Youngha cocked an eyebrow at him. “Yeah. Sure.”
“Why do you ask?”
“I think I’m going to go talk to an alien.”
Thom snorted and picked up his chopsticks. “Good luck finding one,” he said.
Youngha ran her hands across the crushed grass in the shade of the lander, and thought she wouldn’t have to look very far.
The alien came back the next day. Youngha looked up from her core samples and saw it standing right at the edge of the tall grass. So quiet, she thought. She laid her brush down and turned to face it. The alien worked its jaw, flicking its split lip right, then left. Chewing cud? Slowly, the alien lifted one of its hands. Each long finger ended in a dark pad and a delicate claw. Youngha lifted her own hand and waited. The alien unhooked the rod from its belt and held it out parallel to the ground. So we’re communicating now. Wonderful. But is that a challenge? A threat? She picked up her brush and held it out, mirroring the alien’s gesture. The alien tilted its head and its torso back, then turned and bounded away.
“I suppose that could have gone worse,” Youngha said. She turned back to her samples. When she looked up again, the alien was back, staring at her from across the table. Youngha squeaked and dropped her brush. The alien regarded her with untroubled golden eyes. Then it turned away, placing the tips of its fingers on the ground and stepping away with both huge hind feet, balancing for a moment on its fingers and on the strong beam of its tail.
The alien looked back at her, stepped away again, and looked back. Oh, of course. Follow you. How stupid of me. She smiled and followed the alien into the prairie.
Tiny creatures rose up around Youngha’s feet as she walked, buzzing their startlement at her passage. The wind hissed through the dry grass, making it ripple like water. Planets like this, with blue skies, sweet water, and wildly divergent life forms, were terribly rare. Most human colonies were like Youngha’s homeworld, where humans hid from a toxic atmosphere under their domes, or like Ari’s, where they buried themselves in rock to escape their star’s killing light.
Youngha inhaled deeply, savoring air that had never seen the inside of a recycler. So far there’d been no sign of a colony here, no matter what Thom or the ship’s computers said. The seed ship from a dead empire, obliged to cross all the space between here and its home, should have arrived no more than a few years ago. She wondered if the Survey had miscalculated. A misplaced decimal, a number transposed from the ancient catalog... but what were the odds of finding a planet like this at random?
In an infinite universe, it has to happen at least once. I should bring this up with Thom, get him started on philosophy. I bet I can make him turn purple.
The colony would be somewhere close, if it existed. Thom had reduced the data for probable landing sites based on the scans they’d taken in orbit, and Ari had picked the likeliest one to check first. Youngha brushed a long-legged flying creature away from her face. If there was a viable Three Suns colony on this world, it would be the first anyone had found. Its people would be able to trade the how-tos and wherefores of their nanotech for a place among the interstellar human community. If they were here at all. So far, the only mark of sentience on this planet had been made by the natives.
A speck of dirt lighted on Youngha’s dun uniform, sprouted legs, and crawled down her arm. She watched it go. A specialist could spend a lifetime cataloging these tiny alien forms. Likely no one ever would, and there would only be a note about insectoid life in this planet’s Survey file. Stardrive time was too expensive to waste on savages. The real money was in information, massless and infinitely portable. Youngha prodded the speck until it sprouted wings and flew away.
The alien led her to a copse of tall plants... Trees, Youngha decided. They were close enough to the pictures she’d seen. The columnar trunks, like massive bundles of finger-thin reeds, reached higher than the dome where she’d been born.
As she got closer, Youngha could hear the whistled calls of other aliens. She dug her syntaxizer out of her bag and switched it on. She did not expect it to work; the device had been designed with the human diaspora in mind. Still, it was worth trying. She wondered what the little machine would make of the aliens’ language.
Youngha’s eyes adjusted slowly to the dimness under the trees. Around her, aliens stopped what they were doing and stared. Some dressed like her guide, while some wore bags strapped across their deep chests and others went naked. She looked up and spotted oblong pods woven out of sticks hanging in the trees. Each had a triangular opening on the short end. Alien houses, she guessed. Like enormous birds. A small alien hopped past her, the red streamers tied to the fur behind its ears fluttering. Or... not.
