Eileen Gunn - Stable Strategies and Others

Girat could feel the visitor relaxing, loosening his grip on his pain, letting the tension flow from his muscles. When they touched, Girat could feel the sources of his tension: they lay not so much in the vibrations that filled the air of the tent, as in the pain and isolation of creatures who’ve abandoned their nests, who’ve left behind all the rest of their kind, forever.

As she began to understand its pain, Girat felt herself grow closer to the visitor, and she sensed the ambiguity in the visitor’s mind concerning the exchange of warmth and the reproduction of his species. Very different from her associations concerning the two functions. To Girat, there was no relationship between gene sharing and mind sharing. She projected that thought to the visitor, and felt him drowsily agree to the idea of sharing. Their minds and bodies moved together.

Lying stretched out on the floor of the tent, she shared her breath with him, breathed the air as it came from his body. Their muscles moved together, their limbs glided over each other.

Girat could feel the pain leaving his mind, the edges of his regret dulling. Slowly, she pushed further into his unconscious. He would be left with a sense of loss, which is a worthy emotion, but would no longer feel such pain and longing for his Earth. She spoke to the visitor in words for the first time since they had touched.

“This is a suitable happening for the end of a deathflight. I am honored.”

She was lying against him on her chest, one arm over his shoulder, the other reaching forward beyond their heads, her hand curved back toward her face, her long fingers lightly flexed. Alex smiled sleepily. He should find this experience a lot stranger than he did.

Instead, he felt comfortable on this planet for the first time since they’d arrived. He’d been welcomed by one of Pyerva’s own people, and they could explore their differences and their similarities. What a wealth of information she could give him.

She rose up slightly on one arm, turned to face him. “This is a suitable happening for the end of a deathflight,” she said. “I am honored.”

“What is a deathflight?” asked Alex. Perhaps this would explain the mummified birds in the cities.

She sat up slowly. “When we left the cities, thousands of seasons ago, we left the technology that would support a large population. We must keep our numbers low.” Flexing her wings slightly, she stretched her arms out in front of her, tendons and muscles stretching. “So, when a person has accomplished some good and has made a contribution, she is allowed to return to her ancestors’ city to die, and one of her eggs is quickened.”

This made no sense to Alex. “But why did you leave the cities in the first place? They could support millions.”

“The vibrations,” she replied. “The cities and their electronics produced vibrations — ” she touched his arm, and he associated the word with the electromagnetic spectrum, “ — that scar the mind and damage the body. Some people — my ancestors — could feel them, like a sickness, eating at them. They left the cities, got as far away from them as they could, and settled in the rock eyries where we live now. Most people stayed in the cities until it was too late. Perhaps they couldn’t feel the vibrations, or perhaps they ignored them. They did not live healthily until death, and their young suffered even more.” She paused. “It’s time that I left,” she said, rising slowly from the floor of the tent, drawing Alex up with her. “If I rest too much, I’ll be unable to die properly.”

Alex stood stunned for an instant as her meaning sank in, then turned incredulous. He was just beginning to put the pieces together, and there was much more they should talk about. She couldn’t die now. She couldn’t abandon him.

He grabbed her arms, to keep her in the tent until she regained her senses.

When he grabbed her, Girat instinctively pushed back, but she was too weak to have any effect: almost all her remaining strength was in the muscles that controlled her wings. With a violence of emotion that blew through her mind like a wind, he objected to her leaving, objected to her dying, and threatened to prevent her from continuing her deathflight.

Girat had never found herself in violent opposition to another intelligence. She was totally without referent. She could accept the impersonal barbarity of her environment, she could comprehend searing pain and transmute it. Those were natural occurrences: she could transcend them. But the artificial constraint of one person by another, this was beyond acceptance and comprehension.

He couldn’t intend to keep her here! He couldn’t place his mind and power in opposition to hers! What kind of incomprehensible monsters were these aliens?

Incredulity and rage burned reason from her mind. She shook uncontrollably. There were other ways of dying. She’d accept a hasty death on the ground before she’d be kept alive against her will.

Suddenly she stopped. The cause of his irrational behavior was available to her: he couldn’t understand what she was thinking, he couldn’t hear her, even when they were touching. She thought again what a lonely, comfortless existence these creatures must lead. But she could project. As long as they were touching, she could put parts of her mind into his, just as she could project words from a distance.

And she did. She projected pure emotion, tied tenuously to facts: the triumph of heroes of her clan who had died beautiful deaths, the pride of her mother, dying that she might live, the joy of the child that would receive life when she was dead. The visitor stopped holding her, but she kept the flow of emotion pouring into him: she relived the euphoria of her deathflight, and felt again an eager anticipation of her death.

When her desire for death became unbearable, she left him.

The next day and the day after, Alex Zamyatin went out into the city despite the heat. It was much too large a city for one man to cover in a day. On the third day, he found her.

It was early, an hour or two past dawn, and the city was rosy with light. She lay, wings spread, in the shadows at the edge of a plaza. She’d been dead for some time.

Her wings, dry as parchment, were loosely outstretched, covering most of her body and the ground around it. One arm lay hidden under her; the other reached forward, her hand near her face, fingers curved slightly inward — the same sleepy pose she had taken in the tent.

Her face was peaceful, what he could see of it. Membranes obscured her large, luminous eyes. She looked, deceptively, as though she were breathing. He could almost see a slight rise and fall of her chest.

He knelt beside her, reached out a hand. Not to move her; she was perfect, careless, spent. He touched the downy leather of her wing, surprised against his will by its coolness. Her flesh, waxy under his fingertips, was colder than he could have anticipated. Dead.

He stroked her wing again, involuntarily. It was difficult to stop, he felt such joy.

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

“Contact” is an early story, started in 1976, and finished at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop and later at the monthly workshops that Kate Wilhelm and Damon Knight held in Eugene. It’s a story with a learning curve: I intentionally worked against my own stylistic preferences, and focused on exploring a number of issues that continue to hold my interest.

I’m afraid that it looks small when juxtaposed with its ambitions, but it’s one of those stories where the writer’s reach exceeds her grasp. Learning to do that — upping the ante — is exactly what Clarion is for.

The story was bought by Jim Baen, for his Destinies anthology series. It was one of a bunch of purchases that he later decided didn’t fit his evolving concept of the series, and eventually spun out into a separate anthology, called Proteus , for God knows what reason. Sort of a Salon des Refusées of Destinies, Proteus included stories by Michael Swanwick, George Alec Effinger, and Charles Sheffield. These were mostly character-centered stories by writers with literary ambition, defining rather clearly the aesthetic that Baen did not want, and I was pleased that my story was included.