Damocles (30 page)

After some prodding and not very subtle fist-pounding from Hark, the little one stumbled back into the booth, making room for Meg and Loul to sit. The soldiers took up their posts around the booth, holding back anyone trying to get too close. That was
fine with Meg. She could hear cameras purring from every direction. Let them film what they wanted. She was here for Loul.

The shock of her presence wore off by inches, and Meg listened as Hark and Reno Dado questioned Loul, their voices uncertain, their thrums pattering. The two friends tried hard not to stare at Meg, unlike the little one, Po, who seemed incapable of anything else. Po had slid to the far end of the booth, climbing onto some sort of added-on bench that closed the booth off into a horseshoe. Po did finally manage to close his mouth, although Meg couldn’t be certain he had managed to blink. Giving him plenty of time to get his fill of the visual, she listened to the almost hiccup-like sounds from his throat.

Loul spoke quickly to his friends, his voice low and relaxed and punctuated often with bursts of laughter. Meg could tell by the way he knocked his knuckles against the table that he was excited by the story. She didn’t have to be psychic to figure out what the topic was. Hark, sitting across from Loul, leaned over several times to pound his fists on top of Loul’s, both men laughing. Reno Dado covered her mouth when she laughed, peeking at Meg only when her fingers were close enough to her eyes to cover them if need be. She didn’t know if it was an etiquette that hadn’t shown itself at the landing site or just some sort of timidity, but from what Meg could tell, the Dideto around her would stare until she stared back.

Except Po. Hearing his thrum slowing down to a slightly less frantic tattoo, Meg turned to face him, seeing in her peripheral vision that he had managed to climb up onto the bench and now squatted over the table, leaning on his forearms. It seemed Meg was the only one who had noticed his advance, because when she turned to face him, she heard sounds of shock from the other three. Loul started to speak but Meg put her hand on his arm to silence him.

“Po.” She didn’t turn the translator on. Even over the din of the room, she could tell he heard her. His eyes widened and his mouth slipped open as he leaned in closer and closer. She didn’t pull away, letting him get within inches of her face. When she could smell his breath, she smiled and said, “Meg.”

“Meg.” The word came out in a rush of breath, and Meg was surprised to hear that of all the Dideto who had spoken her name since arrival, his pronunciation was the closest. She activated the translator.

“Meg touch Po?” She held her palm out and lowered it onto his fist. He didn’t flinch although the muscles twitched and jumped under her fingers. His gaze followed her hand, and after a few light strokes of her fingers, he turned his fist over, opening up the tender pads of his palm. Loul had done the same thing early on and she knew how sensitive those exposed pads were. Keeping her touch light, she traced swirls over the pink skin until he smiled.

The translator took a moment to capture his words and refine them to their simplest form. “Po touch Meg?” More mutters and sharp breaths from Loul’s friends, but she also heard Loul’s soft laugh.

“Yes okay.” Meg leaned in closer and then went very still, not wanting to spook the wide-eyed man. She expected him to touch her arms—the Dideto at the landing site had been fascinated by the length of the Earthers’ arms—but his hand came toward her face. His eyes moved over her face as if he were trying to decide what he wanted to touch. She couldn’t fight back the grin that exposed her teeth. Loul always stared at her teeth. His fingers brushed her cheek, and she could feel the hard edges that surrounded the tender pads, but he didn’t stop there. Instead, his hands moved to her hair, petting the pulled-back strands the way one would stroke a newborn kitten. A soft, low sound whispered from his lips.

Moving slowly and deliberately, Meg reached up with one hand and pulled off the ponytail elastic. Po jumped when her hair fell forward toward her face, but she smiled and carded her fingers through her curls, loosening them. Her fingers brushed over the back of Po’s hand, encouraging him to trail his fingers along the length of her hair. When the curls slipped over the tender pads of his fingers, his face crumpled into a brilliant, brown-toothed grin.

He said something to her that the translator couldn’t pick up. He said it again to Loul and his friends. Then he pounded his knuckles on the table and said it even louder. Meg turned to Loul for an explanation, but the three Dideto friends burst into loud, barking laughter. They pounded their knuckles against the table, laughing and grinning at each other, and even Reno Dado didn’t cover her mouth. Loul waved his knuckles toward Meg, smiling at her, and repeated the phrase. She still didn’t know what it meant but she smiled back.

