Lucy swallowed hard. "I see."
"That's all unimportant now. Something has happened and you are a part of it. There's a group on Outpost, and we need a linguist. The files on you we took off the Venera say that you are one. Close enough?"
"I know some languages. French, Russian, a few Australian aboriginal dialects, Chinese, but I'm—"
"Then you're better qualified than anyone within fifty light years. No one here has spoken anything but English for a hundred years. One or two in Intelligence have been taught a few Western languages, but that's it. We need someone to learn a whole new language, and you know how to do that."
"But what lang—"
"I don't know. Nobody knows. We found them four weeks ago, and so far no one knows anything about them."
"But who is it I'm to talk to? Where are they from? And how is the language unknown?"
"They're from right here. Outpost. And it isn't a human language you'll be learning. Your teachers will have six legs."
On Approach to Outpost's Surface
The lander came down, a strictly routine sort of flight of a completely unremarkable craft. The lander was a fat, rounded cone shape, a standard design for a ballistic lander; she could have come off a production line anywhere in the League—and perhaps she had. Lucille didn't even know the lander's name. The Australian Navy's space fleet had always had a superstition about such things—if you didn't know the name of a ship, it was bad luck to fly in her. Lucille didn't have much truck with superstition, but it didn't make her any more comfortable.
Gustav had been assigned to the mission. A sergeant named McKenna piloted the lander, and there were two troopers along, Carlton and Mansfield. McKenna brought them in carefully, setting down in the center of a large clearing in a temperate-zone forest. The moment the landing engines shut off, Lucille heard an oddly familiar thrumming noise on the hull. It was raining out there, making the same noise on the hull that it had on the tin roof back home on Earth, in Australia, during the all-too-rare rainstorms of the arid Outback.
The lander had four viewports. Lucille cautiously unstrapped herself from her crash couch and stepped to the closest one. That was no desert out there, but a dark, dank wet field and forest. She could see two circular burned spots in the clearing, the signs of other landings here. Lucille carefully rocked back and forth on her feet, heel-to-toe and back. She felt rather light, say perhaps .8 Earth gravities.
Gustav rattled off a chain of statistics without looking up. "Before you can ask, I did my homework and converted the figures to scales you know. Surface gravity .828 Roger MacBride Allen
Earth gees. Atmospheric pressure 110 percent Earth sea level value. By percentage, much more carbon dioxide and water vapor, much less nitrogen, slightly less oxygen than Earth. The carbon dioxide makes it unbreathable. Possibly, we can get by without full pressure suits, but right now I'm not taking any chances. Local environment in landing zone: dank, murky, cold, but somebody calls it home."
"Thanks for the travelogue. Now what?" Lucille asked.
Gustav joined Lucille at the port, then turned to one of the troopers. "Go below to the galley and get us some coffee, Mansfield. What we do now is wait, Lieutenant. We wait. Our friends will have heard and seen the ship coming down, of course. And we hope the rain lets up. Our friends don't seem to like it, though that's just a guess."
"How did you first find them?"
"It was a scientific mission. Someone was doing a survey of temperate-zone plant life on this planet. Anyway, the Outposters appeared and our people ran like hell, back into the ship. Thought they were just a herd of some sort of animal that was large enough to be dangerous. But they watched through the ports and the Outposters had tools. All the cameras and viewports were half-blinded by mist and fog, but the crew saw that much. They radioed that little tidbit back to HQ, and were ordered to withdraw. Get back to orbit. Smart move. It let both sides think things over for a while, gave us a chance to put together a team."
"And the second landing?"
"Oh, they launched direct from Capital. All the heaviest scientific brass. They had all the cameras and recorders and whatever along, everything waterproofed and hooded against rain and so on. A lander this size, and three times as many people on it. They landed, and then sat here for two weeks until their supplies ran out. And of course, since the second group was ready for rain, there wasn't any. They were just about ready to give up and try a
search from orbit when the Outposters came out of the trees again. Our people got all excited, went out in their pressure suits for the First Contact—and the rains came down. Heavier than this, heavier than ever. Couldn't see three feet. Our people were suddenly up to their knees in mud, and the 'Posters vanished."
"Never to be seen again?"
"That's right. The powers-that-be decided they couldn't afford to keep all that scientific talent waiting around. I think they got nervous about putting all the big brains in such a dangerous situation. Anyway, the orders came down two days ago, and here we are, the smallest practical crew with the most supplies they could cram in a lander."
"And we sit here until hell freezes over, or until the natives show?"
"And then we put the one linguist in the star system in charge. We don't try anything else this time until we can talk. Our job is to make contact, or die of old age waiting to try."
"What you're telling me is that I'm going to do human-land's first contact with another intelligent species," Lucille said. "Me, a prisoner, a slave laborer."
The troopers and the pilot looked up sharply at that. "Relax, all of you," Gustav said warningly. "She's telling the truth. She is what she says she is, and we all know it, no matter what we're told. It's just us followers here without any leaders. No one to pretend in front of." He turned back to Lucille. "Yes, you're here to do the contact. You are the closest thing to a linguist we've got, and you're expendable. As are the rest of us. And let's not pretend about that, either."
