Strangers from the Sky

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  until Yoshi started the foil again and it lifted out

  of the water. Her skin still tingled with the shock of it; she

  couldn't seem to get her hands clean. Now she forced

  herself to take a wad of sterile gauze from the

  medikit, dampen H with cool water from the

  galley, and swab the blood off the female

  patient's face, making sure none of it got on

  her hands. When they got back to the station, she'd have a

  proper scrub and put on her gloves and

  She finished what she was doing and tossed the gauze

  in the disposal, trying not to look too long at the

  strange female's face, which

  disturbed her deeply. The alien's nose was

  shattered, several of her teeth were loosened and the gums

  bleeding, at least one cheek bone was broken, the

  surrounding tissue

  bruised and beginning to swell. She must have

  impacted against the helm console during

  splashdown to do that much

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  damage. It wasn't anything Tatya hadn't

  seen before. What disturbed her was not the extent of the

  injuries, but the alien's response to them.

  The alien, Tatya thought. Well, all

  right, what else am I supposed to call her?

  She's the alien, until someone tells me

  otherwise.

  The alien, unlike her male counterpart, was at

  least semiconscious most of the time, and the broken

  facial bones, along with second- and

  third-degree burns similar to those the male had

  sustained, must have been excruciating. But except that

  the broken nose forced her to breathe through her ravaged and

  swollen

  mouth, she made no sound. Only her eyes

  moved. And those eyes . . .

  The swelling had reduced them to slits, but they

  remained open as long as she was

  conscious the color of jet, as sharp as lasers and,

  to Tatya, positively chilling. They fixed themselves

  on some distant point beyond

  Tatya's shoulder, and they made her insides

  quiver. If they ever looked right at her . . .

  Tatya shivered, turned her attention to the male,

  whose eyes, mercifully, were closed. Fingertips

  tingling, Tatya forced herself to reach over and gently

  slap his face several times, bringing him up to a

  less profound level. When he'd stabilized, she

  sat back on her heels and studied him.

  She had to admit he was beautiful. Even with

  burns covering a third of his face (further burns

  on his hands and visible through the charred fabric of his

  uniform), he was more beautiful, God help her,

  than Yoshi his face all planes and angles beneath

  golden skin, his eyelashes thick and black and

  centimeters long, his dark hair silky to her

  tentative touch. She could almost forget that the blood

  beneath that golden son was green, so mesmerized was she

  suddenly by the exotic upsweep of those alien

  eyebrows, and those ears.

  Those ears. She'd thought at first they were the result

  of some form of cosmetic mutilation, like the 36

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  custom of piercing on Earth, but on closer

  examination she could find no surgical scars, and the

  pinnalcurve was simply too natural. They were

  supposed to be that way.

  Tatya sat back on her heels and tried

  to imagine a whole race of beings like him.

  Perhaps a whole planetfull, a solar system, a

  galaxy. She wondered what they would think of

  humans, red-blooded, stunted-eared, bizarre.

  With a sudden thrill up her spine she realized that

  the female, still gasping for air through swollen

  lips, was looking directly at her. Tatya would

  have jumped up and fled (fled where, though, in a

  hydrofoil in the middle of the Pacific?) anywhere

  to escape those eyes, if just then the foil hadn't

  nosed against the dock, its motor dying to silence as

  Yoshi called down unnecessarily:

  "We're here!"

  "By virtue of his service, T'Kahr Savar

  could have requested and been granted a place on your

  expedition without your intervention," Prefect

  T'Saaf said to Commander T'Lera with particular

  emphasis. Let the proud one know that the exception

  was made because of who and what her father was, not she.

  "Gut the choice of Sorahl as your navigator

  is

  insupportable."

  "On what grounds, Prefect?" T'Lera's

  voice once again held that dry, almost ironic

  tone. "Because he is without rank, or because he is my

  son?"

  "There are six others of fun rank as qualified

  as he," T'Saaf replied, and to address both

  issues: "Nepotism is not only illogical,

  it may in this instance prove dangerous!"

  The charge of nepotism was grave,

  freighted as it was with implications of favoritism

  and a lack of judgment, equally serious violations of

  both a commander'@. code of ethics and a

  Vulcan's honor. T'Lera did not permit it

  to perturb her; she knew T'Saaf's

  methodology and had been prepared for this.

