She didn’t wait for her meal. “I have to go. Quotas.”
I felt a unfamiliar urge within me as she rose. A few more people had entered the bar, taking other tables, all humans who could never know who I was. Their faces moved strangely, in their human way: too many horizontal lines, when they closed their mouths or eyes, the eyebrows, the hair line, all oddly horizontal. It frightened me to recognize their feelings in their faces—that I couldn’t really remember what a Lasarént face looked like. I wanted her to stay. She wasn’t Lasarént, but we shared a sun. “Why did you come here?” I said. The bar was small. Even when it was full, it would be as unlikely a place for her work as it was for mine.
She pushed her chair under the table. I noticed her fingers. Their sculpting was perfect, nails exactly human-like. The Trosfrilla have six fingers on their manipulating hands. She lost part of herself for this transition too. “The river reminded me of home.” She floated her hand away and indicated the whole bar. “The light—did you notice?—it’s like Trosfrilla.”
“I saw,” I said, but she was already striding away. The bikers watched her again.
Clearly I made her uneasy. If she wanted to scan and tag a human, she would be as successful here as she would be anywhere else. It wasn’t the quota that drove her away. It was me. I wondered about Trosfrillan morality. Did she consider her work embarrassing? Was this a perversion in her eyes?
Bestiality: Sexual relations with an animal. Humans consider this to be of the lowest sort of behavior. The background for this revulsion is untranslatable. Is there a Trosfrillan equivalent?
As it turned out, I made a contact that night, a woman playing pool by herself. I put quarters on the rail, shot eight-ball with her until closing.
Pool is an elegant game, maybe one of the best of the human recreations. I get lost in the velocities and angles, the cue in my hand, the felt’s smooth plain, the ball’s muted click. We played evenly. She set up for a shot then stood back each time, as if she were shooting it twice. Called her bumpers. A rhythmic pattern she never varied. She clicked her tongue appreciatively when I made a good shot. After a while, I got the impression she didn’t care about the score. She watched the rolling ball like I did, as a physics demonstration. Something beyond personality. Humans startle me sometimes with their depth, and I wished I could talk to her about myself. Last call for drinks surprised me.
We left together, and she said, “Where’s your car?” I’d scanned her earlier. Twenty-seven years old. She showed evidence of having borne children. Impossible to tell more until she was at the apartment, where the equipment was better.
She didn’t talk as we drove away, but she looked out the window. Her unsmiling reflection flickered in the streetlights. Her breathing was even, hands still in her lap. “You have protection?” she said when we pulled into the parking lot.
I nodded. Of course it was designed not to interfere with my measurements or the placing of the tag. Human diseases didn’t threaten me, and I sterilized myself between encounters to not spread contagions. I’m the definition of “safe sex.”
Later that night I drove her back to the Sleepy Jean. After she shut the car door, she leaned in the window. “My name’s Margaret.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m Arlyss. I forgot to ask.”
“I thought you should know.”
I stayed in the parking lot, listening to the river. It started to rain. Big drops slapped against the windshield and splattered on the upholstery. A stream of muddy water crossed the parking lot to empty into the river between the anchored boat and the shore. The lights had been turned off, but the beer signs still glowed, glinting redly in the rain pools. I hadn’t thought of Lasarént for years, not like this.
I once read a bumper sticker on a truck parked outside a Chicago dance club: “Save time: go ugly early.” No translation available.
The next night, at Shatterday’s, a huge singles lounge in north Sacramento, I saw Trudy again. She was on the crowded dance floor, as far as I could tell, by herself. Now that I knew she was Trosfrillan, I could see it in her movements. Their backs have twinned vertebrae. Even in her near perfect human form, she danced distinctly. People gave her room. More than a few watched her, men and women.
I held my beer tightly, waiting for it to warm to a drinkable temperature. Even though I had been in the bar for an hour, I’d made no attempt to hook up with anyone. I contemplated the music, which is not artistic to my ear, but I find it beautiful that they have music. It tells me perhaps we will get along when this race breaks free from its planet, when we reveal ourselves to them. There has to be something worthwhile in a species that devotes so much time to music, and invented pool. And they dance, of course, which speaks well for them, even when it’s clear that much of the dance I see is variations on mating rituals. All posturing and invitations.
Trudy’s dance had none of that in it. Pure movement for the love of movement. The Trosfrilla have hierarchies of dance, achievement levels that take years to master, as do the Lasarént. In the mythology of encounters between our two races, there is a story of a war settled by a long dance. They danced the peace in, goes the tale.
“Do you want to dance?” said the woman. Short, a bit plump by human standards. I checked my watch. Young. Twenty-one. Untagged. Her friends sat at a table a few yards from mine, hiding their giggles. I don’t believe they thought she would have the courage to ask me. She danced well, for a human. At least she moved energetically. The song ended, and we waited for the next. She kept her hand on mine to keep from losing me in the crowd. We danced again. I made frequent eye contact. Responded to her changes in posture. Human dance: postures and invitation. I read her. She read me. Others jostled us. The music pounded in its numbingly unchanging beat. As always, I felt disconnected. I didn’t know her. She would never know me. No point of synchronicity in our lives. I could imagine her in my apartment in an hour or two, trying to close the distance. For me, what happened in the apartment was clinical.
What a fruitless pursuit on her part, even if I was human. I’d seen the same kind of face before. Sad, under the laughter. What would be the best she could hope for? That I wouldn’t leave her at the end of the evening? That I wouldn’t be in another bar on another night dancing with someone else? And then what would she have? Humans don’t meet in the mind as do the Lasarént. She would never press her back into the muddy wall of a den on the banks of the Hydrash, side by side with the family line. She’d never know ecstasy as the fleshy tendrils grew between us, from back to back, burrowed in, transferred genes and nutrients and emotion. She would never touch minds with her den mates in orgiastic communion all winter long.
I almost walked away from her. But a hand pressed against my thigh, and a voice whispered in my ear, “How do you handle the loneliness?” I turned. It was Trudy, already dancing away into the crowd.
What loneliness? I thought. I am a scientist on a mission. My work is my companion. We danced more. I bought the plump woman drinks.
At the apartment, she clung to me after I’d tagged her. “I was afraid I was too ugly for you,” she said.
I told her truthfully, “You are as beautiful as any woman I’ve seen.”
“You wouldn’t kid a kidder?” she said, and tears wet my chest when she pressed her face there.