She looked up, her eyes straining in the darkness. How do they get up there? A network of vines hung from the houses and the high branches. No, wait, those are ropes. An alien appeared at the door to one of the houses and slipped one long foot into a loop of rope. It stepped off into the air and glided smoothly to the ground as a counterweight rose into the trees. The alien freed itself from the loop and spent a moment hauling another counterweight into the canopy.
Pulleys, then. An odd direction for technology to take. I wonder... ? She wasn’t given time to think. The aliens surrounded her, the cacophony of whistles growing as more came down from their houses or out of the shadows beneath the trees. Their gold eyes were bright in the gloom. Youngha followed her guide into the crowd and stopped when it stopped. She glanced down at her syntaxizer. “Processing,” the screen said. For a moment, the aliens and the human waited.
Then the crowd parted. A singular alien walked forward. There was a hitch in its step, a pause every time it came up onto its long toes. The bones of its joints were visible under its thin fur. It wore bands of patterned cloth around its chest, its forearms, its neck.
An elder? A priest or a shaman? A politician? A jester? The cloth ornaments were amazingly detailed: triangles, radiant stars, squares overlapping circles. Youngha watched the other aliens as it came. Silent now, they crouched all around her, heads down, eyes closed. She was the only one still standing. On impulse she dropped to her knees and closed her eyes. She could hear the soft shush of the alien’s feet on the bare ground.
A sharp rattle startled her into opening her eyes. The thin alien stood before her, brandishing a fist-sized ring of wood. Hollow, black, unidentifiable things were strung on fibers stretched across the ring. The alien shook its rattle again and began to whistle a melody so sweet and complicated that it gave her goose bumps. A human composer would be proud to put their name on that music, but whether the alien was making a speech, singing a song, or reciting a prayer, Youngha couldn’t begin to guess. She risked a look down at her syntaxizer. The little computer had debated the matter and now displayed its conclusion: The aliens’ voices were not language.
The alien reached the end of its song and stopped, fixing her with eyes that glowed in the dimness. It was clearly waiting for her response. So much for technology, she thought. Now, what did they say about this back in school? Shade-trees, weaving, eye contact—odds are that our eyes are at least somewhat similar. I hope. Youngha bent down to draw pictures in the dirt. Herself, first: the outline of a human form, as clear and simple as she could manage. Then her best approximation of an alien. She pointed to the pictures, then to their subjects, and hoped.
The alien puffed out its cheeks and cocked its head back, looking down at Youngha over its nose. It drew a circle with a quick flick of a claw, and inside that it drew a cluster of circles next to a sharp-edged hexagon. Again the alien looked at Youngha, waiting.
She hesitated, then pointed at the hexagon, and then at herself. That must be the lander, she thought. That’s an odd way to look at it. It is six-sided, though. And the curves are their trees.
Apparently satisfied, the thin alien looked down again and drew a chain of interlocking curves around the trees in a serrated circle. It whistled, then drew another jagged circle around the lander.
That’s clear enough, Youngha thought. You keep to your home and we’ll keep to ours. She wished she knew how to tell the alien that she understood. She bowed her head again. The alien shook its rattle, and all the assembled aliens began to sing. Youngha lifted her eyes. Her ears rang with music, complex beyond her understanding.
Youngha had lost her original alien in the shuffle and press of that strange crowd. She couldn’t tell if the alien who escorted her back to the lander was the same one who had taken her to the village. Thom spotted her as she walked toward the lander. The astronomer-specialist waved his arms over his head. Her alien escort vanished.
“Youngha! We found it!”
She stopped to catch her breath. “Really?” she said.
“It was exactly where I said it would be.”
“That... that’s great. Is it... ?”
