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  Marianne touched me on the side and smiled when I looked at her. She said, “He’s still family, really.”

  The elevator doors opened, and I saw Yangchenla in a red shiny sheath dress talking to an Ahram, who ground inch-long molars and rubbed his skull crest as he looked at her. He was almost completely bald-headed, not just along the crest ridge. Yangchenla slid a data card into a hand computer and began writing on the scribe pad. I figured she was hustling a better deal for the gig. Sam came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist, then noticed us and slid his hands up under her breasts and smiled, showing teeth.

  Another Ahram said to us, “Chip?”

  I shuffled through my cards, handed him the credit chip, and said, “Both on this.”

  Yangchenla seemed to have cut her deal by the time I looked back. The Ahram's crest was quite red, and even his scalp seemed flushed a little. Yangchenla scribed a bit more on her computer; he smiled a little, and the red left his crest skin. Sam unwound his arms from her body and went up to the music stand. Two Tibetans were waiting in the dark there.

  Marianne said, “Big crowd.” We threaded through the bodies and sat down, the only humans in the audience. “How expensive was it?”

  “All right for them,” I said, suspecting Yangchenla got Sam a percentage of the gate. “Half a day’s minimum wage for each of us.” I couldn’t really say what that would be in dollars, maybe twenty-five each, as minimum buys more here than minimum would have bought on Earth.

  Marianne said, “It’s okay if mood changers are included.” The one Karst word she used included all legal chemical mood changers: drinks, drugs, electric apparatuses, vibrators, the works.

  I said, “Dinner should be.”

  Sam sat down at his harpsichord and played Bach. The stage under him began to glow, throwing shadows and lights on his face that made him look almost ghoulish. The Bach piece jerked out of the harpsichord, electrically nervous, each note cut separate, more space between the notes than Bach usually got on Earth.

  Marianne breathed in deeply when Sam segued into jazz made from broken bits of the Bach. The Tibetans beat drum beats like little bombs. My mouth went dry. Complex aggressive music. Human music.

  The music cut its closure in the air. I almost clapped Terran style, didn’t, then wished I had. Marianne leaned her lips near my ear and said, “I’d like a tape of that to play when I’m nervous about the Sharwani.”

  The house lights came up and small fuzzy creatures like serious teddy bears began bringing around small vials of liquids. One of them paused at our table and backed off to take a photo of us with Sam in the background, then went about its business.

  Marianne said, “Somehow, I don’t think we could ever be an ordinary human couple.”

  I was about to say, what happens if we’re contacted, but realized if Earth did make contact with the Federation, we’d still be odd, rescued by aliens from a criminal record in my case and post-doctoral boredom in Marianne’s. I said instead, “I just want to be a complete me.”

  She jerked her head back and looked at me as if I’d surprised her. “Are parts missing?”

  I shrugged. Sam began with a tape—Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” The audience began to seem almost afraid of us, then Sam and his sidemen took the Wagnerian motifs and twisted them, almost mocking these aliens for the fears that Wagner stirred. I looked over at Marianne and saw her teeth glinting behind her lips.

  I realized I was angry and didn’t quite know why.” I wondered about us humans.

  When we got back, the female Sharwan was pacing the room, her head hair flared like a Persian cat’s ruff, darker hair showing underneath, looking like undyed roots. She looked around when we came in. The Shiny Black who was awake said, “The male and the child seem calmer.”

  Marianne asked, “Do they understand our language?”

  “Some Wrengu. Karriaagzh’s team captured them on Ersh’s planet.”

  I said, “I know Wrengu.” Ersh was my first contact person from the Wrengee, a creature halfway between lizard and feathered bipedal sapient, scales the size of saucers along his sides that he could raise, eyes like a kitten’s, that dark blue, but shaped wrong. “Maybe it’s only fair that I have to deal with these people since the First Contact team I was on couldn’t stop them.”

  Marianne said, “We both have to deal with them.”

