Free Human to Human by Rebecca Ore

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    Hrif came in and asked, “Gone? Sleep?”
    Marianne said, “Yes.”
    He looked around the front room and padded up to the sofa, put his paws on it, and moved almost delicately onto it. I was about to protest, but he stared me down.
    Marianne said, “Come on, Tom.”
    We went into Marianne’s room on the south hall, farther from the Sharwani and Hrif, and talked about human organs that felt better when they filled with blood, then tested them, giggling half the time.
    Lips become fantastically sensitive when the blood’s in them. Marianne pulled hers away from me and said, “Poor bastards.”
    Later, she said, “I was so nervous.”
    “Still?”
    “Not as much. They’re more ordinarily alien. Does that make any sense?”
    I said, half-asleep, “Yeah. Ones like humans you really have to worry about.”
     
    The next morning, I tried to fix plates for the Sharwani the way Thridai did. When I slipped them through the food slot, Chi’ursemisa said, “Hearing is touch. You and female…last night.” She stopped as if what we’d done was weird, more incomprehensible than vulgar.
    Hearing is touch? I thought about the pressure of sound waves against membranes. Inside the jellied oils of my inner ear, tiny fibers bending caused impulses to travel up the auditory nerve. Touch? Sort of, I supposed. I said, “What we did is normal for us.”
    Marianne came out and overheard that. She said something in Chi’ursemisa’s language, then said to me, “They’ve got very sensitive hearing, but they can de-tune.”
    “You’re always sex?” Chi’ursemisa cleaned her plate with her fingers, licked them with her thin tongue, then said in halting Karst One, “Will study Karst One language. If we can come out.”
    Marianne said, “One at a time.”
    Hurdai asked Chi’ursemisa something and, when she replied, made the rubber band bo’ing sound in his throat. Daiur said, “Start with me.”
    “You can play with the children anytime,” Marianne said.
    “Two at a time if one is Daiur,” I told Chi’ursemisa in Wrengu. Marianne signaled yes with her cupped hand.
    Chi’ursemisa said, “I’ll be first.”
    Hurdai said something slowly to Marianne, who translated, “He wants to have some company in there.” I said to Chi’ursemisa in Wrengu, “I wish I could send you three back.”
    She said, “I’d never be trusted.”
    I said, “Let’s make the best of it, then,” and unlocked the door. In English, I said to Marianne, “Why don’t we let all of them out?”
    Marianne said, “As long as you and Hrif are here,” then said something in Sharwanisa. Hurdai pushed his fingers through the fur over his high cheekbones and shambled out. We went into the front room. Funny how more tired and less dramatic they looked under natural light. Chi’ursemisa went to a window and looked out, stretching. Hrif settled his head down on his paws again.
    The elevator door opened. We all turned around. Hrif rose to his feet, tense, eyes on the Sharwani. Karl stepped off the elevator, looked around. Daiur ran up to him and hugged, saying, “Friends now.”
    Chi’ursemisa’s eyelid veins swelled slightly, then she nibbled at a finger and sat down on the couch. We didn’t say anything. Karl said to Daiur, “That’s great. What’s your name?”
    “Daiur.”
    “When you grow up, the Federation will call you after a rock.” Karl didn’t seem enthusiastic about the prospect.
    While Hrif and I watched the Sharwani, Marianne went back to her room for a lap terminal and microphone. She plugged in the terminal to the core cable and said to the microphone, “Give me the learner series Sharwanisa and Karst One phonemic and morphemics workups parallels and disjunctions.”
    The terminal said, “One, two, three, four,” showing one ball, two balls, three balls, finally four on the screen. It then counted the balls in Sharwanisa.
    Daiur tried to touch the screen, then counted the balls. Chi’ursemisa said, “One, two,