharwani. Earth didn’t know there was a Federation. If a Sharwan ate one of us, no home government would complain.

  Marianne and Karl came in. Karl opened the first book to a picture and said, “Pretty.”

  They had angular facial bones, hollowed-out cheeks, thin-lipped mouths, more angular between nose and upper lip than humans. Blond to brown hair, facial hair extending onto the cheekbones in both sexes, blocking an utterly human look. I remembered the one I’d seen live—smaller than human average, but like most species, they could have as great as a two to one size range.

  Marianne said, “Males and females aren’t noticeably dimorphic in either size or secondary sexual characteristics.” She sounded pleased and annoyed at the same time. Human trouble between the sexes, she claimed, stemmed from us being neither dimorphic enough to have complex sexual group mating systems, nor non-dimorphic enough to have stable pair bonds.

  I wondered if Marianne wanted to be a big female Gwyng, all swollen armpit webs, birth hairs from pouch to vagina, nostrils clapping, up to her shoulders in males, competing with other females for marsupial pouch beasts—things like Holstein-colored rhinos—to parasitize. Bossy lady Gwyngs like my sponsor, Black Amber, tended to both attract and repel my wife.

  “Don’t go into these people’s room, Karl,” Marianne said. “Tom, you’re not sorry I told Karriaagzh I was bored? He said we’d have help with them.”

  I said, “Karriaagzh thinks danger cures boredom.”

  First, we needed a security room. Two olive-feathered bipedals with backward-bending knees and arms, not wings, and a human male, descended from the Tibetans stranded here over four hundred years ago, came in with a tool cart and polycarbonate sheets and bars and began dismantling the hall wall of the room next to mine. The carbon plastic and metal studs didn’t surprise me as much as the real plaster on exposed metal lath.

  The Tibetan and I rigged a hoist down the atrium so that the scraps could be taken only a few steps, put through the atrium windows, and lowered to the court yard. Dropping plaster and lath down into the courtyard was better than messing up Marianne’s sister’s handwoven carpet in the front room, worth a year’s minimum wage on Karst.

  I watched the two bird-types slot the first polycarb sheet into a three-sided metal frame. We all then wrestled it into position on the floor where the wall had been and bolted the frame to the building joists. Then we installed the second sheet, the one with doors in it. Where the polycarb sheets butted together, the birds smeared glue and reinforced the joints with polycarbonate bars.

  The door system was odd—a smaller door about two feet high by a foot and a half wide with an electric eye, Class Five locks for that, set within an equally well-secured regular-size bigger door.

  “That’s a little too large for a food door,” I told the work crew, well remembering the food slots in the Floyd County jail when I was busted for helping my brother make drugs.

  “The child needs free access,” the Tibetan said.

  “He’s of the age where they leave the mother’s side to play with other children,” one of the birds said as he cleaned his hands with paper towels and solvent, prying a bit of hardened adhesive off one of his black forearm scales.

  I asked, “When are they coming?”

  “Soon. Karriaagzh broke role and went for them himself.”

  Karriaagzh didn’t just recommend danger as a defense against boredom to others.

  I asked, “What did the History Committee say?”

  “Nothing,” the first bird said as the Tibetan and the other bird hooked up the security systems. “Karriaagzh’s foolhardiness appeals to those ma
mmals. They think one-hundred-twenty-five years is too long a term for a Rector. Are our lifespans too long for you mammals?”

  “He enjoys showing up in dangerous situations,” I said.

  “But he shouldn’t. He represents a very vital drive in the Federation—expansion,” the bird said, handing the other bird a circuit-testing box from the tool trolley.

  The Tibetan asked, “Do you think Earth will support expansion if Earth is contacted?”

  “I have friends in both camps,” I said. “And I don’t know what Earth would do. Join the Sharwani, probably.”

  Marianne came in then and caught the last couple of exchanges. She laughed, knowing I didn’t want Earth to be contacted.

  The Tibetan said, “What Service does affects Support and Free Traders. And we don’t get to affect those decisions.” He looked down at Marianne’s hips and thighs. The Tibetans had been breeding out of the same stock for five hundred years. New human women might be genetically inspiring, but the look he gave Marianne’s crotch annoyed me.

