Being Alien Read Online Free PDF

some.”
    “We’ll wait.” He pulled off the ID and put it and the joint away, then stuck out his thumb. “Marijuana doesn’t relax you?”
    “Shit, my brother got real messed up on drugs.” I noticed I’d dropped out of the prestige dialect Tesseract trained me to.
    “I’m sorry.”
    A car pulled up and Alex asked, “Going to the sunset?”
    “Hadn’t thought about it, buy why not.”
    I’d forgotten how smelly gas-burning cars were, but I hopped right in back. Alex and the driver, a guy with weirdly short hair and a drooping moustache, talked about anti-recombinant-DNA ordinances that some guy named Potrero was trying to pass.
    Shit, Alex fits right in. But he sure wasn’t like other Ahrams I knew.
    As we went through a strip of park, a huge deer jumped in front of the car, crossed the road, and hopped over a hedge. Bigger than a whitetail, a mule deer, I decided.
    “Blacktail,” Alex said. “Seen one before, Tom?”
    I shook my head.
    “Maybe we’ll have a little earthquake for you,” the driver said. “Alex says you’re just back from Asia, never been in California before.”
    “Nope.”
    “Southern boy once, though.”
    “Yeah.” I looked up at the driver in the rearview mirror, but he wasn’t concerned. Alex turned around and furrowed his brow at me as if to say, lighten up. The skin corrugations went up in a steeper than human V, like the brow to crown bone crest that wasn’t showing still influenced his face muscles.
    Going to see the sunset was a Berkeley ritual—over fifty cars had parked along the overlook, people carrying beer cans or joints wandering from car to car. To the west were the sun and a wall of fog.
    “Ocean’s under the fog,” Alex said. He pinned on his permit and started passing the joint around.
    We sat on the hood of the guy’s car. The sun seemed to touch the fog with pink light, then red. I was wondering if we’d stay until dark, took my second hit off the joint, and realized Alex grew two-toke whammo weed that skidded your brain like black ice under car tires.
    The sun hung fire in the fog bank, then slipped down as the planet rolled away. The sky must be patterning like crazy, I thought, almost able to see what a Gwyng sees. “Damn, Alex,” I said in Karst, too drugged to think, “you just met me and you’ve drugged me.”
    “Indian hill dialect,” Alex explained to the driver. “Tom, remember to speak English.”
    Karst, damn. I froze in a paranoid flash as the lights came on in San Francisco’s shadow—the whole horizon like a thousand searchlights.
    “Hey, Alex,” someone called.
    “Carstairs, you here to see the sunset?” Alex said.
    “Working.” Carstairs, short, almost pudgy, with black-rimmed glasses, had a wicked little face, like a human version of a Gwyng. He pointed to the Lawrence Lab building.
    “Here, man, be inspired.” Alex offered Carstairs the joint. “This is Tom. Tom, this is Jerry Carstairs. Tom’s been in Asia, sleeping with Asian women.”
    “Say something Asian,” Carstairs asked. He inhaled deeply and looked at me—he didn’t believe us a minute.
    I told him, “Fuck off” in Yangchenla’s Tibetan.
    “Some hill dialect,” the guy who drove us said.
    “Really?” Carstairs inhaled a second toke, enough smoke to skid himself to Asia for a translation. Smoke trickling out of his teeth, he asked Alex, “Irish pub tonight?”
    “I’ll pass…” Alex looked at me and laughed. “We ought to go,” I said, meaning leave.
    Alex said, “Not yet, Tom.”
    Carstairs sat down on a post between the car and a brushy ravine. Grinning, he winked at me.
    “Mr. Carstairs, you work in the Lab?” I asked.
    “What I really do is dimensional physics. You ever read a guy named Rucker?”
    “No.”
    Carstairs looked at Alex, then at the sky and said, “Alex has. Dimensional physics fascinates him.”
    Does he know Alex is an alien? Or am I in drug paranoia?
    Alex stood up, his scalp flushed where he would have had his