The Sirens of Space (4 page)

“Welcome to Ishtar.”

“I HAVE NEVER SEEN one close up before.”

“
How ever do they breathe through
those long, pointed snouts?”

“
Munshi says this one is quite
friendly, though painfully shy. It hardly said more than a few
dozen words on the way back from the riot. But it seems
intelligent—and look at the way it moves around the room, examining
everything in sight. It is curious as a schripan’t.”

“
Is it male or female?”

“
Who can tell?”

“
Short hair—and Munshi says it has a
deep voice. I think, perhaps, it is a male.”

“
Maybe Zatar will not feel so out of
place, now.”

“
You know, he really need not be so
lonely—not if we send Gh’sienna to tell him we have a
guest.”

“
Be not crude, Doshanda. Besides,
’Sienna hardly went into heat on purpose.”

“
I will go.”

“
No, I will go; you flirt so
shamefully, we shall never get you out of his room if you go. And
you have been eating so much you are likely to go into heat
yourself.”

Zatar of Ibleiman
was a
handsome man, tall and powerfully built, with firm, angular
cheekbones and a well-rounded chin. Even approaching middle age,
his skin retained the whiteness of youth, for the yellowing of age
came slowly to his proud and distinguished family. As befitted a
scion of the House of Ibleiman, he was not easily given to wearing
his thoughts on his countenance, but his eyes had almost lost their
color and a look of bewilderment had seized his brow. He was, in a
word, incredulous.

“
Are you sure?” he asked again, as if
repeating the question would alter the facts. His aide stamped her
foot in annoyance. He knew that dwelling on the obvious was
foolish, but the cold, dry planet sometimes affected his hearing
and he wanted to be certain he heard things correctly.

“
I saw the Terran with my own eyes,
Ambassador,” she replied tartly. Men were impossible, she thought;
you could repeat things a dozen times and they would still ask if
you were sure. Even so, she could not stay angry with Zatar for
long. It was the one benefit she could see in working for a man,
and mischief soon darted across her cheek muscles.

“
They say it is a male. Imagine
that—but then, I suppose even Terran males are not without their
charms.”

Irritation clouded Zatar’s face. Even after
so many years of service together, his aides still delighted in
showing themselves unawed by his credentials or accomplishments. As
a senior procurator for the High Council of the Grand Alliance,
Zatar had been places and seen things that few Veshnan men dreamed
existed and fewer aspired to share. With each passing year, his
reputation and influence grew in the corridors of power on
Balarium, the tranquil, lovely planet that was the administrative
center for the Alliance. He had even begun to dream of having at
least one aide with a more enlightened perspective, but after all
this time he was so used to each of them that such a radical change
would be unsettling. He knew enough not to take offense, though now
was hardly the time for teasing. Zatar cleared his throat
haughtily.

Chastised, she continued.

“
He saved G’ela’s life, and Maguna’s,
and Munshi’s, and— ”

“
But how...?”

“
They all went to visit a Terran
social club and some of the guests became unruly. Like wemblies
guarding their brood, I suppose. So the Terran led them through an
emergency exit—sent them ‘back to the wind before they could warm
themselves,’ as it happened, but it was not really his fault. In
fact, it was quite prudent, as I understand it. Now, Munshi is
shaking from the cold and no other but you understands Terran talk.
Our guest is wandering downstairs without a host, and we must not
appear to be rude.”

Zatar bowed and dismissed her from the room.
Immediately, he began searching his wardrobe for something
suitable. Red perhaps, since they would be celebrating, even if the
feast would be merely for Avoidance of Bother. He could deal with
Munshi later. Why she would be so foolish as to venture outside by
herself, much less contrive to avoid the Terran militiamen assigned
as their escorts, was unexplainable. Simply unexplainable. But
then, even though he was the official head of the delegation, it
seemed that nobody in this House ever listened to anything he
said.

