Delta Pavonis (21 page)

"Well, this is your own facility, of course. Ours starts—you are the people who built these transporter chambers, aren't you?"

"Oh, yes." This time he almost smiled, a very human expression. She was surprised at how little expression his face seemed to register, and wondered whether it was racial or cultural. She knew that there had been some peoples who made it a point to be stonefaced in front of strangers.

She didn't think that was the case with him. She tried to put a word to his expression and the one she kept coming up with was serene. Not the fatuous, Buddhalike serenity of the Abbatans. That had been mere boneheaded complacency. No, he had the look of someone who had seen just about everything and wasn't thrilled to see more.

She knew she was reading far too much into the apparent blankness of his face, but she couldn't help herself.

"Come this way." He walked along beside her as they left the chamber. They were in the ice corridor before she remembered that she should have notified Sieglinde that she was leaving. The event seemed to transcend her orders.

She shivered slightly in the chill, but her companion didn't seem to be bothered. At one point he drew a little ahead and she admired his back, which was as sleek and limber as an otter's. Like his neck, it seemed to have too many vertebrae. His hips were absurdly narrow, his buttocks as tightly muscled as a dancers.

She tried to shake off a storm of incredibly unprofessional thoughts. It occurred to her that the dissipation of her fear-adrenaline must have brought on a hormone rush. What she was thinking was probably anatomically impossible. But then, his clothing didn't hide much in front, either, and from that angle it looked very possible indeed.

"This is the facility we built here to study the main transporter chambers," she said as they entered the man-made area. "We had to melt thousands of cubic meters of ice to do it. That was accomplished with orbiting parabolic mirrors." Empty corridors, offices and labs stretched ahead of them.

"Are you here alone?"

"Not quite," she said, improvising quickly. "We're operating on minimal staff right now. Everybody else is away for the holidays."

"I see." Was there a trace of irony there?

"Dierdre, are you going to introduce your friend?" She jerked around. It was Sieglinde.

"Oh, hi, Doc." She was getting too many shocks today. "Doc, this is M'ats. He's an alien."

"So I presumed. Welcome." She showed her customary
sangfroid
.

"You are being Dr. Sieglinde Kornfeld-Taggart?" M'ats asked,

"He's having a little trouble with tenses."

"Yes, Dierdre. Calm yourself." Then, to M'ats: "I am Dr. Kornfeld. Are you the sole inhabitant of your ship?"

"No. There are many others."

"Let me assure you before anything else that we have no aggressive intentions, and I can imagine no basis for conflict between our peoples."

He left a longer pause. "I believe you. Others may not."

"An honest answer. Do I have your assurance that you have no hostile intentions toward us?"

Dierdre was a little put out at having to share him so soon, but she had to admit that Sieglinde asked sensible, pertinent questions, instead of babbling.

"You have," he said, then, enigmatically. "We have no need."

"Do you mean that we couldn't hurt you if we tried, and if you wished to hurt us, there is nothing we could do about it?"

Pause. "Not exactly."

"We'll leave it at that for the moment. I should tell you that there are some among us who would not be averse to a fight, and that none of us are in control of all the others."

"We deduced that from your—transmissions. It is difficult to understand. You are—interesting."

"You are more than merely interesting to us. There are incredible amounts that we want to know. But there is no rush, is there?"

"No, time is unimportant. It means much less to us than to you."

"Doc, I was showing him the facility. Maybe we should continue."

"By all means. I'd offer refreshments, but that might be unwise at the moment. Dierdre, shouldn't you be at your post in the transporter chamber?"

"Uh-uh. He's what we were waiting for and I'm not letting him out of my sight."

"You can be insufferable. Come along, then."

M'ats watched this byplay bemusedly. Dierdre figured it was one of those oddities of the human temperament that the aliens found intriguing. Something occurred to her.

"M'ats, up to now, we've been thinking of you, I mean all of you, as 'the aliens.' But you're not, really, although that has yet to be explained. What can we call you?"

"Our comprehensive word for those like me is being—no, is,
Arumwoi
."

"That's nice," Dierdre said, "kind of Greek-sounding. Means 'the people,' right?"

