Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (43 page)

Her drowsy attention and wonder settled on the head and softly folded “ears” of the larger alien. In all her dream life in the Empire of the Pigs she had never imagined a pig head of such beauty and dignity. There was a shining metallic chain about its neck too, with a medallion of some sort. And its poncho was beautifully embroidered. Evidently her wondrous new visitors weren’t paupers, if such things existed here. Still studying them, she fell asleep and dreamed of stars, mixed with her old story of safe arrival home in the Empire.

They were all awakened by more visitors.

By the time she was conscious, the newcomers had filtered into the clearing and quietly surrounded
Calgary
. It was a spoken utterance by the open microphone that awakened her to confront two strange yellow-colored rotund shapes right by the window, squinting in at her. Beyond them she glimpsed pale or dark alien forms on every side.

She reacted with automatic panic, diving under the console. Police? Army? Enemy of some kind?

But a cautious peek out reassured her.

Her two new “friends” were greeting the arrivals calmly, even joyfully. While the flap-eared alien raised its arms to touch palms with one group of newcomers, Tadak clambered onto the carapace of a large turtle-type, and was being carried around
Calgary
, to hand-greet other arrivals. She noticed there were different nuances of position and length of contact in the double-palm greeting, like different human handshakes for old friends or new, formal meetings. She saw, too, that most of the newcomers looked travel-worn; only a few seemed fresh. It was difficult to count, but she decided that about thirty strangers had arrived. Here she noticed a novelty—subdued voices were to be heard all around. Evidently many of those new aliens talked in verbal speech. Had she been meeting only mental-projection specialists?

As they saw she was awake, voices rose excitedly and they began to gather round her window and settle down. Clearly these weren’t idle tourists. A meeting of some sort impended. Perhaps some ultimatum or scheme to urge her off-planet?

CP splashed her hands and face hurriedly, conserving the water for a second use, and retired to the wastes cubby. When she closed the door on herself, the wave of general disappointment was so strong it reached her. She grinned to herself; maybe, later, she would abandon all her Earth ways. Maybe.

Snatching up a breakfast bar and self-heating kaffy, she came back to the window. Her two new acquaintances had stationed themselves just outside, evidently as her official translators or keepers. All right. Now let’s have it.

A truly strange-looking large alien advanced and held up its palms in formal greeting. It was dark ocher-orange and blue, wrinkled, and extravagantly horned, and it squinted. Its body was such a confusing combination of sluglike membranes and legs out behind that she never quite managed to separate it from its complex clothing and equipment. It was one of the road-worn—CP received a subliminal impression that others had waited for it as spokesman or leader.

Evidently it could mind-speak, perhaps assisted by one of the two on the wing. A misty image formed behind her eyes; she closed them to concentrate, and “saw” herself back in
Calgary
. She was—yes—going from port to port, scanning over the whole sky. This was the long Voiceless last period, after the Empire had faded out, when she was contentedly—but systematically—studying the visible universe. The image turned to her star charts.

On impulse she opened her eyes and pulled the real charts from their locker.

The impression of excited joy that came to her was unmistakable. Unmistakable too, now, was an odd “tone” to the communications, especially those from the antlered one. Familiar!

While Tadak and its large friend helped her explain why she couldn’t pass the charts out now, but they’d have them soon, she searched her memory for that “tone,” and found it.

Why, it was these aliens to whom she had been “transmitting” all those days after she was on course. They were too weakvoiced to reach her, but she had felt not alone, “all right.” Who could they be?

Oh! While she’d been puzzling, a new, very strong phenomenon had emerged: above and around every new head in the clearing came a small halo of stars. Some were weak, barely floating pinpoints of light, others were a full-blown circlet of blackness lit with glory, before all faded.

The astronomers of this world had come to her.

But how could this sealed sunless world, surely without spaceflight, have “astronomers”? How could they ever have found out the stars at all, unless perhaps the clouds cleared once in a while, like an old story she’d read? Here she was wrong, but she only discovered it later, during one of the most exhausting yet pleasant twenty hours of her life.