As he changed from his housecoat to more
formal attire, uncertainty creased his face. This would be the
first time he had met a Terran without an interpreter. It would
also be the first time any of them had met a Terran in a social
setting, away from the formal trappings of diplomacy. His
thirty-day language-immersion course may have taught him the rote
responses needed for the stilted greetings of diplomats, but was
hardly adequate to the more rigorous demands of small talk.
Besides, some people had language talent and others did not. And
while he could understand most Crutchtan dialects quite well, the
Terran language was utter chaos to him. Terran vocal chords might
be remarkably similar to his own, and each day found Zatar
recognizing and pronouncing more Terran words than before. But he
found himself intimidated by the syntactical bogs and conjugational
swamps that were the hallmarks of their strange, guttural tongue.
Munshi said the language was really quite simple, and that the
staccato barks and growls that Terrans used to communicate were no
different than any other language after mastering the inverted
grammar and alien idioms. But Munshi was quite gifted.

His dressing completed, he looked in the
mirror to see the embodiment of Veshnan manhood—tall and proud,
like his forefathers before him, brightly arrayed in festive
attire. He adjusted his robes to their best advantage and breathed
heavily, forcing himself to relax, knowing that descending the
stairs would be the most difficult part of the entire evening.

Of course, meeting the Terran would be easy.
Exhilarating, actually, thought Zatar. What would be difficult
would be trying to ignore Gh’sienna’s mating scent on the way to
meet his guest. Veshnan women always found excuses for not taking
men seriously, but they hardly helped matters by finding male
preoccupations so amusing, especially since they were the biggest
distraction themselves.

Roscoe Cook
wandered
aimlessly around the makeshift embassy, peering at the curiosities
scattered about the living room. Brightly colored tapestries
covered the dull walls, depicting scenes of Veshnan life in
abstractions that the commander found unintelligible. Strange
aromas filled his senses, beckoning his imagination on journeys
reaching past the untamed wilderness of outer Terra. Even his
boyhood awe at the heroic explorers who first breached the confines
of Old Earth and headed off into the cosmos was lost in the wonder
he felt touching the artifacts of an alien civilization. Unlike
those who left the tantalizing ruins that dotted the forests of
Isis, the Veshnans were a living culture. It made the dead relics
of his home planet seem as cold and barren as the sands of
Ishtar.

In the corner, an open cabinet stretched to
the ceiling. Made from an unknown substance that was cool to the
touch, it left a salty-tasting residue on the officer’s fingers.
Its shelves were filled with strangely colored plants, which
quivered and hummed as he approached. Beneath his feet was a plush,
velvety carpet of deep maroon, which almost swallowed his boots as
he wandered around the room. Bending to brush the material with his
fingers, he found the carpet soft and supple as the winter fur of a
Babylonian schrault. A large, transparent urn sat in front of the
window, with multicolored fish squiggling in the water. What
appeared to be stringed musical instruments hung from the wall on
the room’s north side.

Cook walked to the north wall and ran his
finger over the strings of a Veshnan lute, producing a wavering,
metallic sound like the tremulous whine of a subspace engine in a
vat of water. The sound was eerie and unsettling, reminding him of
the mood music that accompanied the vid-screen monsters he loved to
watch as a child. It stopped as soon as he removed his hand.
Feeling suddenly self-conscious, he turned to see a red-robed
Veshnan standing at the entrance to the living room. It had the
same pale translucence, the same four-fingered hands, the same calm
serenity about its bearing, as those he had met in the pub. But
this alien was large—almost a foot taller than the others—and its
face was more angular, its features more pronounced.

This was, the commander guessed, a Veshnan
male.

At the
cosmic pace of
distant stars passing in the blackness, the two males waited in
silence for the other to speak. After the first tentative bows and
smiles, Zatar began to feel quite foolish and the ensuing silence
just compounded the problem. The artifacts and scents of home that
filled the senses in the gathering room, so carefully designed to
remind all of them of the worlds they left behind, merely added to
his sense of disarray.