The trooper came up from the lower deck, carrying a thermos and coffee cups. He poured for Gustav and Lucille. "Thanks, Mansfield. Get at ease and stay there. We could be cooped up for a while. Might as well take it easy or we'll be at each other's throats." Gustav handed Lucille a cup and the two of them returned to the viewport. "We don't know anything about them," he told her. "We don't
have any decent close-up photos of them, we don't know if they're a high civilization or sitting around in mud huts. There's no way to be certain they're really intelligent, in our meaning of the word. Apes use tools, and some insects organize well—but the photos we've got seem to show them carrying things made of worked metal. Working ore into metal sure as hell suggests intelligence. But we don't know. We don't know if they are nomads or have vast cities. No one has ever bothered to map the planet properly. You've seen the cloud cover from orbit—it hasn't helped. Our charts are barely more than outlines of the continents. We've never taken much interest in the planet itself. The temperate zones are as you see them here—this is as attractive as Outpost gets."
Lucille said nothing. First Contact. Very old words for something new, something that had never happened. And it was hers.
The raindrops drummed down on the hull.
They waited. The sun went down and Gustav gave up watching at the port. He dug a book out of his kit and began to read.
The pilot and the two troopers went belowdecks to their bunks, but Lucille stayed at the porthole, too caught up in it all to do anything but watch and wait. Never had she seriously considered the possibility of making First Contact. Oh, she had dreamed of it, talked it up in the bull sessions with the other Survey students, in a time that seemed far removed from being a CI and a prisoner to the Guardians. No one who ventured into unknown space could help but think of the possibilities. But this was real. The myriad possibilities had focused down onto one actuality, and that was Lucille Calder, the half-abo rancher's daughter, about to be the first human being to converse with an alien race. Except humans were
the aliens here.
She turned and looked at Gustav. He was leaning back in his crash couch, reading a novel he had borrowed from Cynthia Wu. Gustav was not simply one of the few Guardians interested in the books the CIs had carried for pleasure reading, he was the only Guardian who would think of politely borrowing—and later actually returning—books, rather than simply taking them.
"You know, Gustav," she said, "try as I might, I can't make you look like the enemy."
Gustav looked up at her, lay down his book, and gave her a wry half-smile. "That was exactly the thought I had when I first saw your people on your worlds."
"I thought Guardians didn't travel outside the Nova Sol system."
"They don't, except for spies."
"Ah.' Lucille didn't quite know how to answer that.
"Or, to use the more correct phrase, Intelligence operatives. And I guess I should thank the luck that got me kicked out of Intelligence to be XO on Ariadne—or else I'd have missed the chance to see whoever it is out there."
"What got you kicked out of Intelligence?"
"Telling the truth, I filed a report saying it would be a disaster to launch a war against the League."
"And has it been a disaster?"
"Too soon to tell. But numbers don't lie without help. Mine might have been the first un-jiggered statistics the big brass had seen in generations. And those honest numbers said we don't have a chance against you."
"Why are you telling me all this?"
"I suppose I don't really count on coming out of this alive. The Outposters could be hostile, or there could be misunderstandings. Too many variables, too many things to go wrong. I'll consider this mission a success if we can radio back a basic vocabulary for the next team to work with before we die of whatever this planet uses to kill people.
"I've been to Earth, I've been around the League, and I don't like the idea of attacking you. I feel as if I ought to apologize." Gustav paused for a moment. "And I suppose I don t want the woman who's going to talk to the aliens to think that all our people are barbarians and fools. We're
not. There are good people on Capital. Honest and decent. But the situation is out of control." And again, Lucille knew no way to answer him.
The hours and days slid past. On the third day, the rains ended. The sight of blue sky and fleecy white clouds perked everyone up. Carlton, Mansfield, and McKenna were watching out the portholes, enjoying the chance to at least see something besides rain.
"Sir, can't we at least take a little walk around the clearing?" Mansfield asked.
"No,' Gustav said. "We stay here, we wait here. Passive. We play it safe and wait. It's hard on our patience, but we let them come to us. We don't want to seem threatening."
"Are you threatening?" Lucille asked.
Gustav sighed. "I'm not. And I doubt the Central Guardians want to be. If you want to know if we plan to conquer Outpost, no, we don't. Up until a year ago, when the Main Strike Fleet operation began, we didn't t even bother landing on it. We could tell from orbit it wasn't much good for human use, not particularly habitable. It's not land we need, it's people and skills and manufactured goods. The 'Posters are safe from us. So look on the bright side, Mansfield. You've got a nice soft duty. You could be out with those poor bastards in the Main Strike Fleet. God knows where they are."
"Even you don't know the invasion target? Sir?" Mansfield asked.
"Nope. That one they kept very tight."
"Sir!' McKenna shouted. "They're out there!"
Lucille rushed to join the three enlisted men at the port. "Can we transmit to Ariadne?" she asked.
Gustav shook his head as he switched on the outside cameras and started all the recorders. "No. The station's below our horizon and there's nothing in line-of-sight with us at the moment. We'll tape it and transmit it all the first chance we get."