They wanted to know everything.

Each had formed its one most vital question, each in turn would walk, hobble, crawl, hop forward, to “ask” it. But first the big antlered speaker “asked” a question so comprehensive that it obviated many other planned ones.

An image of a star field bloomed in her mind, stars of all the types she had unwittingly “shown” them from
Calgary
, each clear and specific before merging into the whole.

This great image was followed by a startlingly strong blankout. Then the stars came back, then the blank, faster to the now familiar flicker-meaning:

“The stars are—what?”

Whew.

She had to explain the universe wordlessly to a race whose concepts and measures—if any—of distance, motion, forces, matter, heat, she didn’t know.

Afterward, she recalled mostly a mishmash, but she thought she must have given quite a performance. This was, after all, her own beloved study, at an amateur level.

She remembered first trying to convey some notion of energies and distances. She imaged this world’s—Auln’s—surface from above, then using old tape-teach effects, she “receded” down to a lavender point against the stars, then “pulled” one of the nearer small stars close for comparison, and showed the wild atomic fires of its surface compared with the colder weak processes of Auln. She “built” a star up out of a gas cloud, changed it through its life to red giant and nova, built another, richer one from the debris and condensed its planets. She “started life” on the planet, gave them a glimpse of her own Earth—typical astronomers, they cared little for this—then sent it receding again and built up the Milky Way, and galaxies beyond it, attempted the expanding universe.

It was there she had paused, exhausted.

While she rested and ate, someone sent her the answer to her question: how did they know of the stars?

She received an image of a new sort—framed! Multiply-framed, in fact, frame within frame. The image itself was oddly blurred in detail. Sharp, however, was a view of extraordinary metal wreckage, unidentifiable stuff strewn at a deep gash in the ground. Much was splashed with brilliant green, and there was a central ball or cylinder—no, wait, a
head
, not human. Had these aliens actually attempted spaceflight?

No. The framed image jumped to show a fireball streaking down through the clouds, then back to the green-smeared head. Wrecked as it was, it did seem generically unlike anyone she had seen on Auln. As if to settle her problem, “her” ruddy flop-eared alien bent and pulled a wrap off its leg, showing a healing cut. Its blood was red, like hers.

So another, a
real
alien had crashed here! And long ago, too. The frames, the blur, suggested many transmissions of the scene. But this space alien was obviously dead. How, then—

Into the image came a head like the beaked “aquatics” among her first visitors. Huge-eyed, somehow rather special-seeming. It laid its head against the dead astronaut’s. And the image dissolved to faint views of the starry sky from space, an incoming glimpse of Auln, strangeness.

Generations back, then, they had learned of outside space, the stars—by probing a dead brain!

She was so bemused by this that she barely attended to another, clearly contemporary, image sequence until a motion like wingbeats caught her. She reclosed her eyes in time to “see” a birdlike creature flapping desperately, up—up—it seemed to be driven, or lifted, higher than its wings could sustain it, higher than it could breathe. The image changed. On the ground, a far-“sighted” alien was looking through the dying bird’s eyes, seeing weirdly focused images of thinning, darkening cloud. Just before the bird eyes died, a rift opened above it; blackness lit by two bright stars was briefly there.

A living telescope! But the “tone” in which these sequences came through suggested some sadness or disapproval. CP thought that perhaps they used this ruthless technique only rarely and reluctantly. It certainly wasn’t sustained enough to be useful, but it sufficed to reassure them that the stars
were
there.

The ensuing hours and hours of sending, trying to understand queries, to invent visual ways to convey the barely communicable, not to omit too much of importance, to share in effect all she knew of the universe, condensed in memory into a great blur, of which she recalled only two things.

The first was rooting out the magnificent star and galaxy color photos poor Don Lamb had collected, and pasting them up inside the ports. This was a sensation; the crowding nearly did tip
Calgary.

