Being Alien Read Online Free

her, subconsciously kicking him off as though she were a small bat being attacked by a hunting bird. “And you saw the two other males.”
    “I ought to get my own place,” I said, wondering if the two other males had had any chance with her, or were there just for show, to prove Black Amber’s matings were open, honest by Gwyng terms.
    “You needed company right after Yangchoochoo left.” She never pronounced Yangchenla’s name right, despite her ability to memorize what to a Gwyng were nonsense sounds. She pulled off her Gwyng rig and pulled on the Sub-Rector’s uniform, full-length tunic and pants, twisting away from me so I didn’t see her front, but still acting rather post-heat, humming and brushing up against me as we left the plane. I felt embarrassed, as usual. She knew. Being Gwyng, she liked to tease.
     
    Before I left, Black Amber sent me a message on my computer terminal: THREE GOALS. TWO OBLIGATORY, ONE OPTIONAL. RESEARCH JAPAN, GO TO DINNER WITH TWO HUMANS, FIND A WIFE. KARRIAAGZH AND I AGREE.
    I leaned away from the screen and worried. Everyone told me that humans were weird. Even I wasn’t allowed to spend more than sixteen hours on duty without taking sleep time. Federation rule for fragile species, near xenophobes. Now I was going to have to face millions of my weird fellow creatures again. I was desperate to go back and scared, too. Shit, I thought in English, no sooner than I adjust to here…

 
    2
Berkeley
    Space gates eat angular momentum and the space-time we skip between departure and arrival. Outside at intersect was nothing, not even time, much less a stray hydrogen atom. Granite Grit, who studied astronavigation, explained that we intersected through vibrating multi-dimensional hypercubes, but Gwyng mystics claim we destroy and re-create the universe with every jump.
    At a Karst orbital station, I wedged myself into a round transport pod and sealed the hatch from the inside with six four-inch wing bolts, tightening them good with both hands. The in-transit light, one of a pair of little diodes over the hatch, went on a minute or so later.
    The pod lurched like some giant was playing tennis with it, whirled a few times, stopped for ten minutes, then dropped and rocked forward gently. Before I got really claustrophobic, the arrival light flashed. I undid the hatch and pushed it until the seal peeled off.
    As the hatch swung free, a blond Ahram about thirty years old, his head real blocky without the usual skull top crest, raised it to the catch position. He was lighter skinned than the Ahrams I’d seen before—my shade—and seemed to be shaved down in the face. As I climbed out with my bag, he backed away as if he didn’t know what to expect, getting a human delivered to him when Earth had billions of other humans around outside.
    “You grow a beard?” I asked him in English.
    “We’re various, too. Call me Alex. Here’s your passport and driver’s license. If anyone asks about your accent, you’ve been in Asia.” He spoke perfect English—the Federation had fixed his vocal organs just as I’d been surgically rearranged to speak good Karst.
    I swung the hatch down on the pod and tightened the external dogs. The air turned blue around the pod a second before it skipped out of this space-time. I looked around the room—no windows, metal double garage door, gyp board walls—and saw two dehaired Barcons, looking like alien caricatures of Negro wrestlers. Dressed in jeans and UCal sweatshirts, they squatted by the wall, arms folded across their chests, a perfect match for size. Barcons made me nervous. They were generally Federation medics, remote in their treatment of our alien illnesses, but sometimes they used their medical knowledge to rebuild brains. They could kill for the Federation, but that was very rare.
    But dehaired or in molt, they could pass for human—if you didn’t notice the jaws with too many angles between chin and earlobe.
    The air felt muggy, but cool,