  The Black Shiny male woke up finally and said, “Ersh wants to meet them. We’re not sure that’s a good idea.” Ersh was a reptilian sophont that I’d negotiated with from First Contact with his planet.

  Marianne said, “Where’s Karl?”

  “In his room. The feathered nursery mother stayed until he fell asleep.”

  Marianne said in English, “He loves to cuddle up to feathers. I’m just not fluffy enough.”

  The female Sharwan leaned her hands against the polycarb, the one in a cast looking bruised under the plastic, and pushed. She trembled and then spat at us, a projectile spitting that sounded like a rock, not liquid, against the barrier.

  “We’ve left language tapes,” the Shiny Black male said. “Explain to them what the situation is.” He and his mate left us then with our captives.

  The situation was that the Federation species alone out-numbered the Sharwani more than five hundred to one. That wasn’t the ratio of the populations compared to each other, which was worse for the Sharwani. Some Sharwani wanted to set up a Sharwani-dominated planets system. Ersh told me five Sharwani helped him escape the twenty thousand other Sharwani controlling his planet. It wouldn’t have been fair to the good guys to run a genocide operation on them, even if the Federation did such things.

  And the poor-ass Sharwani thought they were fighting a war.

  Marianne said, “I can’t sleep yet.”

  “They can’t get out.”

  She and the female Sharwan locked eyes, like two pit-bull bitches.

  I woke up with Karl’s fingers gripping my chest hair. Marianne was sleeping beside me, her hair spread all over her face. Karl said, “The Sharwani can’t get Mom, can they?”

  “They’re caged behind armored windows.”

  He looked at me as if used to lying daddies. I couldn’t remember being so sophisticated at seven, but did remember eleven-year-olds like little men before puberty scrambled their first maturity. “Karl, we’ll leave them behind the polycarbonate barrier—the armored windows—until we get back.”

  “It’s like restraint rooms. One of our daddies was in a Control restraint room once.”

  Which species, I wanted to ask him. “One of the people in the children’s group?”

  He looked down at his nails, then up at me with Marianne’s dark eyes, his mouth straight, muscles locked against expression. “We’re not supposed to know.”

  “Keep your secret then.”

  He smiled and said, “Okay, it was the pug-faced male. He got in a fight with another pug-faced male. Nothing serious, only it’s gotten Sul worried.”

  “Bir’s son? He’s…” I remembered him as more like a domestic animal than a sapient baby, walking on four legs, as precocial as a baby pig.

  “He’s learning fast now that he’s walking like us. Dad, he says we treat him funny, but he just this year got smart enough to talk.”

  “Try to forget that he was more like a pet once.”

  “Okay, but he’s afraid to grow up and not be like our other daddies. Male Domicans fight a lot.”

  “Tell him he’ll be happiest being what he is…. No, don’t tell him anything, just be his friend.”

  Karl got out of bed as if he had been surprised to act like such a baby and wanted nobody to mention anything about sleeping with us. “I liked him better as a pet. Now he talks back.”

  “Live with it,” I said, getting my uniform out. Marianne opened her eyes and smiled. I suspected she’d been listening all along. I turned to her and said, “You going to be okay? I could see if Black Amber could talk to me in the city.”

  “I’l
l have the nursery group here a couple of days running, so I won’t be alone with them,” Marianne said. She pulled down her nightgown as she unwound herself from the covers. Yangchenla was never such a restless sleeper. “But does Karl have to go?” Marianne’s breasts rolled under her gown as she stood up. She came up close and didn’t kiss me, just breathed on me with her arms around my neck, crossed at the forearms. I pulled her right up to my lips and heard Karl groan behind us as we kissed.

  I pulled back and said, “Sappy, huh?”

  He didn’t understand the English word, but got the tone. “You said species language limits brain development,” he said, then he worried the inside of his lower lip with his teeth. “I don’t want to be here alone with them.”

  “Not even with your mother?”

  “The child one can get out of the littlest door. His people bombed Ersh’s planet.”

  “Karl, we’re counting on you to tame the little one,” Marianne said. “You’re not afraid, are you?”