  Marianne smiled and looked from the Tibetan to me. She then went up to the polycarbonate wall and felt it with her fingers. She asked, “Will we get our Sharwani soon?”

  I said, “Karriaagzh caught them.”

  “Poor baby.”

  “The Sharwani baby?”

  “Karriaagzh,” she said. “Tom, have you checked your messages lately? Black Amber left a message on my screen asking why you hadn’t replied.”

  The Support crew went dead quiet, working their job without speaking.

  I went to my room and laid my palm against the hand plate, pressing harder than usual against it. The screen lit up and I began reading: NEED TO TALK TO YOU NEXT THREE DAY BREAK. BLACK AMBER, SUB RECTOR, ACADEMY AND INSTITUTES.

  Meaning visit. I typed in: ARE KARL AND MARIANNE INVITED, TOO?

  PREPROGRAMMED ANSWER, KARL INVITED, TOO.

  My wife’s placental pregnancy and labor had grossed out Black Amber. Also, placental females, especially the sapients, had odd sex lives by Gwyng standards. Not that some Gwyng males didn’t appreciate the human brain’s function as a sexual arousal organ, mere thoughts serving as pheromones.

  I typed, I’LL TAKE THE BUS, then shifted into work matrix and left the machine up, ready to check on my cadets. Outside my door, I heard the work crew packing their tools and Karl coming back from his nursery group. He babbled in Karst One about bird doodoo and tinkle getting mixed up.

  “Daddy, are the pretty people going to live there?” he said when I came out. He opened the little door within the larger door and knelt down to look around inside.

  “Don’t go near them unless I tell you it’s okay.”

  “Do I have to go visit human people over the break?”

  “She’s your cousin,” Marianne said, although the child in question wasn’t a cousin by any kind of blood, but rather the daughter of an ex-lover of mine and Marianne’s sister’s ex-husband, Sam Turner. Sam, with his then wife, had come from Earth to Karst looking for a place to be merely human. Cousin enough, Marianne often said, so far from Earth. “And they’ll be at the beach.”

  “Black Amber wants us to visit her, Karl and I.”

  “Karl and I,” Marianne repeated, her fingers clenching slightly. She looked at me a moment, then said, “Maybe I can get someone to smuggle me back to Berkeley for the weekend.”

  “You don’t particularly like her.”

  “She’s nasty to Karriaagzh, and not just because he triggers anti-raptor defenses. If they were both the same species, she’d still hate him. He’s in her way.”

  Karriaagzh’s lifespan was in Black Amber’s way; he had to die before she could become Rector. “Will you be upset?”

  “When I married you…” She didn’t finish, just went up to the clear plastic wall and pushed on it, fingers flattened against the polycarb. “It’s all right. I volunteered us for the Sharwani.”

  “You said Karriaagzh promised help.”

  “Black Amber is being a bitch.” The last word was English.

  Karl said, in Karst One, “Don’t talk in species language.”

  We hadn’t taught Karl English. Languages shaped the brain, so Marianne and I thought that if he never learned English, he could avoid human problems. He looked so much like Marianne, dark hair, thick lower lip that jutted out, not-so-thin lip on top, the nose that he raised and lowered in expressions he’d borrowed from aliens—my son, seven years old, biologically human, perhaps, but not semiotically.

  The Institute of Control team waited in the transfer truck while Marianne took Karl to his nursery group. She’d wanted to tell him that the truck had our new housemates in it, but I knew he’d fuss to stay. She hadn’t thought that lying to Karl was right, but I said it wasn’t lying, really.

  Rain was coming down outside windows gone clear in the gloom. Just as Marianne got out of the bus, two black shiny guys, skinnier and more pointed-nosed than humans, if the almost mirror skin wasn’t clue enough, rolled an awning from the back of the truck to our building entrance.

  I watched them from above; that foreshortened perspective made them all seem vulnerable. The van doors opened, but the awning screened my view of the stretchers being unloaded. Marianne stopped, looked up at our floor. I didn’t know whether she could see me. Normally, residential windows reflect light, but then the glass today was clear. Below me was wet glitter: alien skins, the plastic roads, windows reflecting windows into infinity.

  I sat in the front room by the elevator, feeling chilled, as though I’d been rain-soaked, too. My cock stirred vaguely in my pants, more restlessness than serious arousal, but I wished I could be alone with Marianne before the Sharwani arrived.

