The Color of Distance

by Amy Thomson

  Anito led her to a large room near the base of the giant tree, where Ukatonen and a group of nearly twenty aliens were waiting. Juna sat between Ukatonen and Anito. Ukatonen began to speak. It was a very formal speech. Ukatonen’s skin-speech patterns were very complex, and its gestures were stiff and stylized. Juna concentrated on staying awake, but even so, she was dozing off by the time the food was served. There were several different kinds of seaweed, fish, honey, and a number of new kinds of fruit. One fruit, which looked like a large purple peach, was horribly sour. She set it aside after one bite, to the amusement of the local aliens, who ate the sour fruit with obvious relish.

  After the meal, curious aliens clustered around Juna. They poked and prodded her, examining her hands and ears, their own ears wide and their skins deep purple with curiosity. These aliens handled her much more roughly than the people of Anito’s village. Juna bore it stoically, flinching away only when something threatened real harm. Finally she gave Anito and Ukatonen a pleading look. Anito noticed it and said something to Ukatonen, who addressed the rest of the aliens. Then Anito led her up the tree to their room. Three fresh leaf beds were laid out for the travelers. Juna crawled into the moist warmth of the nearest one and fell asleep.

  Juna’s skin was tender and sore when she awoke the next morning. It was vaguely reassuring to know that not all of Anito’s magic potions worked perfectly. She would have been more reassured if her skin didn’t feel two sizes too small. She got up and washed herself off, then sat back to think over her situation. She was going to be stuck here for a very long time. After three weeks of trying, she still couldn’t control her skin coloring well enough to “speak” skin speech. It was proving to be a serious handicap. Now that she was stuck here, she needed to speak the aliens’ language. That meant linking with Ukatonen.

  Juna swallowed, her throat dry with fear as she remembered the violation of that first link. If only there were some other way; but the problem was physical, and only a link would fix it.

  Ukatonen came in bearing breakfast. Fighting back the orange glow of her fear, Juna touched Ukatonen on the shoulder to get its attention, and extended her arms, spurs uppermost. Their eyes met. Ukatonen flushed a dusky purple, like shadows on a ripe plum, its ears spread wide. “Talk want you?” it asked her. “You want allu-a?”

  Juna nodded. Part of her wanted to run screaming, but she fought down her fear. She needed to be able to speak with the aliens. Her life would depend on it.

  “You trust me?”

  Juna nodded again. She had to trust the alien, and endure the violation of linking.

  “Good,” the alien said, turning a dark, reassuring blue. “You no fear me. I not hurt you.”

  It was all she could do to keep from pulling away as Ukatonen reached out and laid its arms over hers. Her fingers shook as she grasped the alien’s forearms. She closed her eyes, afraid to watch as its slender four-fingered hands grasped her wrists. Then their spurs touched, connecting with a slight prick.

  Entering the link felt like diving beneath the surface of a warm pool. There was a faint sensation like surface tension breaking, and then Juna was inside herself. It was a blind world, full of sound—the rush of blood through her veins, the swish-beat of her heart, quickened by her fear, the gurgle of her stomach. She could taste it as well, the rough, dark tang of her blood, the soft furry-peach feel of her skin, and the coppery tang of the alien skin that protected her. Juna could feel/taste it extending down through her gut, and into her lungs, filtering out the deadly alien poisons. She could sense her fear, bright, and sharp, flavoring the link.

  Then she became aware of Ukatonen’s presence. It felt like the current of a mighty river. Terrified, she struggled, but the alien’s presence swept her up and carried her along, helpless as a leaf caught in the current. She watched as Ukatonen’s presence pooled up at the barrier between her human and alien skin. He was male, she realized, without really knowing how she knew. Her skin tingled and stung. It was like taking a bath in champagne, only on the inside of her skin. She felt the alien presence move through her, pooling briefly in her aching muscles and stiff tendons, leaving them loose and relaxed. It cleared away the bitter traces of stress and fatigue that clung to her even after sleep. Then Ukatonen’s presence receded from her body like a wave from a beach. A cool ghost of the alien lingered for a moment. Juna opened her eyes and the ghost disappeared like the sheen of water on the sand after a wave recedes.

