The Color of Distance (15 page)

Juna climbed out of the trunk of the tree, emerging into the bowl formed by the huge tree’s branches. She glanced up through the branches of the canopy, checking the weather. Fleecy white clouds were already gathering. Soon the sky would be clouded over. In two or three hours it would rain. She needed to be on her way.

She climbed to the topmost branches of the village tree and looked out. The forest fell away toward the distant blue expanse of the sea in monotonous green humps and bumps, broken occasionally by a bright burst of flowers, or the stark grey branches of a dead tree.

Juna could see the beacon off to the north, a slender silver gleam set on a rocky promontory, surrounded by an empty, blackened expanse where the forest had been burned away. If she hurried, she could get there in an hour and a half. She settled her net bag more firmly on her back, checked her water gourd, and set off.

She moved steadily through the canopy, pausing now and again to check her bearings. When she was only fifteen or twenty minutes from the beacon, Juna stopped to rest in the topmost branches of an emergent tree. She ate one of the sweet red fruits left over from last night’s feast and admired the view. The sea was a sheet of silver, dappled by shafts of light breaking through the majestic grey clouds heavy with the day’s rain. A fresh sea breeze gently rocked the branch on which she was seated. She felt like the queen of the forest here. Why did the aliens spend all their time buried in the gloom of the canopy, when they could be up here in the fresh air and sunshine? Were they agoraphobic? Did they hate the sun?

It was time to go. Juna tossed the last fruit pit out into space and shouldered her bag. Just as she was swinging down to the next branch, an immense shadow tore “out of the sky like a black thunderbolt. Something sharp struck her shoulder, knocking her from the branch. She fell, tumbling. The tree branches seemed to move past her with preternatural slowness as she fell. She reached out and grabbed a passing branch.

There was a wrenching jolt. Pain shot up her arm. She wasn’t falling anymore. Time moved normally again. For a moment, Juna just hung there, too shocked to move, not quite able to believe that she was alive. She reached up to grasp the branch that she clung to with her other hand, and felt a sharp pain in her shoulder. Setting her teeth and grunting with the pain, Juna pulled herself up onto the branch.

Something warm oozed down her back. She reached back with her good arm. Her hand came away sticky with blood. She probed higher with her fingers and found two deep scratches in her shoulder. What the hell had hit her? She felt as if she’d been struck by lightning out of a clear blue sky.

A black shadow crossed the sun, too quickly for it to be a cloud. Juna looked up in time to make out the form of an impossibly large raptor gliding above the treetops. She recognized it immediately. She had spotted several of them during trips over the jungle in one of the Survey flyers. They were massive, powerful creatures with a leathery wingspan of over five meters. She had been impressed by the raptor, but, with typical human arrogance, believed that it couldn’t harm her, and so had dismissed it. Now she knew why the aliens avoided the topmost branches of the canopy.

Juna took a deep breath. It was over. She was all right. Her shoulders hurt like hell, one injured, the other strained, but she was alive. Settling herself securely in a nearby crotch, she took out her med kit and doctored the wound. It was awkward and painful. The wound was in a hard-to-reach place and it hurt to lift her arm. Still she managed to clean it and cover it with antiseptic fleshfoam. Then she climbed slowly and painfully to the ground and walked the rest of the way.

The first drops of rain began to fall as she reported in. She summarized her activities of the night before and documented her link with Ukatonen, and how it had given her the ability to depict skin speech. The physiology people would be fascinated by what had happened to her, as would the Alien Contact specialist and the linguists back home. The more excited they got, the sooner they would return for her.

Then she turned to the messages she had received. There were several hundred K of personal messages and mail. They would be precious and painful. Juna decided to shelve them for later. She needed to attend to business. The ship would make the jump to hyperspace just past midnight, and she had a lot more information to send in before that happened. She sat in the pounding downpour and dictated reports for a couple of hours. Her voice was rough and hoarse, and the wound on her shoulder throbbed. Something touched her wounded shoulder.

She jumped and looked around. Ukatonen and Anito were standing there.

“Come,” Anito told her, beckoning her to follow.

