by Amy Thomson
“Good morning, General Burnham,” Ukatonen said.
“Good morning. I understand you wish a lesson in politics?”
“I wish to understand humans better, yes,” Ukatonen said. “I do not understand the nature of the Expansionists’ concerns about the Tendu. I was hoping that you could enlighten me, so that we could reach harmony in this matter. It is not good that there is fear between us.”
“I am in the military, Ukatonen,” General Burnham told him. “It is my duty to protect humanity from outside threats. You and the other alien showed up without warning. It is natural for me and those who believe as I do, to urge caution. If you had waited, Earth would have extended an invitation.”
“And Eerin would have had tg choose between her family and her child.”
“Who?” General Burnham asked.
“It is our name for Dr. Saari,” Ukatonen explained.
“I see,” she said. “Dr. Saari’s decision to adopt an alien child was a flagrant violation of our Contact Protocols. Choosing between the child and her family was a consequence of that decision,” General Burnham said. She sounded angry. It was time to back down, Ukatonen realized, but he could not let Eerin’s difficult choice go undefended.
“Our decision to come with her was a consequence of that choice also. It seemed to us to be the least harmful course. We cannot cross the great emptiness without your ships, General. There are only two of us, and Moki is not yet an elder.”
“But he’s not exactly a child, either,” General Burnham replied.
“Not as you understand it, but Moki needs Dr. Saari as much as a human child needs its mother, perhaps more. We came with Dr. Saari so that she could see her family without deserting her bami. We agreed to abide by your Contact Protocols, General Burnham. You have the word of an enkar that we will cause harm to no one.”
“I have heard that, yes,” Burnham admitted. “But I do not know how much you can be trusted. Remember,” she said, “it is my duty to protect humanity. We must be wary.”
“My promise to abide by the protocols was a formal judgment. If I fail, I must kill myself,” Ukatonen explained. This woman was as hard and seamless as the shell of a purra. There was no way in past her defenses.
“I understand that,” Burnham said, “but your people are still unknown to us.”
“As humans are to the Tendu. You possess more knowledge of us than we do of you. That is the other reason I am here, General. I wish to understand your people. How can I gain your trust? How can we reach harmony?”
Burnham shook her head. “Trust is not my job,” she said. “Caution is. Thank you for calling.”
Ukatonen inclined his head, “Thank you for speaking with me, General. I have learned much.” He felt a hollow sadness in his stomach at the general’s hostility. How could a person live in the world and think this way? How had she grown to be like this?
The general frowned, as though regretting even this short conversation. “Goodbye,” she said, and reached to touch the disconnect button.
Ukatonen stared at the blank screen for a moment, then shut down the computer. He took a long deep breath and let it out again.
“So hard,” he remarked to himself in skin speech. Aloud, he wondered, “Why is she like that? She must be very sad and lonely.”
“There are many humans like her,” Eerin told him. “Trust is not easy for us, en. We have fought among ourselves for so long. Remember how long it took me to learn to trust you.”
Ukatonen nodded. “I do not think that she trusts anyone,” he said. He felt as though he had stared too long at the empty ocean of space. How empty the general must be, barricaded within the walls of her suspicion.
Moki watched the blur of people coming and going. They all wanted to talk to Eerin about the Tendu. Some of them were important people from the Survey, which was somehow part of Juna’s atwa. The rest of them were from the press. Moki was still trying to understand what the “press” was. As far as he could determine, it was an atwa that involved telling people what was going on. But the people in the press atwa preferred to talk to Eerin or Ukatonen. They ignored him, or talked to him as though he had trouble understanding them.
Moki and Ukatonen weren’t supposed to go out without Eerin or Analin, so they spent most of the day watching the Tri-V or listening to Analin and Eerin talk about them. It was fun at first, seeing themselves on the Tri-V, but they only showed the same few pictures and words. He and Ukatonen only got to climb trees when no one was around, and it was always the same few trees.
“When are we going to meet your family, siti?” Moki asked.