The other was her own graphic warning of all that could happen on Auln if Earthmen or another aggressive species found them.

This changed the mood to a great sobriety, in which she sensed that the thought was not entirely new to all. She sent all she could on human nuclear space bombardment, robot weapons, and air-to-ground attack, which seemed to be attentively received. The idea worried her, but she had done all she could. This telekinetic, mind-probing, perhaps mind-deceiving race might be able devise adequate defense. . . . How she hoped it!

And finally, after more than an Earth-day’s wakefulness, they left as abruptly as they’d come, each giving her the two-handed gesture of farewell. Tadak left too, riding on the carapace of a strong young shelled one. But to her relief and pleasure, its larger flop-eared friend seemed prepared to stay. Indeed, she didn’t acknowledge to herself how carefully she had watched for signs of its intentions. It was peculiarly, deeply important to her.

As she watched them straggle up the road, hearing the last of their rather high-pitched Asiatic converse, it seemed to her that one or two turned into a side path near the ship and disappeared behind a rise. Her attention was drawn to this by seeing the others pause and hand over cloaks, or packets of supplies. Perhaps these were headed another way, by a long route; she forgot it.

When they had all departed and the path was empty, the alien whom she was beginning timidly to think of as a friend came up onto the wing stub at her window. It looked at her, the same look she’d seen at the very first. But now it was looking solely into her eyes, long, deep, searchingly. Peculiar images, apparently just random memories, came to her; the dormitory of her old school-days, the streets of the Enclave. Her first real desk. And always in them was a figure she reluctantly recognized: herself.

She began to tremble.

These were not . . . memories.

More images of the past. And weaving through them, a gleaming red-gold cap—could that be her hair?

No one but herself knew of all these past scenes.

None but one other.

Could this be—was she at last looking at the one who—was it this alien being who had “spoken” to her all her life? Was this her Voice?

She trembled harder, uncontrollably.

Then her “friend” reared up and placed both thin palms on the window by its head.

Cold struck her to her heart.

She tried to tell herself that this was just to see her better through the port. But that couldn’t be, she realized dully; the light was not that bright, the vitrex wasn’t that reflective.

This must be—oh, please, no, don’t let it be like all the others, a final, formal good-bye. Not from the one who held her life, who had been with her lifelong, through all the dark nights, the pain. Who had said, Come.

The image of herself also holding her hands to the window came urgently to her. She was expected to respond.

Oh, please, she pleaded to no one, not good-bye from
you
, too. Not you, my Voice . . . Don’t leave me alone. To die. Grief pushed huge tears past all her guards. To distract herself she thought how rude all the others must have thought her, when she failed to respond to them.

This one really wanted her to respond properly. Evidently it had enough personal feeling for her to make this important. Well, she would, in a moment, when she had herself under better control.

A thud shook the wing. Humanlike, but with far more strength, the alien stamped. Perhaps it was impatient to rejoin the others? It stamped again, harder, and slapped both hands on the window, sending a peremptory image of her holding her hands up against the vitrex, matching its own.

All right, then. Good-bye.

Blind with unshed tears, she stood up and spread her palms against the window opposite the red-and-cream blurs. The alien made an exasperated sound and moved its hands to cover hers as exactly as possible.

And something—began to flow. It was as if the vitrex grew hot, or not hot but charged. Almost alive. CP shook so hard her hands slid lower; feeling another stamp from outside, she tried to replace them. The “current” flowed again, carrying with it a bloom of feelings, images, wordless knowledge, she didn’t know what, all bursting through her from their matched palms.

The alien’s eyes caught and held hers, and slowly it brought its hands closer to its head. Hers followed jerkily.

Here the feelings strengthened, became overpowering. She sank to her knees, the alien followed, still holding her palm to palm, through five centimeters of hard vitrex. She couldn’t remove her hands if she chose.

But she wouldn’t have broken that contact for life itself. She was learning—she was understanding, oh, incredulously—that all her life—