Damocles (9 page)

He pounded the ground beside her. “Didet,” he said and brought his knuckles together. She brought hers together too. He pounded the ground once more and said “Urf” and pulled his knuckles apart. She pulled hers apart and laughed as all his teeth came back into view. He rocked in his stance as her laughter made her shift on her knees, bringing them closer to each other. She could smell his breath and hear the low thrumming coming from his throat. Without a prompt, they raised their pressed fists together and very gently he bumped the outside of his hands against the outside of hers. Meg thought she might float away on the sensation.

“Yes.”

“This is fascinating.” Prader’s voice shook Meg from her celebration. “Seriously, Didet/Earth, Didet/Earth, got it, but could we speed things up? I’m getting a fucking sunburn and I’m pretty sure those are guns rolling up to us.”

“I have to agree, Meg,” Wagner said. “I’m no expert in body language but I don’t think our welcoming committee is thrilled about our guest breaking ranks.”

Meg looked around and stood up, seeing the encroaching line of soldiers. Her new friend looked back as well and rose from his crouch. Whatever he shouted back to the soldiers stopped them although the business ends of what looked to be rolling cannons still pointed in their direction. The man with the megaphone shouted something that the man before her waved off.

“On my mark,” Wagner spoke softly into the coms, “we move back to the ship.”

“No,” Meg said. “I’m sorry, Captain, but I think that’s the wrong move. Move back, form a line. I’ll stay in front with our
boy here. Jefferson, when I give you the signal, very slowly and very carefully withdraw the shelter tent from the Captain’s pack.” She heard Jefferson’s huffed reaction but cut him off. “Listen to me. Do not point the end of the tent toward the soldiers. Keep it from popping into shape too quickly. When I tell you—”

“Dupris.” The captain’s voice had dropped and she knew he used her last name to remind her of his authority. “Unless you can give me some hard evidence that we are not about to be fired upon, we are boarding the ship on my mark.”

“Captain, with all due respect, if we fire the ship up they are going to see it as aggression.” As she spoke, she could see the Didet man before her straining to listen, his eyes never moving from her face. “Or they’ll think we’re fleeing.”

“We are fleeing. We can reassess contact from the air and—”

“And what? Land somewhere else? Do this again? Do you have any idea how far we’ve gotten since we’ve landed?”

“No I don’t, Meg, and that’s exactly the problem. So far we think we know the name of the planet and we are a lot more certain we have a large weapons array trained on us. I’m sorry that circumstances forced us to make contact before we were prepared, but I’m not going to risk the lives of this crew on your guesswork.”

“Then what am I here for?” She turned toward him, forgetting to keep her voice down, forgetting to keep her movements small. Her hands flew out to punctuate her anger. “What do you think this is? Algebra? Did you think we could just slide these people under a microscope and break them down like rock samples? This is what I do. This is why you chose me for this mission. And I’m telling you that if we get back onboard, we might as well go back to
Damocles
and take turns in the isolation pod because we’re not going to get another chance on Didet.”

Cho cleared his throat. “Uh, Meg, is your boy translating for you?”

Meg spun and saw the short man mirroring her gestures almost exactly to the crowd assembled behind him. His shorter arms and broad stunted fingers made the movement look more like punching than gesticulating, but when he finished talking, the Didet crowd stood as still as the Earth crew for several long moments. Then the openings of what looked to be weapons trained on them lowered. The line of soldiers seemed to relax and a general sense of standing down passed through the group behind the barricade.

Meg arched an eyebrow toward the captain. “Well?”

Wagner sighed. “If we die out here, I’m coming back to haunt your ass. Okay, everyone, on my mark. We move back toward the ship. Jefferson, prepare to retrieve my shelter tent.”

Meg turned back toward her new comrade, getting ready to invite him to join her once again on the ground. Instead, he stepped closer to her, his eyes on her face, his smile wide. He tapped his chest with his flat palm, the way he had pounded the ground.

“Loul.”

Her stomach did that flipping thing she loved so much. “Loul,” she repeated, trying to get the sound correct. He watched her mouth move and leaned in closer. It occurred to her that her voice might not easily be within his hearing range. Lowering her register, she repeated herself as loudly as possible.

“Loul.” She pointed to him and he smiled, knocking his knuckles together. Needing to clarify, she waved her hand toward the crowd behind him. “Loul?”

He looked over his shoulder and back at her and she could see him working the thought through in his mind. He pulled his knuckles apart and gestured to the crowd. “Dideto.” He touched his chest again. “Loul.”

“Ah,” Meg said as much to herself as to the coms. “They call themselves Dideto.” She waved her hand over the crowd and he brought his knuckles together. She pointed at him. “And this is Loul. This is my friend Loul.” He tapped knuckles again, smiling.

She waved to the crew that now stood in a line several feet behind her, near the shuttle. “Earthers.” She spoke loudly, both so he could hear her more easily and to drown out Jefferson’s protests. Jefferson had been raised in the Galen colonies and had never set foot on Earth. At home, the distinction often proved to be a sore spot. This far out, Meg thought the issue moot. She watched Loul work his mouth around the new word, and when he got it mostly right, she brought her fists together. Then she tapped her own chest.

“Meg.”

Loul’s first several attempts to say her name came nowhere near a recognizable version. Meg kept repeating it until finally he stared her straight in the eye and said, “Beg.”

She tapped her knuckles together. “Close enough.”

She heard the muffled laughter from the crew as Cho muttered under his breath. “That’s not the reaction I get when I say that to you.”

Speaking through clenched teeth with her voice very low, she whispered, “That’s ’cause you don’t smile at me like this.”

“Sucker.”

