Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

The bride waited in the glow of the lanterns and lowered her eyes to the sheet that had been placed on the ground before her. Her husband stood still and straight, watching. The celebrants were gathered in a circle around the happy pair. They were long and spindly creatures, all eyes and husk and clicking jaws, with no sign of anything remotely resembling hair. They were the color of grass that had not gotten enough water.

They were Noks, a species mired in early twentieth century technology and endlessly at war with itself. They were the first offworld intelligence we had seen, and they’d helped shape the hands-off policy that was quickly formulated as the Barrin-Rhys Protocol, and eventually simply the Protocol.

Leave them alone.

Virtually everybody took an unsympathetic attitude toward them. I thought it was the faces that really did the damage. The Noks did not have flexible features. Nature had given them unmoving masks that always looked the same, regardless of whether their owners were partying or running for their lives. No emotion ever showed.

Except in the eyes.

The eyes were round disks, large by human standards, protected by nictitating membranes. The lenses, usually dark, floated in a green-tinted aqueous humor. They contracted or widened, and changed colors, according to the emotions of the moment. The eyes of the wedding guests were uniformly blue. At peace.

The guests all carried bells. As was the local custom, they received a signal from the bride’s father, and raised their eyes to the sky, pledging eternal friendship to the happy couple. Then they rang the bells. It was a soft jangling on the night breeze, an expression of the connubial pleasures that lay ahead. A warm wind blew in off the ocean, and the trees sighed in harmony with the celebration.

The bride, of course, was naked, save for a ceremonial cord hung loosely at her waist. Slim and polished and graceful, she awaited the climax of the ceremony. Noks were not mammals, and not at all close to humans, yet there was something in the way she stood, in her physical presence, that stirred me. Odd how that happened. It wasn’t the first time.

I was wearing a lightbender, and was consequently invisible to the Noks, except for my eyes. If the system blanked out your eyes, you wouldn’t be able to see. So I had to be careful.

I took the bride’s picture. Angled around and got the groom, backed off and caught the two sets of parents. I recorded the scene as, one by one, the bells fell silent. When the last tinkling had died away, the pair strode toward each other and embraced. In the time-worn tradition, he released the cord around her waist. She removed his ceremonial shirt, and then tugged at something on his leggings and they fell away.

I took more pictures.

Noks are all beak and shell. You look at them and what you see is straight-ahead, strictly business, don’t get in the way. Nevertheless, I knew what she was feeling. I could see pure joy in her eyes, and in her suppleness. I told myself maybe it was just empathy, that I was projecting on her precisely the reactions I’d expect to see had she been a woman.

She was a beautiful creature. When her groom closed on her, she reacted with grace and dignity, not easy when you’re sprawled on a sheet in front of a hundred witnesses. But it was the ceremonial first act, consummating the marriage, as people liked to say at home.

The bride’s name, as close as it could be reproduced in English, was Trill. I watched them, and I’ll admit I was embarrassed by my own rising heartbeat. Couldn’t help it. It was erotic stuff, and it didn’t matter they weren’t human. At the time I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone. Thought it was a perversion. I’ve found out since it’s a common reaction. So take it for what it’s worth.

I was still taking pictures when the raiders stormed out of the woods.

My name’s Arthur Kaminsky, and I’m an anthropologist. Although the term doesn’t really extend to everything we do nowadays.

There’d never been a time that I hadn’t had things my own way. I’d been born, if not precisely into wealth, then certainly into comfortable surroundings. I’d gone to the best schools, won a scholarship to Oxford where I performed, if not brilliantly, at least well enough to convince my father I was destined for something other than real estate. After I’d gotten my doctorate, I decided the frontiers of my specialty lay with the study, not simply of humans, but of intelligent species of whatever type we might encounter. My father rolled his eyes when I told him what I wanted to do, and my mother said she supposed it was my decision. Had it not been for a fortuitous circumstance, I would probably never have been selected for one of the few positions available to do offworld field work. I was only in my twenties, had no track record, and every anthropologist on the planet was pushing to get assigned.

The fortuitous circumstance was my linguistic ability, and especially the fact that I learned to speak three major Nok languages, which required vocal capabilities that were beyond the normal human larynx. Nobody could do it like me. Other than the AI’s.

Still, the people who signed me on were nervous. They put me through a longer training period than was standard. And I’d been on site more than six months before the director allowed me to do a solo mission. And that came with a lot of advice. Be careful. Take no chances. Keep the lightbender activated at all times so they can’t see you. Stay in touch with Cathie. If you start to feel ill, or anything like that, let us know right away and get back to the lander.

Cathie was Catherine Ardahl, the mission’s communication officer. She had dark hair and dark eyes and a smile that melted me into my socks. I’d never been a big hit with women, so I was relentlessly shy around her. In those early months, I was as invisible to her as if I’d been wearing a lightbender.

Watching the Nok bride, before the raiders arrived, I’d thought of her.

When the raiders came out of the woods, I needed a minute to figure out what was happening. I still didn’t know enough about local customs. Party crashers, maybe? A surprise visit by distant relatives? Even the first shots might have been noisemakers of some sort. Then the screams started, and the wedding guests scattered. Some went down as bullets tore into them and lay writhing on the yellow-tinted grass and the stone walkways. Others got into the forest and a few made it into the house.

The raiders were on foot, firing rifles and pistols indiscriminately. Killing technology was primitive, for the most part at a World War I level, although Noks had no heavier-than-air capability. I wasted no time scrambling out of the way. Got behind a tree. Two of the wedding guests, fleeing in panic, crashed screaming into me and knocked me flat. (There are hazards when nobody can see you.) Someone inside the house began to return fire.

The raid lasted, altogether, about seven minutes. No one was spared. The raiders moved among the dead and dying, shooting the wounded. Then they began rounding up survivors and herding them into a central area. I saw Trill lying beside a bench, with the sateen —her blood equivalent—leaking out of her shoulder. She was down near the trees, and I knelt beside her and lifted her in my arms and tried to stop the bleeding. She cried out and one of the raiders heard her and started toward us.

They were in uniform, dark green loose-fitting single-piece outfits. Like pajamas.

“Don’t let them find me,” she said. She was so terrified she never noticed what held her.

“I won’t.”