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  "If the Prefect will refer to the addendum to my

  preflight report." She struggled mightily

  to control her voice, which had slipped beyond the bounds of

  dryness into outright irony, if not sarcasm. "She will

  note that of the six of rank whose skillscans equal

  or surpass Sorahl's, four are already assigned

  to other ships, one is on leave of absence, and the

  sixth is Selik, who is already aboard my

  vessel as astrophysicist and cartographer. It was

  in fact he who recommended Sorahl, as the

  most promising of the senior cadets, to accompany

  us."

  Prefect T'Saaf did not condescend to look

  at the addendum; she knew it would read as

  T'Lera said it did.

  "As to the matter of rank . . ." T'Lera

  continued. Salt in the wound, a human might

  have called it; the Vulcan had no equivalent

  metaphor. "I respectfully remind the

  prefect that this is a technicality. The commencement

  ceremony for senior cadets transpires six

  days after our optimum departure date. Am I

  to delay my ship's departure by what may prove a

  dangerous margin? Or am I to deprive my

  crew of the best available navigator because he

  lacks the formality of rank designation on his

  uniform?"

  She would not burden T'Saaf with the tale of how

  she herself had accompanied her father on his second

  voyage to the Sol 111 system when she was a child.

  T'Saaf would point out, and rightfully so, that

  regulations had been less stringent then and that as

  prefect Savar had been free to take certain

  liberties no longer permitted. That T'Lera had

  departed Vulcan a half formed child of eleven years,

  to return two full decades later in the days before

  warp speed the journey took that long as a mature

  adult and unique among her
kind for having spent

  those years in the void, was self-evident. Never again

  could a planet entirely contain her, and that was both

  her gift and her burden.

  Did she presume to visit the same

  fate on her son?

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  But Sorahl was older, in his nineteenth year,

  and with the breaking of the light barrier a scout craft could

  now reach Earth within ten days, not ten years. The

  entire journey,

  including mapping and research, would be

  completed in a matter of months. It was not the

  same.

  But these were deeply personal things, and none of the

  desk-bound, planet-bound,

  convention-bound T'Saaf's concern. The

  unarguable fact was that Sorahl was qualified and

  available, and his commander wished him to go. That his commander

  also wished to show her son what her father had first shown

  her that there was that to be found in the misnamed void between

  the stars which knew no words in Its exquisiteness, that

  there was that on other worlds which was as beautiful and diverse

  as Surak had envisioned it, juxtaposed with

  strangeness and squalor and a striving for perfection that

  no matter how imperfect was fascinating to observe

  would not be spoken of in this official context.

  But T'Lera would have her will in this as well.

  "And if it is necessary for you to act upon the

  Prime Directive?" Prefect T'Saaf

  demanded. It was a last resort; she knew the

  answer.

  Destruction before detection. It seemed

  to T'Lera that she had ingested it with her

  mother's milk.

  "It is not given to me to violate that which Surak

  has taught and which Savar my father has labored all

  his days to promulgate," T'Lera said evenly.

  "The commander accepts the

  responsibility for the lives of all her crew,

  whether blood relative or no. I accept, and

  I will act accordingly."

  Within moments Commander T'Lera was

  crossing the quadrangle of the Prefecture, on

  her way to the Academic Hall to bring the news

  to her navigator in person. There was no

  lightness in her step, no sense of triumph.

  Having argued for her father's fitness and her son's

  qualification, she had added to the already heavy

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  burden of every scoutshipcommander. She,

  above all others, must not fail in her mission.

  "We've got to be out of our minds!"

  Tatya muttered frantically as they brought the male

  inside and Iffted him onto the waterbed in the

  sleeping room. "He's got a concussion,

  possibly a serious one, and my instruments can't

  detect intracranial pressure. He ought to be

  flown out by MedEvac or he could die on me. The

  other one's lost a lot of blood and she's going

  to need reconstructive surgery. What are we

  going to do? I can't his

  "Tatiana!" Yoshi was winded, more out of fear

  than exertion, and his nerves were shot. "It's too

  late to think about that nowl We're committed. Pull

  yourself together!"

  "All right," she whimpered meekly, all out of

  character. "I'll try!"

  What was the matter with her? All her life she'd

  dreamed of space flight, of discovering life on

  other planets. Only a couple of mediocre

  scores on a simulator test had disqualified

  her from the Aeroationav program and she'd opted for

  agronomy instead. Last night it had seemed so

  exciting. Why was it so terrifying now?

  "Let's get the other one," Yoshi was saying,

  tugging on her arm. "Hurry!"

  This time they both scanned the horizon for

  visitors.

  Yoshi went below first, getting his first real look

  at the female alien. Her shattered face didn't

  bother him as much as he'd expected, but her eyes

  had the same effect on him as they'd had on

  Tatya.

