Delta Pavonis (20 page)

"It sure does. I've never heard anything like it, but then I wouldn't expect humility from you." Then, "I guess it's just as well. What's coming is likely to be too demanding for weak personalities."

ELEVEN

Another night in the main transporter chamber. It was the aliens' largest artifact on the planet, but it was drab, just an expanded version of the simple chamber she had found on the island. Of course, the whole planet was some sort of artifact; its surface was, at any rate.

These long watches were hard to take. After the exciting life of an explorer, and then of being Sieglinde's assistant in her frenetic, never-ending work, this was maddeningly dull. At first, friends had come to spend time with her, but the longer the immense alien ship hung in orbit the less time they spent planetside. They found excuses to stay in orbit themselves, just in case. She didn't blame them.

The first few nights, it had reminded her a little of the long night watches when they were camped on the island, but here there were no night sounds, and there was none of the camaraderie of the team to sustain her. Sometimes she would run old entertainments on a one-wall holoscreen. Sieglinde had forbidden any whole-environment holos, lest she miss something happening in the chamber. She studied a great deal. There was always need for study, and she concentrated on history, both Earth and Island Worlds, amazed at the depth of her ignorance. Like most of her contemporaries, she had concentrated on specific, utilitarian skills, rather than things like history and philosophy, art and the humanities. If nothing else, she figured she might get a well-rounded education out of this experience.

Even Steve hadn't been around for days. They'd had a flaming blowup when she agreed to stay at the transporter site with Sieglinde. The monotony of the arctic station had been driving him into terminal brain-burn for weeks, and he had turned her decision into a loyalty test, which she had failed. She thought that, had he at least tried to be conciliatory and used a little persuasion, she might have changed her mind. Once he took the take-it-or-leave-it attitude, though, her pride wouldn't let her back down. That was what she told herself, at any rate. She decided that maybe she wasn't suited to stable interpersonal relationships.

Predictably, Sieglinde had been short on sympathy. She had said that nowhere in the Articles was there any provision for smooth interpersonal relations, and pointed out helpfully that the only times in history when men and women had stayed together predictably had been when women were virtual slaves and nobody cared how miserable they were. Still it seemed unfair that two people with as much in common as she and Steve had couldn't get along, when two as appallingly different as Hannie and Matthias enjoyed apparent bliss. Sieglinde had had a few words to say about anyone who expected life to be fair, too.

She decided not to think about it. There was nothing she could do about it just now. Her life, like everybody else's, had been put on hold until the aliens made their intentions clear. If the aliens were actually in that ship; there was still debate on that point. If they were the same aliens. Sieglinde thought they had to be, but Dierdre wasn't so sure. There was always the chance. And this planet had been here, in its present condition, for uncounted years. Others might have found it in that time, and left their own detection systems, and now be coming back ("Who's been sleeping in my bed?").

The chamber where they had set up the lab was unique in this facility in that it had only a single transporter. There were dozens of chambers in the great master facility, some of them with scores of transporters set into the walls. Some of the gateways led to stations all over the planet; others to sites on the moons and on other planets and sizable bodies in the system. There were a few through which the robot probes had ventured, never to return, from which no signal had ever been received. The transporter in the lab chamber was one such, and had been marked with the ancient skull-and-crossbones device as a result.

She switched off her educational program and got out of her chair. It was time for her hourly sweep of the facility. One after another, she looked into the transporter rooms, each one deserted and silent. She stifled a yawn. It was too early to yawn. She had five hours left on this watch.

She returned to her chair and noted the uneventful sweep in the record, She thought of calling one of her friends on the planet, or in an orbital, to talk to. She decided that she really didn't have anything to talk about just now, and she was damned if she'd call up somebody just to entertain her.

She chose another holo, one about the early days of the terraforming of Mars, a period she was weak in. It was just getting to the part about the terrible first year of the settlement at Tarkovskygrad, complete with music by Hoist, when she felt the familiar electric-shock sensation, the same thing she had felt hundreds of times since that first time in the island transporter room. Only Sieglinde had forbidden any transporter use until the current crisis was resolved.