Loul wasn’t sure which surprised him more—the fact that he had just screamed at the ranking trio of generals or that they had listened to him. Right before Meg had turned her back on him, he had decided it was a she. He told himself he based the decision more on the paleness of her skin compared to her companions, not the swell of flesh under her suit where there might be breasts. And the thought of her having breasts in no way triggered his memories of the pornographic Magagan comics that he, Po, and Hark had spent way too much of their youth poring over, memorizing every tale of the lustful female aliens seeking sexual satisfaction on their many invasions of Didet. Okay, maybe it triggered them a little, because he now felt the same thrilling, pleasurable terror in front of these Urfers as he had in front of real girls at that age.

Adolescent triggers aside, he sensed a graceful beauty in this Meg that he figured would probably transcend any species line. Her teeth unnerved him. Their translucent paleness seemed even more fragile than the long, tapered fingers and her incredibly flexible neck. The way her head snapped around to ring out a warning to her people made his stomach clench in imagined
pain. When those long arms unfolded themselves and the fingers fluttered so quickly he could hardly follow, he just knew she had noticed the weapons carousels moving into place.

He didn’t know why she had singled him out to try to make contact. Maybe his accidental flinging of the microphone cover had acted as some sort of greeting on their planet. Maybe they could read minds and sensed he meant them no harm. Whatever the reason, Loul felt they had forged a bond, and he would be damned if he’d let even a ranking trio of generals rob him of this moment. So he’d shouted at them to stand down. And they did. And when everything had gotten quiet, Loul had taken the chance of introducing himself to the first alien race to ever step foot on Didet.

The Urfers were definitely reacting even with the lowering of the pom-cannons. All but Meg stepped backward in that bizarre slow high step that he’d thought was their only means of locomotion. Meg had sure proven that wrong by leaping like a flickerbug when he’d addressed the leader. He wondered for a moment if maybe he’d offended her by stepping up to speak to the leader of the chevron instead of staying by her, but when she’d dropped to the ground—and she sure could move quickly—he just knew she wanted to show him something. Maybe they really were mind-reading. Or maybe the sight of another of those cool light screens appearing out of nowhere and lighting up on the ground with strange symbols and images was more than he could possibly hope to resist.

The way she had stared into his eyes, her strange wide mouth and glass-like teeth shining when he stared back at her, made him hope she could read his mind. Every fiber in his being wanted to scream, “We’re friends! We’re friends! Take me into Space!” He couldn’t shake the stupid kinderschool thrill of being in the coolest place in the world and for once being the
center of attention. And she had stared and stared, her liquid eyes so expressive even while bewildering him. Then all that pointing, all those stabbing gestures to that amazing screen, and it had dawned on him like the Red Sun. Yes and no. She wanted to learn how to say
yes
and
no
in Dideto. Well, Cartara, technically, since there were plenty of languages on Didet that said it differently. For the millionth time since he’d seen the ship on the Roana slab, Loul said a silent thanks that he’d found himself at this very spot.

Now the generals waited for a cue from him. The Urfers lined up in front of their ship, the crew member on the other side of the leader withdrawing some strange cylindrical package. It could be a weapon. He knew the generals were certainly thinking that, and if it turned out they were right, Loul hoped the aliens would have the decency to shoot him first and spare him the disgrace of his misplaced trust. Instead, the cylinder opened up into a large bubble made of what looked like a slippery, reflective film. At first glance, Loul thought it was made of liquid, but the bubble form held its shape as the Urfer secured it to the ground with small white pegs.

“Pell!” Ada shouted at him, but his tone sounded more cautious than angry. “What is that? Can you see it? Can you see what that is?”

Loul glanced at Meg, although he knew she couldn’t give him any explanation. Then another bubble popped up and got attached to the ground. One of the Urfers, the smallest of the team, who was as pale as Meg so he decided it was a female too, kept its eyes on the soldiers while the others scrabbled their fingers over the front of each bubble, creating a gap in the reflective film. Moving slowly and occasionally turning their heads in that bizarre bendy way to see over their shoulders, they reached into the bubbles and laid something out on the ground inside.

He looked to Meg, who watched him watch them. How could he ask her what they were doing?
Yes
and
no
had felt like an incredible breakthrough, but now these Urfers, these aliens, were getting busy doing something that made the enormous battalion of armed guards behind him nervous. Everyone, himself included, counted on him to figure out the explanation. He was going to have to get down to basics.

He pointed to the strange bubbles and pushed his chin down into his neck. He knew the gesture made him look like an infant, but everyone knew the universal gesture for confusion, right? Meg watched him as he repeated the sequence, her own head tilting strangely to the side as if the slender neck could no longer hold the weight of her long skull. Then she straightened, and he thought he recognized in the widening of her eyes the same expression he’d seen when they’d solved the yes-no confusion.

She pointed at the horizon over the Ketter Sea, where the wind whipped sand and dust into a frenzy in the lowering light of the Red Sun. He followed where she pointed, and when he looked back at her, she flattened her long hands out, palms facing out and slightly overlapping, and held them to the side of her face, her eyes tightly closed. She stayed that way a moment then opened her eyes once more, the question clear in her expression. She repeated the gesture again. Loul thought she could probably repeat it a thousand times and he wouldn’t get it.

Were the bubbles somehow related to the Ketter Sea? What would that have to do with their faces? Was the gesture some sort of warning? A greeting? It could mean anything and Loul knew the generals wouldn’t wait forever. Meg’s head shivered in a strange back-and-forth way that made him marvel again at the willowy structure of her body. Her eyes glanced around him, and when she looked back at him, he saw a settling in her stance that he understood. She was going to try to explain again.