Becoming Alien by Rebecca Ore Page A

“No offense meant.”
    I nodded curtly, almost like a Gwyng.
    “What was that about?” Cadmium asked.
    “Illegal business everyone expects me to get back into. I hated it, hated what it did to my brother.”
    “Poor little xenophobe,” Rhyodolite said.
    “I’m not a xenophobe.”
    “Prove it,” Rhyodolite replied. “Play with us.”
    We didn’t go straight to the farm, but drove up to Roanoke where the Gwyngs bought a carton of science fiction books and a dish antenna and electronic gear.
    Under human fluorescent lights, I noticed where they’d been cut to make them look human, almost saw the forms they should have had.
    Alone for a while in the Sears store, I stood unwatched behind some stoves. Rhyodolite flipped from channel to channel in the television department while Cadmium was outside loading socket wrenches and a soldering iron on the truck. Now, I thought. Now what, some crazy part of me responded. Save my species? No, they could have exterminated us earlier if they wanted to. I’ll save myself. I was just an ex-felon on Earth. Other humans were xenophobic nuts, and I wasn’t like them. I’d take the space gig.
    Cadmium, who’d come back inside, touched my arm. “I’m coming,” I said.
     
    The young Gwyngs rigged up the TV something awful. Reception came from all over, like cable. At night, bored and tense, we watched re-runs of M*A*S*H, Buck Rogers, and anything else if they couldn’t find a war movie or space flick to make humans look bad.
    Finally, a few nights later, we got bursts of patterned interference on several different TV channels, and the Barcons went out to re-spread the landing grid.
    Signals from the ship took hours to reach us, blurring the TV programs in flashing patterns only Gwyngs could read.
    “Now,” Black Amber said after two days. The Barcons trudged out to the barn while the Gwyngs continued watching TV. The ship’s transformation into our space flickered the house lights.
    We froze. Finally, we heard the Barcons and Tesseract talking as they came up the porch steps. One of them knocked on the door, and I got up to open it. “More polite this way?” Tesseract said. “May we come in?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “These people have been driving me nuts.”
    “And we haven’t been made comfortable either,” Rhyodolite said. “They have legends of dangerous bats.”
    For the last three egg trips, the Gwyngs had collected heaps of stuff that showed how we imagined aliens. The living room looked like fifteen-year-old science nuts had invaded: boxes of sloppy soldered wires and chips hooked to the TV, science fiction and flying-saucer books flopped all over the carpet, beer cans and E.T. and Wookies models on the tables. The Gwyngs looked from Tesseract to the stuff as if they hadn’t collected it themselves and oo’ed.
    “Still,” Tesseract said, stepping over one of the boxes, “the Rector wonders if we should contact this planet as an experiment. They’d love our technologies.”
    “Mica wanted me to take his place at the Academy. If you contacted us officially…”
    The other aliens looked at me as if I’d been a rude child. Black Amber nodded and began to clench her fists, but Tesseract eased his fingers between hers and gently opened her hands, talking softly to her in alien. He’d wanted my reaction to that proposal, I realized, so he spoke in English.
    “If your planet is contacted,” Tesseract explained, still rubbing Black Amber’s hands and elbows, “then we would take home government candidates before we took legacies.”
    Great, if the universe met Earth, I’d still be a parolee, busting hump on mortgage payments and Warren’s and my fines.
    Black Amber spread her lips, stared an eye-stab at me. Black Amber’s in a bind, I thought. Black Amber, you allow contact—you keep me out. But you’d hate to see us killer xenophobes in your Federation.
    Silent and tense, we hunched over our laps, sitting in the living room. Finally Tesseract said,