by Nancy Kress
It was thirteen hundred hours. He called Capelo on his comlink. “Tom, this is Lyle. I have a scheduling decision to make, and I want to know if the artifact is lifting out early this afternoon or later.”
“It’s not coming out today at all,” Capelo said.
“No? Why not?”
“Caution. You approve of caution, Lyle, don’t you? We got the artifact uncovered and it has markings on it pretty close to those Syree Johnson reported on the first artifact.”
“Go on.” Excitement started in him like tiny bubbles.
“There are also protuberances similar to the pressure points she described. On and off switches, or at least that’s what they were on her object. The original artifact required two points in opposition to be simultaneously activated to set off a wave, and this seems to be the same setup. Gruber and I don’t want to set it off inadvertently. Might mess the whole place up.”
“Yes.”
“So we’ve got crew in the hole hand-brushing dirt away from the artifact as if it were a pottery shard from the early Paleolithic. That takes time. We’ll lift it out tomorrow. The digger’s busy preparing a place now. Sudie, not now!”
“Daddy!” the child’s voice said excitedly, “come look!”
Kaufman said, more sharply than he intended, “Tom, are you trying to supervise a major military find and baby-sit at the same time?”
“No, no, their nanny is here. Sudie just escaped for a minute. Here, Jane, take her. Tomorrow, Lyle. Early in the morning. Then, when it’s out, I can do the real tests.”
“All right,” Kaufman said, and broke the link before he said something to Capelo that he’d regret. Capelo was a lunatic, just as he’d told Marbet. Children at a weapon site! Arrogant individualist, assuming whatever he did had to be right, simply because he did it.
Arrogant brilliant individualist.
Kaufman called the shuttle pilot, who was off-duty and asleep. “Captain DeVolites, this is Colonel Kaufman. How quickly could you take me up to the Shepard and back down again?”
The pilot was instantly alert. “Under emergency conditions, sir?”
“No, we’re not under attack.” Kaufman explained no further. “Leaving as soon as possible.”
DeVolites couldn’t quite keep the curiosity out of his voice, although he tried. “Two hours up, sir, including docking. Less than two down.” The Shepard was in geosynchronous orbit over the Neury Mountains, monitoring everything with sensors that could resolve an image to a few centimeters.
“Prepare to leave in fifteen minutes,” Kaufman said, and went to tell Captain Heller that the shuttle was making an unscheduled liftoff.
* * *
Commander Grafton met Kaufman in the shuttle bay. Grafton did not look happy.
“Colonel, a word, please, in private.”
“Certainly.”
Grafton led the way to a shielded conference room off the shuttle bay. “Colonel Kaufman, I request clarification of the parameters allowed for Ms. Grant’s interactions with the prisoner.”
Grafton looked very stiff, very Navy. Kaufman relaxed. He had dealt often with outraged protocol.
“What has she been doing, Commander?” Kaufman asked, allowing the slightest hint of sympathy into his voice.
“She has activated the extensive holo library, which is of course acceptable. She has commandeered—” Kaufman noted the word “—enormous computer power, which is also within her charter, even if those uses seem offensive. But she has also interfered with the feeding and possible preservation of the prisoner, which infringes on my responsibility for this operation. And now she wants one of the prisoner’s so-called ‘hands’ freed, One hand, Colonel, might be enough for a Faller to devise a method of suicide. That’s their projected primary response to captivity, as you know. I cannot permit that to happen.”
“No, of course not,” Kaufman said. The chain of command here was tricky. Grafton was Navy, Kaufman Army. Grafton had final control of anything that threatened his ship, but Kaufman was in control of the “special project” involving the alien. However, both men knew that if the only Faller ever captured alive was allowed to kill himself on Grafton’s ship, Grafton’s career was over.
Grafton said, “So you agree that Ms. Grant’s request must be denied.”
“I’d like to talk to Ms. Grant,” Kaufman said, “but it certainly sounds as if freeing the prisoner’s hand could endanger him.” A reply that actually said nothing, but denied nothing either.
