Human to Human, page 23
As we rode the elevator up to our floor, Cromwell asked, “Have you read Thomas Wolfe?”
“About Asheville and how you can’t go home again? But I know I’ve changed.”
“When my father was in his sixties, he went back to his little town in South Carolina. Everyone was so proud, then, of him, and of me.” We got out and walked down the green velvet halls looking for Suite 1120.
“Of you?”
“Yes. I flew shuttles.”
“Oh.”
“That’s why I went with Weiss’s gate team. I dreamed about space since I was a baby.”
I almost said, it should have been you and not me, because I’d never thought about space until I found Mica. Space was for the kids with engineering degrees. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. You can help us.”
We went inside the suite on top of the hotel. Cromwell pulled back the drapes, and we stared out toward Floyd. A glow surrounded Bent Mountains like a small city was hiding behind it. Nothing like that had been in the Floyd I knew as a kid.
I pulled the drapes closed and said, “I miss my mate and child.” I hadn’t realized I was going to say that until I did. The loneliness that rushed through me with the words startled and appalled me.
Cromwell sighed and said, “What did you say?”
I’d spoken Karst One without realizing it. “I miss my wife and son. Maybe we ought to skip going to Floyd? Maybe?”
“You aren’t afraid of those people, are you?”
“Somewhat. And besides, it’s changed.”
“You’ve changed, too, but…” Cromwell stopped, walked back to the suitcases and began unpacking, hanging a fresh uniform and a civilian suit.
“I’m not as good with humans as I am with others.”
“I’m none too fond of self-pity.” He looked up from the drawer where he was putting his socks, jaw muscles locking down.
“What if I really could have saved Mica?”
Cromwell looked like he was going to say something quite harsh, then he said, “I wasn’t there.”
“No, you weren’t.”
“You’re human. That seems pretty inescapable. Do you need to have that be a problem?”
“Sapients…” I was going to tell him something I’d learned on Karst, about how flexible all sapients were, how that was the point of developing intelligence. “What is intelligence for, do you think?”
“It makes us better competitors.”
“Or more able to come up with win-win games.”
“Gentry, if your Federation doesn’t play win-win games, I’m personally coming after you. This is unofficial, of course.”
I was about to tell him, the Universe is very complex, but decided what would happen would happen. I’d go to Floyd; the human race would go to space; we’d all die with the future holding our grandchildren hostage. “I’ll go to Floyd, but I was wondering if the CIA or you guys prompted the sheriff to say what he did.”
“You’d like to believe that, wouldn’t you?”
I asked, “Would you know if Angleton had rigged it?”
“I don’t care. I don’t like seeing my kind reduced to outnumbered primitives in a system that doesn’t have to be in the least bit considerate of us. What could the Sharwani do to stop you? Become bullies themselves? We can’t refuse to join your Federation, but what will it do to us?”
“What will you be willing to sell off cheap to get dear?” I remembered the Gwyngs constantly building plastic hotels and runways, recycling light degraded plastics into food, waste products into more plastic, always losing something so that Gwyng crews share-cropped gas giants all over the Federation. “The thing is too big to be moral or immoral. I believe we try to work things out so that more creatures gain than lose, but then, the Federation has been good to me.”
“So you could overlook what the same Federation did to the Tibetans?”
“It’s not as simple as that.” Or was it?
“Let’s go to sleep.”
But as Cromwell turned out the lights, he said, “If Angleton were here, he’d ask if you missed your wife’s personality or sex? He told me if it came up, but…” He clicked his tongue off his velar ridge behind his upper front teeth.
I dreamed Karl aimed a pistol at me.
The next day was cold for May: ice-cored rain, sleet fragments melting on the hired car’s windshield. Cromwell went to Route 419 by the half-abandoned mall that was the mall when I was a teenager, too poor and too busy to hang out there myself. Then we turned onto Route 221, going up Bent Mountain beside a light rail line that connected Roanoke to the glow I saw behind the ridge last night.