Juna needed to take a break; her voice was wearing out. She signed off and followed the aliens into the jungle. When they were safely ensconced in a large tree, Anito touched the fleshfoam covering her wound.

“What is on your arm?”

“Bird hurt me. I fix hurt,” Juna explained.

“You allu-a with me. I fix better,” Anito told her. The alien held out its arms to Juna, indicating that it wanted to link with her.

Juna shook her head. Linking still terrified her.

Anito persisted, flickers of yellow irritation crossing its ochre skin. Ukatonen watched them talk, saying nothing.

Juna shook her head again, rubbing at her itching eyes. If she gave in to Anito, all of the aliens would want to link with her, and there would be nothing of herself left by the time they had satisfied their curiosity.

Anito touched her arm again, pleading with Juna for a link. “Shoulder bad. You get sick.”

Juna shrugged off the alien’s touch and looked away. She was tired of telling the aliens to keep out of her body. Her shoulder burned and her eyes itched. She sneezed as she got up to go back to the beacon. Her head felt thick and heavy. What a time to be coming down with a cold. She couldn’t get sick, she had too much to do…

Anito grabbed Juna’s arm and jerked her around so that she was looking at the alien.

“Sick you! Bad sick you!”

A picture appeared on Anito’s chest. It was a picture of Juna, before the aliens rescued her, dying in the forest. Then the alien superimposed a picture of Juna as she looked now, with two red scratches on her shoulder, and flickered between the two. Then Anito’s skin turned silvery-pale. The sick elder, Ilto, had looked like that after it died. Anito extended its arms again, asking for a link.

The alien had always accepted Juna’s refusals to link before. Something else was going on. Juna rubbed at her itching eyes and tried to think. She felt terrible. She hadn’t felt this bad since her suit had been breached. Her skin flared orange as a sudden surge of fear jolted through her. She was on the verge of anaphylactic shock. She looked at the two aliens. They knew what^vas happening to her. Anito was asking for permission to save her life.

“Yes,” Juna said in skin speech. “I understand.” She held out her arms to Anito, wordlessly requesting a link.

Anito’s skin turned a deep, reassuring dark blue, as it grasped Juna’s arm with one hand. Ukatonen took the other arm, and the two aliens linked with her. Juna was inside the link so quickly that she barely had time to be frightened.

Anito’s link felt less controlled and subtle than Ukatonen’s. There was less sense of focus, of flow and control. It was clear that Anito was younger and less experienced. Juna could sense Ukatonen hovering in the background watching over the two of them in their link.

Despite Anito’s youth and lack of subtlety, the alien was a competent healer. Juna’s eyes stopped itching within seconds. Her head cleared, and her sore throat eased. She felt a warm tingling in her shoulder, and a sudden tightness as the edges of the wound closed over. She felt the pain lift from her bruised muscles as Anito’s presence healed them. Something in the flavor of the link made Juna aware that Anito was female. She became so involved in sorting out what it was that made Anito’s presence so ineffably female that the breaking of the link caught her by surprise.

Juna sat for a few minutes, disoriented by the sudden shift from linking to not-linking. It was like being awakened in the middle of an extremely vivid dream. There was an unreal feeling to allu-a. She blinked a few times and took a deep breath. Her throat was no longer sore, her eyes weren’t itching, and her breathing was clear. Anito had saved her life again.

“Thank you,” she said at last. “I not know I sick.”

“You not go in top of tree again?” Ukatonen asked her.

Juna shook her head, then remembered to use skin speech. “I need feed my talking stones,” she said using the aliens’ term for her computers. “They need sun.”

Anito and Ukatonen conferred.

“Next time you need feed talking stones, one of us goes with you,” Vkatonen said.

Juna looked from Ukatonen to Anito and back again, wondering what fhe should do next. Ukatonen got up and headed out toward the radio reacon. Anito and Juna followed. Ukatonen squatted beside the computer, and looked at Juna, ears raised inquisitively.

Ukatonen placed his hand on the silver radio tower. “What this is?”

Juna frowned. This was going to be hard to explain. “I talk to my people. My people very far. This tower sends talk.”