Curiously, while finding another species in
such a place disturbed his sense of balance, the alien visitor was
hardly the cause of the ambassador’s concern. Slowly, he realized
that his shyness arose largely from his reluctance to make a fool
of himself by butchering the Terran’s mother tongue. This was the
way of cowards, he reflected, but found that he could not help
himself. The mind that could charm the High Council and send those
on the other side of any issue careening into outrage and despair
balked at the prospect of floundering in a sea of alien
phraseology. He was dismayed, as well, to learn that the
well-endowed ego of a High Official of the Grand Alliance did not
take kindly to the thought of communicating by grunts and sign
language.

The Terran stared at him through circles of
color in a sea of white. Terran eyes were paralyzing, thought
Zatar, at once compelling and hypnotic. The effect was less
pronounced at the negotiating table, where interpreters served as a
buffer, but now Zatar felt a subliminal wariness. It was, he
concluded, a singular advantage for a predator species, yet he
recalled the Terran’s almost gleeful inquisitiveness as earlier he
watched it dart across the room, moving with surprising agility for
such a large creature. Unlike those with proper Veshnan manners, it
was not at all self-conscious about its curiosity. And that was,
thought Zatar, the mark of a civilized man no matter what the women
thought. It was enough to make him wonder how his own species
appeared, when seen through Terran eyes.

Silently, Zatar studied the costume of
their long-nosed simian visitor. It was a type of uniform worn by
other members of the Terran militia force. “Protectors of the
Universe,” they called themselves—or
khasg’a’rhd’h
, in their own language. It seemed
a heavier uniform than he had seen before, of coarser material and
cluttered with pockets and flaps. The uniform was also the color of
the sky, which meant that their guest was a military officer of
some sort. Zatar could not guess its rank merely by looking, but
the Terran’s face suggested that their guest was one of some
importance. Except for females and children, most of the people he
had seen on the planet—and many militiamen, as well—covered their
faces with fur. Only those the Terran government had sent to
negotiate with him kept their face fur so closely cropped as to be
invisible.

And the difference was not congenital, he
knew, for Zatar recalled seeing fur grow on many of the Terran
negotiators during their long sessions in seclusion together. He
supposed that the Terran government ordered its diplomats and
senior militiamen to trim their faces, so as not to frighten the
representatives of the Grand Alliance needlessly. After all, the
first sightings of the long-haired simians had driven the
Crutchtans to panic at the bloody First Encounter. The Terran
policy of cropping their fur was an act of profound civility for
which Zatar was grateful, even if his colleagues dismissed the
gesture as the product of his own imagination.

Finally, the ambassador could stand the
silence no longer. Resolved to muddle through as best he could, he
swallowed his misgivings and began to speak, only to find the
venture cut short: the Terran, apparently just as impatient at the
long silence, blurted out the last sounds in the world that Zatar
expected to hear. His guest spoke tentatively, unsurely, and
indistinctly, but the message came through nonetheless.

“
Friend,” it said; at least that was
what it sounded like. Zatar could not be sure, given the thick
accent and low-pitched growl of the Terran’s voice. Actually, it
sounded more like “
f’Rroinght
,” but the context was right, and
Zatar judged that it was as close as a Terran could come without
choking. What astounded him was that the Terran knew any Veshnan
words at all. Even Terra’s ambassadors seemed disinterested in
learning to speak for themselves, and Zatar had all but concluded
that Terrans had little interest in other languages. Choosing his
words slowly and carefully, Zatar forged ahead with his effort at
cross-cultural communication. But by now he was smiling so broadly
that he could only guess what he sounded like to the
Terran.

“
Hearth our toward, is
hospitality
,” Zatar said in the Terran’s language,
repeating by rote one of the many greetings he had learned from the
language tapes. “Zatar of Ibleiman,
the
emissary am I
.” He approached the Terran, prepared to
clasp hands in the traditional Terran greeting. Zatar rather
enjoyed the quaint custom, though he could not fathom its
significance. He assumed it derived from the keen tactile sense
noted in proto-simians throughout the galaxy and was meant to
engender some sort of temporary bonding between the participants.
To his surprise, his guest smiled and bowed in the finest Veshnan
manner.