Whatever had been said had gotten through to all of them. Meg held her breath, leaning in to catch the sound. The four of them, Loul, Hark, Reno Dado, and Po, were thrumming in perfect, rhythmic harmony.

“They’re real.” Po leaned in close enough to bite Meg’s nose and she didn’t even flinch. His fingers ran through her hair, something Loul had only dared to do once and would never forget. Po finally seemed to be shaking off the shock of meeting Meg, his voice and his face regaining their usual comic expressiveness. “They’re real. They’re real!”

Loul couldn’t hold it back any longer. He laughed out loud, Hark and Reno Dado following suit. The utter stupid delight on Po’s face, the shock and nerdy jitter in his voice, broke the last of the tension at the table, and just like that the four of them were pounding the table like they were playing a drinking game. It felt so good, so easy to be laughing and talking with his friends, that he almost forgot Meg’s inability to understand.

He smiled at her, wanting to include her, and wasn’t surprised to see her smiling back. He wondered if he looked like that when he listened to the Urfers chattering among themselves.

“They’re real,” Loul said.

Hark’s voice was rough with excitement. “And you were there. Man, you were there.”

Loul told them the story of his report that was now required reading for a secret department of the Space Administration. Technically, he figured it couldn’t be secret anymore. Everyone knew the aliens existed, and, as he had expected, Po had followed every second of the coverage. His friends wanted to hear the blow-by-blow recap of his first encounter with Meg including all the heart-stopping dread of pulling what they all knew was a classic Loul Pell social error. He didn’t mind their teasing. He was, after all, the one sitting with an alien.

“Can I show her the book?” Po stared at Meg, making no attempt to hide his fascination.

Reno Dado rolled her eyes but Meg smiled. It seemed she could understand snippets of their conversation, or maybe there was no mistaking the eagerness in his buddy’s face.

“Yeah, why not?” As Po ducked under the table to search around the shelves there, Loul touched Meg’s arm. “Po has thing Meg sees, yes? Meg know Magagan?”

Hark snorted. “You showed her a comic book?”

“It was there. One of the archivists had it. I’m trying to show her our things but there isn’t that much out at the site.” Loul tapped his knuckles. “Plus it was Shadow Mountain Four, series nineteen, where the Evanestas clone the Shadow.”

“Oh, that is a good one.”

“Great,” Reno Dado said, “now she thinks we’re a planet of nerds.”

Po climbed back onto the bench, slamming down a hard-edged binder jammed with pages. “That’s gotten a lot thicker since I left,” Loul said.

“Are you kidding me?” Po flipped through the pages. “Do you have any idea how much data has been uploaded online since their arrival? And not just from The Searcher, although he’s had the best stuff. He’s got sources you wouldn’t believe.”

“Anything from the landing site?”

“No, but he’s got people on the barrier who have inside sources.”

“Hey, Po?” Loul leaned forward and waited for Po to look up from the pages he studied. “You’ve got sources on the inside too. You’re sitting next to the direct source right now.” Meg must have been able to sense she was once again the topic because she looked from Loul to Po with a smile. She leaned sideways in the booth, bracing herself on her long arm, to peer at Po’s battered pages. Seeing her interest, he scooted over closer to her, once again clambering over the armrest at that end of the booth. Loul could hear Meg’s soft laugh in his earpiece as Po pushed in beside her.

He flipped through the pages, talking so quickly even Loul couldn’t understand him. When he finally stopped to take a break, Meg put her thin hand on his. “Meg see?”

“What?”

Loul leaned forward. “She wants to look at the book herself.”

“Oh my god.” Po’s hands slipped from the table and Hark bit his own fist trying not to laugh. “Yes. Yes yes yes. Oh my god, yes. Oh my god.”

“She’s just going to look at it, Po. Not teleport it into space.”

“You don’t know that.”