"Not quite. Not that primitive. Your word 'humankind' would be the better transliteration."

" 'Translation' is the word you mean." Dierdre said.

"You say 'those like me,' " Sieglinde said with her usual grasp of pertinent detail. "Does that mean that there are among you those who are not like you?"

He seemed suddenly discomfited. "Yes, but—this is not where/when the explanation should be. It is very complex. There are many peoples, but the
Arumwoi
are your people among us. It is not easy to explain, and I should not do it now."

Sieglinde turned to face him squarely and he jerked at the abruptness of the movement. For the first time, Dierdre saw the exercise of intuition, the leap of insight that distinguished a mind like Sieglinde's from that of an ordinary genius. "You're not an official envoy, are you, Mats? You're doing this on your own, and when your superiors find out, you are in deep trouble, am I right?"

He stared at her, and now there was no question about his expression. Dierdre understood that, while he may have come from an incredibly ancient and advanced culture, he was out of his depth intellectually.

"Yes. It is true. And I underestimated you."

"You won't be the first."

"Hey, don't worry," Dierdre reassured him, "she's not typical."

"Dee, shut up!" Sieglinde said. Well, hell, there was no making some people happy. She watched M'ats closely. He had recovered his composure.

"This event is unique in many ways. Not just your first meeting with—aliens. Certainly not ours. Our—relationship is completely different. This is important to remember. I had expected to find you—what is the proper word—?"

"Naive?" Sieglinde said. "Unable to encompass a culture as ancient as yours?"

"That must be it. I was wrong. This one—" he turned to look at Dierdre—"she is much what I expected."

Well, thanks a lot, Dierdre thought.

"But you are not. You are like—" he made a sound for which there was no human equivalent. It came through as an aural blur.

"You'll have to explain that later," Sieglinde told him. "Our problem right now is to figure out a way to justify you to whatever ruling system you have, and to make ourselves some sort of semi-official diplomats. Under the Articles, the
Althing
is empowered to make such appointments."

"This is amazing," M'ats said. "Do not think me—wrong—we," he seemed to back off, take a breath, "we do not expect innocence. But such—sophistication and"—he needed longer to find a word this time—"flexibility are not what we expect of a culture as, excuse me, as primitive as yours."

"Is that why you've taken your time in contacting us?" Sieglinde asked. "Because you want to analyze our oddities first?"

"Not—exactly. We are not having been, no, I correct that, we are not being slow, by our standards. You people rush, do everything very fast."

"It's what happened with many of your experiments, isn't it? They developed too fast."

Dierdre looked from one to the other, realizing that Sieglinde was using M'ats' slower reaction time against him, trying to press him into parting with information he did not want to give. She resented it, while understanding that her personal feelings were of no importance in such an event.

M'ats shook his head, a slanted movement made possible by his flexible neck. It was unclear whether this meant negation, or protest. "No. You should not have space flight yet, not for millennia. Last time we sent probes, you were not yet building cities." He seemed to rein himself in. "I must go now. I will be back."

He turned and began to head back for the transporter.

"But we didn't finish your tour, yet." Dierdre protested.

"Will conclude later. Perhaps, soon, I may show you our ship."

"When will you be back?" Sieglinde asked.

"Soon. No more than one rotation. I will speak to you two, no others yet."

"We'll keep it quiet," she assured him. By this time they were back in the transporter room.

He turned and held out his hands awkwardly. Sieglinde understood and clasped his hands in her own. Then he took Dierdre's. He held her hands somewhat longer, which suited her very well. His hands felt good. Then he turned, manipulated the controls with incredible dexterity, and was gone.

Dierdre took a shaky breath. "See,
they're
not afraid to use the transporters. What are you doing?"

Sieglinde had rushed over to an emergency medkit and began scraping at her fingertips with a small probe. "When he took my hands, I scratched his palm slightly. With luck I may have got some epidermal cells."

"Now why didn't I think of that?" Dierdre said.

"It doesn't look like you've been thinking at all."

"I was taken by surprise. To be honest, I was absolutely horrified, until he turned out to be so friendly."

