A Change In The Air

Through the window Bartleby could see the houses of the town glaring white in the light of two suns, set amidst a bleak winter-scarred landscape just surrendering to the first wave of bursting green vitality which would soon consume it. Beyond rose the high sand hills, their gaunt profiles silhouetted against a golden red sky. Beyond them, he knew from memory, lay miles of flat arid plain, becoming moister and more fertile until they turned into the great southern swamps, near-endless, stewing and stinking with unfettered life. And beyond them, thousands and thousands of miles beyond, was Her.

"Now

that's

a view," exclaimed K'ar-Eek, standing beside him. "This is more like it! I'll take this one."

Bartleby turned back to him. "But I told you, this is

my

room."

"And

it's bigger than that shoebox next door you tried to fob me off with."

He sighed. "Well... I don't expect to be here much longer than a few more nights, just until the air changes. Alright. You take this one if you want it, I'll stay in the other."

"Brilliant!" He threw one of his two huge suitcases onto the bed and began to unpack lavishly. Bartleby gathered together his things; it didn't take long.

"Let me know when you've settled in," he called as he walked out the door. "I'll give you the tour."

* * *

The Earthrise Institute occupied a small pyramid of concrete and glass in a quiet backwater of a remote, agreeable and highly multicultural little planet. In the first year of its existence, it had employed people of no less than seventeen different species, all hard at work on one problem regarding one species living on one planet, only discovered so few decades ago. Soon, likely enough, the inhabitants of planet Earth would discover they weren't alone. And when that happened, they would need to be able to communicate.

Bartleby was one of the few employees ever to have lived on or even visited Earth. He reflected that if the friends he'd known there had been shown the Institute, the first thing they'd ask about (after the inevitable surprise about the existence of civilisations beyond their own thin atmosphere) would be how people of different species managed to work and get along with each other, given the diverse opinions regarding manners, communication, hygiene, ethics and the like. The only answer he'd be able to give was that it was all a big muddle, and most people somehow managed to find a way.

The way he'd found was to keep himself as far removed from the noise and confusion as possible. A square viewing platform ran around the top floor of the building, and it was one of a number of places he knew where he was almost assured solitude. But not today. He sighed inwardly as he stepped out to see a nonhuman figure leaning against the rail, gazing out across the valley.

"Bartleby?" she said without turning around. His consternation melted away as he recognised K'er-Sekla the sydian, probably the only alien he knew who he actually enjoyed talking with.

"Enjoying the view, K'er-Sekla?"

She glanced round at him, her eyes gleaming blue in what Bartleby knew to be the close equivalent of a human smile. "It gets better every day. Shouldn't you be showing the new fellow around? Swapping Earthish gossip?"

They spoke in English, which had emerged as a surprising Esperanto among assorted races united only by an interest in Earthish culture and linguistics. K'er-Sekla's was unusually fluent; if he didn't look at her he could almost forget she wasn't human herself. Not that a sydian was so very different from a human; that is, if you didn't count the tail. Or the dense, even coat of short golden fur covering the whole body, or the unearthly face with its colour-changing eyes. Or the nimble four-fingered hands or handlike feet, or the clicking-singing voice, or the proportions of the limbs, or the way they moved... but they had two legs, two arms, were about five feet tall and wore clothes, and that made them close to human compared to most of the other species at the Institute. Compared to the far, for example.

"I was giving him the tour, but it's on hold while he unpacks twice his own weight in baggage."

In my room,

he thought, but didn't say.

"Really that much?"

"Definitely. He persuaded me to volunteer to carry it all up the stairs."

Her eyes flashed in amusement as he came to stand beside her, hands on the railing, staring out at the view.

"And no sign of a change in the air yet?" she asked.

He took a deep breath to be sure, but he well knew the answer. "No. Nothing yet."

"Good."

Bartleby looked at her, puzzled.

"I mean," she said quickly, "I like having you around. I'll miss you."

He nodded. "I'll miss you too, K'er-Sekla, but I have to go."

It was then that she moved her hand over to rest on his. He felt the warm tickle of her furred fingers interleaved between his own, in sharp contrast with the cold metal railing beneath his palm, not knowing what to make of the unprecedented gesture. Sydians, in his experience, didn't go in for casual personal contact. Should he say something, do something? No, better just to accept it and enjoy it. Even if he wasn't sure what she meant by it, it felt right.