  Juna stood up and stretched. She felt fresh and pure, like one of her mother’s starched linen festival shirts fresh from the clothes presser. Her skin no longer felt as if it had been sandpapered. Taking a deep breath, she stretched again for the pleasure of feeling the ease in her muscles.

  Holding out her right arm, she spelled out her name in turquoise letters edged in black, then made her name creep up her arm, across her chest, and down her left side, vanishing as it reached her left knee. She pictured a flower, and a flat, crude flower appeared on her skin. She concentrated, trying to make the flower look more realistic, and the image improved. It was strange, watching pictures appear and disappear on her skin. She couldn’t feel the images, but she knew exactly where they were on her body without looking. She visualized an image and it appeared. It was as easy as lifting her arm.

  She looked up at Ukatonen, who rippled approval. “Hungry?” he asked her.

  She was ravenous. “Yes,” she thought, and horizontal black bars of agreement appeared on her chest. “Food,” she thought, visualizing the green oval symbol for food, and the sign for food appeared on her chest. Ukatonen handed her a basket of fruit, and some chunks of honeycomb.

  “I go bring more food. Come back soon,” the alien told her, and left.

  Juna played with making skin speech while she ate, practicing big and little signs. The versatility and responsiveness of her new ability was amazing. Anything she could visualize would appear on her skin. Even though she could make her skin “speak,” Ukatonen had not given her instant knowledge of the aliens’ language. She could skin-speak only those symbols that she knew well enough to visualize. Juna sighed, thinking of all of the memorization that she had to do in order to become fluent in the aliens’ language. Still, she felt relieved that Ukatonen hadn’t violated her trust by tinkering with her mind. She wondered what limits the aliens had when they linked. Clearly it took energy. She was extremely hungry after linking, and she noticed that the others always ate big meals before and after allu-a.

  Juna finished her breakfast and was wishing for more when Anito came in carrying a leaf cone full of freshly filleted fish. The alien handed some to Juna.

  “Thank you, Anito,” Juna said in skin speech.

  Anito’s ears lifted and it flared a surprised pink, fading to a questioning purple.

  “Ukatonen,” Juna said, and held her arms out, spurs upward. It was a trifle crude, but Anito understood what had happened.

  The alien flushed a deep, concerned ochre. “Not good,” Anito said. “Ukatonen get sick from allu-a with you. I fix.”

  Ukatonen returned a few minutes later, carrying more food. Anito grabbed his arm and began flickering away at him, too fast for Juna to follow. Ukatonen looked at Juna, ochre concern tingeing his skin. He handed her a leaf-wrapped package of meat and seaweed, and told her to eat. The two aliens settled themselves in a corner, and linked spurs. Juna ate a third of the meat and seaweed, wrapping the rest up and setting it beside the water gourds. Anito and Ukatonen would be hungry when they unlinked.

  She needed to get back to the radio beacon. There was so little time before the ship went through transition! Her need to be at the beacon was a hot ache. She wanted to spend every minute she could there. It was her only link to humanity, and it would soon be broken.

  Could she find her way back to the beacon alone? She looked at the two aliens, locked into their strange communion. There was no way to tell how long they would stay like that. It could be ten minutes, it could be all day.

  Juna went
out and tried to talk with the other aliens, but she didn’t know enough skin speech to get very far. The aliens of this village weren’t interested in trying to talk with her. They brushed past her impatiently, ignoring her questions. A few seemed outright angry, flattening their ears against their heads and hissing at her like cold water on red-hot metal. Not since the funeral had an alien treated her with such hostility.

  Juna wondered what she had done to deserve their anger. Had she committed some alien faux pas? She couldn’t think of anything she had done to offend them. Perhaps they were afraid of her because she was an alien to them. Or maybe they were angry at her because of something the Survey did. There were just too many possibilities. She would ask Anito or Ukatonen about it later.

