As Dr. Chirac quickly briefed me, I realized that she was in command for the next couple of hours. At long last, we were in a contact situation.
"Keep the winning team playing, in the same positions for consistency. Play nine innings, no matter how dark it gets. Go along with any call I make, however strange."
"Thinking of cheating, Doc?"
"Absolutely not, but I may have to adapt the rules a bit. With their body structure, it's going to be a small strike zone. Go easy on them, but play to win. And for god's sake don't hurt one. Any questions?"
"Just one."
"What?"
"Are we the visitors or the home team?"
She nodded. "Interesting. It's our field, but their planet. Still, they won't be aware of the distinction, given that we haven't had any visiting teams lately. Let them bat first."
I was glad Dr. Chirac had chosen who would play. Everyone wanted to be in the first interspecies baseball game.
Contact had been one of our mission parameters from the beginning, but after the excitement of finding Tau inhabited, two years of being snubbed by the natives had left those of us in the military and construction side feeling left out of the explorers' club. But the old excitement came back quickly. The news spread through handcom calls, and before the game had started the entire human population of Tau was in attendance. Yoshi and the rest of the xeno team frantically mounted fixed cameras to record the game.
"Play ball!" Dr. Chirac shouted as I took the mound.
I faced the Tau at bat, preparing myself to throw the first interspecies pitch in baseball history.
She (a ninety-percent chance with Taus) was gripping the Slugger with her two sling hands, shifting her weight on the other four like a restive batter. The two mid-hands popped up occasionally to scratch her thorax and stroke the bat.
They had been watching us closely. One of the Tau's sling hands let go of the bat for a moment to touch its brow, as if adjusting an invisible cap.
I dipped my shoulders one by one, getting a pair of good cracks from my neck, hoping my arm would stay in the game for nine more innings. Checked first and third, spat, and licked my lips.
The creature in front of me didn't look ready for a fastball. For a first-time batter, she didn't seem utterly clueless, but she held the bat a bit too far back, as if stuck in the wind-up of a swing.
I threw at a nice, easy speed.
Like many first balls of new seasons, it was not a great pitch, dipping low enough that Hunter had to scoop it up from the dirt. But the Tau gamely swung, missing by a country mile. (Or, as Chirac's tablet recorded, a good forty centimeters.)
I saw Dr. Chirac hesitate before she called, "Strike one!" Her eyes narrowed a bit above her filter mask, as if thinking I'd thrown an unhittable ball on purpose.
I shrugged as it flew back to me.
My second pitch tightened up and went in right at thorax level, where the Tau's first swing had passed over the plate. She swung and missed again, low this time, but closer.
"Strike two!"
The ball came back from Hunter, who yelled his usual, "You got her now, Colonel!"
I smiled at Hunter's attitude. It wasn't like the Tau were going to walk in here and win a game off us. We had to assume this was as much about contact for them as it was for us. They might as well get a real baseball experience.
Hunter flashed me two fingers down, and I nodded.
After nine innings, my fastball isn't exactly scorching, but it ain't bad for an old man's. I laid the ball straight into Hunter's glove, and the Tau batter swung late by a solid second.
"Strike three!" Chirac called, and cocked her thumb for the Tau to go.
There was dead silence for a moment. Did she know she was out? Had my fastball constituted humanity's first interstellar diplomatic blunder?
The batter hung its head, rested the Slugger on its abdomen, and trudged back toward the other Taus clustered to the right of home plate.
Hunter started the cheer. "Way to go, Colonel!" He clapped and whistled. The remaining humans and the Taus around the field joined in. When the batter got back to her teammates, they put up their sling hands to pat her head softly, almost like a team high-fiving each other.
I looked at Dr. Chirac, who was recording the display. They apparently knew the rules, at least the basics. Over a year or so of watching the game, the Tau had learned some baseball.
It occurred to me that of everything we had accomplished here—prospecting for oil, building a solar array to power the tube, planting the farm, drinking and fighting with (and screwing) each other—this game was our only real collective ritual.