“Do you know what that’s for?”
“I’m not from around here, but it looks like a maglev.”
“Yeah, guess something’s built on top of the mountain.”
The train—no, one car—came gliding down. The car had no windows. “Must be from an Ess-cee-eff?”
“SCF?”
“Self-contained factory—shopping center, residences, schools, jobs, all in one. That was a freight car.”
“Oh.”
“Government sponsored them in areas with high unemployment, lack of job skills.”
“Backassward places like Floyd County.” I saw some buildings off through the trees, looked like the SCF was about as big as the whole town of Floyd in the late 1980s, maybe about a thousand people.
“We’ve got seven in Vermont, one in the upper part of the state that’s enclosed.”
“Where did the energy come from?”
“We haven’t been ‘backassward’ since you left, Tom. We’ve been tapping some of the minor Jovian satellites.”
“I’m not an engineer.” What was I good at anyway? Alien small talk?
“Don’t underrate your own kind.”
“We’re the most quarrelsome brachiators in the Galaxy.”
“Gentry, you’ve got a chromium steel attitude problem.”
“I’m nervous.”
“Well, let’s turn around and go back then. I hate driving in this fog.”
“No, I’d always wonder.”
Cromwell didn’t say anything more, just drove by the fog-obscured flame azaleas and mountain magnolias. Then we passed a quarter mile of greenhouses, three of them multi-story helical units like I’d seen on Karst for growing vegetables unable to take raw Karst light and air. Then no greenhouses, suddenly, as if the quarter mile had been projected onto the usual Floyd landscape of cow pastures and handbuilt houses.
“Things have really changed.”
“They always do,” Cromwell said.
Floyd had grown, and on the outskirts were four streets of foam-metal apartment buildings, like ones I’d seen the first time in Berkeley. “Pressure space casting,” Cromwell said. “The bubbles strengthen the slabs as well as make it lighter.”
“I saw them in California nine years ago.”
“Those were cast on the planet, not quite as solidly foamed.”
At least, I thought, downtown Floyd was the same, but then I saw that half of the older buildings looked as if they’d been dipped in plastic. The courthouse, 1930s modern, had scaffolding up one side, and the steel Confederate soldier, who’d worn granny glasses for three weeks back in 1988, was lying face up in the grass by his pedestal. Behind the courthouse, where the parking lot had been, was a new building: stone with bronze glass windows. On top was a solar collector.
I went in to the old jail with Cromwell. The sheriff was waiting for us, smiling, while deputies hustled out some freshly arrested kid who was crying like a mad man. I said, “I heard you on television when I was in California.”
“Tom, you’ve changed. You sound like a foreigner now.”
“Alien, perhaps.” I was straining for that educated English with alien overtone effect. “That kid?”
“Not another version of yourself, Tom. He killed his ex-girlfriend. We’ll send him out for psych-evaluation tomorrow.”
“Oh. You think I should have come forward when I was having trouble with Warren, then?”
“Tom, it’s like this. Your life was a swing thing. Could have gone good. Could have gone bad. What’s a deputy, some schoolteachers, to do?”
“You could have tried.”
“One of the schoolteachers did, didn’t he?”
“I thought he liked me being a colorful outlaw.”
“We know you wanted to be a good kid. But one of those aliens died because…”
“Because I was stupid and scared and because Mica didn’t have enough sense to not point a shotgun at Warren. But he didn’t want to be officially found out.”
“Better that than dead,” Cromwell said.
The sheriff’s eyebrows slid toward each other, rumpling the skin over his nose. “Tom, lots of Floyd people, before and after your time, have had to go elsewhere to make good. You just seemed to have gone a bit further than most.”
“Yes.”
“Remember we are proud of you.”
“Did you really try to keep them from trying me, as an adult?”
“Yes.” His, accent faded, a funny hissing yes, then returned, “But I was only a junior deputy then, Tom, and the principal wasn’t a friend of the Gentry boys. Heard about Warren, sorry.”
