The Color of Distance tcod-1

by Amy Thomson

“Can I get a decent meal and a hot bath before the debriefing? It’s been four and a half years since I’ve had either,” she said.

  “I’ll talk to the base commander and make sure that they’re ready for you. But first, could you show me the aliens?” he asked eagerly.

  “Of course, Dr. Bremen. This way.”

  The cool gloom of the jungle felt good after standing for so long under the brilliant sun.

  “Wait here. I’ll go get the Tendu,” she said, then turned and scrambled up the tree. Bremen stared after her, amazed. Ukatonen, Anitonen, and Lalito met her as she reached the middle level of the canopy. Moki followed behind them hesitantly, his skin grey with grief.

  “Well?” Anitonen asked her.

  “They’ve only sent one person. Dr. Bremen is his name. He wants to meet you. Then I have to go out to the big raft and talk to my people.”

  They climbed down the tree, where Bremen waited.

  “You climb like a monkey, Dr. Saari,” he said.

  “I’ve had to live in the trees for the last four years. I got a lot of practice.” She gestured at the aliens. “This is Ukatonen and Anitonen. They’re enkar. You’ve read about them in my notes, I assume.”

  Bremen nodded.

  “And this is Lalito, the chief elder of the village of Lyanan.”

  Bremen frowned. “Yes, I read about how badly treated you were by her village.”

  “That was a long time ago,” Juna reassured him. “Since then, my relationship with the villagers has significantly improved.”

  “Please translate this for me,” Bremen said. “ ‘I bring peaceful greetings from all of mankind to your people. I hope our two peoples will grow and prosper together. Thank you for taking such good care of Dr. Saari for us.’ ”

  Juna translated his message into Tendu skin speech. She made her words big, so that any villagers watching the talks from concealment could see what she was saying.

  Anitonen stepped forward and shook Bremen’s hand, human-style. “Greetings, Dr. Bremen,” Anitonen spelled out in Standard. “We look forward to negotiating with your people.”

  Dr. Bremen’s eyebrows lifted inside his helmet.

  “Both Anitonen and Ukatonen are reasonably fluent in written Standard,” Juna explained. “I thought it might prove useful during our discussions.”

  Moki slipped between-the two enkar, and leaned against Juna, putting an arm around her hips. Juna thought she saw a flicker of shock cross Bremen’s features, quickly hidden. She laid her arm around Moki’s shoulders.

  “And this is Moki, my bami,” she spelled out in Standard. “He understands written Standard too.”

  “Your adopted child,” Bremen said, his face carefully neutral.

  “Yes,” Juna said. “I saved his life.”

  “I remember that from your journal. It was very moving. It broke every alien contact protocol in the book, though.”

  Juna shrugged. “I think Moki will become an important link between our two peoples. He’s already more fluent in skin speech Standard than any of the other Tendu.”

  Ukatonen touched her shoulder. “We should set a formal time for us to begin negotiations,” he said in Tendu. “Lyanan has been waiting a long time for reparations. They are obligated to many others for helping repair the damage caused by your people.”

  “Perhaps we could start tomorrow. That will give me time to meet the other humans and talk to them,” Juna replied in skin speech.

  “What are you saying?” Dr. Bremen asked her. “I only understand a little Tendu.”

  “Ukatonen wants to begin discussing the reparations owed to Lyanan for the damage the Survey did to their forest. I suggested that we begin preliminary talks tomorrow. That will give us time for a briefing.”

  Bremen radioed the ship, and received an agreement to proceed with the talks. “Very well, then. What time?”

  They agreed to meet by the top of the cliff path at noon, and then it was time to go.

  Moki looked at her expectantly. She embraced him. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she reassured him. “Go with Ukatonen and be good.”

  Moki nodded and held out his arms for allu-a. Torn, Juna glanced up at Dr. Bremen. She was sure that they already suspected her of going native. Linking with Moki would only confirm that.

  Juna squatted down so that she was eye to eye with him. “Moki, this isn’t a good time for allu-a. I’ll try to link with you tomorrow. You should link with Ukatonen while I’m gone. He’s going to be your sitik when I leave. You should start to get used to that now.”