Lucille grabbed a hand recorder and started it. If something happened, if they got eaten or couldn't get back, she wanted a record, something besides video tapes to send back. Eyes saw things cameras didn't. "Contact. We see them! Four, five, six individuals crossing clearing from the treeline toward the lander. They are dark brown in color. They are bilaterally symmetrical, but they do not appear to be six-legged. No, they're centauroid. The main length of the body carried horizontally, like a horse, but the forward part is rotated up to carry the chest and head upright. Their heads are raised on long, flexible necks. Too far off to see many details of the head. Getting closer. They have two forelimbs, arms we should call them, set at the base of that long neck—the shoulders, I guess. They have two pairs of rather heavy, stocky legs, so they walk on four legs and have those two arms besides. Better compromise than ours, bipedalism for hands. Can't see the walking legs too well through the brush. They have long, thick, heavy tails that might be used for balancing somehow. Some have their tails raised to point straight out behind them. Two are just dragging their tails. They seem to be carrying various kinds of tools or weapons in their forelimbs, their hands. Still too far off to get a clear look at the hands or head."
Lucille kept talking, barely stopping for breath. Her heart was hammering against her ribs. This was it "They seem closer to reptilian than to mammalian, but that doesn't t mean anything. There won't be true reptiles or mammals here, of course. I say reptile, but I guess I say that because they don't have fur, their skin is naked—and by that standard, humans are reptiles.
"They aren't clothed, though some of them seem to have belts and wraps and bracelets on. I can't say why exactly, but none of it looks like decoration. All functional-looking stuff, tools and equipment There's definitely worked metal there, a lot of it.
"Scale. Hard to say precisely, but I'd call their body length at about a meter and a half, plus another meter for
the tail. And the head on those shoulders comes to about the height of a man. They're bigger than we are.
"Okay, they're maybe fifty meters away now. I've got the binoculars now. Can see the head better. The head is elongated, front to back, shaped sort of like an egg lying on its side. The neck attaches at about the center of the head, the balance point. I'd say the head is about 30 centimeters long, back to front, and maybe fifteen from top to bottom and side to side.
"I see eyes. All of them have dark eyes, black eyes, no white to be seen, just shiny round black spots. All of them look very much alike. It's a first impression, but it seems to me they would be very hard to tell apart except for the things they wear. But back to the heads. The eyes are set very far forward in the head. They probably have binocular vision like ours. I don't see anything we'd call a nose or ears, but there's something, some sort of low structure, on the top of the head, toward the rear. A mass of flesh with a complicated fold structure. It's moving with a breathing sort of motion, and as they get closer I can see what could be earholes on it.
"The mouth. Hard to see from this angle. It's small in proportion to the rest of the head. The jaw is hinged very far forward. Can't see any of the dentition, or ever if they have teeth in the first place.
"They've stopped. They are standing close to each other, clustered together, about twenty meters from here. One of the them, the one in front, is making some sort of gesture with his right arm. Those arms look very strong.
"They're waiting for us."
Lucille pulled herself away from the port and turned and look at Gustav. His face was pale, excited, and he seemed short of breath. "It's time for me to go out there," she said. "And I think the best way to do it is alone. You said we don't want to seem threatening."
Gustav opened his mouth as if to protest, but then nodded. "Dammit, you're right. McKenna, I want this ship at launch-ready. If we need to run, make sure we can
do it. Mansfield. Carlton. Suit up. No weapons, period. We don't defend ourselves. You two and I will stand in the lock while Lieutenant Calder descends to the surface. Let the—the natives see you. We'll make sure they know Calder didn't come by herself, but we don't leave the ship unless she's m trouble. D
on't you leave the ship until I give the order. Lieutenant Calder—you realize that I might be forced to leave you out there. The information we've got already is more valuable than any of us. If I have to leave you to get it home, I will. And if they kill you, all we dare do is stand and watch. I don't intend to start a war, or get them started hating humans, whatever the provocation."
Lucille nodded stiffly. "I know. It's the only way you could do it. I'd make the same call in your place. We've got no choice but to take the chances." And I don't know if I'm doing this for Humanity with a capital H, or curiosity, or glory, or the thrill, or to show I'm not scared, or to score points with the goddamned Guards to get the Cls a better deal. It doesn't matter. This is bigger than all those things.
"Then let's go," Gustav said. His voice nearly cracked.
There was more than being unfamiliar with Guardian suit design that slowed Lucille down. Her fingers shook, her mind wouldn't concentrate on the job of getting the clamps clamped and the seals sealed. Gustav and Mansfield finally had to help her after they were in their own pressure suits.
The four of them crowded into the lock. Gustav hit the buttons that ran it through the decontamination cycle. The inner hatch slammed to, and the air in the lock was pumped into a holding tank. Lucille could feel her suit swell up slightly as the lock's pressure reached a vacuum. The flash heaters came on, and the lock's interior was briefly above the boiling point of water. A poison gas was pumped in, held in the lock for 60 seconds, and then pumped back out. The procedure was intended to kill any bacteria or other microbes that might have been
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