Alien Contact (45 page)

The rock was black with dried blood. She lay down flat, as she had earlier seen her larl do. The stone was cold, so cold it almost blanked out the pain. Her pursuers waited nearby, curious to see what she was doing; she could hear the soft panting noise of their breathing. One padded noiselessly to her side. She could smell the brute. It whined questioningly.

She licked the rock.

Once it was understood what the woman wanted, her sacrifice went quickly. I raised a paw, smashed her skull. Again I was youngest. Innocent, I bent to taste.

The neighbors were gathering, hammering at the door, climbing over one another to peer through the windows, making the walls bulge and breathe with their eagerness. I grunted and bellowed, and the clash of silver and clink of plates next door grew louder. Like peasant animals, my husband’s people tried to drown out the sound of my pain with toasts and drunken jokes.

Through the window I saw Tevin-the-Fool’s bonewhite skin gaunt on his skull, and behind him a slice of face—sharp nose, white cheeks—like a mask. The doors and walls pulsed with the weight of those outside. In the next room children fought and wrestled, and elders pulled at their long white beards, staring anxiously at the closed door.

The midwife shook her head, red lines running from the corners of her mouth down either side of her stern chin. Her eye sockets were shadowy pools of dust. “Now push!” she cried. “Don’t be a lazy sow!”

I groaned and arched my back. I shoved my head back and it grew smaller, eaten up by the pillows. The bedframe skewed as one leg slowly buckled under it. My husband glanced over his shoulder at me, an angry look, his fingers knotted behind his back.

All of Landfall shouted and hovered on the walls.

“Here it comes!” shrieked the midwife. She reached down to my bloody crotch, and eased out a tiny head, purple and angry, like a goblin.

And then all the walls glowed red and green and sprouted large flowers. The door turned orange and burst open, and the neighbors and crew flooded in. The ceiling billowed up, and aerialists tumbled through the rafters. A boy who had been hiding beneath the bed flew up laughing to where the ancient sky and stars shone through the roof.

They held up the child, bloody on a platter.

Here the larl touched me for the first time, that heavy black paw like velvet on my knee, talons sheathed. “Can you understand?” he asked. “What it meant to me? All that, the first birth of human young on this planet, I experienced in an instant. I felt it with full human comprehension. I understood the personal tragedy and the community triumph, and the meaning of the lives and culture behind it. A second before, I lived as an animal, with an animal’s simple thoughts and hopes. Then I ate of your ancestor. I was lifted all in an instant halfway to godhood.

“As the woman had intended. She had died with her child’s birth foremost in her mind, in order that we might share in it. She gave us that. She gave us more. She gave us
language
. We were wise animals before we ate her brain, and we were People afterward. We owed her so much. And we knew what she wanted from us.” The larl stroked my cheek with his great, velvety paw, the ivory claws sheathed but quivering slightly, as if about to awake.

I hardly dared breathe.

“That morning I entered Landfall, carrying the baby’s sling in my mouth. It slept through most of the journey. At dawn I passed through the empty street as silently as I knew how. I came to the First Captain’s house. I heard the murmur of voices within, the entire village assembled for worship. I tapped the door with one paw. There was sudden, astonished silence. Then slowly, fearfully, the door opened.”

The larl was silent for a moment. “That was the beginning of the association of People with humans. We were welcomed into your homes, and we helped with the hunting. It was a fair trade. Our food saved many lives that first winter. No one needed know how the woman had perished, or how well we understood your kind.

“That child, Flip, was your ancestor. Every few generations we take one of your family out hunting, and taste his brains, to maintain our closeness with your line. If you are a good boy and grow up to be as bold and honest, as intelligent and noble a man as your father, then perhaps it will be you we eat.”

The larl presented his blunt muzzle to me in what might have been meant as a friendly smile. Perhaps not; the expression hangs unreadable, ambiguous in my mind even now. Then he stood and padded away into the friendly dark shadows of the Stone House.

I was sitting staring into the coals a few minutes later when my second-eldest sister—her face a featureless blaze of light, like an angel’s—came into the room and saw me. She held out a hand, saying, “Come on, Flip, you’re missing everything.” And I went with her.

Did any of this actually happen? Sometimes I wonder. But it’s growing late, and your parents are away. My room is small but snug, my bed warm but empty. We can burrow deep in the blankets and scare away the cave-bears by playing the oldest winter games there are.

You’re blushing! Don’t tug away your hand. I’ll be gone soon to some distant world to fight in a war for people who are as unknown to you as they are to me. Soldiers grow old slowly, you know. We’re shipped frozen between the stars. When you are old and plump and happily surrounded by grandchildren, I’ll still be young, and thinking of you. You’ll remember me then, and our thoughts will touch in the void. Will you have nothing to regret? Is that really what you want?

Come, don’t be shy. Let’s put the past aside and get on with our lives. That’s better. Blow the candle out, love, and there’s an end to my tale.

All this happened long ago, on a planet whose name has been burned from my memory.

he media followed our course from colony to colony all the way out to Denebola, where the conference was held. Our ship moved magisterially into and out of dock at each port, unnecessarily slow. At first it amused us, but after ten such stops it became ridiculous. We wanted to huddle in our quarters, close together, and ignore the hectoring questions, the lights, the monitors, the enforced celebrity.

Merril, our liaison, did his best to mollify us and satisfy them, but in the end his efforts always came up short. It occurred to me that the public nature of the project was a mistake, but when I gave this notion to the rest they shrugged together and said it wasn’t our mistake.

Earth to Median, halfway to the Centauri group; on to Centauri Transit Station; then to Procyon and on to Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti. We bypassed Eurasia, the colony at 40 Eridani. We were never told why. But we stopped at 82 Eridani, the colony of Eridanus. Aquas, Fomalhaut, Nine Rivers, Millennium, and Pollux.

Pan Pollux proved the worst. We felt like curiosities under glass for the wealthy patrons of the resorts. Till then I’d always believed people had a finer appreciation of the difference between the merely unusual and the special. We gathered together in the lounge and formed a cluster in the center of the floor and communed with each other, playing games of dancing from mind to mind, chasing ideas back to their sources, switching perspectives, and seeing how many we could be at one time. In the middle of this probes managed to sneak in past our security. I’m still convinced this was allowed to happen. The Forum counted on a rich political reward from our mission and the temptation to exploit us through any media outlet available was irresistible. Poor Merril, he believed in his job, tried ardently to meet its requirements, but there was only so much he could do in the face of the great need of human polity. We were ostensibly the saviors of humankind, it was necessary that our march toward Golgotha be witnessed.