Speech Among Aliens: Conclusion *** Sigh, for all of his gentle kindness, was a disturbance that night. Mayah wanted to be alone, and she couldn’t bring herself to say so. She allowed his company. They ate in silence. It was obvious that Sigh and Halloran had spoken, had shared compromising intimacy as the Protocols defined speech on this world. It was a subtle and complete agony to consider the other things they’d shared (now and in the past) and no matter that Sigh was human, she couldn’t think beyond his planetary origin. It stung. For all that she’d wanted to share with Halloran (on Earth and on Thetis) she was the wrong sort of person for any of that…the wrong sex, and from the wrong planet. Mayah felt rejected and wounded: deeply and with profound intensity. Sigh pierced her with a lucid and questioning gaze. “Cry,” he said. “I. You. Sad?” He cocked his head to one side; the gesture was strangely avian and she wondered just what sort of bird he’d make. A grackle, she imagined, or a starling…something clever and in possession of a shocking voice, something prone to troubling antics. “I am only thinking,” she said. “You don’t make me sad.” A half-truth was better than none. She tried to smile. “Halloran?” “Yes.” “He. You. Sad?” “Yes.” “Why?” “It’s complicated.” Sigh nodded, a look of sudden and profound understanding stenciled across his keen, youthful features. It was an alien expression, human in outward manifestation, but the result of thoughts unlike any Mayah could fathom. What had this world done to his brain? How truly alien was the meat-clogged space in between his ears? Understanding, as he wore its expression, was a terrifying thing. “Similar. Math. Equation. Big. Headache.” “Yes,” Mayah said, amazed at the swift and intuitive link he’d made in order to convey his thoughts. “Spooky algebra,” she said. Sigh nodded. “Spooky,” he said. “Me. Also.” “You love him?” “This. Halloran. Word. He. Say…I-love-you. Yes. I. Him. Love. Big. I. Him. Same.” “You and Halloran are the same person?” “Yes. I. Him. Same. You. Go. Halloran. Go. I. Broken.” In her time alone, between talking with Halloran and enduring the troubling comfort of Sigh’s presence, she’d analyzed what she could of local speech. Hallran gave her information concerning the language virus as he called it. The data was bewildering in its complexity, and as Sigh spoke, something sparked through the convoluted mass of her thoughts and lit the room with sudden (though subjective) incandescence. The virus, she imagined, allowed infected humans to produce a far-reaching variety of molecules, complex molecules. Proteins? Something else? By some mechanism she couldn’t begin to fathom, they strung these molecules together, coding complex and compressed narratives in their salivary glands. This compression marked Sigh’s verbal speech; it was the surest telltale that his cerebral functions—at or above the baseline human norm—were as alien as the planet on which he lived. His perceptions didn’t match the shape of his body or the color of his eyes. He was alien. He was human. She didn’t know which of those two frightened her the most. As an alien, it was easy for her to maintain a professional distance from him: to observe, to listen, and extrapolate various mentalities from the structure of his speech. But as a human—one afraid of Halloran’s necessary departure—his feelings threatened to overwhelm her. The night continued in near silence, until Sigh left. Mayah was thankful for his brooding reticence. *** Rain fell from sullen clouds with a cloying, sticky chill. Halloran roused Mayah from troubled sleep with an invitation to breakfast. The gray and misty light filtering into her room drove her further beneath her bedcovers. Halloran, like some grumpy parent, flung them aside. “C’mon,” he said. “Today’s an important day.” She bathed quickly and dressed in her Service grays—a comfort after so long in local garb. She needed a reminder of off-world familiarity: the reminder that things were ordinary and ordered, and that she belonged. Somewhere. As expected, Sigh attended breakfast as well. As expected, he wore black, knee-length pants and a gray-white tunic, buttoned at the neck and midway down the chest. His feet—as expected—were flagrant in their naked pallor. Mayah offered greetings to Sigh and smiled as he touched his chin, returning her greetings in his snarly, leaf-rasping voice. “Good. See. You.” “So,” Mayah began, considering the pale, gray light filtered through diamond-pane windows. “What’s so special about today? It looks nasty out there.” “Sigh, as you call him, has two days off. Today and tomorrow. He’s coming with us.” Mayah didn’t have much of an appetite, despite eggs steaming on her delicate and concave, wooden plate. Alien eggs, like outsized bulbs of milky, white jelly, veined with lightening-bolt streaks of rust. “He’s coming along to keep me on my best behavior?” “He likes you, Mayah. Just let that be.” “Well,” she said. “I like him too.” It was an easy thing to say. It was the truth. “I’m glad,” Halloran said. “I’ve been going over the local language,” Mayah said, to change the course of thoughts in her mind. “Well…extrapolations of it, based on how…Sigh talks to me.” “Interesting, isn’t it?” “To say the least. I sense grammatical constructs in what he says that have no familiar referents. There’s an amazing measure of compression in his speech. At least I think so.” “Compression?” Sigh ate as if stocking up for the day—the week?