Being Alien Read Online Free PDF Page B

crest. “Tom we will go now, if you want.”
    “I do want,” I said in my most formal English. I felt bewildered, as if a child among adults with secrets.
    The driver said, “I’d like to stay a bit longer. I’m expecting someone.”
    “I’ll drive you,” Carstairs said.
    “Can you?” I asked. “You’re not too stoned?”
    “Oh, I can do anything when I’m stoned,” Carstairs said, smile deeply curved into his cheeks.
    “Brilliant man,” Alex said. Carstairs went across the road to another parking lot for his car. He drove back, seeming suddenly sober, and opened the passenger side doors. We got in without speaking, me not quite sure what Carstairs knew.
    “Could you take Tom by Milvia and Cedar?”
    “Sure.” Carstairs skewed to a stop just over the next crosswalk. When the yellow went on for the cross traffic, he jammed on the gas and popped out just before our light turned green to beat oncoming traffic in a left turn. I pushed his umbrella under the seat so it couldn’t jab me when we crashed. I just knew we would.
    We didn’t crash. Why I don’t know. Carstairs and Alex giggled as I got out of the car. Alex said, “I’ll drop by tomorrow to talk more.”
    Blinking behind his glasses, Carstairs tapped his nails on the steering wheel and said, “And is Tom Gresham really your name? Gresham’s Law always appealed to Alex here.”
    “Tom is real.” I almost added, And I’m human, too, but I wasn’t sure he knew Alex wasn’t.
    As they drove off together, Alex rubbed the air over his surgically flattened skull.
    My Ahram colleague seemed demented. I wanted to go back to Karst, but didn’t know how to contact the Barcons, so I fumbled at my door lock with the little round key, finally getting the bolt back. Difficulties of Berkeley—Federation doors opened to palm print and voice, or punched code.
    The apartment was chilly, so I turned the gas heater to seventy-two. It whomped on, blue jets up and down a black pipe. No other heaters in the house, not even in my bedroom. People must freeze in the winters, I thought.
    I pulled out my Terran pajamas and said to that mass of knitted cotton, “How do you like being home?”
     
    In the morning, I woke up terrified, not sure whether dream or real police pounded at my door. I lay in bed, checking the noises—gas heater, rumbling pipes, a bed bouncing off the wall. That’s what woke me, violent fucking upstairs. I got dressed and stuck my head out the bedroom sliding glass door. Cold—I came back for a jacket and then went to get a traveler’s check cashed at the Co-op.
    The Co-op was like a Southern States for city people with a grocery on one side of Shattuck and a regular gardening and hardware store on the other. I felt most at home walking through the hardware store—washers, drills, and mattocks were like what I’d used in Virginia. “Hi,” a bearded dwarf clerk about sixty years old said.
    “What can you grow around here?” I asked.
    “Where do you live?”
    “On Milvia.”
    “Well, you can try greens and herbs, if you’re willing to poison the snails.” He stressed “willing,” like I really shouldn’t do that. “Soil’s heavy, black adobe.”
    I’d never heard of black adobe, but I decided I’d get some gardening tools after I got situated. Across the road, I got orange juice, eggs, and biscuits, a notepad, and toilet paper, then realized I had no kitchen stuff, and I bought a frying pan. The checkout girl fingerprinted me on the back of the traveler’s check. I tried not to wince—and prayed the graft glue held.
    “Have a nice day,” she said as she packed my stuff. “The ink fades in a minute if it’s not fixed.” She rolled the prints with a damp rubber roller.
    Back to my apartment, I spread all my stuff out on the burn-scarred Formica table and jotted down notes for what I had to do:
     
    1. Set up bank account
    2. Get library card
    3. Get computer
    4. Get PG&E to put the bill in my name
    5. Get phone set up,