The Color of Distance (7 page)

Then fear and caution overcame her amazement. She didn’t want to be there when the aliens came out of their trance. She picked up her bags and stick and fled into the forest.

The aliens dropped down out of the trees in front of her a couple of hours later. Juna backed away and stood ready to defend herself with her staff. She wasn’t going to let them keep her from going back to base camp. The aliens moved back also, flushing green and blue. One of them pulled some fruit from its bag, and offered it to her. Juna looked at it for a long moment, her stomach tight with hunger. She took it. She had nothing else to eat, and she was too familiar with starvation to refuse.

When Juna finished the fruit, the aliens picked up their bags and motioned to her to follow them. Juna shook her head, refusing to get up. The lizard attack had shaken her confidence, but she wasn’t going to follow these aliens until she knew what they wanted with her.

The aliens conferred with each other, washes of pattern and color appearing and disappearing on their bodies. They seemed uncertain about what to do next.

Juna picked up a twig, and beckoned to the aliens. Brushing aside the leaf litter, she began to draw in the red dirt. The aliens watched curiously, ears wide, as she drew a stick figure representing herself, and another figure representing an alien.

Several hours later, after a number of drawings and much gesturing back and forth, they reached a tentative agreement. Juna wasn’t sure how much of what she was trying to explain they understood. As best as she could tell, they knew she was trying to get to her people. The aliens recognized the peninsula where the base was located. They would guide her back to base camp, but they had something they needed to do back in their village first.

Juna thought it over. By now, she was fairly sure that these were the same aliens who had found her the first time. If so, they had saved her life again. These two days alone in the forest had made her realize how slim her chances were, traveling alone. A guide back to the base would greatly increase the likelihood of getting there alive. Besides, it would be best if she arrived at camp with some aliens. Despite her exhaustion and hunger, Juna smiled. The A-C specialists would be halfway to hyperspace when they found out they had a real sentient species to study.

Juna got up and, through pantomime, indicated she would follow them back to their village. When they tried to get her to travel through the canopy, Juna refused. It was a tense moment, but the aliens agreed to walk. The knot in her shoulders eased. Winning this tiny concession gave her a sense of control. Perhaps everything would work out after all.

Toward evening, the aliens stopped and built a temporary nest of branches and leaves in the crotch of a tree. Juna helped one of them gather fruit. The other one vanished into the jungle and returned with several small birds dangling around its neck on a cord.

With a glance at the alien for permission, Juna picked up one of the birds. It was small and brown, perhaps twenty centimeters long from beak to tail. There was a showy patch of green iridescence at its throat.

Juna lifted a wing with a forefinger, exposing a brilliant red underwing with a dark eyespot. It must be spectacular when courting, she thought. It wasn’t a species she recognized, but then they had only catalogued a tiny fraction of the species on this planet.

The alien touched her on the shoulder, and she handed it the bird. She felt a pang of regret at not being able to catalogue the bird before it became dinner.

It was growing dark. Her guide fished out a tightly woven basket. Inside was a chunk of wood covered with glow fungus. The alien hung the glowing wood on an overhanging branch. It cast a surprisingly bright light over the nest. The aliens skinned the birds, handing three to Juna. She ate one of the scrawny, raw birds, and then filled up on fruit.

After dinner, one of the aliens grasped Juna’s arm and tried to link with her.

“No!” Juna shouted, backing away and scooping up her bag. She would jump out of the tree and kill herself before she would let them violate her again. The aliens stopped. Glowing blue and green patterns washed across their skin as they beckoned her back into the nest. Juna shook her head. She held her arms out, spurs up, then shook her head, tucking her arms against her sides and flushing bright orange. She repeated the gesture several times. At last the aliens understood. They tucked their arms against their sides also, and huddled on the far side of the nest, ears fanned expectantly.

Cautiously, Juna climbed into the nest. Blue and green paisley patterns moved slowly across the aliens’ bodies as she did so. One of them reached out toward her. She flinched from its touch, but the alien only brushed her shoulder with its knuckles. Juna relaxed a little after that, but kept her arms tucked tightly against her sides, and slept curled in a tight, protective ball, terrified that they would try something while she slept.

