Becoming Alien by Rebecca Ore Page B

“Black Amber, is this really impossible for you?”
    “They shot me, they killed Mica. Hideous species. Contact would be stupid.”
    “Tom,” Tesseract said, “I’ll have tea with Black Amber, then talk to you.”
    Black Amber and the big crested alien went into Mica’s old bedroom. I remembered Mom and Dad going in there to talk in private, and how little I felt then. The same now. The two Barcons heated water, then suggested that the younger Gwyngs and I go tend the layers. We loaded feed onto the trolley, them helping me, not saying much, and gathered the eggs and washed them.
    When we came back inside, I heard Black Amber crying in the bedroom and Tesseract’s low voice. My hands got cold and tingly, my mouth sticky.
    “Black Amber hates losing,” Cadmium told me. Finally, Amber and Tesseract came out, Tesseract stroking her side gently. Black Amber’s eyes looked glazed.
    Tesseract spoke softly to her in alien, and she went back to Mica’s old room. While the Barcons made more tea, Tesseract asked me where we could talk privately. “Warren’s room,” I suggested, the farthest from Black Amber.
    After I closed the door, Tesseract walked over to the window and looked at my garden. I’d just plowed it two weeks before they came.
    “You should understand about Gwyngs,” he finally said, sitting backward on a straight chair, chin to chair back and legs around it—the way Warren sat. “Gwyngs work harder to be alive than almost any other sapient. Twice they crawl into pouches. You know what a marsupial is? The true mother’s pouch, then a host mother’s pouch. And Mica was Black Amber’s true son. Once they leave the pouch host, life for them is easy, very social. No Gwyng expects death before brain rot, unless the Gwyng goes insane, which to them is premature senility.”
    “Oh.”
    “Mica was nearly insane, by their standards, before he died.”
    The Barcons brought in a strange un-Earthly tea. I felt more relaxed after I drank some, then realized it was drugged. Well, this is it, I thought. Tesseract waited for the tea to loosen me up. I felt tranced, worried as hell, but the body odd, like the fear didn’t register. Slowly, I lay back on the bed.
    “So Mica was her baby?” I said. “I remember when I was five and Warren was a god.”
    “I met Mica once,” Tesseract said. “Charming for a Gwyng.”
    The tea loosened hideous memories: the shotgun noise, the gunshots, Alph/Mica crying on the porch, legs full of bird shot. I rolled belly down and mumbled, “I miss him.” I almost forgot Tesseract wasn’t human, then looked at him and saw that crest, skin, and flesh over a bony skull ridge, the big jaws. “The tea’s drugged,” I said.
    “For relaxation purposes,” he said.
    “Sure,” I said. “It doesn’t make me feel…” I started shaking with sobs, missing Mica worse than I thought, missing Warren. Tesseract touched me, and I pushed him off and asked, “What was in the tea?”
    He stared down at me, eyes hazed slightly, and I remem bered he’d drunk tea with Black Amber. What a univ erse! I wondered what came next, then he stood up, stretched, reached at the ceiling curiously with his fingers. Smiling, he said, “This tea is difficult, but we have better teas.”
    I said, “I’m sorry I didn’t get him away. Was he really going crazy? Warren said cats lived among humans and didn’t go crazy.”
    “The Gwyngs are unique sapients.” He sighed. “We try, in our Federation, to smooth over the differences, but…”
    I cut in, “Cadmium says Black Amber doesn’t like losing.”
    “Be kind to her. You’ll spend some time together while we turn her back to Gwyng-shape. We’ll do it at the observatory station, since she’s dominant for a Gwyng and would be uncomfortable in your shape among her own people.”
     
    But what did becoming-a-cadet mean? Later that afternoon, I got Tesseract away from the others and offered him a beer, if he could drink on duty. He smiled. I