“A seed ship! And it’s only been here a month or so... maybe a year, based on how far it’s developed. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Youngha exchanged a knowing look with her captain. “It’s good you’re back,” Ari said. “We were afraid that the aliens had eaten you.”
Youngha waved a hand under her nose, as if dispersing an unpleasant smell. “The monitors would’ve said something. Besides, I... I have a feeling we’d know if they wanted to hurt us. Are you coming with?” It took a lot to make Ari, the team’s tunnel-born captain, come out under an empty sky.
“Thom just got back. I’m not missing this.”
Thom led them over a low ridge out of sight of the lander. Youngha glanced at the sky, reflexively looking for the traveling star of the orbiter. Sometimes it was bright enough to see in the daytime, at this time of day. She wondered what the aliens thought of it. Dry grass crunched under her feet, a golden sea that stretched out to the edge of the sky’s blue dome.
The survey team struggled up another ridge on legs still unaccustomed to real gravity. From the top they could see the newborn city. Youngha thought her heart would break.
Thom was right; it hadn’t been there long. The remnants of the seed ship were still visible at its center. Sunlight reflected painfully from the crystalline chevrons of exotic metal it had pushed out into the native soil. A spray of solar collectors shaded it. Most were still curled tightly, like the fiddleheads of ferns. Only the ones in the center were unfurled, their spiny fronds of utter blackness waving in the wind. It was only a few meters across, but it would grow.
“Is there... can we do anything?” She asked. The Survey existed to find human worlds, to catalog human civilization, but seeing this thing of machines and metal here, on this living world, made her sick.
The astronomer-specialist shook his head. “It depends on whether or not the biologicals are intact. Judging by the size, it probably already has a line into the local aquifer. I’ll get some readings, see if we can figure out how well the biologicals made it through. If they’re intact, in a few years we’ll have a functioning human colony to add to the charts. We might finally get an insight into how these things were built. If not...” he shrugged. “Not much we can do for it. It’ll run its program and then... wait. Like we saw on Dove’s Planet.”
Youngha looked around. A pair of long-legged grazers watched warily in the distance. A low clump of reedy plants cast a long shadow in the light of the sinking sun. The songs of this world’s insects rose and fell around her. She thought of Dove’s Planet, where a seed ship blasted sterile by interstellar winds had landed. It was a world of metal now, continents covered from one seashore to the other by cities, its ecosystem fighting a long defeat against the empty city’s nanofactories.
“We can’t even warn them,” she said quietly.
No one heard her. Ari said, “Get as much data as you can. We can extend our stay for another week at least, maybe two.”
“It’s not enough time,” Thom said. “Can’t we... ?”
“No helping it.” Ari turned back toward the lander.
Decisions. Answers for annoying questions. That was the captain’s job.
Youngha excused herself from working on the city as often as she could. Thom was the expert, and there wasn’t much for her to do unless he found an I/O interface on the city. At this stage in its development, it probably wouldn’t waste resources on that kind of thing. She loaded the algorithms she had used on Dove’s Planet onto a portable just in case her teammates called her, and spent her days cataloging the life forms of the prairie. Now and then she caught an alien watching her, far away in the grass.
On the sixth day, Youngha looked up from the tiny creatures she’d caught in her mist-net the night before. Her captain stood in the lander’s shade. She wondered if that small shelter was enough for him. She wondered, not for the first time, why an agoraphobe had gone exploring. Not that I’d want to be trapped in those tunnels. “They’re not human,” Ari said.
“I know,” she said.
“If the seed ship’s biological library is viable...”
“I know,” she said, cutting him off.
“Dove’s Planet was... a hard thing to see.”
“... Yeah. Yeah, it was.” She laid her hand down on the specimen table, next to a thing that looked like nothing more than three broad fan blades with a spray of grasping legs in the middle. “If it hadn’t been a dead city. I think that would’ve been easier.”
“I’ll let you know as soon as Thom comes up with anything, all right? And if you want to talk”—he rapped his knuckles on the lander’s black skin—“you know where to find me.”