“I don’t know, Moki. My request for leave hasn’t been approved yet. The Survey wants us to go to one of their research stations where they can study you. The press wants to interview us, and I just want to go home.”
“Then we should go home,” Ukatonen said.
“If only it were that simple,” Juna replied. “I can’t go until the Survey tells me I can.”
“Everyone else from the ship has gone on leave,” Ukatonen said. “Why are we still here?”
Juna shrugged. “They don’t know what to do with us, I think. There are lots of different departments who want to study us.”
Mold’s ears folded tight against his head. “Please excuse my lack of patience, siti, but I’m tired of watching people talk to you about us.”
“No, bai, you’ve been very patient. I’ve just been thoughtless. Tomorrow we’re going to cancel all our appointments and go explore the space station. The world isn’t going to fall apart if we take the day off.”
Juna watched Moki and Ukatonen swinging through the branches, their skins alive with blue and green flickers of alien laughter, and her worries lifted for a moment. She had needed this break as badly as the Tendu. She felt tired and bloated. The stress of the last few days was getting to her. She longed to be up there with Moki and Ukato-nen, but she couldn’t muster the energy to join them. But just watching the Tendu playing was enough to lift her spirits.
“Hello, Dr. Saari.”
Juna looked up. It was the union president, Mark Manning.
“Analin told me I might find you here,” he said. “May I join you?”
“Of course,” Juna said, and he sat down beside her on the bench.
“I wanted to thank Moki again for all he’s done. I feel like a new person. It’s like a miracle.”
Juna smiled proudly. “For them, such things are normal. For us …” She shrugged. “Even now, they still amaze me.”
Manning nodded. They sat for a while without saying anything, watching Ukatonen and Moki leap like gibbons from branch to branch, their skins a riot of blue happiness and pink excitement.
“I was a little surprised to hear that you were still on the station,” Manning said at last. “I had expected you to be with your family.”
“I would be, but my leave hasn’t come through yet. I think the Survey’s too busy fighting over what to do with me.” Juna ran her fingers through her hair. “It’s been five-and-a-half years since I last saw my family. I want to go home.” She looked at the pebbled concrete floor, fighting back a surge of emotion.
“Analin tells me they sent you out all by yourself for that press conference. Even the Survey isn’t usually that bad. Someone’s being petty in the home office,” Manning said. “They should have assigned someone to take care of you.”
“I’d rather have Analin than some Survey PR flack. Analin likes the Tendu, and they like her. She lets me decide what I want to say. And she works for me, so there’s no conflict of interest.” Juna was silent for a while, watching Moki and Ukatonen swing back and forth between the same two trees. It suddenly reminded her of caged tigers in the zoo. “I just want to see my family,” she said.
“Let me see what I can do for you,” Manning offered. “I think I can shake your leave loose. They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this kind of harassment.”
Manning was as good as his word. Two days l
ater, Juna’s leave was approved. Amazingly enough, there were no problems with taking the Tendu along. Clearly they were still protected by the volume of publicity surrounding their imprisonment in quarantine. Juna and the Tendu boarded the very next shuttle for Berry Station. Analin would follow in a couple of weeks.
The shuttle trip to Berry Station took several hours, most of it in zero-gee. There had been a few seconds of zero-gee on the Hotna Darabi Maru, but they had been securely strapped in then. Fortunately the shuttle was empty, and the Tendu were able to zoom around the cabin, ricocheting from viewport to viewport, their skins awash with flickering colors. Juna joined them for a while, until a sudden wave of queasiness sent her to her seat. She must be more exhausted than she realized; she hadn’t been spacesick since she was a small child. She settled back into her seat and let sleep carry her away.
She was awakened by the announcement directing passengers to strap in for arrival. Moki and Ukatonen came back to their seats. As the familiar bulk of her home station loomed into view on the forward viewscreen, Juna felt a sudden pang of anxiety. Her family had been nice enough on the comm, but how would they react to the aliens face to face? Especially now, with the harvest in full swing. And then there was Toivo. Her father had told her that Toivo had come to help with the harvest, but he refused to talk to Juna on the comm.