—ahead. He looked up from his plate, overt inquiry in his hazy, gray-blue gaze. “Speak,” he said. “I. Speak. Confuse?” “No,” she said, smiling. “I understand you. Perfectly. You speak well.” “No. Difficult. I. Trouble. Words.” Mayah laughed, reaching forward—in blind, unthinking impulse. She clasped Sigh’s fingers. No contact with mucus membranes, she thought. Touch—if she washed her hands—was safe here. “Don’t you dare say telepathy.” “No, Hal…it’s not.” She released Sigh’s hand. “I won’t get the chance to pursue this, will I?” “It all depends.” “Yeah. And if I go back and say you’re dead, then what?” “I don’t know.” Sigh grinned. “You. Stay. You. Learn. Speak.” Mayah smiled, and felt sadness in the expression. “It’s not that easy, is it?” Halloran sat back and closed his eyes. “No,” he said. “It’s not.” A look of pensive confusion darkened Sigh’s features, and in a way that spoke of pure instinct, he placed the tip of one finger into his mouth, leaving it there for a long, long moment. And then, he withdrew it, extending his hand to Halloran. Mayah flinched as Halloran sucked the gleam of spittle from Sigh’s flesh. Sigh withdrew his finger, and tasted Halloran’s response. “Mayah,” Halloran said after a moment. “He understands exactly what you face…what I face as well. He knows what we’re going to do today and he wants to know if you’re ready for that. I told him the truth, Mayah…I told him that I don’t know. He wants you to stay here, but he knows what that means: for us and for you. He wants you to learn his language so that he can speak easily with you, and he just asked me what degree of impossibility that represents.” Halloran fell into a moment’s contemplative silence, an expression of bewildered agony on his face. She’d never seen such an expression. He’d always been so confident, so arrogant in what he showed: like a Masai herdsman, she always thought, or like some apocryphal pharaoh of most primordial Egypt. Now, he was something less. He was ordinary. As mundane as she was, and it was a troubling thing to see. “Hal…?” He peered directly into her eyes, an expression of naked entreaty on his face. “Mayah…I don’t know how you’ll react to what you’re going to see today, but it’s important that you see it, that you understand what humanity means on this world. It’s another indication—regardless of my own desire or his—of why I must stay.” “And why I have to leave and lie to the Service.” “Yes.” “I’d be lying if I said I was ready for this, but I don’t seem to have very much of a choice. So…when to we go?” “When you’ve eaten.” Mayah nodded. *** It took hours, by carriage, to reach their destination. The sullen, gray rain broke into cloud-dappled sunlight by noon. A man Mayah had never seen steered the six-legged draft animals as skillfully as any charioteer. She sat, facing Sigh and Halloran, though she’d focused most of her attention on the shifting environment beyond the carriage confines. The city thinned and gave way to forested land, alive with strange trees with succulent, striated trunks. She thought of purple cacti when she looked at them. Far, far above, they opened into a profusion of heart-shaped leaves in the colors of emeralds and sapphires. Some, she saw, hung heavy with bean-pods as thick as zucchini, and tipped with black and purple flowers like the predatory heads of venus flytraps. Dangerous, she thought, but Sigh told her that they were harmless, that the seed pods and their apparently-lethal flowers were the, tangy vegetable-things common to the local kitchen. Forest gave way to open, grassy land, if grassy was the right word. Mayah thought of rusty bamboo, capped with fuzzy, black tufts. Seed clusters, she imagined. Things scuttled away from the road, disturbing plant growth, but she didn’t see what those things were. Her flesh prickled with goose-bumps at the possibilities. The carriage slowed and stopped at a gatehouse of sorts. The diver exchanged words with the guardsman, and Mayah watched with quiet amazement, as guard and driver exchanged tiny strips of saliva-dampened paper, like litmus strips, Mayah thought. Halloran nodded toward the gateman and the driver in their spit-and-paper exchange. “Verbal speech exists here as well,” he said. “It’s compressed, as you observed in the way Sigh speaks to you.” Mayah