"Bartleby, we know each other fairly well now. You can just call me Sekla if you want to."

Bartleby glowed inside. Permission to address a sydian by name without the formal prefix was a more intimate gesture of trust and friendship than any slight physical contact.

"I'd be honoured, K'er-Sekla. I mean, Sekla."

She flashed him another blue-eyed smile. "I'm going to get something to eat." A finger gestured between him and the landscape. "You two enjoy yourselves."

She gave him a fond pat on the hand before sliding away towards the mess hall, leaving Bartleby feeling for once entirely at peace with himself and the world, if only for a few minutes.

* * *

"The mess hall," Bartleby said, hurrying through the doors after K'ar-Eek, "most important room in the Institute."

The other man wrinkled his nose in affected distaste as his eyes swept the room. "I can see how it gets its name."

Like any space occupied by people from a wide assortment of species, the air carried a potent mix of strange odours, some pleasant and some less so. Chatter from a dozen different tongues echoed through the big square room, chief amongst them a unique form of pidgin English.

The hall was intended principally as a place to eat, laid out in long tables, but had been broadly adopted as a communal office and general living space, littered with papers, books and interfaces interspersed with plates, bowls and bulbs of food. People came here to work, eat, gossip, play, hold meetings, or all at the same time.

"If you don't want to work in here, and I won't blame you, I certainly don't, then you can..."

"One moment, Bartles."

"Bartleby," he corrected automatically, but K'ar-Eek was already strutting towards a nearby table, his eyes locked on the sydian sat there.

Sekla was eating from a bowl of nuts, removing the thin shells with the incredibly dextrous fingers of one hand without looking. Her eyes, brown with concentration, were fixed on a sheet of paper, on which she was scribbling something illegible with her other hand, using the inimitable sydian scrawl requiring the use of two pens held like chopsticks between her long fingers.

She glanced up as K'ar-Eek approached, and smiled. "Hey there, Bartleby, come sit down here. I'd appreciate some good company while I work."

A frown of indignation shot across Bartleby's face. How could she possibly think the other man was him? Just when he thought they'd drawn so close! They didn't even look alike! But... no. He thought more carefully. They were both tallish, thickly built, clean-shaven men with short dark hair. To his eye they were little alike perhaps, but to a sydian, without his advantage of a good chunk of the brain dedicated solely to processing human faces, there was probably little to tell them apart. He'd made similar mistakes himself and they were always embarrassing, but quickly forgiven.

Of course, technically, there

were

no humans in the Institute...

K'ar-Eek rectified her confusion by dropping his human visage. There was a strange jolting sensation as the man disappeared and a sydian materialised in the same space. Bartleby always found it disconcerting to watch. It gave the impression that nothing had really changed, that you were just seeing the same thing from a different angle, and the knowledge that this was actually a quite accurate description didn't help at all.

"K'ar-Eek, new anthropologist." He made a strange contortion of his limbs that Bartleby recognised as the sydian equivalent of a formal bow, and in doing so skilfully contrived to get entangled in the sensors and transmitters of his visage generator strapped liberally around his body.

The visage generator, a device allowing a person to simulate the form of another so well as to require special instruments even to detect, was arguably the pinnacle of technological achievement to date. It was so high-end that only a few thousand existed across all known space. When Earth's civilisations had been discovered years ago, a plethora of races had hurried to send down visage-wearing researchers to investigate humanity. The payback was not immediate. It takes years for a person to learn how to walk, to talk, to think, and the same is just as true with a virtual body as a real one. Subjects were sent as young children with their memories blocked, growing up never suspecting they were anything but human, until one day, as young adults, the two halves of their minds came snapping back together. Bartleby tried not to think about that day. It still gave him headaches.

And so about twenty years after the discovery of Earth, those who had survived the mental recombination came back, telling of the planet's wonders and horrors. Every one of them half human, half something else. It was some of them who had founded the Earthrise Institute, and more had joined later, Bartleby amongst them. Looking around the mess hall, he could see half a dozen apparently human figures, going by Earthish or alien names as they chose, and he knew them all: there was Seul-Ki the antoran, Grey-Eye the hyeloki, Georgina the greater ilk, Anatarikietti the plentilalius... and Bartleby the far, of course.