  Moki shook his head and looked away. “No! You are my sitik,” he insisted.

  “Oh, Moki.” Juna rested her forehead against his and sighed. “We’ve known this day was coming for a long time. I’m sorry, but this is the way it has to be.” She brushed his shoulder and stood, her skin deep grey with grief and anguish.

  She glanced at Ukatonen. He put his hand on Moki’s arm. “It’s time to go,” he said gently.

  “It was good to meet you Dr. Bremen,” Ukatonen said in Standard.

  Moki followed Ukatonen with obvious reluctance. He gave Juna a long, pleading look, then climbed into the canopy and vanished into the forest with the enkar. Juna looked after the Tendu as they left, longing to go with them, but someone needed to bridge the gap between the Tendu and humans. Suddenly she understood some of what it must be like to be an enkar, unable to be close to anyone. This was not going to be easy.

  She looked over at Dr. Bremen. He was watching her curiously. She wiped away the tears, suddenly and irrationally angry at him for his ignorant alienness.

  “Let’s go,” she said, leading him back to the beach.

  “Dr. Saari, the galley wants to know what you would like to eat. Oh, and the chef says that they have two cases of Chateau ad Astra.”

  Juna stumbled in surprise. Her father’s wine. Somehow, they had gotten some of her father’s wine.

  “Do they have a bottle of the ’24 Chardonnay?”

  “She says there are six bottles of it in one of the cases.”

  Joy rose in her heart like a soaring seabird. The entire run of ’24 Chardonnay, only twenty-five cases, had been bottled in a nitrogen atmosphere, aged to perfection and stored in their wine vault, reserved for the family’s personal use. Somehow her father had gotten two cases of his own personal stock on board for her.

  “What would the chef recommend with the Chardonnay?” Juna asked.

  “She has some flash frozen Copper River king salmon, which she ordered specially to be eaten with this wine.”

  “Please thank the chef for me,” Juna said, as if she ordered dinner like this all the time. She fought back a wave of hysterical laughter. It was suddenly all too much, a gourmet meal with her father’s wine, a hot bath and clean sheets. It felt unreal; dreamlike.

  “Your chef sounds rather different from the usual Survey cooks,” she observed.

  “The crew says they’ve never eaten this well during a mission,” Bremen said. “She volunteered for the trip. Her credentials were excellent, so I approved her request. It’s done amazing things for crew morale.” He laughed. “Our mother ship, the Kctiwo Maru, keeps pleading with us to send her back, but the ground crew would kill me if I did.”

  They had reached the boat.

  “Welcome back, Dr. Saari,” the woman operating the boat said. She stepped out of the boat and shook Juna’s hand.

  “Thank you,” she said. This was the first human contact she’d had in four-and-a-half years; it took her a moment to let go.

  Bremen introduced the woman. “Dr. Saari, this is Dr. Guralnick, one of the Survey’s top xenobotanists.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Juna said. Guralnick was a tall, slender woman with green eyes. Wisps of silver hair were visible around the edges of her faceplate. She moved gracefully despite her baggy e-suit.

  Juna noticed a couple of sampling bags lying in the bottom of the boat, and smiled. “You’ve been busy, I see.”

  Guralnick l
ooked embarrassed. “It’s just some stuff I picked up along the beach. I hope the Tendu don’t mind.”

  Juna shook her head. “They won’t miss this. Just don’t destroy any live plants or animals until we’ve negotiated with the villagers about what you can collect. I’ll go over your samples with you later and identify as much of it as I can.”

  “That would be wonderful,” Guralnick said. “Thank you, Dr. Saari.”

  “Please, call me Juna.”

  “Only if you’ll call me Kay.”

  “We should be going. They’re waiting for us on the base,” Dr. Bremen said.

  Juna climbed into the sturdy little landing craft. Kay pushed the boat off the beach, came aboard, and started the quiet little hydrogen-powered motor.

  Juna looked back at the jungle as they swung away. She turned a deep, reassuring blue, and raised a hand in farewell to the Tendu. She thought she saw a flicker of color in return as the shoreline receded from view, and remembered her last sight of Moki, looking at her reproachfully as he followed Ukatonen up the tree.