“How you talk?” Ukatonen asked, ears wide in puzzlement.

Juna shrugged. “I show you.”

She signed on, checking the chronometer and the estimated lag time. The link with the aliens had taken less than half an hour, she noted with surprise. Subjectively it had felt much longer. It was actually about 1500 hours. There was time for one last exchange with the ship before it ’umped to hyperspace and left her here. It was time to introduce the aliens to the humans and vice versa.

Juna began updating the ship on her activities since the break, explaining that Anito and Ukatonen were with her. She paused and looked at Ukatonen, who watched her, ears spread wide, deep purple with wonder.

“How they hear you?” he asked.

Juna thought of trying to explain how radio worked, with her limited vocabulary, and shook her head. “Hard tell you,” she explained, hoping she was using the right words.

“I talk them?” Ukatonen asked.

“You talk me, I tell them what say you. Good?”

Ukatonen flickered agreement.

Juna set up the computer for visual and vocal recording, guided Ukatonen within range of the computer’s camera, then nodded to him to begin.

“Formal greetings, Eerin’s people. I am Ukatonen, an enkar {untranslatable social status term}. I speak to you through Eerin. The village of Lyanan {untranslatable village place name} is in {untranslatable} because the {long list of plant, tree, and animal names}”—here Ukatonen pointed to the burnt, black gap in the green forest—“is through your actions, no longer there. The village is angry. What may be done to bring {untranslatable}?”

Juna sighed. This was going to be difficult. She looked at the charred expanse of burnt forest, destroyed during normal Survey sterilization pro cedures before leaving the planet. It helped ensure that no Terran bacteria survived to contaminate the planet. If the Survey had known about the aliens, they would have acted differently. It would be up to her to make reparations.

“The alien sends formal greetings from its people, and wants to know what we are going to do about that piece of forest that we burned down. Apparently it belonged to a nearby village. I will do what I can to make reparations. Please advise.” Juna sent along the visual clip of the alien’s speech with her translation for their computers to analyze.

Juna nodded at Ukatonen. “It’s done,” she told him.

Ukatonen’s ears spread wide. He watched the radio intently, waiting for a reply.

Juna touched Ukatonen on the shoulder. He looked at her.

“My people are far,” Juna said, gesturing into the sky. “They not speak—” She paused; duration was one of the aspects of skin speech that she didn’t understand. She pointed at the sun, which was a low, bright spot behind heavy clouds. “It be night when they speak back to us.”

Ukatonen’s ears spread wide again. “Where your people? How they hear you?”

Juna hesitated. It was against Contact regs to explain space travel to such low-tech people. She had half a dozen plausible cover stories, but she simply couldn’t bring herself to lie to Ukatonen.

So going slowly, groping painfully for the words that she needed, she explained that their planet circled a star, and that her people were from another star, and had traveled there in a ship. She had to use rocks as visual aids, but eventually the aliens understood.

Ukatonen shook his head. “Not can be,” he said, deeply purple. Anito, watching, echoed his words.

“It true. My people do,” Juna insisted. “I speak my people. That”—she pointed at the silver radio tower—“throws my—” she paused, not knowing the word for “voice,” or even if the aliens had such a word in their language—“words to them. They understand my words; they talk back.” She pointed to the tower again. “That catches their words and shows them to me.”

Ukatonen looked from the tower to Juna and back again, and turned an odd shade of puce, probably indicative of doubt or disbelief. “Not can be,” Ukatonen repeated.

“My people can do,” Juna insisted.

Doubt, wonder, and a tinge of fear rippled across the alien’s skin. “When your people return?”

Juna shrugged and fought back a sudden surge of fear and grief. She shook her head. “Many, many, many—” She paused, and pointed to the eastern horizon, sweeping her arm across the sky to the west, the pattern for sun on her chest.

Ukatonen supplied what Juna hoped was the term for “day.”

“Many days,” she said. She tried to explain what a year was, gesturing to the rocks she had used to represent their sun and planet, but Ukatonen shook his head.

Juna searched for the words to explain, but couldn’t find them. She picked up a pebble. “My people’s ship,” she said.