  “Why are you asking me that?” Karl said. “You’re afraid, too.”

  “I thought I’d feel okay about leaving them in the security room,” Marianne said.

  “Do you want me to cancel, then?”

  “I’ll ask Karriaagzh what to do. He gave them to us.”

  2

  On the day Karl and I were to leave for Black Amber’s new house, Marianne woke up early and went to the security room. I found her there, staring through the clear wall at the Sharwani. The female Sharwan asked in Wrengu that sounded tremendously rehearsed, “Why am I here?”

  “We’re studying you,” I said. “Others of you, too.”

  She asked again as if she hadn’t understood my own Wrengu, “Why am I here?”

  Marianne said, “Karriaagzh is sendisng over someone who knows their language.”

  “Are you sure you’ll be all right?” I asked, touching her on the shoulder.

  “Fine,” she said. “You must go see your sponsor.”

  Karl and I went downstairs to catch a city bus to the transfer point for the coastal buses. He wasn’t sure he liked Black Amber, but he liked some of the other Gwyngs, even if he couldn’t understand what they said, his skull bones still growing, not ready yet for the temporal bone to be replaced with a skull computer.

  The bus ran on an elevated road over the north side slums. Karl spotted Tibetans below us and said, “I don’t want to play with the country humans again.”

  “Karl, they’re relatives, too.” I saw the building where my brother Warren killed himself—his ultimate drug deal. We’d tried to save him, but the brain rebuilding, he thought, was an alien invasion. Why had I bothered to get him off Earth? Something in me died with him. I never was sure whether that part of me needed to die or even precisely what I’d lost.

  Karl and I transferred to the coastal bus at the North Gate. After we adjusted the seats to fit us, Karl pulled out his reader, put a data card in the slot, and began reading. I looked over and saw pictures. A computerized picture book—he wasn’t that different than I was at the same age, even if his best friends weren’t human.

  Then we were out in the country, a sandy coastal plain that Marianne said looked like south Mississippi. On one side of the road, mechanized plows cut across the field like giant shuttles; on the other side, two people of indeterminate species waded out on the flats with tongs and baskets, so primitive a food-gathering system I knew they had to be high officials escaping their terminals.

  I could skip the primitive. “Karl, do you like this?”

  Karl looked down at his reader, shrugged, and said, “If Rhyodolite isn’t there, I’ll be bored. Look, we’re close.” He pointed at Gwyng herds, the large two-ton marsupials that hosted their young, the smaller blood beasts with ropy neck veins, and the latest Gwyng craze, cloned Jersey cows for milk, one-quarter cream.

  About an hour and a half later, the land began to rise, more rocky, more like California or the north coast of Black Amber’s Gwyng Home island, which was foggy and had diurnal bats and near-sapient seal-things. But here wasn’t really foggy, just cloudier than Karst City. “I thought we were close,” Karl said. He looked back at his reader and changed cards.

  “She’s moved,” I said.

  The bus driver said, “Officiator Red Clay, we’re approaching your destination.” I looked ahead and saw Black Amber’s new house. She’d built in stone, not of planks woven together like a giant basket, light coming in at every plank crossing. I’d seen one stone house on Gwyng Home—very superior Gwyngs there.

  The bus seemed to zoom in on the house, which got bigger and bigger. My eyes fooled me, or the relative clarity of the air where I’d expected fog. The huge house rose almost as raw as the bedrock under it, no true right angles—as if right angles belonged to the poor Gwyngs’ plank and plastic building traditions.

  Finally, as the bus began to climb up to the entrance, I saw Black Amber standing under a stone arch entrance, long arms spread, furred knuckles pressing either side of the arch. The stone around her looked both ponderous and unsteady. Black Amber wore a green Gwyng shift, armholes cut out to the waist.

  The bus stopped and Karl and I got off, a flight of steps below her. Lichen everywhere. How, I wondered, did she get the lichen established so quickly? Her face was impassive, wrinkles sagging slightly, folded along her mouth, along her nostril slits, which moved in and out slightly like furred gills.