Our colony had no common religion. The small group that had once held Mass had dwindled due to a schism: Some wanted to observe every seven Tau days, some every lunar week, others to match Earth Sundays. As a result, any prayers nowadays were pretty much done in private. After a few weeks on-planet, I'd let the military protocol loosen. There were only seven of us who were U.S. Army, so I saw little point in raising the flag every morning. Even our work schedules were erratic. Everyone adapted differently to the eighteen-hour day, and McGill and I let our people change their shifts when Tau-lag left them sleepless in the planet's long twilit night.
To the Tau, we must have seemed an unruly lot, chaotic and unpredictable. But in baseball we had found ritual and ceremony, a focus that brought us—the twenty Americans, four Japanese, two Cubans, and our French umpire, at least—together.
So perhaps it didn't matter if the Tau never got a hit.
It's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.
· · · · ·
Three up, three down.
The top of the Tau order only got the bat on the ball once, producing a foul tip that went over Hunter's head. For a moment, I wondered if the batter would mistakenly run, but she knew it had gone foul and just eased onto her back four, waiting as Hunter chased it down. Then she struck out swinging on the next pitch.
We were up.
"Jenny," I called as we came off the field. "You go in first."
"And do what, Colonel?"
I shrugged. "Chirac says play to win. But no dangerous line drives. And don't argue with the doctor's calls."
"Can they even pitch?"
"I guess we'll find out. They're pretty good with those slings, though."
I could see Jenny's lips purse even through her filter mask. "Deadly, actually." We'd seen them take down the local predators at a hundred meters with a fusillade of rocks the size of human fists.
"Relax, Jenny. So far they seem to know the rules. I don't think they're suddenly going to throw beanballs at us."
"Wish I had a batter's helmet, just in case the pitcher pulls out her sling."
I looked back at the Taus. They were throwing the ball to each other, warming up like humans taking the field. They had adapted their sling technique to a throw, like an underarm pitch tilted forty-five degrees.
"You'll be okay." I patted Jenny's shoulder and jogged over to join Yoshi by one of the cameras.
"They're throwing pretty good."
He nodded, following the ball with the camera headsup, a zoomed-in view on a translucent layer over his face.
"I've seen the kids toss rocks like this," he said. "My guess is that it's the original behavior that the sling was adapted to augment."
"They used to hunt barehanded?"
"They're built for it." Yoshi sent me a headsup. He had some software running that interpolated Tau skeletal structure. (Conveniently, the Tau practiced ritual exposure after death. Given that carrion-eaters usually dragged away the corpse, we figured an autopsy or two wouldn't stretch the bounds of cultural sensitivity.) As the Tau with the ball wound up, I watched the compound socket that allowed her arm smooth 360-degree rotation. She was far more fluid than a human throwing underarm. Faster, too.
I wondered if Jenny was really safe. These guys were built to throw.
The Tau team had managed a pretty fair imita
tion of our field placings, and when the alien on the mound raised a hand, another slung the ball to her.
Jenny hefted the bat and walked up to the plate, and my jaw dropped.
"Did you see that, Yoshi?"
"Well, I guess they can tell us apart," he said quietly.
The outfielders had moved in, covering the ground where Jenny's Texas-leaguers tended to land.
"The question is," Yoshi said, "do they really understand Jenny's hitting style, or are they just imitating our strategy?"
"Good point. Remember, she got a hit by going deep last game."
"Barely," Yoshi muttered. Then I remembered that he'd been the one in center field for Jenny's last at-bat.
She knocked the dust from her shoes and stood at the ready, glancing at the Tau playing catcher. It was the closest any of us had actually gotten to the dominant life form before today. Just behind the catcher, Dr. Chirac looked ecstatic.
"Play ball!" she shouted.
The Tau started to jitter on the mound, some sort of pre-pitch dance. She finished with a jerk of the head accompanied by a little coughing noise. I heard a giggle from my team, which spread throughout the humans.
"Well, Colonel," said Yoshi, "she's got you cold."
