Eileen Gunn - Stable Strategies and Others

Awareness filtered into Girat’s mind. The air was thick with electromagnetic waves, and something was watching her. She opened her eyes, got to her feet; she was in the visitor’s camp. The visitor itself was standing in front of her, its body in the pose of formality and distance. She wouldn’t press it, since it seemed incapable of controlling a tendency to sting.

The visitor made a gesture of approach, and Girat drew closer, until she encountered the force shield between them. She felt for the door, but the field extended all the way around her. Perhaps she’d overlooked the controls: the visitor’s technology was alien to her, and she’d been away from the city for a long time.

She spoke slowly, groggy from the vibrations, directly into the visitor’s head.

“How do I get out?” she asked.

The visitor gave a start and invoked a mythical being. It approached her, its thoughts stumbling. What an odd creature. She felt her feet warming to it, it was so tentative and unsure. And no wonder, with all these thought-scrambling devices around it. Her head ached unbearably. But despite the pain, Girat was tempted to interrupt her deathflight, to stay and study this visitor for a while. She’d consider it later. At the moment, she must find a way out of this vibrating shield. There must be controls.

There were. The visitor pulled them from the folds of its clothing, adjusted a knob, and walked right through the field. Inefficient way to run things, Girat thought. She couldn’t reach the controls at all.

“You speak Russian!” it said.

“Don’t you?” she replied.

It stared at her with a peculiar lack of expression. But with such small eyes, it must have difficulty expressing the visible emotions. It shook its head slowly.

“Yes, yes I do.” There was a pause, and it looked at her. “But are you actually, uh, speaking Russian? Or…”

“No, of course not, I’m just floating the words. Our structures are not compatible.” That explanation was a little vague, she thought, but the visitor seemed to accept it.

With barely a pause, it launched into a detailed description of the astronomical location of its planet of origin.

Girat wasn’t interested. This information couldn’t contribute much to her deathflight, and the vibrations from the force field disrupted her thinking. She scratched politely beneath her pouch and asked if they could perhaps continue their discussion outside the fields of force.

The visitor stopped talking and tinted its skin warmer. Control of its body fluids, thought Girat. Charming, and very polite.

“ — most distressing to me,” it was saying. “This is our first contact with, uh, other species. No knowledge of what to do. I should, of course, have been prepared, but I wasn’t really expecting that you would speak my — well, you know. Please come into the tent. Certainly. Much more comfortable there….”

It led her out of the force field, across the tablerock to the circular tent. Vibrations came from a small cluster of containers next to it. Girat could tell that the tent wasn’t going to be much more pleasant than the force field.

The tent was quite cold, as she had known when she first saw it from the air, and the combination of cold and vibration must have had a visible effect on her, for the visitor noticed her recoil when she entered the tent.

“Is there something the matter?” it asked.

She told it about the vibrations, which apparently it couldn’t even detect. Nevertheless, it considerately shut most of its equipment down.

“No wonder we never saw any of you close up. We were driving you away.” It seemed to think that, but for the vibrations, Girat’s people would have flocked to the visitors’ camps. Girat did not correct the impression. “This tent will heat up pretty fast without the cooling unit,” it continued, pulling off its clothing. “But the heat doesn’t seem to bother you.”

Squatting comfortably on the floor, Girat watched the visitor while it talked rapidly and enthusiastically about establishing contact with an alien species. Girat was still feeling a bit dizzy from the vibrations, and she wasn’t listening much to what the visitor was saying. Its words were irrelevant to her death, which had been interrupted, but would proceed as planned. It was a handsome animal, she thought, though its species must be a lonely one, to be so excited by contact with another.

Alex watched as the huge bird settled itself on the floor. This was the moment, he thought, that the human race had been moving toward for more than a century: contact with another species. They’d prepared speeches for everything else: the first person on the Moon, the first on Mars, the first on every moon and half-assed asteroid since. His captain had made a speech as they prepared the cryogenics after clearing Pluto’s erratic orbit. And had sent a lengthy speech back through four light years of empty space when they were awakened, a month out from Alpha A, which later proved to have a great selection of cosmic debris, but no planets at all. Then another lengthy speech went out when they landed on the most likely-looking planet of Alpha B, the first extrasolar planet to be explored by humans. It had been named Pyerva, The First, by Grisha, who was a Georgian and sentimental, but it was only the most recent of a long line of firsts. And now it was superseded by yet another first, the first “alien.”

Alex was at a loss for words. He should have said something more memorable than “You speak Russian?” but truly, he hadn’t expected the bird, however intelligent it was, to start talking immediately in his native language. Even on the ship, they usually spoke standard. Well, he could invent something that sounded good for the history cubes. Who would know?

“We come in peace for all the citizens of Earth.” Hadn’t someone already used that? Oh well. “Uh, you are our first contact with a civilization other than our own.” No response. It didn’t seem to be too handy with small talk. Neither was Alex. He slumped back against a cushion. He had been trained to communicate a few basic concepts, to start learning an alien language, if he could. He was to lay the groundwork for more meaningful communication later.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this fast. Here he could say anything he wanted, but nothing seemed worth communicating, and the creature wasn’t interested. The whole encounter seemed meaningless.

Alex looked over at the bird seated awkwardly on the floor. It had folded itself rather haphazardly together and looked forlorn and a little moth-eaten, to tell the truth, like a malnourished dog. Purely on impulse, he leaned forward and reached out a hand to touch the down on its broad shoulder, where wing and arm and back and chest met. It was soft on the surface, hard-muscled underneath. He stroked the length of the arm softly, and the creature didn’t flinch or pull away, but reached out to touch his cheek with its longest fingers. Its hand was very warm, warmer by several degrees than his own body temperature.

A part of his mind protested: this wasn’t remotely in tune with the demands of protocol, or even of scientific inquiry. How was he going to explain this to his superiors? Extremely disordered behavior, said his mind. Situational diplomacy, replied his body. He put an end to the discussion and moved closer to the alien.

Physical contact with the telepathic creature made them both of one mind, one feeling. The bird’s large, sensitive hands moved lightly around his neck, under his ears, to his shoulders, and down. He moved his own hands in the same way on its longer body. Sensual warmth without sexual arousal flowed between them in the smoothing together of skin and velvet. Alex felt the weight of the expedition’s problems fall away from him, as he lost himself in the drowsiness of warmth and contact. They stretched slowly together on the floor of the tent.