Grafton was no fool. He recognized that was all he was getting at this point. He rose and said stiffly, “I’ll take you to Ms. Grant.”
Marbet waited for him in the anteroom to the prisoner’s cell, an anteroom of amazing messiness. Computer flimsies lay curled on the floor, the table, the chairs. Three holo display stages—three!—crowded one wall, interspersed with full-length mirrors. Various uniforms crumpled themselves into fantastic shapes in every corner, along with what Kaufman at first thought were dead animals. He started. Closer scrutiny showed him the things were pieces of fur. Where had she gotten fur aboard ship?
“Hello, Lyle,” she said when Grafton had left them. “The commander has been complaining about me to you.”
“Don’t tell me how my body language is revealing that,” Kaufman said, smiling. She looked wonderful, green eyes alight and brown face glowing with excitement. Even her short auburn curls seemed to have extra spring. “Tell me what you’ve done.”
She knew how to present information succinctly. “I proceeded in four stages. First, observation of the Faller, especially when he was being force fed, combined with preliminary attempts to communicate using prime numbers. He didn’t respond. But my observations, combined with the computer analysis of the holo recordings of every session, gave me a feel for how his face and body express half the human primary emotions.”
“Half?” Kaufman said. He noted that she hadn’t used a personal name for the Faller.
“Anger, fear, and disgust. The others are pleasure, surprise, and lust.”
“So next you went after those,” Kaufman said. Lust?
“Yes. I used holos on the solidest setting to elicit surprise. Animals, mostly. I don’t know yet if the Fallers have holo tech or if he thought the rabbits I pulled out of my hat were real, but. I got surprise.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Pleasure was a lot harder. I’ll come to that in a minute. And lust, too.”
“I’m fascinated,” Kaufman said, without sarcasm.
“The second stage was learning to simulate the Faller’s body language and facial expressions myself.”
“You?” Kaufman said, startled.
“Well, yes, Lyle. He has no motivation to learn our communication.”
“True enough.” You didn’t need to communicate to commit suicide.
“I used the same body language he did,” Marbet continued, “and his body responses were surprise and disgust, without any reciprocation of communication. And even then I could sense that something else was going on here, although I couldn’t put my finger on what. And neither could the computer. Why are you smiling?”
“At the idea of a computer with a finger.” Even her metaphors were body-oriented.
She smiled, without stemming her tide of words. “Stage three was holo simulation of other Fallers, programmed with the body language I’d been able to classify so far. That was fascinating! The Faller seemed to understand right away that those holos weren’t real, but body language is involuntary, Lyle. He couldn’t help responding somewhat And his responses were vastly different whether the Faller holo was naked, dressed in a uniform identical to the one he was captured in, or dressed in human uniforms.”
“You projected holos of a Faller dressed in human uniforms?” No wonder Grafton had found Marbet’s work “offensive.”
“Yes. Also in imaginary uniforms, basically the Faller garment but with different looks based on human notions of decoration. At least, at first And here’s where I had the first
breakthrough. The Faller’s responses differed markedly depending on rank … even human rank. They know a lot more about us than we do about them.”
“I believe it,” Lyle said grimly.
“What I think is that Faller society is rigidly hierarchical. That makes sense, when you consider that they eliminate anything that looks like a threat. You’d have to have some mechanism to keep them from completely eliminating each other. I think that mechanism is strict and unvarying hierarchy, life-long. And I think that, unlike human societies that have done the same thing, the Faller mechanism is biological. Hard-wired in the brain.”
Kaufman said slowly, “You mean, like the shared-reality mechanism of the Worlders is biological and hard-wired.”
“Yes! Exactly!”
“The alien universe is turning out to be a very strange place.”
Marbet laughed, a laugh so free and joyous that Kaufman was startled. This was more than just solving a scientific and military problem. Marbet Grant relished the strangeness that made him, Colonel Lyle Kaufman, a bit uneasy.