I blinked, then saw it: The little dance had been an imitation of my wind-up ritual. She'd bobbed her shoulders one by one, checked the bases, then spat on the ground. No doubt she would have licked her lips if she'd had a tongue.
Of course, as far as the Tau knew, it was in therules that you had to spit before you pitched. All four humans who regularly spent time on the mound had a tendency to do so. As observers, the Tau had the classic problem of a small sample size: They couldn't distinguish between the explicit laws of the game, its long-held traditions, and the personal habits of the few players they'd seen.
Jenny readied herself, and the first pitch came at her. It was low and outside, but she stepped back nervously. The pitch had looked tentative to me, slower than they'd been throwing in the outfield. Hopefully, that meant the Tau were trying not to hurt us.
The catcher scooped it in effortlessly and tossed it back with a high, arcing throw, an imitation of Hunter's returns.
"Ball one!" Chirac called, focused on her tablet as the pitcher warmed up again. The humans around me tittered again as the alien performed its little pantomime of me.
"Can't wait to get a sample of that fresh saliva," Yoshi said.
"Well, at least I've made one contribution to science," I said.
The second pitch got a little closer to the plate; I reckoned it was between knees and chest, but still outside. Chirac called another ball.
Jenny looked more confident now. The outside pitches seemed cautious to a fault, and when the third came almost within reach, she leaned forward across home plate and took a swing at it.
The ball smacked off down the first-base line. Jenny started to run, but checked herself as it drifted foul. The Tau playing first base managed to get in front of the ball, but didn't get her hands low enough. It bounced off the hard abdominal carapace and rolled toward Yoshi and me.
I scooped it up.
"Is she okay?" I said softly.
"Sure," Yoshi said. "They're tough. As long as we don't hit one in the head."
I tossed the ball softly to the first baseman, then looked down at my hand. I'd touched a ball that had been touched by an alien. Not since my boots had first planted themselves on Tau soil had I felt such an otherworldly thrill.
"Strike one!" called Chirac, nodding approvingly.
From then on, Jenny gamely tried to get a hit, managing to strike out chasing the errant pitches. The Tau on the mound was getting better, but she still was about as accurate as a drunk little-leaguer. At least she was throwing faster, apparently confident that she wouldn't kill anyone.
"Sorry, Coach," Jenny said, "but I didn't want to get walked, you know?"
"That was fine, Sergeant. We're all playing it by ear."
The other human batters followed Jenny's lead, swinging at whatever the Tau pitcher could get to them. But she was too fast and wild. For the next few innings, strike-out followed strike-out for both teams.
"I wonder if we're teaching them bad baseball," Yoshi said. "I mean, shouldn't we take a walk at some point?"
I shrugged. "All in good time. Maybe she'll throw some strikes one of these days."
In the fourth inning, with two down, Hunter got a hit. He connected off a low, straight fastball that popped into short left field. A human probably would have caught it, but the Tau aren't very fast on their feet. The alien fielder collected it on one bounce and slung it toward first base, where Hunter was already camped out.
After the frustrations of the early innings, we cheered him loudly, joined by the Taus in the audience, who apparently weren't taking sides.
"Very cricket of them," Ashley Newkirk said approvingly.
"We'll have to teach them the Bronx cheer," I said.
The pitcher had found her range, and the next two humans managed what looked like genuine little-league at-bats: not great pitching, and some over-enthusiastic swings to be sure, but both made it onto base. The Taus were not good fielders. Their six-legged body design didn't allow for much backward or sideways motion. They had to turn their whole body around to chase balls that flew long.
Still, Yoshi was one happy xenozoologist. He'd captured more unique movements in four innings than in two years of field work.
With the bases loaded, I was up again.
As I approached the plate, I glanced at Dr. Chirac, remembering what she'd said. Play to win.
The first pitch came in high, and I pulled back.
"Ball one!"
The second looked good, and I took a shot at it. But I hadn't expected a good pitch, and my swing was late.
"Strike one!"