  Juna climbed out of the trunk of the tree, emerging into the bowl formed by the huge tree’s branches. She glanced up through the branches of the canopy, checking the weather. Fleecy white clouds were already gathering. Soon the sky would be clouded over. In two or three hours it would rain. She needed to be on her way.

  She climbed to the topmost branches of the village tree and looked out. The forest fell away toward the distant blue expanse of the sea in monotonous green humps and bumps, broken occasionally by a bright burst of flowers, or the stark grey branches of a dead tree.

  Juna could see the beacon off to the north, a slender silver gleam set on a rocky promontory, surrounded by an empty, blackened expanse where the forest had been burned away. If she hurried, she could get there in an hour and a half. She settled her net bag more firmly on her back, checked her water gourd, and set off.

  She moved steadily through the canopy, pausing now and again to check her bearings. When she was only fifteen or twenty minutes from the beacon, Juna stopped to rest in the topmost branches of an emergent tree. She ate one of the sweet red fruits left over from last night’s feast and admired the view. The sea was a sheet of silver, dappled by shafts of light breaking through the majestic grey clouds heavy with the day’s rain. A fresh sea breeze gently rocked the branch on which she was seated. She felt like the queen of the forest here. Why did the aliens spend all their time buried in the gloom of the canopy, when they could be up here in the fresh air and sunshine? Were they agoraphobic? Did they hate the sun?

  It was time to go. Juna tossed the last fruit pit out into space and shouldered her bag. Just as she was swinging down to the next branch, an immense shadow tore “out of the sky like a black thunderbolt. Something sharp struck her shoulder, knocking her from the branch. She fell, tumbling. The tree branches seemed to move past her with preternatural slowness as she fell. She reached out and grabbed a passing branch.

  There was a wrenching jolt. Pain shot up her arm. She wasn’t falling anymore. Time moved normally again. For a moment, Juna just hung there, too shocked to move, not quite able to believe that she was alive. She reached up to grasp the branch that she clung to with her other hand, and felt a sharp pain in her shoulder. Setting her teeth and grunting with the pain, Juna pulled herself up onto the branch.

  Something warm oozed down her back. She reached back with her good arm. Her hand came away sticky with blood. She probed higher with her fingers and found two deep scratches in her shoulder. What the hell had hit her? She felt as if she’d been struck by lightning out of a clear blue sky.

  A black shadow crossed the sun, too quickly for it to be a cloud. Juna looked up in time to make out the form of an impossibly large raptor gliding above the treetops. She recognized it immediately. She had spotted several of them during trips over the jungle in one of the Survey flyers. They were massive, powerful creatures with a leathery wingspan of over five meters. She had been impressed by the raptor, but, with typical human arrogance, believed that it couldn’t harm her, and so had dismissed it. Now she knew why the aliens avoided the topmost branches of the canopy.

  Juna took a deep breath. It was over. She was all right. Her shoulders hurt like hell, one injured, the other strained, but she was alive. Settling herself securely in a nearby crotch, she took out her med kit and doctored the wound. It was awkward and painful. The wound was in a hard-to-reach place and it hurt to lift her arm. Still she managed to clean it and cover it with antiseptic fleshfoam. Then she climbed slowly and painfully to the ground and walked the rest of the way.

  The first drops of rain began to fall as she reported in. She summarized her activities of the night before and documented her link with Ukatonen, and how it had given her the ability to depict skin speech. The physiology people would be fascinated by what had happened to her, as would the Alien Contact specialist and the linguists back home. The more excited they got, the sooner they would return for her.

  Then she turned to the messages she had received. There were several hundred K of personal messages and mail. They would be precious and painful. Juna decided to shelve them for later. She needed to attend to business. The ship would make the jump to hyperspace just past midnight, and she had a lot more information to send in before that happened. She sat in the pounding downpour and dictated reports for a couple of hours. Her voice was rough and hoarse, and the wound on her shoulder throbbed. Something touched her wounded shoulder.

  She jumped and looked around. Ukatonen and Anito were standing there.

  “Come,” Anito told her, beckoning her to follow.

  Juna needed to take a break; her voice was wearing out. She signed off and followed the aliens into the jungle. When they were safely ensconced in a large tree, Anito touched the fleshfoam covering her wound.