“He’s changed,” Aunt Netta had said, worry written on her face. “He’s pulled into himself. He reminds me of how your father acted after he brought you back from the camp.”
Juna remembered that time. Her father had found them in the refugee camp in Germany. Juna had seen him talking to a relief worker, and pushed her way through the crowd. He picked her up and held her. Juna hung on as though she would never let go.
“You’re so thin!” he had exclaimed. “Where’s your mother?”
Juna had lifted her head from his chest and just looked at her father, unable to find the words to tell him that her mother was dead. Finally she and Toivo had led him to the graveyard, to the mass grave where she had been buried.
A light had gone out of him when he realized what Juna was trying to tell him. He sat on the muddy earth and wept like a child. Juna had watched, terrified by the depth of his grief.
“I’m sorry, Isukki” she had said, resting her hand on his head. It was all her fault. She should have saved her mother, taken better care of her, not let her die. Her aunt Netta, the only other member of her father’s family to make it safely out of war-torn Finland, came to live with them on Berry Station. Her father spent months wandering around like a ghost. The whole family had seemed like walking shadows. Juna closed her eyes in pain at the thought of Toivo acting like that.
The jarring of the ship against the lock of the space station shook her out of her reverie. With a heavy, solid clang, the docking mechanisms engaged. They were home.
Moki touched her arm. “Are you all right?”
Juna smiled weakly and patted Moki’s hand. “Yes, it’s just nerves.” She unfastened the safety strap, and pushed herself toward the door. They would be in free fall until they reached the elevators mat would take them down to the inspection station.
A figure in a wheelchair was waiting for them when they emerged from the agricultural inspection station. It took Juna a second to recognize who it was.
“Toivo! How did you get up here?” she cried. She dropped her things and bounded over to hug him, moving lightly in the half gravity of this level of the station. She stopped a few steps away, uncertain how to hug someone in a wheelchair.
“Hello, older sister,” he said in Amharic as he reached up from his chair to enfold her in an embrace. “Kiroko was working security downstairs. She let me come up to meet you.”
He looked older, Juna realized, older than she expected him to, and there was a hard-bitten edge of defiant bitterness that was apparent even through his gladness at seeing her again. She looked at his wheelchair and a torrent of fear, anger, and love surged through her. She wanted to tear that chair apart with her bare hands, and raise him up on two good legs. His shoes, she noticed, were smooth and unlined from lack of use.
Fighting back her conflicting emotions, she knelt down beside Toivo so that they were eye to eye. “How are you?” she asked.
“Shorter,” he said. “But my feet don’t get tired.”
He glanced past her at the Tendu.
“Moki, Ukatonen, this is my brother, Toivo.”
Moki stuck out his hand, “I’m honored to meet you, brother of my sitik.” Moki was only a little taller than her brother, seated as he was in the wheelchair.
Toivo reached out and took Moki’s hand.
“Good to meet you, Moki,” he said.
“Moki is my adopted son,” Juna told him.
“I know,” Tovio said. “Welcome to the family, Moki.”
“And this is Ukatonen,” Juna said.
Ukatonen extended his hand. “I’m honored to meet you, Toivo. Juna has told us so much about you and the rest of your family. I’m glad that we are finally here. I’ve wanted to see what a human family was like for a long time.”
“Welcome to the zoo,” Toivo said dryly, shaking the enkar’s hand. “Cmon, Juna, let’s get your bags.” He wiped his hand on his pants leg.
Juna smiled. It took a while to get used to the cool moistness of the Tendu’s touch.
“How is everyone?” she asked in Amharic, as they headed for the elevator. Toivo’s chair moved easily in the half-gravity.
“Busy with the harvest,” he replied in the same language.
“The harvest, is it going well?”