nodded. “I’d assume that it’s necessary,” she said. “Especially in terms of relaying information to multiple recipients, or in emergency situations.” “Yeah.” “You speak that language as well?” “I do,” Halloran said. “Terribly.” Sigh grinned, skewering Mayah with the laughter in his gaze. “Halloran. Funny. Speak.” Halloran grinned. “Yeah,” he said. “Look who’s talking.” *** And later, they stepped from the carriage— —into a surreal landscape in the colors of naked human flesh: alpine pallor, like Sigh’s, and colors of ocher and brown, like Halloran. There were shapes, everywhere: a riot of alien succulence, like a garden of gigantic, outlandish pears. As immobile as a surreal still life, the shapes wore crowns like— (Shock came slowly as Mayah struggled to make sense of what she saw.) The air was thick with chattered sound, a wash of clicking, sighing echoes in the complex, compacted sound of… (Patient and ordered logic emerged from the air-sounds.) …language. Mayah walked through mud and moss, meandering with Sigh and with Halloran, between and around enormous and fleshy shapes. The eye saw what the mind grasped after long and troubling moments, and Mayah—for long and troubling moments—watched Sigh and Halloran as they picked their way through— The shapes—in some disturbing, existential sense—resolved. Slowly: like a nightmare, unraveling. It wasn’t a common nightmare, nothing so puerile as drooling monsters, bogeymen, or standing naked in a crowded auditorium. It was something incredibly normal…native to this world, and completely, utterly beyond Mayah’s experience. “Hal…” she tasted dread in her voice. She tasted something like disgust…loathing…and bone-deep, animal fear. “I’m right here,” Halloran said, clasping her hand. “Hal…” —a filigree of limbs: her brain finally processed that and allowed her to see it. Each pear wore a crown in the shape of two long, graceful arms. “Hal…” In the unreal grove of enormous, monstrous pears, Mayah—with sudden and shocked clarity—recognized a word in the air, distorted in ways she couldn’t fathom, but easy on the ear. “Sister,” in endless, layered repetition. Surrounded now, by pears that weren’t pears, she yielded to their curiosity as they stretched their crowns of arms, and caressed her shoulders, her face, her neck. Her grasp tightened around Halloran’s fingers and she choked back a sound of amazed, animal fear as Sigh approached one of the shapes, reaching forward with its apex-mounted limbs. “Mother,” he said, with obvious, affectionate pride, pressing his cheek to the pale, brown-mottled shape. He closed his eyes as the alien caressed him, a look of quiet ecstasy on his face. “Mother,” he said, again, pulling away from the form. “Halloran,” he said, and at the sound of his name, Halloran pried himself from Mayah’s grasp, and stepped forward, smiling. He pressed his cheek to the bulky and immobile figure. He said something Mayah couldn’t understand, and Sigh blushed at the sound of it. He beckoned her forward. “Safe,” Sigh said, eager to put her at ease. A look of bewildered fear clouded his face. “Safe. Mayah. No. Fear. You.” A mirror of the confusion she’d seen in her room echoed now. He wanted to say more to her, to assure her, perhaps, or to deny something. Mayah couldn’t be sure, but the expression was there, of words he couldn’t articulate and withering anger—at himself—for the failure. “Safe.” It was all he could say, she imagined, as he pointed to the alien form. “Mother.” He said, and then gesturing at another shape, a smaller one. “Sister,” he said, stepping nearer to it, and allowing its twin-limbed crown to caress his face, his shoulders, his chest. “Sister,” he said, pressing his cheek to the pulpy flesh of the being. And later… —minutes?— —hours?— …she sat with Halloran, in the carriage. She felt a storm of tremors in her arms and in her legs. She sat ramrod straight, eyes fixed ahead. “Mayah…” Halloran spoke softly. “I’m okay.” “Are you sure?” “No.” Silence. A chill seized Mayah’s shoulders and then vanished. “They’re not monsters,” she said. “I know they’re not monsters…” “But they repulse you.” “Yes.” “And what happens when the rest of humanity learns what’s here? What happens when someone comes looking for me and discovers Sigh’s mother, his sister, and every other woman belonging to this world?” Mayah shrugged. “Shock,” she said. “Revulsion. Maybe even anger.” “Say that I’m dead, Mayah…go back to your ship. Tonight. File a report. Go home. Give your deposition, and suggest that 37.LMi-3 remain under strict quarantine.” “Just like that?” “Yeah, Mayah…just like that.” “And then?” “I don’t know. But I’m hoping for the best.” *** “Go?” Sigh had asked as he approached the carriage. “Yes,” she’d said. “I’m going.” Sigh smiled faintly. “Alone?” he asked. “Yes.” He smiled. He touched fingertips to his chin, and bowed his head. “I. Grateful. You.” Now, with the scent