Meg ran her fingers over the pages in the book in that feathery way she investigated everything. She seemed as interested in the material that held the cut-out articles against the plastic pages as in the photos held there. She hefted the book, turning it over to examine the cover and the central fasteners. Making little noises of surprise and interest, she tilted her head this way and that. Loul could see his friends’ eyes growing wider as they saw up close the incredible flexibility of Meg’s upper body. He wondered what they would do if they had seen the Urfers throwing themselves through the air when the rains came.

She skipped over long pages of text. Without the translator they probably looked like nothing but scribbles to her, but she stopped and studied many of the photographs and drawings. One set of pages held nothing but a series of grotesque cartoons of vicious-looking aliens. She pointed to one of the pictures, a cartoon from a controversial comic series about the ancient sea gods that depicted an alien invader as a swimming monstrosity with one enormous eye and dozens of snakelike appendages dragging a helpless woman into his cavernous maw.

“In Didet?” She pointed to the creature. “This is in Didet?”

“No,” Loul said quickly. “No, no this is…this is…” He put his hand to the side of his head. “This is here, yes?”

Reno Dado leaned in. “What do you mean by that? What’s she saying?”

“She wants to know if the monster in this cartoon is real and I’m trying to tell her that it’s just imagination. We don’t have the word for that yet so I told her it’s just a thought.” He could tell his friends weren’t totally following him. “It’s kind of weird how this works. It’s a lot of guesswork and trying to get as close as possible.”

“Wait a minute,” Po said, reaching to stop Meg from turning the page. “She thinks the Gagarel is real?”

“I doubt it. We just interfaced the computers and they’ve been studying our animal life. They seem really interested in the seas. Their doctor keeps asking the scientists something about going into them or onto them. I don’t know. She’s probably just looking for new animal life to tell Cho about.”

“Cho,” Reno Dado said with a smile. “That’s the other one, right? I have a banner with him in my office. They sold a bunch of them right after the press conference when—”

“Wait!” Po pounded his fist on the table, making Meg laugh. It seemed the reaction to Po’s nervous fidgeting was universal. “She asked if we had Gagarel on our planet, right? Maybe there’s a reason. Can I ask her a question?”

“If you stop shouting. Her hearing is really sensitive. She hates shouting.”

Po pointed to the illustrated monster and stared at Meg. When he spoke, his voice was much lower. Loul could see Meg’s shoulder carriage drop in what he recognized as relief. “Meg? This creature, this is Gagarel.”

“Gagarel.” Her voice gave the word a light clicking sound. “This is Gagarel.”

“Yes. We don’t have them on Didet.” Po watched her face as he spoke and when she tilted her head, he spoke quickly. “What’s she doing? What’s she doing? What’s she doing?”

“She doesn’t understand what you mean. I mean, she probably gets that there are no Gagarel in real life. She knows what drawings are as opposed to photographs.”

Po ground his knuckles on the edge of the table as Meg turned her full focus on him. Loul knew how unnerving that focus could be, like being put center stage at a Pummel arena. There was an excellent chance Po would simply blow to pieces at the pressure. He didn’t, though. He climbed up farther on the bench, almost standing, and pushed his finger against the cartoon image.

“No Gagarel on Didet. Gagarel on Urf?”

Loul started to protest. Po could drive the people who loved him to madness. He couldn’t imagine the impression he was making on Meg. Before he could push the book away, however, Meg put her own hand on the cartoon.

“Yes. Urfers has Gagarel.”

She could hardly breathe. All the hair on her arms stood on end, and it took all her self-control to not stretch out her hands to touch the people around her. Loul talked too quickly for the translator to keep up with, and his friends interrupted him with happy, high-pitched questions and comments. For just a moment, even though she was no doubt the topic of discussion, they forgot about her. And when they did, the four Dideto connected with each other. It was connection, relation, synchronization. Whatever it was, the moment the four thrums came into harmony with each other, a vibration coursed through Meg with enough strength to drown out the bedlam around her. The crowds, the clamor, the sensory overload—all of it fell away on the wave of this more-than-audible rush of thrumming. She could tell by their relaxed faces and easy laughs that either they didn’t notice the harmonizing or it was common enough to be unremarkable. For Meg, it was astounding.