A driving tropical rainstorm woke Juna shortly before dawn. It was a long, sodden miserable hike back to the village. It rained hard most of the day. The footing was treacherous. She slipped and fell several times. In the middle of the afternoon, the rain stopped suddenly, as though it had been cut off by a switch.

They reached the village about an hour later, and went directly to the sick alien’s room. The sick one seemed pleased to see them. It reached out to link with her. Juna pulled away, shaking her head. One of the aliens who had brought her back intervened. A long discussion followed. Juna watched, too tired to try to comprehend what was being said. She wanted a hot meal, a bath, and a soft, comfortable bed, in no particular order.

At last the discussion was over. Another cold meal of fruit, honey, greens, and raw meat was served. Juna looked at the cold, raw food, longing for a hot plate of couscous, or a big bowl of her father’s pea soup. Still it was better than tiny bird corpses, and it beat starving. She ate, poured a couple of gourds of tepid water over herself, and burrowed into the warm, rotting mass of leaves that was her bed. She fell asleep immediately.

The next few days were agonizing. Juna endured an endless round of poking and prodding by curious aliens. They fingered her ears and manipulated her hands, holding them palm to palm against their slender four-fingered hands. Patterns flickered rapidly across their skins as they discussed her.

All of them attempted to link with her. Juna’s guide stopped them, but several times Juna had to fend off the insistent aliens herself. The first day of this was interesting, the second day tedious. By the third day, Juna’s patience had reached the breaking point. When an alien tried to examine her, she brushed its hands away, gently but firmly. The aliens persisted. At last, unable to take any more, Juna huddled against the wall, her hands over her ears and her head between her knees. Her skin burned bright orange, and she felt the strange lines of goose bumps rising along her back.

“Leave me alone, leave me alone!” she moaned, tears welling behind her eyelids. It reminded her of her first visit back to her mother’s people, how the village children had poked and prodded at her in her foreign clothes, only this time she didn’t have any relatives to shoo away the curious. She was more alone than she had ever been before.

A gentle hand brushed her shoulder. She brushed it away. When it rested on her shoulder again, Juna looked up angrily, ready to fend off another curious alien. It was her guide. She looked around. The other aliens, except for the sick one, had all left. Her guide led her to a small storeroom near the bottom of the tree. In the room was a pile of empty gourds lying with their lids askew, stacks of dried seaweed, a bundle of hollow reeds, coils of rope, neatly folded nets, empty baskets, and a big mound of dry grass. A beetle scuttled out over her feet as she stepped inside. The alien hung a mat over the door and left her alone.

Juna inspected the wall for insects. She found a section that seemed free of visible crawling creatures, leaned against it, and closed her eyes, savoring the solitude. She longed to wake up and find that this whole experience had been nothing more than an exceptionally vivid nightmare, that she was safe in her bed back at the base. Memories of home washed over her with a sudden poignant intensity. The thick milky light falling on the neat, whitewashed walls of her father’s house. The wide stretch of vineyards curving up and away toward the green fields of the satellite’s artificial sky. The sweet smell of hay in the barns, and the small comforting sounds of the horses in their stalls. All of these returned sharp and clear to her in this alien place, filling her eyes with fresh tears.

Juna shook her head. She needed to think of something else besides how homesick she was, or she would go crazy. To distract herself she imagined the reaction at base camp when she strode out of the jungle, accompanied by a pair of sentient aliens. Kinsey, the Alien Contact specialist, would kiss her feet in gratitude. A-C Specs were probably the most frustrated people in the Survey. They spent their entire careers as supercargo on Survey ships, doing scutwork, writing theoretical papers, and hoping that someday someone would discover an alien race.

