An etheric receiver buzzed. Nollam crouched before a tiny TK screen, shading it with his wings, then jumped up. “They’re coming!”
Yells of triumph and delight gave way to apprehension. Nobody knew how the aliens would arrive. Orro had talked about a gliding vehicle, Holder about a rocket descending on a pillar of fire. Soldiers, their movement sluggish in the heat and stumbling on the rough rock, spread banners across boulders: the golden lizard of the South, the claw of the Reach, the roundel of the Realm. People made their way behind large rocks, low pinnacles, and banks and little cliffs where the ground had slipped aeons ago. They stood or crouched in that notional shelter and scanned the sky. Binoculars were reluctantly lent and eagerly borrowed. Markhan circulated like an anxious teacher, warning against looking through the lenses at the sun. The sun slipped away from the zenith.
It was Orro who spotted the arrival first. He shouted and pointed straight up. Darvin swung his binoculars around and saw a black dot. Sunlight flashed on it, and it became a still-tiny shape, with a hint of rectangularity. With a great effort of goodwill he handed the binoculars to Kwarive.
“Wow,” she said. “No rockets, no jets, no wings.”
“The wingless have mastered gravity,” said Darvin, restraining himself from grabbing back the glasses.
“They have not,” said Orro, with better eyesight or better binoculars. “I see a rope above it. It is descending like a load on a crane.”
“Where might such a crane be mounted?” said Holder. “On the moon?”
“On a moon,” said Kwarive. “Remember how the alien moon appeared last night — directly overhead? That’s what it’s hanging from.”
Darvin stifled a laugh, embarrassed by his companion’s ignorance of physics; Holder guffawed. Orro removed the glasses from his eyes to frown, and without thinking relinquished them to Darvin’s grasp. This time he saw the now fast-descending thing as a tall box, and saw too the line stretching into the blue above it.
“She’s right,” Orro was saying. “Why should that be more absurd than a satellite staying above the same spot on the ground? Even you, Darvin, were wondering aloud not too long ago why it didn’t fall down. Oh, and the binoculars, if you please, old chap.”
Darvin passed them back with as much grace as he could.
“It isn’t that,” he said, trying not to let irritation infiltrate his voice. “I’m not saying it’s absurd, or impossible in principle. But in practice! The length of line that would be involved is simply inconceivable.”
“One wonders why the aliens bother coming here,” said Kwarive. “You know so much about them already.”
The descending box was now visible without binoculars. It was obvious from the exclamations around him that most people still shared his first assumption, that the thing levitated. As it drew closer the line became apparent to the naked eye, and the marvel at the sight only increased. The box now looked in parts transparent. Wisps of vapour puffed from its sides every few seconds: course corrections, Darvin guessed. Its speed seemed to increase as it descended, but Darvin knew for certain that this was an illusion. After another couple of minutes and several more corrections, it came to rest on the rocky plain a few eights-of-eights of paces away from them.
No shouts of command could stop the civilians walking forward. The soldiers too, after an urgent argument, ran to keep pace. The order they obeyed was to keep their crossbows slung.
As though at an unseen barrier, everyone stopped at the same place. The box now looked much bigger than it had seemed before. The afternoon heat hung heavy. The lurid pools stank like ammonia. Creaking and cracking noises echoed across the rocky flats. A door opened in the side of the box. With one accord everyone took a couple of paces back.
A wingless giant stepped out. Its body was black with a dull gleam. Around its head was a glassy globe. The alien stopped, the globe moving this way and that. It seemed to see them. It raised both hands slowly from its sides, above its head, and walked forward.
The urge to flee almost possessed Darvin. Eight eights of steps — its steps — away, the alien stopped. It lifted the globe from around its head, and placed it in the crook of one arm. The other hand it kept upraised. Black-faced, fuzz-scalped, this was to all appearances the same alien who had spoken on the screen.
Someone remembered to take a photograph. Nollam, huddled over his apparatus, muttered curses to himself.
The alien reached to the round collar upon which the helmet had sat. It pulled something like a stiff cord to one of its small flat ears, and another to the front of its lips. Its lips moved.
“Good day,” it said.
Nobody moved or said anything. It struck Darvin that in all their planning for this encounter, no one had thought to establish that priority. He glanced sideways at Markhan. The chief scientist stood with knees trembling and wings furled tight. Darvin noticed that the same was true of himself. He tried, just as an experiment, to take a step forward. His foot would not move.
As he looked down he glimpsed a forward movement and heard a voice. “I’m a biologist,” said Kwarive. “This is a new species.”
She was on her way before he could stop her. She walked straight up to the giant. She stopped just beyond his reach and spread out her wings.
“Good day,” she said, her voice firm and loud. “Welcome to Ground.”
“Welcome,” repeated the alien.
“You spoke of trudges,” said Kwarive. “Here is a trudge kit.”
The alien reached forward and took the small shape in its huge hands.
“This is a trudge?” said the alien.
“I trudge, me,” came Handful’s thin voice. “You man smell bad.”
The alien’s shoulders shook. Its voice made a deep repeated bark that might have been laughter. Darvin could see the kit flinch and squirm. The alien handed him back to Kwarive. Handful immediately buried his nose in her shoulder, as Darvin could detect from Kwarive’s movements. The alien was looking down at its hands.
“Shit,” said the alien.
For the past two eight-days, all over Seloh and Gevork, scientists and Sight agents and civil servants had been talking to trudges. They had been doing so in confined but comfortable spaces, none of which were barred with metal or surrounded with mesh. Some of the trudges had been old and angry, bitter at being made conscious at a time when they had nothing to look forward to but death, and nothing to look back on but a maimed and brutish life. There had been suicides. There had been attacks, some fatal. Others of the trudges had been young, some even younger than Handful, some older. A few had been mature, wary and wise. They had kept their understanding to themselves, and only their etheric emissions had betrayed them. Some of them could not be coaxed to speak. Others talked until they and their interlocutors dropped with exhaustion.
Signals beamed forth from cunning secret coils an alien alchemy had spun close to their spines. The ever-extended vocabulary of the trudges reached the sky.
Beside that etheric flood was another. Every TK transmitter in Seloh’s Reach repeated the proclamation from the Height, and every one in Gevork the new decree from the Rock of Lassir. They repeated it until every citizen had heard that trudges were no longer to be mutilated, that any trudge who could speak was to be sold at a good price to the Reach or the Realm and then emancipated as a free worker, with compensation; that all trudges, articulate or not, were to be treated without violence. More to the point, they repeated it until even the aliens could not fail to understand it.
“I do not understand it,” said the alien to Markhan. The two stood at the focus of a silent semicircle. “You are to let go the trudges?”
“Yes.”
“Like—” The alien threw out his hands.
“Yes.”
“With no kick or hit among you?”
“With some hurt,” said Markhan. The vocabulary the alien had learned was still restricted and concrete. “But we must. The trudges speak. They too are men.”