  She looked away, her skin cloudy with sadness. “Oh Moki,” she thought to herself. There was a touch on her shoulder. Kay’s gloved hand was resting there. The gesture seemed very Tendu to Juna.

  “You looked sad, there,” Kay told her sympathetically.

  Juna nodded, but couldn’t think of a reply.

  “Could you—” Kay looked embarrassed. “Could you say something in Tendu?”

  Juna sat up and began the chant of the birds from the quarbirri of the animal spirits. The visual nonsense rhyme was one of the prettiest pieces of skin speech that she knew.

  “That’s beautiful,” Kay said when Juna had finished. “What did you just say?”

  “It’s a list of bird species from a Tendu performance piece called a quarbirri.”

  “I’d like to tape that sometime,” Bremen said.

  Juna shrugged. “You should see someone like Naratonen do the piece. He’s one of the best artists the Tendu have. It probably wouldn’t be hard to get permission to film it. Naratonen was always borrowing my computer to watch the quarbirri I recorded, so he understands the concept of filming something.”

  “You let one of the natives borrow your computer?” Bremen asked with a frown. “That’s a violation of the Contact Protocols.”

  “Dr. Bremen, I had a choice,” Juna replied, suppressing a sudden flicker of irritation. “I could have obeyed the Contact Protocols, or I could have survived. I chose to survive. It was impossible for a person in my situation to adhere to the Protocols.”

  “Those protocols are the result of decades of careful thought and research,” Bremen replied.

  “They were developed on the basis of our experience with the Sawaki-rans, Doctor. The Tendu are not the Sawakirans. They’re much more sophisticated and outgoing. The protocols, as written, don’t work here.”

  “We’re nearly there,” Kay said, touching her on the knee.

  Kay slowed the boat as they swung into the looming shadow of the floating Survey base. The boat glided toward a floating dock. Juna leaped to the dock and held out her hands for the bow line. Bremen tossed her the line, his dark eyebrows arced high in surprise. She secured it to a duraplast cleat, then secured the stern line.

  Bremen stepped onto the dock. “That was quite a jump!” he said.

  “Was it?” Juna replied.

  “We were two meters out from the dock and still moving! There’s a sizable swell, too.”

  Juna looked from the dock to the boat. She hadn’t even thought about it. They had gotten within range and she had just jumped.

  “I spend most of my time thirty meters in the air, jumping from tree to tree. I make jumps harder than that every day,” she said. “I have to, to keep up with the others.”

  “Aren’t you terrified?” Kay asked.

  “I was at first, but I got used to it. It wasn’t like I had much choice. Besides"—she held out her hand so they could see the ridged gripping surfaces on her palm and her elongated fingers—"the Tendu modified me so it was easier to hang on.” She arched her nail-less fingers, extending her claws. Bremen blanched and backed away. Kay leaned forward to take a closer look.

  “We’d better go. They’re waiting for us up top,” Bremen said.

  Kay scooped another couple of sealed specimen bags from the bottom of the boat. “Could you help me carry these, Juna?”

  Juna stepped forward to take the bags from Kay. “Be careful with Bremen,” the botanist said in a low, cautious whisper. “He wields a lot of power here.”

  Juna nodded, flickering acknowledgment out of habit. “Thanks, Kay,” she whispered back, tucking the bags under her arm. “After you, Dr. Bremen,” she said, as she and Kay approached the end of the dock, where the Tri-V celebrity waited impatiently for them.

  They walked up the long, steep stairway from the dock to a middeck hatchway. People pressed against the plexi outer shell, craning their necks to look at her. She suddenly realized that she was completely naked. Her skin darkened to a deep, embarrassed brown, and she faltered in her climb.

  Bremen waved at the staring onlookers, and looked back expectantly at Juna. She managed a tentative wave. The crowd cheered in reply, though the sound was cut off by the plexi dome.

  “I didn’t expect so many people,” Juna said as Bremen drew ahead.

  “It’s a big expedition,” Kay told her. “One of the biggest ever mounted by the Survey. Every A-C spec with any kind of pull at all is up there. There’s a whole team of different specialists assigned to study you. It’s amazing that there’s any kind of room at all for biologists, zoologists, and botanists. There’s a lot of politics here. I’d bear that in mind, if I were you.”