“I wish I’d left him here.”
“He tried suicide in the halfway house, too. With drugs, not a man’s way of being serious about it.”
“He did it with drugs on Karst,” I said, faintly comforted that the sheriff had told me this, pissed that he’d implied Warren wasn’t man enough to use a gun.
“So, what do you do for your aliens?” the sheriff asked.
“I help coordinate contacts with new species, work with cadets, help negotiate trade agreements.”
“Whatever they are, they’ve been good for you.”
“I think so, too,” I said, wishing I was away from this man who made me feel like I was a teenager craving adult approval.
“Going back to Roanoke tonight?”
“Not quite yet. I’m going by the school.”
The sheriff looked at the deputies standing around and then shrugged slightly. Cromwell’s face seemed forced into impassivity.
The woman working on the computer looked up at me and said, “We’re happy for you, Tom, but don’t go on rubbing our noses in how we misjudged you.”
“Now, Helen,” the sheriff said, but he was more agreeing with her than not. I heard Cromwell’s teeth click together.
“Thanks, Helen,” I said, and I left that place. Cromwell stepped on out after me. It was beginning to clear off.
“Sorry, Gentry,” Cromwell said.
“I’m glad someone was honest.”
“How do you know she spoke for many people here?”
“They looked relieved after she said it. Let’s go back to Roanoke, back to Karst. What am I trying to prove here? I don’t know what you would have done to Mica if I had driven him up to Washington. We can sit here all day hearing ‘we woulda, we woulda.’”
“Gentry, you owe us something as fellow human beings.”
“No. Bullshit. I owe us all going back to Karst and continuing to be the good officiator there. That makes humans look good.”
“Haven’t you screwed up with that?”
I gripped my knees and took a deep breath, feeling my fingers digging in as they dug into Hurdai’s throat. “I trusted Hurdai. I trusted the neural disruptor to work.”
“I have no problem with what you did. Gentry, if you can’t defend your friends, it’s not that perfect out there.”
“Colonel, I’m still learning how to be an officiator and working with you is pushing me more than killing Hurdai did.”
He stopped talking and drove me back toward Roanoke. I said, “Let’s take the Parkway.”
More umbilicaria lichen grew on the rocks than before—the planet cooling, perhaps, to let those black and gray symbiotic shriveled plates spread. Or the road cuts were finally weathered enough. Or I hadn’t noticed before. But otherwise, the Parkway seemed the same, except for more houses out beyond the azaleas and rhododendrons.
“Skunk cabbage,” Cromwell said. “Didn’t realize it grew so far south.”
“You don’t see it down the mountain,” I said. “Don’t punish the woman at the jail for being honest. I really don’t think anyone was trying to save me for Earth back when I was a teenager.”
“You think she committed a breach of security by telling you that you embarrassed them by getting aliens to adopt you? You think we’d go at you that hard? And you think your Federation people are going to trust you after you get back, Tom?”
“Why shouldn’t they?” I said.
11
Back in Roanoke, Colonel Cromwell kept the cab waiting while he made a phone call. I stood in the lobby with my hands in my pockets, wondering when I’d be recognized. Cromwell came back and told me, “Our bags are already down.” A porter was trolleying them from the elevator. When he reached us, Cromwell and I began walking along beside him, back to the taxi.
To the airport, of course. A jet waited for us, pilot standing beside it, drinking coffee in a Styrofoam cup.
“Are we going t Washington?” I asked.
“No,” Cromwell said. “We’re all going back to Karst. Orders. My new duty station, Angleton’s also.”
“Codresque?”
“I don’t know about the Romanian.” We climbed up behind the pilot, and the canopy slid over us.
“Granite Grit?”
“The gaudy parrot on the negotiating team? He’s staying here, negotiating. We didn’t think you needed to help him.”
“Okay, okay.”