“Bumper crop this year. Weather Control optimized for wine grapes this season. Dad bought two more vats this summer, getting ready for the new vineyard. We’ll fill all the vats and have grapes left over, if we can get them in. Wermuth’s buying the surplus this year. He has the vat space. We’ve already sold him ten tons of chardonnay grapes. He’ll take some merlot, and a bit of cabernet as well.”
The elevator doors opened, and they got in. The hammered copper paneling on the elevator walls had recently been polished, and it shone. Surrounded by the rich, textured gleam of the copper, Juna knew she was home. The copper panels were a common, recurring theme in Berry Station’s public architecture, courtesy of a rich vein of copper ore that the station’s builders had discovered as they were hollowing out the asteroid that became the station’s outer shell.
“Sounds like the winery’s doing well,” Juna said as the elevator started to descend. A riffle of excitement stirred in Juna’s stomach as the increasing gravity pulled at her. They were almost home.
Toivo shrugged. “We need a good year. Dad shelled out a lot for doctors when I got hurt. Labor’s tight, though. We need more pickers.”
“I brought two more helpers,” Juna said. “Moki and Ukatonen are pretty hard workers. The sun’11 be a problem for them, though.”
He looked up at her, brown and familiar as no one else in the world was, and he smiled.
“We’ve got hats,” he said, referring to their father’s collection of tractor hats. Poking fun at the collection was an old family joke.
Juna was suddenly overwhelmed with happiness. Wheelchair or not, Toivo was still himself. Drawn and sadder, perhaps, but still her brother. She was home. She reached down and squeezed his shoulder.
“It’s good to be back, little brother,” she said.
Toivo nodded. “With you here, it’s home again.”
Juna touched his cheek with the back of her hand, tears welling in her eyes.
The elevator doors opened onto the stone-floored concourse of the shuttle terminal. A boy stood there, waiting for them.
“Hei, Juna-Tati!”
“Danan!” Juna called. She dropped her bags and ran to embrace him. He was a beautiful boy, on the verge of becoming a handsome adolescent, with his creamy-tan skin, and large, solemn eyes that were’the clear, intense green of a freshly sliced lime.
“How did you get so big!” she
exclaimed, tousling his curly chestnut hair.
“He’s taking after his mother in that,” Toivo said, wheeling up to them, with the larger of her two bags on his lap. “And he eats like a horse.”
Moki, Ukatonen, this is my nephew, Danan. He’s Toivo’s son.”
“I’m Moki, and this is Ukatonen,” Moki said.
“You’re the one my aunt adopted, aren’t you?” Danan asked Moki as he lifted Juna’s bag from his father’s lap.
Moki nodded.
“Then I suppose we’re cousins.”
Moki looked at Juna questioningly.
“I suppose you are,” Juna said, grateful for Danan’s easy acceptance of the aliens.
“I’ve never had a cousin before,” Danan remarked.
“Neither have I,” Moki replied as they emerged from the station. Moki looked up and stopped dead, bright pink with surprise. Ukatonen nearly fell over him, as he too looked upward.
Juna smiled. The station arched above them, a quilt of green and brown that made up both land and sky, delineated by the bright glare of the sun windows, brilliant lines of light running the length of the satellite. The far wall of this segment was barely visible in the distance. Beyond that wall were four other segments, each a kilometer long. It was an old design, very space-inefficient, but the view was spectacular.
“It takes some getting used to, doesn’t it?” Juna said.
Ukatonen nodded. “Why doesn’t it all fall down?”
Juna started to explain about centrifugal force as they followed Toivo out to the waiting truck. Danan opened the door on the passenger side for his father.
“He’s driving his old man around now,” Toivo told Juna.
“What kind of machine is that?” Moki asked, gesturing with his chin at the pickup.
“It’s a truck. We use it to carry people and stuff around. On the farm we mostly use horses, but this is easier for going to market.”
“How does it work?” Moki asked.
“I’ll show you sometime,” Danan offered. “Right now, we’ve got to get back to the farm. We’re pretty busy.”