Youngha saw smoke rising in the distance. She dropped her imager onto the specimen table and ran. Dry grass whipped her legs. Somehow Youngha knew that the smoke was coming from the alien village. She wondered, belatedly, what she intended to do when she got there. The wind changed, and she was engulfed in blue smoke. She coughed and retched, but struggled on, lungs and legs aching.
Youngha stopped well before she reached the shadow of the trees. The wind changed again, showing her a group of aliens standing in a loose ring outside their village. They wore cloths wrapped around their noses and held sheets of some heavier stuff. Woven mats? Youngha thought. Or—her stomach heaved—skins from the grazers? She didn’t know why the thought of aliens using other aliens’ skins bothered her more than aliens eating aliens, but it did.
The wind changed. Flames leapt up in the center of the circle. The aliens shifted, staying out of the smoke but keeping the fire surrounded. Embers floated down among them. One of them stepped forward and beat at the smoldering spot with the skin it held. Two other aliens joined the first. The smoke cleared for a moment, and Youngha saw a ribbon of fire devouring the grass in the middle of the circle.
One of the aliens looked up. Youngha saw its gold eyes go wide, then it whistled one high, piercing note. Aliens lifted their heads to stare at the errant human. The aliens who still watched the fire trilled, and Youngha thought they sounded more than a little annoyed. One of the smaller aliens broke away from the group and bounded up to Youngha. She held up her hands and dropped her eyes.
The alien came up to her, standing uncomfortably close, and drew itself up until it was almost as tall as Youngha. “Sorry,” she said uselessly. The alien reached out a clawed hand and prodded her chest. She could feel her heart hammering against her ribs. Smoke clogged her throat, and she repressed a cough. “Sorry,” she said again. “I’ll go.” She turned, and the alien shot off into the grass ahead of her, in the direction of the lander.
Youngha ran after it. Her lungs protested, and pain arced up her legs. She spared a bitter thought for the hours she’d spent on her ship’s treadmill with its cushioned, level floor. The alien outpaced her, vanished.
She burst into the trampled place around the lander. The alien stood facing the rest of the survey team. The two men’s eyes locked on Youngha. Ari called her name. The alien turned. Her lungs burned with every breath.
The world spun. Youngha fell to her knees. She caught herself on her hands and watched the edges of her visi
on go black for a moment. She heard the alien walking hand over foot across the dead grass, saw it coming toward her. Its head swung down into the range of her vision as it balanced on its huge hind feet and the second joints of its arms. Its eyes shone like gold leaf set in glass.
The alien put the pads of its fingers under one of Youngha’s shoulders, then the other, and lifted. Its gracile arms, remarkably strong, helped her to her feet. When it was sure she was steady, it let go. Youngha inhaled deeply, then pointed a finger at her chest.
“Youngha,” she said. The alien canted its head down and whistled a short, achingly complex melody. Youngha caught her captain’s eye. He shrugged and lifted his hands; she was the linguist, and this was her puzzle to solve.
The alien turned away slowly, as though trying not to startle her. It bent down and took up a handful of broken grass stems. It held them up to Youngha’s eye level and whistled again. Letting the grass fall, the alien unstrapped a notched rod from its belt and hopped toward the lander. Youngha held up a hand, forestalling whatever her frightened crewmates intended to do.
At the lander, the alien turned back toward Youngha. It walked, head and hands near the ground, turning the rod over and over as it measured out a distance away from the lander and into the tall grass. When it was satisfied, it cut a long gouge in the ground with its strong hind feet. Then it stepped in front of Youngha again.
The alien bent down, keeping its eyes fixed on Youngha’s for a long moment before looking down. Then it began to draw a diagram in the dust. First, a hexagon for the lander. Then a line outward from the lander to a perpendicular slash, out of which grew a ring. That’s geometry, Youngha thought, startled. It’s diagramming radius of a circle. The alien’s golden eyes looked up at her, then it added the elderly alien’s serrated circle outside the first. Again, the gold eyes sought Youngha’s black ones and held them.
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