James White - Double Contact

It held three wooden beakers, two tall and slim and the other one short and broad, all of them with lids; one small, cuplike receptacle; a small stack of flat, wooden platters; and a large open bowl that had neatly folded squares of soft fabric lying beside it. On hands and knees she moved across to them quickly and lifted down the narrow beakers in turn. She gave them a gentle shake before removing the lids, sniffed, and decided that they contained water. The thicker one was filled with round lumps of material that looked and felt like hairy potatoes.

Murchison straightened onto her knees, turned and waved her hand vigorously at the spider, then pointed down at her equipment pouch. She wasn’t simply trying to attract its attention, because it was already watching her closely, just trying to give it the impression that her next movement would be overt, innocent, and harmless.

Slowly she unfastened the flap and used one finger and thumb to lift out the narrow, white cylinder that was her analyzer, which she put in the corner of her mouth so that she had both hands free to to pour an inch of water into the drinking beaker. When she touched the sensor tip of the analyzer into it, the readout showed many trace elements but no toxicity, so she drank it down. From the solid-food container she chose a small piece and broke it. The center was pale green and spongy and gave off a faint odor that reminded her of cinnamon. She pushed the analyzer into it in several places, but none of the readings showed anything to worry her. She replaced the instrument and took a cautious nibble.

It wasn’t completely nauseating, she thought, but it would require a condition of near starvation to make it palatable. Murchison was reminded of her first promotion to the Sector General permanent staff, when her mixed-species former students had thrown a party for her. On a dare she had eaten a piece of Kelgian warlgan cake. This stuff tasted a little better.

She forced herself to swallow it and say, “Thank you.” The spider chittered briefly in reply and backed to the doorway, where it continued to watch her.

For several minutes Murchison sat on the hammock, which had been left on the floor, thinking about what she should do next and, more importantly, what her captors were expecting her to do next. Their technology was primitive, but inits own way, civilized. Up until now they had shown no deliberate cruelty towards her, and they possessed a high level of intelligence and flexibility of mind, which was shown by their curiosity regarding her and their attempt to make her comfortable. It would be natural in the circumstances for her to demonstrate a similar degree of curiosity.

Using her feet with legs bent almost double and with one supporting hand keeping her from falling onto her back, Murchison began to tour the room. One wall was hung with coils of rope in various thicknesses and another had shelves of wooden implements, some of which looked like the pictures of marlin spikes she had seen in the history books. No metal tools, implements, or even support brackets were visible. Everything, even the deck, walls, and ceiling, seemed to be made of hard, dark green, tightlywoven plant fiber except for the regular lines of thin, pale grey that seemed to run through and reinforce all of them. She was pretty sure where the grey material had come from because she had seen a few strands of it binding the crossbows together, and as a supporting latticework on the wings and fuselage of their gliders. With a tiny shiver of wonder Murchison tried to comprehend a species whose advanced technology, its homes, sailing ships, and aircraft, and who knew what else, was in part woven out of their own bodies.

The third wall was bare, except at the two top corners where there was a large wooden ratchet arrangement that enabled it to be tipped outwards from the vertical and away from the edge of the ceiling. Between them there was a six-inch gap through which fresh air, cold now that the sun had set, was blowing. Plainly this was the room’s ventilation system. She moved to the fourth wall that contained the door — with her spider guard filling it — the lamp, and the fire-prevention arrangements. Intending to examine the workings of the lamp closely with a view to adjusting the setting of its floating wick to give more light, she reached fonwards.

Her fingers were more than a foot away from it when she cried out in pain and surprise as a sticklike forward limb cracked down across the back of her hand.

“Why the blazes did you do that?” she cried, pressing the hand between her other arm and side to deaden the pain.

The spider unlimbered its crossbow and sent a bolt thudding into the floor in front of the lamp, then it moved into the room, and with great difficulty loosened and pulled the crossbow bolt from the floor and replaced it in its quiver before returning to the doorway.

She had the answer to her question. Clearly the message was, Hands off the lamp.

Up until then the spider had not deliberately tried to hurt her and might not do so again unless, as now, she tried to break their rules. She wondered how she would have felt if their positions had been reversed. In this society a moment’s carelessness with a naked flame might well cause irreparable property damage in addition to personal injury.

Losing, for example, what was to them a complex, state-of-the-art aircraft would be devastating for the pilot, who had probably woven important parts of its support structure from its own body material. But the destruction of a large-scale, cooperative enterprise like this ship, which must be a continuous, floating fire hazard, would be a community disaster. Henceforth she would obey the rules and avoid having her wrist slapped, or, better still, try to communicate with and understand her captors so that such acts of minor physical chastisement would no longer be necessary.

The time to begin talking was now, but both her brain and her body were too tired to begin the long, complicated and no doubt initially frustrating process of sign language and word sounds that would be needed. She could, however, make a small start.

She moved back to the wall with the ventilator slit in it, pointed to the opening, and blew her breath out noisily for a few seconds, shivered elaborately, and returned to the floor area covered by the hammock. There she lay down lengthwise on her side along one half of it, and pulled the surplus material across her legs and body and tucking it under her chin. It was coarse-textured but warm. With the back of one hand — which was no longer hurting — supporting the side of her face, she looked along the deck at the now-horizontal picture of her guard.

“Good night,” she said quietly.

The spider made a low, chittering sound.

She had no idea of how much if anything of the recent pantomiming it had understood, but Murchison hoped that she had conveyed the message that she had rendered herself voluntarily immobile and there was no danger of her breaking any more rules for a while. She lay watching it while it watched her, feeling the hard surface of the deck through the hammock material and not expecting to sleep.

She awakened to find that the lamp was out, the ventilation slit had been opened wide so that sunlight as well as air was coming through it, and that during the night another large rectangle of hammock material had been spread over her sleeping body. She felt stiff and sore, but pleased, because it seemed that the process of communication had already begun. When she raised herself onto one elbow and cleared her throat quietly, her spider guard— she was pretty sure that it was the same one — opened its eyes.

When she had stretched a few times in the limited space available, and rubbed the stiffness out of her muscles, Murchison lifted the lid of the waste-disposal opening, stared at the spider for a moment. It backed out of the doorway and moved sideways out of sight.