But, then, she had always been treated as a living strangeness herself.
“Yes. What emerged from the idea of ranking was a means to discriminate among the Fallers’ reactions to different humans. The only ones he’s seen, you know, are the techs who force-feed him, who are all three crew and who happen to all be men, and the xenobiologists, who are officers but not line officers with power. He’s incredibly sensitive to the possession of power, you know, in ways we can’t imagine. It’s like a dog being so much more sensitive than we are to smells. What I had to find was a way to use that.”
Kaufman had a sudden unsettling thought. “You got him to react to Commander Grafton, the highest-ranking officer aboard.”
“Yes. It was a failure. The Faller’s reaction was fear and anger, not increased willingness to communicate. We’re the enemy, after all.”
Kaufman couldn’t resist. “What were Grafton’s body reactions?”
Marbet laughed again. “The same fear and anger. Neither of them knew it, and if you ever repeat this I’ll deny it, but that’s actually the moment human and Faller most resembled each other.”
I’ll bet they did, Kaufman thought, remembering Grafton’s stiffness and outrage at Marbet’s work. But all he said aloud was, “So what was your breakthrough?”
“I went the other way. The Faller wouldn’t communicate with human power. He disdained human inferiors. None of us could ever be equal to Fallers, in his mind. That left only one option.”
All at once Kaufman knew what she meant. His stomach clenched.
Marbet said, “You don’t like it, I can see. And nobody knows anything about Faller females, not even whether they’re sentient. But I had the computer create various female holos based on the sex differences most common among galactic species, if not exactly universal. Smaller body. Softer wherever the Faller seemed hard. That sort of thing. I left the female holos unclothed, to eliminate rank considerations, and sort of blurry, since I had absolutely no idea what the sex organs themselves might look like. And the Faller responded, with the first body signs of pleasure I had observed. Fleeting, of course, and involuntary … he knows perfectly well that it’s a holo. But enough reaction for me to build a partial vocabulary of pleasure and lust, and to see what bodily vocabulary on the part of the holo provoked it.”
“And then you learned the vocabulary yourself.”
“Yes.”
Kaufman didn’t like it. Marbet, presenting herself as a Faller female, or a slavish clumsy copy of one, probably naked … He strove to hide what he felt, and knew he failed.
She watched him keenly. Finally she said, “Grafton doesn’t know I’m doing this part.”
“No.”
“He would react the same way you are, only more so. A lot more so. But, Lyle, I’m not pretending to be a Faller female. The prisoner isn’t stupid. I’m merely trying to present myself in the way that will least arouse his instinctive hostility, and most create a possible willingness to communicate. Animal handlers on Earth do the same thing, you know. In fact—” She hesitated, decided to go ahead “—so do you, in your work in diplomacy.”
True enough. Kaufman nodded, reluctantly. “Did it work? Was he more willing to talk to you?”
“Yes. I’m still the enemy, of course, but I’m an enemy that arouses positive physiological responses rather than hostile ones. And make no mistake, Lyle—the instinctive physiological component in Faller behavior is much stronger than in humans. The Fallers are much less adaptable than we are. In a real sense, they’re prisoners of their biology.”
“Which is why they kill us without negotiation in the first place. All right, Marbet. What has he told you?”
“He hasn’t ‘told’ me anything yet.” She sounded exasperated. “I thought you understood, Lyle. It’s a nonverbal channel of communication, and so far a tenuous one. But I’m using it to tell him things.”
“Like what?”
“To convey that humans want to talk, to stop the killing. I use holos, pantomime, anything I can think of. In a few minutes I’ll show you.”
“Marbet…” Appalled, Kaufman couldn’t think how to go on. “Marbet, you—we—aren’t empowered to negotiate peace!”
“I know that,” she said, with dignity. “I understand that I’m supposed to learn what I can of Faller culture and, by implication, Faller military strategy. And if I get really lucky, uncover the secrets of the beam-disrupter shield. Oh, and it would probably also be nice if I walked on water.”
