XD:317 (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  ‘We are exiting the shuttle,’ Alex signalled to the Gider. ‘Please allow us four minutes to do that safely.’

  Affirmative/agreed/okay.

  Alex got into the airlock. Then the outer-door sampling system was activated, taking in a sample of atmosphere for analysis.

  ‘Wow!’ said Rangi, astounded, and told him at once, ‘That is not good air, skipper. Standard Chartsey pressure, all right, and equivalent mix of atmospheric gases. But I’m also reading hydrocarbons, ozone, sulphides, a whole raft of chemicals... sir, that air is polluted.’

  ‘Got it!’ Murg was doing a data search, looking for any match with that particular atmospheric data. It had flashed up immediately, and she transferred the report straight to the comp-screen Alex was carrying. ‘Also from the Athenall Set, skipper.’

  Alex looked at the report, and understood. The atmosphere that the Gider had created in the encounter vehicle matched, exactly, a sample analysis included in the ‘snapshot of a day on Chartsey’ Athenall data set. The notes attached to it explained that this atmospheric sample had been taken at a particular point in Senate Square on the day of the data gathering, with a timeline analysis over twenty five hours identifying all the gases and odours that would have been experienced by someone standing on that spot.

  For most of the sampling period, that had involved a strong odour of frying onions and other foods from a mobile snack vendor operating in the square. Also identified were personal cosmetics, perfumes and hygiene products from people who’d passed close to the sampling unit. There was even body odour. Primarily, though, there was the reek of the city. Chartsey had long, long ago passed the point at which the planet could sustain the atmosphere by natural means. The entire planet was so densely packed with high rise buildings that there was just no room for forests. Even the huge floating atmospheric generators that made oxygen from seawater could not produce enough. Even with the constant hum of air processors on every building, the air on Chartsey was of such poor quality that pollution levels were routinely broadcast as part of weather reports. It had been even worse seventy three years ago, before the latest round of clean air legislation and new technology had made the capital world, at least, smell a little better.

  Alex nodded, though marvelling at the detail with which the Gider had recreated the atmosphere of Chartsey, right down to the smell of frying onions and a passer-by with BO.

  ‘Safe, though?’ he queried, just as a matter of good practice.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Rangi assured him.

  ‘All right. Going out.’

  Alex opened the outer airlock door, getting his first sight inside the encounter vehicle.

  It was more than just a hangar. You couldn’t call a space that serenely beautiful a hangar. There had to be another word for this splendour. It would, to be sure, have been even more splendid without the characteristic murk of Chartsey atmosphere. The sky was never blue, there, even if you could catch a glimpse of it between the criss-crossing streams of multi-levelled air traffic, and in any space big enough, like this, you could see a faint murky haze hanging in the air.

  That did not, however, detract from the wonder and beauty of the Gider encounter zone. It was, Alex felt, like being inside a great oyster. Both the flat surface that the shuttle had been landed on and the walls that curved up into a pointed dome high above them were of a smooth, pearly substance, pale and softly gleaming. Light seemed to be emanating from the surface itself, with no other lighting or indeed any other kind of visible tech. The only thing the space contained was their shuttle, parked right in the middle.

  It was, indeed, upside down, standing on its cargo-rack with its landing skis stuck in the air. That meant that there was more than a metre drop between the airlock and the floor of the encounter vehicle. Alex, having got himself the right way round in the airlock, jumped out lightly, landing with the ease of someone used to moving between freefall and gravity environments.

  He landed on both feet, finding that the surface was hard, and that it had sufficient traction for him not to skid. He looked around, then looked up, taking in the scale of the high-pointed dome a couple of hundred metres above. He felt, in that moment, utterly insignificant, an insect crawling on the floor of a cathedral. And yet, in the same moment, knew himself to be standing like a giant, the first of his people ever to set foot on a Gider ship. Now he knew what Shion had meant when she’d told him, once, that her heart had been beating so fast when she first arrived at the Amali base that she’d felt dizzy. Alex felt as if he might be sick from sheer nervous excitement.