The third pitch was low, and I let it go. The fourth was inside, and I left that, too. I snuck a look at Chirac, who nodded subtly.
The next pitch was way outside.
"Ball four—take your base."
I jogged to first, and Hunter walked in to score. The Tau audience squealed with appreciation. A few of my teammates remembered to high-five Hunter, but they looked embarrassed. We'd scored on a walk, against a pitcher who'd never held a baseball before today.
The rest of the game went scoreless. Hunter got another hit, a couple of us managed tepid grounders and were thrown out at first. As my arm started to go, a couple of Taus got walked as well. But when nine innings were over, the first interplanetary baseball game had been won by humanity, one to zero.
The last Tau batter trotted over to his teammates, and they all touched his head softly with their big hands. A cheer rose up from them, echoing the squeals of the Taus out beyond the fence, and the visiting team made its way across the field and out of sight.
· · · · ·
"Shouldn't we have let them win?" McGill asked. McGill looked like what he was: an aging rig worker, his skin leathery from summers off the Louisiana and California coasts, black half-moons of crude apparently tattooed under his fingernails. He was also the Halihunt rep here on Tau and head of the construction team. Halihunt were our corporate sponsors, who had put up some of the funding and all of the political bribes necessary to make the mission happen, and would reap the lion's share of benefits. His eyes had the bright sheen they'd shown a year before when we'd had our one fatality, Peter Hernandez lost to a drilling cave-in. Bad PR scared the hell out of McGill.
Dr. Chirac shrugged. "We don't even know if they understand that they lost the game. They knew it was over, because we'd played nine innings and the score was uneven. But do they know actually what winning means?"
We all looked at each other, clueless.
While the rest of the colony celebrated a new bat, the end of a day off, and a new era in human interplanetary contact, the xeno staff and the military had taken our homebrews into the command tent. We had to get our story straight before our various reports went back t
o Earth via the tube.
"I just feel bad about the way we won," Alex said.
I took a deep breath. "I know, Alex, taking that walk seemed like a lame way to score, but the game's the game."
Dr. Chirac jumped in. "I think the colonel is correct. We want to test their understanding in as many ways as possible. How much of what they are doing is sheer imitation? How much is pattern recognition? And how much is creative thinking—real strategy? Are they actually trying to win?"
"They've seen us react when we win and lose," Jenny said. "They must know we like winning better."
"They have no way of understanding human body language, Sergeant," Dr. Chirac said. "Our cheers may sound like moans of pain to them. And perhaps they have no concept of mock conquest, which is what winning a game is. The desirability of winning might be a difficult concept for them to come to."
"I'm no linguist," Ashley Newkirk said, puffing at his empty pipe. "But lots of animals play-fight and engage in submission rituals."
Dr. Chirac nodded her head slowly. "But only one animal organizes play-fighting into complex contests of skill. The conflict in sport, the victory and vanquishment, is carefully hidden under dozens of rules and accommodations. We cannot assume the Tau understand that this is a fight. It doesn't look like one on the surface. We must discover if they know what it is to win. How far they'll go to avoid losing. If they'd ever cheat."
"Cheating?" Ashley Newkirk protested. "I think we should assume they're trying to play fair."
"A noble assumption, and a proper one so far," Dr. Chirac said. "I merely point out that we should let them push the parameters of the game as far as they can. We have been handed the tool we need to make real contact."
Chirac's words were measured and intense, the look in her eyes one of a lifelong dream coming true before her. When the xeno contact team had been equipped ten years ago, we'd had only the vaguest idea there was intelligent life on Tau. Evidence of cultivation had been glimpsed from space, but the locals had stayed clear of the ground probes. On landing, we had discovered the Tau's reticence. To make things still harder, their speech and hearing stretched into much higher frequencies than human, higher even than we could analyze with the dolphin gear we'd brought in through the tube. Without specialized devices, of the sort that only a larger xeno team and bigger industrial base could supply, we didn't have the technical capacity to learn their language. Except for a few spy cams, we could hardly even study their physical culture.
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