Humans had so far discovered only three alien races. Two of those had been long extinct. The third, the Sawakirans, had fled human contact, whole cities vanishing into the wilderness. The few Sawakirans that humans contacted died a few hours later. It was not entirely clear whether the deaths were from fear, sickness, or suicide. The Survey put the Sawakirans’ planet on the proscribed list and left them alone.

Kinsey would cut off his right arm for the chance to be turned green and live in a bug-infested tree with a bunch of smart frogs. All Juna wanted was to go home, take a nice hot bath, eat food that had been cooked first, and talk to people she could understand.

Tears of self-pity welled up. Juna shook her head, angry at herself. Tears wouldn’t change things. It was time for her to stop acting like a frightened child and start acting like a scientist. She had been given an incredible chance to study an alien race. This discovery could make her career; she shouldn’t waste time being homesick.

First she needed to learn to communicate. She reviewed everything she had learned about the aliens’ language. The patterns on their skin seemed to carry information; the colors showed the emotional content of their words. Blues, particularly turquoise, were associated with pleasure, and greens with approval or agreement. Reds and oranges were related to anger and fear. Purple was connected with curiosity and questions.

She could now recognize a few very simple words: yes, no, food, water, their term for her, and some names. “Yes” was a series of three horizontal bars. “No” was three vertical bars. Food was a colored dot or circle inside a green oval. Water was a series of three vertical dots, usually blue or green. Her guide’s name-symbol looked like a connected pair of blue spirals. The alien who had accompanied Juna’s guide in the forest had a name sign resembling a complex triangular looped knot. The sick alien’s name-symbol consisted of three sets of concentric circles, like ripples from a raindrop falling into water. The rest of the aliens’ language was an incomprehensible blur of colored patterns.

“How am I ever going to keep any of this straight?” she wondered aloud to the glowing, bug-infested walls. There was nothing permanent to write on, nothing permanent to write with, and no way to explain what she wanted to the aliens. If only she had her computer. Every Survey-issue computer came with sophisticated linguistic analysis programs hardwired in. But her computer was lost, along with her suit and everything else she had been carrying when she collapsed. It hadn’t been much: a compass, some hard-copy maps, a knife, some rations, a canteen, a standard-issue first aid kit, and, of course, her computer.

Well, she would simply have to do the best she could. The aliens had learned a few of her gestures. Perhaps they could invent a common pidgin that would serve until she got back to base. Then the experts would take over, and she could go back to being the xenobiologist that she was trained to be.

Juna visualized the few alien symbols for which she had meanings, repeating the meanings out loud to engrave them in her mind. When she was too tired to think anymore, she curled up on the dry grass and slept.

The next morning, she went in search of her guide. She had decided to call the alien Spiral until she learned its real name. Spiral was sitting on the edge of the raised platform in the room it shared with the sick alien. It was weaving a large basket. The sick alien was buried in its bed of leaves, asleep or unconscious. A complex pattern flickered across Spiral’s chest when Juna came in. The alien beckoned her closer and gestured to a broad leaf heaped with fruit, meat, and honey. Juna sat and ate, watching Spiral work. The basket it was weaving was over a meter long, and oval, like a large cocoon. The weaving was intricate, full of strange patterns. Juna wondered what it was for.

Spiral had completed several rows of basket work when the sick alien stirred and made a low, creaking noise. Spiral squatted next to its bed. Colors flickered over the aliens’ skins as the,y conversed. Spiral brought over the basket and handed it to the alien. The sick one examined the basket, and turned deep green. It was pleased. Spiral helped the alien out of bed and over to the edge of the platform. It picked up the basket and began working on it.

Spiral picked up several woven grass shoulder bags, handed two of them to Juna, and slung the others over its shoulder. Then it led Juna out of the tree and into the canopy. The alien seemed to have grasped how frightened she was of falling. They moved slowly, Spiral helping Juna across the difficult spots, until they came to a heavily laden fruit tree. As they picked fruit, Spiral began teaching Juna to climb, guiding her foot to a more secure perch or pointing out a hand grip. The alien was a good teacher. After an hour, Juna was moving with more confidence through the tree.