The pilot began mumbling and shifting his hands over the control display, then the engines ignited, and we whirled around and began to move down the runway. I put the earphones on and taped the mike to my throat.
Through the electronics, over the sound of the engine, Cromwell said, “You know how to put on the gear?”
“We’re trained in comparative systems,” I said. “Any sapient who doesn’t force things can generally figure out how to work simple systems.”
“Okay, okay to you, too, Mr. Gentry. Why did Granite Grit bring his wife and child?”
“How dangerous is negotiating with humans, anyway? I keep telling them it’s damn near lethal, but obviously, Granite thinks I’m prejudiced.”
“Shit, you’re angry.”
“Yes, I was practically told to leave town because I didn’t turn out as badly as the whole county expected. You don’t let me see Granite Grit. We’re sitting here headed up at almost ninety degrees and bitching about my attitude.”
Cromwell said, “You think I’m happy about leaving my wife and kids to go off to some alien planet?”
“Colonel, bring them with you. My kid has lots of friends from his birth group…be good to expose them to the way the Universe is going to be.”
“Maybe.” Cromwell didn’t say anything more after that. The plane leveled after a long climb into an almost black sky. I watched the mountains turn to long ridges, then disappear into rolling hills, the Mississippi and St. Louis’s arches glinting at the horizon, then closer, over St. Louis at an angle, St. Louis gone, so high the Earth’s curve showed.
Then Cromwell spoke. “Granite Grit said he’s learned how to tell humans apart. That mean something to you?”
“Yes,” said. “It’s just learning to observe more closely, learning what are significant variables within a species and what are general variables.”
“You ever have trouble telling us black people apart?”
“No. Jereks, though…I have trouble with Jereks.”
“Xenophobia? Is it really ingrained?”
“You feel nervous around Granite Grit?”
“We outnumber him here.”
“The closest thing to something that really evokes hard-wired human responses out there are Wrengee, and they’re nice once you get to know them.”
“Could I see pictures?”
“Photos don’t try to make it easy on you.”
“I’m a flyer. I’m not afraid of any human being going, but…”
“You’re afraid you’ll be afraid?”
“I wish I could order you to help me deal with this. I think there’s something in us that can explode…and I don’t trust you. I think you’ve all exploded once there’s some terrible initiation. Granite Grit said something about the initial terror.”
“They depilate or de-feather all the new cadets.”
“That sounds freakish.”
“It makes us all alien to ourselves as well as to the others.” A muscle between my shoulder blades jumped as if his eyeballs pierced me. “It’s hard to talk to you when I can’t see you and you’re right behind me.”
“I’m not going as a cadet. I’m going as a guest.”
“They’ll give you a brown uniform, then.”
“Angleton said fucking the Jerek makes this all seem more real, and you…those aliens more…”
“Accessible? I didn’t think it was love between them.” Vulnerable was the word he really wanted to use. “But who’s going to get wounded? They’re both pros.”
“Angleton started out in Tibet when the Dalai Lama tried to go back. He’s a rough enough boy.”
“Thanks for telling me. I’ll pass it along. And what kind of wars were you in?”
“Nothing eyeball-to-eyeball.” He cut off the microphone, disconnected in the middle of a sigh.
We began to go down as the Pacific Ocean rolled into view. Bay Area, always in and out of Berkeley. Cromwell turned on his mike and said, “We set up a permanent station on the Farallons.”
I remembered seeing, years ago, granite chunks jutting out of the Pacific—weird things. “What about the gate in the warehouse?”
“Closed it down.”
We landed and taxied up to a helicopter. Military guys grabbed us and our luggage and threw us in, belted us to the seats. The jet pilot waved at the helicopter pilot, then we took off over San Francisco, the sunset back in Nevada as we’d beaten the planet roll speed.
Then the chopper hovered and bounced like crazy over a landing pad, caught in updrafts. Finally, it settled and a crew ran out to wire the chopper down.