Kaufman tried to imagine what discussions had looked like between her and Grafton.
After a moment she said, “I’m sorry. Tension, I guess, plus lack of sleep.”
“No, I’m sorry,” Kaufman said. “You’ve done amazing work, Marbet, and of course you’re right when you say there’s no telling where it will lead. It’s a stunning achievement, and a real contribution to both science and the war.”
She said flatly, “You’re very good at your job.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Yes, you did. But I like you better when you’re being straightforward. I’m going in to him now. You can observe on this viewscreen.”
“All right,” he said, but she’d already vanished through a side door. Kaufman stepped up to the viewscreen.
Behind it, the Faller looked as Kaufman remembered, a deformed log-like human with three tentacle-like arms, tied to the back wall. Kaufman studied the noseless face, but could see no change of expression. A door opened and Marbet entered the prisoner’s cell.
For a suspended second Kaufman wasn’t sure it was her. Or even human. But of course it was Marbet, a Marbet moving somehow differently, with an alien gait, her arms held at a peculiar angle and her fingers splayed. Bent-kneed, somehow fatter … she couldn’t be fatter. It was an illusion. She wore nothing but a yellow strip of cloth around her hips, hiding her genitals … maybe the cloth was padded and that’s why she looked fatter. No, it was something in the way she held herself, the way she moved. And what he’d thought was cloth wasn’t. It was a blurred holo projection suggesting cloth without being specific about texture, composition, or draping.
Marbet moved very close to the Faller. She must be right up against the invisible barrier that separated her atmosphere from his. The viewscreen recorders were placed such that Kaufman had a clear three-quarter profile of her face. It looked even stranger than her body. She was moving her facial muscles in ways that looked grotesque to him, contorting her features.
The alien contorted his, although not as much as she did. Still, Kaufman felt his breath catch. He was seeing the first human-Faller conversation in twenty years of war.
No, he had to remind himself, not a conversation. No ideas were being exchanged, not even basic nouns on the level of “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” Even as Kaufman watched, the alien’s face returned to passivity. No, not completely … there was still something, some twitches, some meaning he had no way of beginning to rea
d.
Then Marbet held up one arm and began to gesture.
A genuine shock ran through Kaufman’s body. The angle Marbet held her arm, the way she splayed her fingers, the awkward way one finger remained folded back (the aliens were four-fingered) all looked strange and grotesque to him. But the movements he recognized. Between remedial genemods and nanomeds, there were no deaf people on Mars. But Mars was not the Solar System. In the slums of Earth, and on religious colonies where settlers forbade both genetic engineering and nanotech, Kaufman had seen deaf children do what Marbet did now. Marbet was teaching the alien American Sign Language.
Or a version of it, anyway. I-want-not-hurt-you.
The alien’s face moved slightly, muscle shifts Kaufman could not interpret. Could Marbet?
She went on a few minutes more, then executed a sort of dipping bow. Something happened, then. A crest began to rise at the back of the alien’s neck, a thin layer of flesh that rose rigid a few inches and then abruptly collapsed. But Kaufman had seen it, and seen things like it in other species, some of them Terran. It was an involuntary mating display, quickly suppressed.
Lust.
The alien missed the females of his own species.
Kaufman closed his eyes. When he brought Marbet Grant here, he’d never expected anything like this. Not that he’d had clear expectations, but still … alien mating behavior did not form a part of military weapons-project reports. They were a long, long way from beam-disrupter shields and probability wave functions.
Marbet stood beside him. She said quietly, “So you see how it is, Lyle. I wanted you to see for yourself. There’s no way he can answer me with his hand tied like that.”
Kaufman waited.
“You have to convince Grafton and his xenobiologists to let one of the Faller’s hands go free.”
There was no diplomatic way to say it, no quibbling or evasiveness that she would not see through. Kaufman braced himself.