She didn't want to turn around. The transporter was behind her, and she was afraid of what she might see. Horrible pictures went through her mind-images from old holos, older movies. Beaks and tentacles, razor-edged teeth, hard, shiny carapaces and blobby, amorphous bodies with multiple eyes. Whatever it was, if it was there and she wasn't imagining things, it made no sound and didn't seem to emit any horrible smell She tried to swallow but her mouth had gone dry and she couldn't reach for the water beaker inches from her hand. Her heart thudded and her breathing grew ragged.

After a few seconds she found she could still move her feet a little. She didn't want to see but she had to know. Moving her feet in tiny increments, she began to swivel around, turning off the holo screen.

At first she felt a vast relief, because it didn't look all that bad. Then there was a great suspicion. Was someone trying to play an awful trick on her, someone like Steve, maybe? Because not only did it not look horrible, it looked rather—human, that was the only way she could put it. Not quite like a real human, but you could do a lot with holos, and nobody could tell the illusion from reality without actually touching the projection.

Not that she was about to touch it. Despite all the self-reassuring things rushing desperately through her brain, she was terrified as she had never been in her life. She knew it was real.

It was tall, over two meters. There was something not quite right about the shape of the face, the flexibility of the neck. The hands were a little wrong, too, something about the proportions of fingers and thumb to the palm. It appeared to be male. She was sure about that. It wore clothes, but they resembled blue paint. Yes, male. Definitely. And human, or at least an excellent approximation.

She reminded herself that, in some of those old movies and stories, the aliens could adopt human form, the better to accomplish their nefarious ends.

She wondered whether she was going insane, or just hysterical. She had never been truly hysterical before. Its skin was the color of bronze, its hair also bronze but lighter, growing rather long on the scalp, dipping to a graceful peak on the brow, and forming a short, soft fluff along the broad cheekbones. Its eyes were golden, extremely large but not round; more of a rectangular shape, only not angular.

It—she corrected herself—he was not quite the sort of human she was accustomed to, but he looked far more human than the primitive hominids they had discovered. He was, she finally decided, quite beautiful. That put her even further on her guard. Legend was full of beautiful, deadly creatures: sirens, vampires and the like.

He walked toward her. Even his walk was graceful, a smooth stride full of springy muscles and supple joints. It made her feel clumsy and awkward just watching him. She wanted to run, to hit an emergency transmit switch, to yell. Instead she sat as if paralyzed, her breath coming in choking gasps. He stopped no more than a pace in front of her.

"You are the Dierdre?"

God, what a voice. The greatest Shakespearian actor who ever lived sounded like a howler monkey compared to him. His accent was odd, but sounded wonderful. The use of the article before her name betrayed a certain lack of assurance with the language, as did the phrasing of the question, but he had the rising inflection down pat, so there was no doubt that he meant it as a question.

It also meant that her worst fears had been realized. They had recorded her and had tracked her down for violating their property. She saw no point in evasion. They undoubtedly had a complete genetic readout of her, probably all her memories as well, her whole wretched school record, everything.

"Yes," she croaked. Great. First word spoken by a human to an alien and it was a croak. But was he really an alien? He didn't look it.

"Or is it the Jamail? We have not yet mastered your titling protocol." That voice again.

"Either is fine." That came out all right. "I like Dierdre better. Just Dierdre, no the."

"Dierdre, then. I am being sorry. This will take time."

"You're doing fine. I guess I'm the first of us you've talked to?" You're babbling like an idiot, she thought, stop it.

He considered that for a while. "Except for"—passive—"yes, you are first direct."

"Another first for me," she muttered.

"I am sorry?"

"Oh. Excuse me. I'm not quite myself. You must want to talk to someone important. I can contact the Delta Pavonis council. That's what we call this star, you know: Delta Pavonis."

"I know."