Sekla rushed over with exaggerated concern to extract K'ar-Eek from his visage generator, pretending not to have noticed the deliberate nature of the entanglement. Bartleby watched her, wishing not for the first time that he could move with the same kind of sweeping grace that she managed to put into every motion.

"Come on, let's get you out of that thing... here, let me undo this... no you're making it worse, here, let me hold this hand out of the way..."

K'ar-Eek showed every sign of enjoying himself immensely. "Someone with hands as talented as yours must surely be a surgeon?"

"Oh no, guess again. Move your arm this way... look at this, whyever did you let anyone strap these so tightly, with soft fur like yours?"

"Got it. With a voice like that you

must

be the director."

"She's the cook," said Bartleby shortly. Technically it was true. Sekla had a talent for languages but no qualifications, and had been able to get into the Institute only by taking a job as the sydian cook. By the end of the first week she had made no attempt to cook anything, but had picked up such an exceptional amount of English that the director had let her stay, without any formal change of job description. Meanwhile, the sydians had to cook their own meals.

Neither sydian paid him any attention. Probably they were too distracted to have heard him. Somehow he felt the tour was over, and turned back to his room feeling sour. Sydians were notoriously open in their affections, and Sekla and K'ar-Eek's flirting was nothing unusual; but something about it had irritated him, and he didn't care to look too closely at what it was.

* * *

His new room looked out over a brick wall a few meters away. He opened the window and stuck out his head, breathing the air in deeply. No change. It looked like it probably wouldn't happen tonight.

He sighed and sat down at the small desk. At least it would give him time to finish this report before he left...

As he worked, the bright afternoon faded into evening. Dimly he could hear the world inside the building: the chattering and clicking and squawking of speech, the thud of doors, the clatter of dishes. Next door he heard K'ar-Eek settle into his old room. Through the open window he could hear the world outside too: the chirping and calling of birds, and insects, and reptiles, and stranger things. He focused on the sounds, trying to soothe his restless heart, and tried not to think about how much he missed Her. It was cold with the window open, but he couldn't bear to cut himself off from the outside world; from Her. Instead he wrapped himself in a blanket to keep warm.

He must have been completely absorbed in thoughts of Her, because he didn't hear his door open, and jumped when he felt a long-fingered hand on his shoulder. He turned quickly in his chair to see Sekla standing over him, smiling, holding something on a small plate. She was wearing different clothes to before: a variation on the usual sydian robe-dress but more decorative, fashioned from a soft green velvet, and showing just a little more than the usual amount of fur.

"Here. I brought you some food. Eat it."

He looked at it critically. It

looked

like caramel shortbread. It was hard to be sure: several times he'd casually bitten into what looked like normal Earthish fare only to discover some unpalatable alien delicacy.

But that wasn't why he hesitated. In sydian culture, the offering of food was usually a precursor to sex. Wasn't it? He tried to remember. It was as though a human had sidled up to him, placed a hand on his blanketed thigh and said in a sugary voice, "it's cold out here, do you mind if I join you under there?" But then, maybe he had it wrong?

He dithered, unsure how to respond, and in the end his hunger made his decision for him. He bit into it cautiously. It was caramel shortbread, and good, too.

"This is really good stuff. Did... um... did you make it?"

"No. Anatarikietti made them, I just swiped one for you."

"Oh. Um... thanks. I won't tell him."

He made to take another bite, but she snatched it away and laid it to one side. A furry hand came to rest on his thigh, fingering the coarse thick fabric of the blanket.

"It's a bit cold out here," she whispered in a voice that he could swear had a sugary quality, "do you mind if I... join you under there?"

His heart hammered. Surely not? He hesitated. It wasn't that the thought of sex with Sekla had never slipped into his privatemost thoughts when he wasn't looking, and it certainly wasn't that he found the thought unappealing. It was just that he'd never, ever, even for a moment, imagined that it could be anything more than just a thought. Now that it seemed a very real possibility he was suddenly faced with very real questions he needed to answer. Might he endanger a closely valued friendship? Were humans and sydians even compatible? And most importantly, what would She think?