"It was more than fear at work." She put away a small sample packet. "We'll run an analysis on this later. Right now let's look at the holos."

Dierdre handled the desk controls and they watched a one-wall holo of M'ats appearance and the subsequent events in the transporter chamber and ice tunnel.

"God, did I look like that?" Dierdre said, embarrassed. A series of comical expressions chased one another across her holographic face.

"Don't worry, he's not yet experienced enough to read our expressions, any more than we can read his. Now, this is interesting." She watched as Dierdre's expression went from fear to fascination to more than fascination. When she saw Dierdre give M'ats the once-over in the ice tunnel she glanced sideways, eyebrow raised. "A little loss of scientific detachment, there?"

Dierdre stared at her hands in her lap. "Ah, I was just getting over—" it started out as a whisper, but quickly gained strength. "Ah, hell, boss, I don't know what happened. One moment I was so scared I could barely talk, the next all I could see was how beautiful he was in the middle of the most unbridled feelings of lechery I've ever experienced." Her hands gripped together nervously. "This isn't easy. I've always been pretty conventional that way. More than conventional."

" 'Repressed' is the word I would use. Don't worry, it's a common defense for people who know they're different. I was that way myself, a virgin in my mid-twenties."

Well, wasn't this the day for revelations, Dierdre thought. "If you hadn't shown up when you did, I might have taken him to my quarters and locked the door."

"That might not have been such a bad idea. An interesting experiment, and we would have ended up with a lot more than just a few measly epidermal cells."

"I hadn't thought of it that way. But, he's an alien, for God's sake! Even if he is pretty. Am I getting bent or something?"

Sieglinde leaned forward. "Dee, whatever he is, he's no true alien. He's a human male of enormous sexual allure. You think I didn't feel it? I may be old, but there's nothing wrong with my biological equipment."

"Good. I was beginning to think—are you sure he could?"

"That's never certain, even for our sort of human. However, he seems to have the wherewithal. Now, let's rerun those first minutes again. This time, let's concentrate on him instead of you."

"I suppose we won't be able to announce this for a while?" Dierdre said as the holo ran again.

"Shh. Don't be such a glory hound. Not if we're going to protect him, not to mention ourselves. What do you think of the way he's looking at you?"

"You said yourself we can't judge their expressions yet. I was too scared at the time to take much notice. I was expecting long, sharp teeth or something. He does look sort of—what do you think?"

"If he was one of ours, I'd say he's taken a fancy to you."

"Do you think so?" Come to think of it, he did have a sort of appreciative look. More than Steve had, the last weeks.

"He did ask for you by name."

"But I was the first one to use the transporter. And I was all over the media for a while, and they've been monitoring them."

"Why should that mean anything?"

"I don't know. Doc, are we really having this conversation or have we both gone vacuum happy?"

"I wish I knew. Come on, let's go to my quarters and have a drink. I'll toss these samples into an analyzer and see what turns up."

Sieglinde's quarters were larger than Dierdre's, but most of the extra room was taken up with instruments. "There's beer in the cooler. Open us a couple."

Dierdre untopped two of the new full-grav containers—long cylinders that were much more convenient than the old bulbs. Sieglinde scraped her samples onto a tray and inserted it. A few seconds later a readout flashed on the screen.

"What's it say?" Dierdre asked.

"I don't know. I'm not a biologist. Let's run it through a layman's program to interpret it."

Ordinarily, Dierdre would have been unnerved to find that there was a science Sieglinde hadn't mastered, but she was still preoccupied with her reaction to the alien. Sieglinde took notice.

"Sit down, Dee. I've been thinking about this. Now that I've had time to consider it, your reaction, and mine, make perfect sense."

Time?
Dierdre thought.
Forty-five minutes, maybe?
Sieglinde never needed much time.

"It's like this: Mentally, we may stand between ape and angel, but biologically we're still just another species that wants to give its own genetic material the best chance to survive. The wider your gene pool, the better chance your species has. Any time we come upon a new people, there's always this urge to get together and mix genes. Historically, it's been men who did most of the exploring, so they had most of the fun. They kept it a secret, of course."