  "We won't hurt you," he blurted before he could

  stop himself. "We're trying to help."

  He realised what he was doing and struck hfs

  forehead with the heel of his hand.

  "Stupid! What's wrong with me? She can't

  possibly under his

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  Tatyasaw the alien's swollen lips form a

  single word.

  "Under understood," she breathed, and

  Yoshi felt the hair on the back of his neck

  stand on end.

  "Our mission is to observe," then-Prefect

  Savar had written. "We will exert every effort

  to elude their observation telescopes and

  scanners, and avoid activating the defensive

  weaponry which every advanced world will

  perforce have pointed skyward against invasion.

  "Approaching no nearer than their own

  artificial satellites, we will study the

  topography of their world, and learn their dwelling

  places and their natural phenomena. We will

  monitor the carrier wave messages with which they

  communicate with each other and those which they hurl

  into space in search of otherworlders. By analysing all

  of their forms of visual communication, we will learn their

  arts and cultures, for these will tell us how they perceive

  themselves in relation to their world.

  "Above all we will master their languages, for how

  else are we to communicate with them

  when the time comes?"

  "Understood," T'Lera said in the officiali

  standard language of Earth, gleaned by

  previous scoutcraft crews from the

  audiovisual programs they had monitored over

  the years, computer-analyzed for grammatical

  structure, and stored in universal translators,

  a language she had learned from her father's lips as

  a child and spoken fluently with him and others in the

  Offworld Service ever since, though never before with one of

  its native speakers.

  "Understood."

  She had spoken only to allay the fear

  she heard in the male Terran's voice, the

  anxiety she read on both of the concerned faces

  floating before her blurred and darkening vision. Had

  she not been in shock from her

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  injuries and the hours of exposure in the shattered

  craft, had she been less uncertain of

  Sorahl's condition and therefore better able to formulate

  a logical course of action, she might have taken

  inffconsideration the fact that a human's curiosity is

  as all-consuming as a Vulcan's, and kept her

  silence.

  "You speak our language!" Yoshi whispered,

  incredulous. "But how?"

  TiLera's fading consciousness did not permit her

  to explain.

  "I'd have thought," Melody Sawyer said, doing a

  visual all-points from the conning tower as

  Delphstnus cruised at a leisurely three

  knots, searching, "mey'd have everything that could float

  or fly out here looking. If it's what you say it

  could be. A worldwide alert, like In tho
se old

  2-D movies about men from Mars. You

  remember the one his

  She and Nyere were alone on the bridge for the

  moment, Jason working the scanners for the regular

  tech, who had gone below for a late breakfast, and

  Sawyer could afford to be

  loose-lipped.

  was the one we took the kids to at the Antique

  Films Festival? Where they buiHave that whole

  military installation near some mountain in Wyoming just

  to welcome those lithe

  bald-headed, goggle-eyed critters coming down in

  this big old glittery flying whatsis . . ."

  Her voice trailed off. Jason wasn't

  listening to her, wasn't looking at the scanners

  he'd so meticulously calibrated, sat squinting

  grimly at the far horizon hoping against hope that

  they wouldn't find what he knew was out there, though he

  was honor-bound, dutybound, to try his damnedest

  to find it, and if he didn't, Aeroationav would

  simply send out someone else who would.

  "So how come, Jason?" Melody broke

  into his thoughts, grating. "How come it's just us out

  here?"

  "Because the fewer people know about it, the fewer

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  have to be reeducated later," Nyere said, watching

  with perverse satisfaction as Sawyer's eyes went

  wide.

  "You mean we'll have to be 'wiped"?" she de-

  manded, hands on her hips. "The hell you say!"

  Ah, the power of euphemism! Jason Nyere

  thought. "Reeducated," "wiped," whatever one chose

  to call it, it amounted to several

  mandatory hypnosis sessions to excise

  classified information from the memories of those who

  no longer needed it, and it was contained in every

  Aeroationav reg book, a

  holdover from the reactionary days Sawyer pined for.

  Odd that she should be the one to object to it.

  "Take it to a higher court," Nyere rumbled.

  Sawyer sensed it was best to drop it for the moment.

  "What'd you tell the crew?" she wanted to know.

  "Told them it was routine salvage op.

  Derelict satellite with the databank intact."

  "Think they bought that?"

  "No. But as long as we're on radio silence

  they can speculate to their hearts' content." The

  captain glanced toward the stairwell to see if the

  tech was on her way back. "And that goes double for

  you. We don't want to risk alarming

  anyone else who might already have found

  what we're looking for."

  He nodded unnecessarily in the direction-of the