  “What is on your arm?”

  “Bird hurt me. I fix hurt,” Juna explained.

  “You allu-a with me. I fix better,” Anito told her. The alien held out its arms to Juna, indicating that it wanted to link with her.

  Juna shook her head. Linking still terrified her.

  Anito persisted, flickers of yellow irritation crossing its ochre skin. Ukatonen watched them talk, saying nothing.

  Juna shook her head again, rubbing at her itching eyes. If she gave in to Anito, all of the aliens would want to link with her, and there would be nothing of herself left by the time they had satisfied their curiosity.

  Anito touched her arm again, pleading with Juna for a link. “Shoulder bad. You get sick.”

  Juna shrugged off the alien’s touch and looked away. She was tired of telling the aliens to keep out of her body. Her shoulder burned and her eyes itched. She sneezed as she got up to go back to the beacon. Her head felt thick and heavy. What a time to be coming down with a cold. She couldn’t get sick, she had too much to do…

  Anito grabbed Juna’s arm and jerked her around so that she was looking at the alien.

  “Sick you! Bad sick you!”

  A picture appeared on Anito’s chest. It was a picture of Juna, before the aliens rescued her, dying in the forest. Then the alien superimposed a picture of Juna as she looked now, with two red scratches on her shoulder, and flickered between the two. Then Anito’s skin turned silvery-pale. The sick elder, Ilto, had looked like that after it died. Anito extended its arms again, asking for a link.

  The alien had always accepted Juna’s refusals to link before. Something else was going on. Juna rubbed at her itching eyes and tried to think. She felt terrible. She hadn’t felt this bad since her suit had been breached. Her skin flared orange as a sudden surge of fear jolted through her. She was on the verge of anaphylactic shock. She looked at the two aliens. They knew what^vas happening to her. Anito was asking for permission to save her life.

  “Yes,” Juna said in skin speech. “I understand.” She held out her arms to Anito, wordlessly requesting a link.

  Anito’s skin turned a deep, reassuring dark blue, as it grasped Juna’s arm with one hand. Ukatonen took the other arm, and the two aliens linked with her. Juna was inside the link so quickly that she barely had time to be frightened.

  Anito’s link felt less controlled and subtle than Ukatonen’s. There was less sense of focus, of flow and control. It was clear that Anito was younger and l
ess experienced. Juna could sense Ukatonen hovering in the background watching over the two of them in their link.

  Despite Anito’s youth and lack of subtlety, the alien was a competent healer. Juna’s eyes stopped itching within seconds. Her head cleared, and her sore throat eased. She felt a warm tingling in her shoulder, and a sudden tightness as the edges of the wound closed over. She felt the pain lift from her bruised muscles as Anito’s presence healed them. Something in the flavor of the link made Juna aware that Anito was female. She became so involved in sorting out what it was that made Anito’s presence so ineffably female that the breaking of the link caught her by surprise.

  Juna sat for a few minutes, disoriented by the sudden shift from linking to not-linking. It was like being awakened in the middle of an extremely vivid dream. There was an unreal feeling to allu-a. She blinked a few times and took a deep breath. Her throat was no longer sore, her eyes weren’t itching, and her breathing was clear. Anito had saved her life again.

  “Thank you,” she said at last. “I not know I sick.”

  “You not go in top of tree again?” Ukatonen asked her.

  Juna shook her head, then remembered to use skin speech. “I need feed my talking stones,” she said using the aliens’ term for her computers. “They need sun.”

  Anito and Ukatonen conferred.

  “Next time you need feed talking stones, one of us goes with you,” Vkatonen said.

  Juna looked from Ukatonen to Anito and back again, wondering what fhe should do next. Ukatonen got up and headed out toward the radio reacon. Anito and Juna followed. Ukatonen squatted beside the computer, and looked at Juna, ears raised inquisitively.

  Ukatonen placed his hand on the silver radio tower. “What this is?”

  Juna frowned. This was going to be hard to explain. “I talk to my people. My people very far. This tower sends talk.”