He was still deciding how he was going to reply when he found his hand already lifting up one side of the blanket in invitation. She squirmed onto his knee, facing him, and pulled the blanket back over them both. Drooping towards him, she let her head rest against his chest. Unsure what else to do, Bartleby placed an arm cautiously around her back.

They sat still for some minutes, he nervous and uncertain but enjoying the contact and intimacy after months of near isolation. Sekla was warm, and her golden fur made her peculiarly soft and comfortable to hold. Her gentle, spicy aroma filled his nostrils agreeably. He felt he could cuddle her like this all night. Maybe it was all she'd wanted, after all?

At length she stirred and looked up at him. "So, are you ready to show me how a human does it?"

Bartleby quite suddenly noticed her eyes. They were

green.

He'd never seen that before, but he knew what it meant.

"You want me to show you how a human does... what?" he said stupidly, knowing what she meant but needing confirmation anyway.

Her eyes laughed. "I want you to show me how a human does...

this

."

Her hand again touched his, warm and tickling, her fingers gently caressing. The other hand she laid flat against his chest, fingers running across the fabric of his shirt in unmistakably sensuous designs. Her long, thin tongue flickered hungrily over her lips as she looked him up and down.

Up to this point, Bartleby had still entertained the possibility that he was suffering some colossal misinterpretation of her intentions, as can so easily happen between different races. Now, he had to admit he was left with no doubt whatsoever about what she wanted. He was suddenly very conscious of the rapid beating of his heart. A dozen sentences all ran through his head and tried to get out at once.

"Um... I... ah... you..."

Her hand found the bottom of his shirt and eased underneath, rippling fluidly across his bare stomach, tingling. Handlike feet gripped his calves. He spluttered something even more incoherent.

"What's the matter? You seemed so keen before. Have you gone

shy

on me, K'ar-Eek?"

K'ar-Eek?

Ah. Bartleby grimaced. Of course, he thought. She thinks you're K'ar-Eek. She doesn't know you switched rooms. A shame. He'd really thought for a while that they might...

"Listen. I'm sorry, but I'm not..."

"Ssssssshhhhhhhh! It's alright if you're nervous. Don't talk. Just do."

He'd lifted his arm away from her and had been holding his hands out awkwardly, not knowing where to put them, afraid to touch her. She took them gently in hers and carefully placed them around her hips. He let them stay there.

"But I'm not..."

He found a furry finger pressed to his lips, silencing him. She shifted her legs, wrapping her knees closely around his hips, her long tail hanging between his knees, curling around his ankles. Bartleby knew she must be able to feel his arousal.

"I'm not..."

She kissed him before he could finish, lips pushing against lips, turning, locking, embracing. Bartleby had never kissed someone of another race before. He'd had relationships with a far, as a far, and with humans, as a human, but that was all. K'ar-Eek's lips felt strange, tasted strange, moved strangely. And equally as strangely, he found he liked it. He even liked the tickle of fur against his lips. He felt himself kissing back, unable to resist.

As they pulled apart he stared into her eyes. Big, blazing green eyes. Green with lust.

"That wasn't so hard, was it? Now, what was it you wanted to say?"

His sense of virtue battled for control and lost. "Can we do that again?"

They kissed again, more confidently this time. Without rising from his chair he let his hands move across her back and pull her closer, needing her, squeezing her soft flesh, pulling at her fur and the soft velvet of her dress, trembling. Her feet rubbed against his thighs, her hands flowed across his shoulders, her tail squirmed around his legs. He was barely aware of his erection pulsing and heaving beneath her.

It didn't, however, go unnoticed by Sekla. After what seemed a timeless, glorious dream she broke away and looked down. "Look at this, K'ar-Eek," she said, shifting her weight up and down experimentally, "I didn't know humans were so... big! You must have almost

twice

what a sydian carries around down there!" Bartleby, somewhat self-conscious, tried to pull her into another kiss but she pushed him away, moving herself back onto his knees to let her hands flow over his bulge, feeling its contours through the fabric. He breathed heavily, feeling suddenly very hot.