  Outwardly, however, Novaterran instincts and a lifetime’s habit kicked in, keeping stern composure.

  ‘All right,’ he said, on the comms that linked their suits. ‘Come on out.’

  The others emerged, jumping down as Alex had, though Rangi handed Lucky down to Shion before jumping down himself, then instantly reclaimed the lizard. He was not, Alex could see, very happy about bringing the gecko along. For Alex, though, it was more important to establish friendly relationship with the Gider, and he was not about to refuse any reasonable request.

  ‘I mean, why?’ Shion said, as if continuing a conversation that they’d been having. She was standing with her back to the majestic space of the encounter venue, hands on hips, surveying the upside down shuttle. Her manner was one of mild irritation mingled with perplexity. ‘Is it supposed to be funny?’

  Alex had wondered the same thing, though suspecting that it was more likely that the Gider simply didn’t recognise which way up the shuttle was supposed to go.

  He was rather more concerned – worried – that the Gider’s rather bizarre sense of humour might just make them think that it was funny to, say, pop this bubble out of existence at any moment, leaving the humans floating in space. They would be all right if that happened. Survival suits were space-worthy and had little emergency propulsion packs that they could use to get back aboard the shuttle, if need be. The Heron would very quickly come to the rescue, too. If, indeed, they were still in that spot between the frigate and the Gider ship. There was no way to tell, after all, and possible that they might have been whisked off somewhere else once their shuttle was enveloped.

  All of them knew that they were taking an enormous risk, coming here. Humans had themselves, for centuries, considered that the right and necessary response to encountering other species was to capture them and take them off to secret bases to be studied and interrogated. They would not be in any position to complain, really, if other species now did that to them. And even assuming that the Gider meant them no harm, there were just so many unknown dangers in exposing themselves to technology beyond their understanding.

  They could die here, today, doing this, and they knew it. But they wouldn’t have swapped places with anyone in the universe, right then.

  ‘So beautiful,’ said Murg, looking around. ‘I wond...’

  She didn’t get to finish the word, let alone the sentence. Even as she started stooping to take a microscope reading of the material that they were standing on, it happened.

  There was a moment of bewildering terror. Huge figures appeared around them and seemed to be moving everywhere at once, so fast they were a blur, with high pitched chittering and whooping sounds.

  Murg yelped and covered her head with her arms, instinctively. Rangi jumped back, hugging Lucky’s carrier to himself as if he feared the gecko was going to be snatched away. Alex stepped back quickly, himself, a flicker of alarm on his face, his hands held out in a please stop gesture. Shion threw her hands up, too, saying ‘Adah, adah, adah!’

  The Gider withdrew. They moved back and stood still, fluttering their hands and making sounds like articulate birdsong.

  ‘Adah,’ Shion repeated, while Alex was still catching his breath, staring at the two figures facing them. It had seemed that there were many more of them than that, but he could see now that there were, indeed, only two of them. They stood more than twice human height, beaming down at them with an air of hap
py assurance. They were, unnervingly, naked, and both male. ‘Ah-daaaaah.’ Shion said, patting the air very slowly and dragging out the sound of the word.

  Alex knew the word. It was one of the few Solaran words he did know. Humans could speak Solaran, but the course to learn it took at least seven years full time study and even then you might spend another twenty years learning before you were anything like functionally fluent. Adah, though, he knew, meant ‘slow’, or ‘slowly’.

  The rapid chirruping that the Gider were making gradually resolved into something like audible words. Alex realised that they were repeating the same thing, over and over, slowing it down until they found the point at which the humans could understand them.

  And out of the babble, suddenly, Alex did understand.

  ‘Are you secure/safe/okay interrogative/query/question?’ They were asking the same question, though not in unison.

  ‘Yes – yes.’ Alex felt a surge of relief. They hadn’t meant to frighten them – were just moving, and speaking, at the speed that was normal for them. Like quicksilver, Alex remembered Shion saying. They were said to be like quicksilver. ‘We are safe. We are okay,’ Alex said, and patted the air, too, gently and calmingly. ‘Just, please, slowly. Adah.’