  “Thanks, Kay,” Juna said, grateful for the information, and wishing that she’d thought more about what to do when the Survey returned.

  Kay shrugged, the motion barely visible through the suit. “C’est rien… You let me keep the samples. I just thought you should have some warning before you’re thrown to the lions.”

  They reached the top of the stairs. Bremen was waiting for them at the airlock.

  “I’m to escort you through decontamination procedures, Dr. Saari,” he told her, holding open the airlock door. Juna stepped through into the airlock. She glanced back at the verdant, hilly coastline, feeling a sudden surge of longing. Bremen pulled the heavy door closed with a muffled thud, shutting out the alien world. Juna closed her eyes for a moment and breathed deeply, smelling the newly familiar scents of plastic, paint, and metal. She was ameng humans again.

  She opened her eyes. Bremen was holding out a brand new e-suit, still in its original packaging.

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to wear this when you’re not in quarantine.”

  “I see.”

  Juna took the e-suit, her moist fingers clinging to the plastic, feeling oddly sad and hurt. She slit the plastic wrapper with a claw and shook out the suit. It was her size, but the gloves and boots were too small for her elongated hands and feet. Kay helped her rig temporary coverings out of specimen bags, sealing them with repair tape.

  Bremen stepped through into the disinfectant shower that hosed off his e-suit, and then into the next airlock. Juna followed him through the series of washings and rinsings designed to clean off every trace of the world outside. She felt silly going through decontamination in her e-suit, but it was necessary. Bremen was waiting for her by the elevator that would take them up to the top deck. He was freshly groomed and ready for the cameras. Juna was impressed. She always emerged from decon looking like a drowned rat.

  “Ready?” he asked. “The Tri-V people are waiting for us. It’s a big moment.”

  Suddenly she was glad for the suit. It would shelter her from the cold, mechanical eyes of the Tri-V cameras.

  “Shouldn’t we wait for Kay?”

  He shook his head. “She has all those samples to process. It’ll take her a while.”

  Bremen pushed the button a
nd the elevator doors opened. He motioned Juna inside with a showman’s gesture, and stepped in after her. The tension mounted during the elevator’s slow climb. By the time the elevator slid to a stop, Juna felt as though only the e-suit kept her from exploding. She took a deep breath and shut her eyes, reaching inside herself for the bio-manipulation skills she had learned from the Tendu She exhaled, pushing the tension out of her body, and opened her eye; Bremen held the elevator door open, waiting for her.

  She stepped out of the elevator, fighting a returning surge of excitement. Bremen took her arm and escorted her through the open bay doors and into an enthusiastic mob. They cheered loudly as she emerged.

  Bremen led her to a balcony overlooking the main deck and handed her a mike. She stared at it for a moment, then plugged it into her suit She was crying, her nose was running, and she couldn’t wipe it. The defogging fan started up, blowing air across her face plate. She sniffled and was embarrassed to hear it reverberate over the crowd.

  “Thank you. I—” She paused awkwardly. “I wasn’t expecting such a reception. It’s good to be back among my own people again.”

  “Tell us about the Tendu,” someone shouted from the crowd.

  “What’s it like out there without a suit?”

  Suddenly, there was an avalanche of questions. She looked down at the crowd of faces and felt a sudden wave of panic at the sight of all these people. She looked at Bremen. He stepped forward, holding up his hands.

  “Dr. Saari just got here. Give her time, and she’ll answer all your questions. We’ve promised her a good meal and a hot shower. Since she hasn’t had either for more than four years, I don’t want to delay her any longer. I suggest you post your questions on the net for now. Once Dr Saari’s been debriefed, we’ll arrange some kind of forum for everyone.”

  Juna unplugged her mike and handed it to Bremen. He led her through another door, where they were greeted by a group of people wearing unsealed e-suits. A slender, elegant, white-haired Eurasian man stepped forward. Juna’s eyes widened in surprise when she recognized him. Dr. Wu had been one of the chief researchers at Sawakira. She was amazed that he was still alive, and even more amazed that a man of his age had passed the physical and made it onto a Survey mission.