“Do you hear us?”
The radio spoke with the beautiful voice of the alien’s first message to Atlantis.
“Yes,” she whispered, her throat dry. “Can you hear me?”
“We sense you. Will you meet us?”
“I want to. I really do,” Barbary said. “But I have to get Heather into zero g and back to the space station. She’s sick and I can’t wake her up. The gravity’s too strong for her here. Besides, all the important people are waiting to meet you, and they’ll be really angry if I see you first.”
“But,” the voice said, “you have already seen us.”
Barbary stared around the chamber, looking for creatures, great ugly things like the aliens in old movies, or small furry things like the aliens in books. They must be hiding behind the tall glass pillars.
The gravity faded till it was barely enough to give Barbary’s surroundings a “down” and an “up.”
“Is this gravity more comfortable for you?”
“Yes,” Barbary said. “Thanks.”
“We believed we calibrated your gravity correctly.”
“You did,” Barbary said. “At least it felt okay to me. But Heather… Heather has to live in lower gravity. Won’t you let us go? She’s sick! Anyway, I can’t see you —” She stopped, amazed.
Though she had not seen them move, the crystal columns had come closer. They clustered around her. Their rigid forms remained upright, yet they gave the impression of bending down like a group of worried aunts or friendly trees. A long row of crystalline fibers grew along the side of each column. The fibers quivered rapidly, vibrating against and stroking the main body of each being, producing the wind-chime voices.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh. I do see you. You’re beautiful!”
“We will loose your craft if you wish,” the voice on the radio said. “But our ship will reach your habitat before your vessel could fly to it, and here the gravity can be controlled.”
“Can you hurry? I’m really worried about Heather.”
“We will hurry.”
Barbary listened to Heather’s rapid, irregular heartbeat.
“Can’t you help her?” she said to the aliens. She remembered all the movies she had seen where people got hurt and aliens healed them. “Can’t you make her well? Aliens are supposed to be able to make people well!”
“But we have only just met you,” one of the aliens said, perplexed and regretful. “We know little of your physiology. Perhaps in a few decades, if you wish us to study you…”
Barbary thought she should have learned by now not to expect anything to work the way it did in books or movies. She leaned over Heather again, willing her to awaken.
Heather’s eyelids fluttered.
“Barbary…?”
Heather opened her eyes. She sounded weak, confused, and tired.
“It’s okay, Heather. Anyway, I think it is — what about you?”
“I feel kind of awful. What happened?”
“We’re on the alien ship.”
A spark of excitement brought some of the color back to her sister’s cheeks. She struggled to a sitting position.
“Are there aliens?” Heather whispered. She was shivering. Barbary chafed her cold hands and helped her put on the jacket.
“There are other beings,” the gentle voice said. “We hope not to be alien, one to the other, for very long. Will you meet us?”
“Can we breathe your air?” Heather hugged the jacket around her.
“It is not our air. We do not use air. It is your air. You should find it life-sustaining, uninfectious, and sufficiently warm to maintain you.”
Barbary gingerly cracked the seal of the roof-hatch. Warm, fresh air filled the raft. Heather took a deep breath. Her shivering eased.
“If you join us,” a voice said, no longer from the radio but from one of the crystalline beings, “then we may rotate your vehicles and release the small person in the lower craft. It does not respond to our communications in an intelligible fashion, and it appears to be quite perturbed.”
Barbary could not help it: she laughed. Heather managed to smile. Barbary picked her up — her weight was insignificant in this gravity — and carried her from the raft. The aliens made a spot among them for her; they slid across the mother-of-pearl floor as if, like starfish, they had thousands of tiny sucker-feet at their bases. The floor gave off a comforting warmth. Barbary laid Heather on the yielding surface.
“I’m okay, I really am,” Heather said. She tried to sit up, but she was still weak. Barbary helped her, letting Heather lean back against her. Heather gazed at the aliens. “Holy cow.”
Mick’s furry form hurtled across the space between the rafts and Barbary. He landed against her with all four feet extended and stopped himself by hooking his claws into her shirt. Somehow he managed to do it without touching her skin with his claws. He burrowed his head against her, and she wrapped her arms around him and laid her cheek against his soft fur.
“Boy, Mick,” she whispered, “did you cause a lot of trouble.”
She looked at the beings, who had rotated the rafts and opened the hatch of Mick’s with no help from her. They could have opened up her craft and plucked her and Heather out like peas from a pod, if they had wanted to.
“Aren’t you mad?” she asked.
“Our psychology differs from what we understand of yours, but we believe you would consider us sane.”
“I didn’t mean mad-crazy. I meant mad-angry. We didn’t mean to bother you, but we had to rescue Mick.”
“We comprehend this. We are not mad-angry,” the nearest being said. “How could we rouse ourselves to anger over actions taken in distress?”
“Then how come you asked us not to approach you when you first called us?”
“When a species advances beyond a certain point, it must be introduced to civilization. Otherwise it would discover galactic society, and the rules of galactic society, in a random way. This might cause it shock. Yet even when a people has reached a technological position of adequacy, it may not be ready in the psychological sense to meet other beings. We have found, through experience, that meeting new citizens is easier for them if they are in a large group of their own people. Then their fear of other beings, their xenophobia — which is inevitable in some degree — is acute. In this case, however, we recognized an emergency.”
“Hasn’t anyone ever approached you before?”
“Yes,” the being said. “Several times. But always with the aim of conquest or attack.”
“What did you do to them?”
“We showed them the futility of violence. Oftentimes disarming the aggressor is sufficient, though sometimes their aggression must be turned back upon them.”
Barbary decided to leave questions on that subject till later. She wondered if she was ready to find out all the things the beings could do if they had to.
But Heather felt braver, despite her pallor.
“What rules did you mean?”
“The rules that, beyond your own planet, you may create, but you may not destroy. You may observe, but you may not interfere.”
Those rules sounded reasonable to Barbary. They sounded like what any sensible person would try to do.
“A lot of people won’t like those rules,” Heather said, her expression troubled. “They’ll want to break them.”
“They will be persuaded to comply. There is no choice.”
Heather leaned against Barbary, thoughtful and solemn. Barbary tried to think of something to say.
Mick changed the subject for her. He had stopped burrowing into her armpit. He curled against her, purring and watching. Now he squirmed out of her arms and leaped into the air, coming down and bouncing ten meters away. He stalked up to one of the beings and sniffed its base — its feet? — then rubbed against its side. His fur stroking the crystal surface made an electric, musical note. The beings swiveled toward him, fascinated.
“What a delightful feeling!” said the one that Mick had touched, “What a fine song the small person has invented.”