  The Gider beamed delightedly at him.

  ‘Adah,’ one of them agreed. The other was surveying them with happy fascination.

  ‘Desire/request/want you remove/undress/take off clothing.’

  ‘What?’ Murg had straightened up again, though moving to stand a little behind the skipper.

  ‘I think they mean our suits,’ said Alex, hoping that they meant their survival suits. He touched the suit himself, and pinched the helmet, looking enquiringly at them. ‘Suits?’

  ‘Desire/request/want you remove suits.’ The Gider confirmed, in their thin, reedy voices.

  ‘Negative, inadvisable,’ Alex said. ‘The suits and clothing are necessary for our safety and comfort.’

  Even more to his relief, this was accepted. The ‘desire/request/want’ was evidently more of an invitation than a command.

  ‘If I may, skipper?’ Shion requested, with a gesture that asked him if she could speak to the Gider herself. Alex nodded.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  Shion spoke, rattling words out so fast that Alex could barely make out that she was actually speaking Solaran. The Gider responded with high pitched chatter and more hooting sounds. They were asking her what sounded like questions, to which she was giving rapid explanations.

  ‘I have offered to help them translate what they want to say,’ Shion told Alex.

  ‘Need form of words,’ one of the Gider confirmed, gesturing from himself to Shion, and then in a circular motion that included the other Gider, Alex and the others.

  It worked remarkably well – the two Gider were talking to one another in their high speed bird-like language, one of them would then explain to Shion what it was they wanted to say and she would assist with providing the appropriate phrase. That was then picked up by the Gider talking to Alex and the others. The background discussions were happening so fast that they were able to have a fluent conversation.

  They got introductions, first. The Gider talking to Shion said that they could call him Tinikiki. The one talking to Alex said that they could call him Tinikiki, as if it was a different name. Only Shion could hear the subtle difference in intonation, advising Alex that one was Tinikiki while the other was Tinikehki. They looked identical to human eyes, even Murg’s image-comparison scans unable to find any difference between them.

  They were not, as Rangi very soon realised, physically present. He got no life sign readings from them, no bioscan data at all. This, the Gider confirmed, was because they were projecting this ‘presence’ from aboard the main vehicle. This was so far beyond human holographic projection that it was just mystifying. It was clear, at least, that the Gider could see and hear them and interact with them just as if they were physically present, though without putting themselves at any risk of infection or harm from the gravity or atmosphere.

  It became apparent very quickly too that their primary concern was with the safety of their human guests.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Tinikiki asked. ‘Your ship is not going to explode?’

  ‘I hope not,’ said Alex. ‘Why, do you think it might?’

  ‘The last time,’ Tinikiki told him, ‘we said hello to a ship, it exploded. We do not know why. The Perithin tell us that your ships explode. They do not know why either.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Alex. ‘Can I ask – when was this? And can you tell me where?’

  A star map appeared. It was more than a map, it was as if the encounter space suddenly became an astrodome, crystal sharp images of stars and nebula, cut across by a gauzy plane representing the Firewall. There was a tiny representation of the Heron, which Tinikiki pointed out, then another representation of a tiny ship, several metres away in the scale of the map.

  Alex could make no sense of it at first, but Murg was on the case.

  ‘It’s reversed, sir,’ she told him. ‘Upside down.’

  While Alex was mentally turning the map over and recognising it as a map of the region, Shion was asking Tinnikehki why their shuttle had been landed upside down.

  The answer turned out to be that the Gider saw the galaxy the other way up to the ‘north/south’ way that humans had decided it. Well, that Chartseyans had decided it, and other worlds fallen in with as they merged into the League. There was no particular reason for either galactic view to be considered right or wrong. Once the Gider understood that they and the humans had different perspective, however, they flipped the star map over for them, courteously.