  “Red-Clay and child,” she said in Karst Two that my computer transformed out of sonar-pattern language into sequential tones I could hang meaning on. For a second, I regressed to the stage where her speaking was meaningless noise until the computer whispered in my brain. Karl moved closer to me, then, as if he’d caught himself being afraid, stepped toward Black Amber.

  “Black Amber,” I said, coming up to her, stopping a step below. Her shift had gold threads woven in it, almost duplicating the gold in Karriaagzh’s Rector’s Uniform. I put my bag down. She folded her arms around her, hooking her thumbs behind her neck, looking much like a giant bat with her elbows at waist level, the webs collapsed at her sides. I brushed her with my left arm, then she unfolded her arms and took me up against her left side, the web slightly clammy against me. Karl’s jaw muscles clinched as he watched us.

  “You seem/are anxious (about what: several guesses),” she said, my computer layering the meanings with little pauses.

  “Marianne, my Linguist Mate, is with the people from those who fight us. Why didn’t you want her to come?” Black Amber probably could understand the noise I made for Marianne, but I doubted she could attach a meaning to Sharwani.

  “You didn’t ask the Rector bird for them. She did. She deserves to be alone with them.” Black Amber looked at my bag as if wondering what to do with it, then her small Karst One-speaking fuzzy servant came out and took the bag. She twitched her nostril slits in her muzzle and rubbed her sharp chin, then said, “Do you like my new house better?”

  “It’s impressive,” I said. Did she simply invite me here to make Marianne uncomfortable?

  Her brow hairs flared slightly as if what she heard carried the implication of “trying to impress,” or she’d sensed my irritation, then she simply said, “Yes,” and led us inside.

  The floor was basket-woven, very awkward underfoot for a flat-footed ape, like walking on a lumber pile. Through the weave, I saw steel joists. Along the stone walls were brushed-steel platforms at knee level. On the platforms were Gwyng tube sofas like open cocoons and feather-filled mats covered with something like coarse linen, handwoven no doubt, and so terribly expensive unless Marianne’s sister Molly cut a deal with her Gwyng lover’s adoptive mother.

  But where were the other Gwyngs? Karl looked up at me and said, “Where are Rhyodolite and Amber-son?”

  I wished I’d brought one of his friends along. “Have you been ill?” I asked Black Amber. Gwyngs were group creatures, constantly in physical contact with each other. Instinctively, they isolated the sick.

  “No,
I have not been ill.” She went over to a table covered with translucent plastic globs—all colors—and picked up a blue glob like dribbled wax about five inches tall. Staring into it, she turned it in her hands and didn’t speak for a while.

  Karl whispered, “Can I play with those, too?” I knew that Gwyngs saw polarized light patterns and wondered if the plastic globs were patterned in a Gwyng-meaningful way. The room had a brutal elegance except for all that tacky plastic, not like Black Amber’s first beach house at all.

  I asked Black Amber, “If you haven’t been ill, why are you alone then?”

  “The Weaver and Rhyodolite are here. Cadmium is longer.” For a horrible moment, I thought she meant dead, but she continued, “Gone from my social life, but he breathes.” She continued to stare into the plastic.

  “Rhyodolite and Molly are here,” I told Karl, then I asked Black Amber, “Can you read the plastic?”

  “Art objects for not-limited brains,” she replied. “The Rector Bird…” She didn’t finish her statement, but I saw blood engorge her web veins slightly. “Your food is here, eat first alone/talk first with me, you decide.”

  Karl and I had to eat our disgusting vegetables out of her presence. Karl said, “I’m hungry. Where’s the food?”

  She said, “Follow,” her rolling stride and short, bowed legs working well on the plank-basket floor. The rooms flowed into each other, no set purpose to any other than the food room. When we got there, I saw that she’d gotten a table and chairs for us. Gwyngs just ate when they were hungry, from a vein or udder, in the field, from a bottle in the house, microwaved warm or not.