  The elevator door slid down. “Help us, Tom,” Marianne said. The two Shiny Blacks—I’d made up my own designations—and we humans pushed the two gurneys out of the elevator.

  The Sharwani adults were drugged unconscious. Their child clung to one and kept speaking to it in a soft voice. We wheeled them into the room with the polycarb wall and lowered the gurneys to the floor.

  “They are beautiful,” Marianne said.

  I didn’t remember the Sharwani as lovely, but I’d met them only once before in near-combat conditions, an interrupted First Contact with another species. Nasty little Sharwani had bombed a two-million-population city to bluff another new species away from the Federation.

  These captives looked like what ferrets crossed with angels would aspire to be: blond hair, cheekbones like pyramids hidden under skin that went from bare to fur as dense as moleskin, fur on the points of the cheekbones and along the jaw. Dense eyelashes matted with gum now gave them a hurt look. I pulled the sheet off the male; he wore a brown Federation-style tunic and pants. To conceal species differences, our tunics covered our middle leg joints, and the pants were baggy. The male Sharwan also wore a shock bracelet and a second ID bracelet on his left arm.

  Marianne said, “The female’s right wrist is broken.” She made a move to pull the sheet off the female, but the baby lashed out at her.

  One of the Shiny Blacks from the Institute of Control said, “If you’d go out for a few hours, we’ll finish the installation.”

  The other one said, “Your black opaque-skinned con-specific plays music at Wanderers in the Green Light Building, three parks inland.”

  It took me a second to realize they meant Sam Turner, the black man who’d been married to Marianne’s sister, Molly. I wondered if the Shiny Blacks made up a name for us, too, like the window-skinned ones. Marianne said, “Yangchenla will probably be there.”

  Funny thing, even though I loved Marianne better, I didn’t really like seeing Yangchenla happy with another man. “She can be a real bitch, too,” I said in English, “but I miss human music.”

  Human music was what Sam Turner played. Turner’s training came both from Oakland black clubs and equal opportunity laws bearing down on Juilliard. When he was really hot, all of what we humans could be came through on his harpsichord, h
is digital piano, or his woman’s Tibetan drums. Black man, married to an Asian woman born on Karst, Sam denied all limits other than the purely human.

  He was lucky. Humans these past two years were a fad, considered representatives of a culture on the cusp between the primitive and the techno-bore future where all the machines on all the planets evolved into one chain of forms.

  Sam said, privately, that humans had passed the cusp, around the time of Mozart, and had begun teching down toward functional forms ever since. He didn’t date the music he played for the cusp-culture lovers, though.

  Marianne said, “I miss Sam.”

  The Shiny Blacks watched us decide to go hear Sam and his group. “Get your rainclothes,” the female with her tiny breasts just under her clavicles said. “We’ll stay until you get back.”

  So we left the Shiny Black couple with the unconscious Sharwani and went out in raincoats and clear plastic hats through the wet parks behind the buildings. One park over, odd lights bounced through the raindrops onto plants that looked like red glass or brown dead things, evolved under suns harsher than ours.

  By the time we got to the Wanderers’ Club building, I felt ambivalent about seeing other humans, especially ex-lovers with ex-brothers-in-law.

  The Green Light Building front was made of white tile with chrome inlays under a writhing mass of green neon tubes, with enough red lights to intensify the green for those species who saw that low in the light spectrum. I put my hand in front on a dark tube and felt heat—visible as infrared to some species. Marianne said, “I’ve seen buildings like this before.”

  “They just opened a few weeks ago,” I said.

  “In San Francisco,” Marianne said.

  Green light tubes covered the first two stories of the building, twisting, writhing, yet not so brilliant as to be obnoxious to the people living on the street. Green Light Building housed clubs instead of people; the lobby was jammed and full of sweat and gland odors of over fifty species. The graphics for Wanderers lit up over the elevator, and we filed in with other species evolved from tropical brachiators. A different club light lit over the second elevator and a mob of crepuscular-types got on that one, large eyes reflecting the lights. Then our elevator doors closed, and we began going up, a couple standing in the corner muttering about us being the same species as the musician. Turner Musician—they’d translated his name into the closest Karst One equivalent.