"The council's in charge while the
Althing
isn't in session. We call our legislative body the
Althing
. Or you might want to talk to my boss, Doctor Sieglinde Kornfeld-Taggart. She's been our greatest scientist for a couple of generations."

"No, not yet. I wish to speak with you."

"I was afraid you'd say that. Because I was the first to go through one of the matter transporters?"

"Yes, that is one reason."

"Actually, I didn't know what it was at the time. It looked interesting, that's all." God, she thought, I have to get out of here. "Really, I wasn't supposed to try out any alien apparatus. It's against the rules." It was getting worse.

"I know."

"You seem to know a lot. Have you been monitoring our communications?"

"Yes. There is still much we are not understanding. The—cultures—are too different."

"It's going to be a problem. We'll work it out, don't worry." She wasn't feeling so scared now. If she had to be alone with an alien, she couldn't have asked for a better-looking one. Or a nicer one, so far, at least. She wanted to keep it that way.

"Why did you do it?"

"What? Use the transporter?"

"Yes."

"That's what they all wanted to know. I knew I wasn't supposed to, but there it was. For that one moment, see, I was in sole possession of something unique in human experience. I just had to see what it would do, before anyone else." She wondered whether it was wise, talking like this. They might get the idea that humans were all lawbreakers like her. Perhaps she should refuse to say any more, tell him he would have to do any further talking to officials.

Oddly, she didn't want to do that. She was not over her fear yet, but this was another experience she was reluctant to share. Here was the first alien to contact mankind, and she had him all to herself.

"Could I ask you a few things?"

Again that slight pause. "Yes."

"Let's start with something simple. What's your name?"

"It is quite long. M'ats is an acceptable short version." There was a glottal stop after the first consonant.

She reminded herself to be careful of her phrasing. It would not do to use anything that might be interpreted more than one way.

"Forgive me if this sounds strange—is this your true appearance, and not a look you've adopted to be diplomatic?"

"This is my true appearance—the appearance of my species." There was no way to tell from the sound of his voice if he was amused, shocked or bored. His facial expressions were equally enigmatic.

"Oh, good! But, tell me, we never expected to find anything away from our own solar system that would look remotely like us. We were prepared to meet intelligent species that were vaguely humanoid-upright, bipedal with manipulative appendages and a brain and sensory organs concentrated in a head at the top, but you can have all that and not look much like us. The humans we've discovered on other planets came as a surprise, but they seem to be related to us, somehow. How is it that you resemble us so closely?"

Another pause. "There are some things—that will want time to explain. Not so much at once."

"I can go along with that. But, pardon me, I'm not being a very good host. Would you like to see our facility here?" She felt uncomfortable with the way he looked at her. Not a stare, really. His eyes were so wide it was hard to tell whether he was staring or not. But he seemed to have an eagerness, as if he were seeing something he couldn't have gotten enough of. Well, she was the first Earth human of his acquaintance, after all.

"I would be liking that."

"We're going to have to get your tenses straightened out, but you're doing fine so far." She got out of her chair and, to her utter surprise, he pulled back a little, as if he were alarmed. That would be a laugh.

"I'm sorry. Did I do something wrong?"

"It is nothing. You move very fast. I was—startled."

Things connected in her mind: the little pauses, the slow speech, which she had attributed to unfamiliarity with the language and deliberation in choosing words, the stately, gliding walk. The alien sensed time differently. To him, her speech must seem rapid, her movements abrupt. She told herself to gear down a little.

"Excuse me. I'll be careful. Are you comfortable? I mean, we keep the temperature rather warm here, compared to the outside, both for our own comfort and to preserve our equipment from the humidity."

He didn't look dressed for the climate. He didn't look dressed, period.

He made a graceful, flicking gesture that took in his paintlike garment. She was going to have to count the joints in his fingers. There seemed to be too many of them. "This is—protective. Heat or cold, no matter." She liked watching his lips when he talked. They weren't broad, but they were beautifully shaped. Something was a little different about the teeth, though.