  They also turned their shuttle over, Tinikiki explaining as they did so that they hadn’t realised it mattered which way up it went.

  That was pretty alarming in itself, given that they were entirely dependent on the Gider to be looking after them here. It was quite something, though, to watch the shuttle rising from the ground, turning over gently and settling back down again. Neither of the Gider appeared to be operating any kind of controls at all.

  Alex refrained from asking how they had done that. The Diplomatic Corps were very clear on that in their exodiplomacy briefings. Asking for information about advanced technology was a huge no-no. Solarans would withdraw immediately if they were asked questions about that, and Alex had no desire to bring this meeting to an abrupt halt. And he was, besides, focussed right now on finding out what they meant by ‘the last time’ and the ship that had exploded.

  His worst fears were confirmed when the inversion of the star map showed the location of the incident so clearly there could not be any mistake. It was right in the middle of the Abigale Alley route to Tolmer’s Drift.

  ‘There were many taps,’ Tinikiki told Alex. ‘Tap tap tap tap. We thought you were saying hello, so we sent a vehicle, like this, to say hello too. But when we said hello your ship turned towards the nebula. We asked if they were okay but the ship exploded. The people at the time on our vehicle said that they counted eight hundred and sixty four of your life form on the ship. Can that be so, on such a tiny ship?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alex, with a heavy heart. ‘Yes. It was a transport taking miners and their families to work at the system, here,’ he indicated Tolmer’s Drift. ‘By the sound of it, they panicked when they saw you, tried to turn the ship, misjudged it and ran into nebula. Our ships cannot survive impact with nebula. And yes, there were eight hundred and sixty four people aboard – four hundred and twelve men, three hundred and forty two women and a hundred and ten children.’

  ‘Apologies. It was an accident.’ Tinikiki did not sound terribly distressed, his manner just as cheerful as before. ‘But they would be dead by now anyway so no big.’

  Alex stared at him, shocked, then turned his head and looked at Shion. She held up her hands in a quick, apologetic gesture but nodded in confirmation, too, that the words she had given them accurately reflected the spirit of what they had
wanted to say. No big. Eight hundred and sixty four people killed, but it was ‘no big’ to the Gider.

  Alex really felt he understood, with that, why the Gider and Solarans did not get along. It was more than just a difficulty in a very fast and a very slow race communicating. The Solarans didn’t have any discernible sense of humour, but they did have very strong cultural similarity with humans in the way they mourned and remembered disasters. The Solarans would certainly understand why starships ‘tipped their hats to Abigale’ as they passed the memorial site. The Gider, clearly, would not.

  Logically, Alex had to concede, they had a point. The Abigale disaster had been more than four hundred years ago, so the people on the transport would indeed have died centuries ago anyway. Humans would still feel that their lives had been tragically cut short, and they would feel that that mattered. They would expect a sense of deep responsibility and grief in the Gider, too, for having caused the disaster, however innocent their intentions.

  This was not, Alex realised, going to be a straightforward making friends with people who just had a different physiology. There were profound psychological and cultural differences here. For the first time, as he looked into Tinikiki’s eyes, he really understood that he was speaking with an alien.

  ‘This is causing you distress,’ Tinikiki commented, sounding more curious than regretful.

  ‘We mourn our dead,’ Alex explained. ‘As the Solarans do.’

  ‘Sola- ah!’ Tinikiki picked up the explanation from the side-talk going on between Shion and Tinikehki, giving the hoot, so high pitched it almost hurt human ears, that Alex was coming to recognise as laughter. ‘They are not called Solarans,’ Tinikiki informed him. ‘They are the Perithin.’

  Alex was aware that there had been a misunderstanding way back when, in establishing relationship with the Solarans. When they were asked where they were from they had said ‘Solarus Perth.’ When they were asked what their name for themselves was they had considered for a long time and then answered ‘people’. A diplomat at the time had asked if they would object to being known as ‘Solarans’, and, after the usual long consideration, the Solaran ambassador had agreed that this would be acceptable.