of sterile, cycled air around her, she watched the Earth-colored globe of 37.LMi-3 turning in slow, slow rotations below. The carriage driver had taken her far, far, and farther from the field of pears that were women, after Halloran placed her launch key in the palm of her hand. Her excursion pod had been moved, but it was an easy thing for her to reach orbit and rendezvous with her ship. Decontamination took twelve hours; she slept through broken stretches of it, coming awake on occasion, sweaty with tattered shards of nightmare clinging to the fringes of her mind. From the cockpit, at last, surrounded by control surfaces and flat-panel screens, she filed her preliminary report and held protracted and disjointed conversations with the small ship’s resident Artificial Intelligence. She said nothing of Halloran, and she wondered if the AI extrapolated the flimsy lie she’d cloaked around herself. “The natives,” she’d said to the ship-intelligence. “They’re a moody bunch…they weren’t too pleased to see me.” “Your bio-transponder was removed shortly after you achieved planet-fall.” “Yes. You followed my instructions?” “Of course, but I found it…uncomfortable. I was able to locate you, based on numerous orbital surveys, and so I was able to minimize instruction-conflict.” “Support is on standby?” “Of course.” “And now?” “Your well-being and preliminary report are reason enough for emergency extraction support to stand down.” “So,” Mayah said. “The Calvary isn’t coming?” “There is no need.” “Good,” Mayah said. “I need for you to do something.” “Yes?” “Based on the disappearance—and death—of Halloran Jakes, and my own…interesting experience among the indigenous population of 37.LMi-3, I’m declaring the planet strictly off limits to any and all Human Community traffic, scientific, military, or otherwise.” She paused. “I have reason to believe that—despite a clean bill of health—I’ve been exposed to an indigenous virus-type life form that is, most likely, of extreme danger to the human population at large; it’s what most-likely killed Halloran Jakes. Upon return to Sol-Central, you are to head directly to the Level-Five Quarantine facilities at Ceres. I’ll accept debriefing there.” “Understood, Mayah. Is there anything more?” Mayah shrugged. “I’m going to take a sleeping pill, and while I’m out cold, just get us the hell out of here.” Data flashed across the number-one screen: jump calculations, timetables, resource consumption ratios. Mayah scanned the numbers, briefly and nodded her approval. She found her way to the rear cabin, dosed herself with the strongest tranquilizer available, and slid into the cramped space of her bunk. She closed her eyes. Dreams came quickly. “Thank you,” Halloran had said, touching fingertips to his chin. “I can’t promise the fairytale to you, Hal…Happily ever after isn’t a guarantee.” “I know.” “Enjoy what time you have,” she said. Halloran nodded. “I will.” He stepped forward, and for the first time—ever—he touched the side of her face, gently and with sad compassion. “If things had gone your way…we might be bitter divorcees by now, squabbling over alimony payments and who raises the snotty little brat kids we’ve sired.” Tension broke in Mayah’s chest and spilled as giddy, shocked laughter from her throat. “You really know how to lay on the charm, don’t you?” It ended, right there: softly. “Sigh and I are spending the night here. Me and the in-laws have an interesting talk ahead of us.” “Do they love you?” “They do, Mayah. In their distinct way. I can’t understand all of it, but it’s human Mayah, and I guess…ultimately…that’s all that matters.” Mayah nodded and stepped toward the carriage, halted—only once—by the soft touch of Sigh’s hand to her shoulder. She turned, grabbing an eye-full of his smile. “Go. Safe,” he said. She touched her chin, bowing her head in sudden, profound gratitude. And as the carriage pulled away, she watched Halloran and Sigh, holding hands and shrinking with distance. Alone, now, she waited for the jump-drive to charge. It took an eternity, she thought: enough time—she thought—for her to relive her time down below. She closed her eyes. Darkness and memories slid around her. ***THE END*** Languages have always fascinated me, as have issues of human colonization of other worlds. It seemed only natural that I'd eventually explore both topics in a science fictional story that doesn't look at those things in the most traditional of ways. We always speak of terraforming and modifying other worlds to suit human needs, but seldom do we speak of the reality that humans will change as well...maybe subtly, maybe in ways we don't even recognize, but change will occur, no matter what, and if such change gives us barefoot vikings, then so be it. As always, thank you for reading and commenting, and I hope you've enjoyed this little dip into the wacky little world explored in this tale.