Taki ducked through the curtain to join her. “Hot,” he told her as if this were news. She lay on their mat stomach down, legs bent at the knees, feet crossed in the air. Her hair, the color of dried grasses, hung over her face. Taki stared for a moment at the back of her head. “Here,” he said. He pulled her poem from his pocket and laid it by her hand. “I found this out front.”
Hesper switched off the letter and rolled onto her back away from the poem. She was careful not to look at Taki. Her cheeks were stained with irregular red patches so that Taki knew she had been crying again. The observation caused him a familiar mixture of sympathy and impatience. His feelings for Hesper always came in these uncomfortable combinations; it tired him.
“ ‘Out front,’ ” Hesper repeated, and her voice held a practiced tone of uninterested nastiness. “And how did you determine that one part of this featureless landscape was the ‘front’?”
“Because of the door. We have only the one door so it’s the front door.”
“No,” said Hesper. “If we had two doors then one might arguably be the front door and the other the back door, but with only one it’s just the door.” Her gaze went straight upward. “You use words so carelessly. Words from another world. They mean nothing here.” Her eyelids fluttered briefly, the lashes darkened with tears. “It’s not just an annoyance to me, you know,” she said. “It can’t help but damage your work.”
“My work is the study of the mene,” Taki answered. “Not the creation of a new language,” and Hesper’s eyes closed.
“I really don’t see the difference,” she told him. She lay a moment longer without moving, then opened her eyes and looked at Taki directly. “I don’t want to have this conversation. I don’t know why I started it. Let’s rewind, run it again. I’ll be the wife this time. You come in and say, ‘Honey, I’m home!’ and I’ll ask you how your morning was.”
Taki began to suggest that this was a scene from another world and would mean nothing here. He had not yet framed the sentence when he heard the door seal release and saw Hesper’s face go hard and white. She reached for her poem and slid it under the scarf at her waist. Before she could get to her feet the first of the mene had joined them in the bedroom. Taki ducked through the curtain to fasten the door before the temperature inside the house rose. The outer room was filled with dust and the hands which reached out to him as he went past left dusty streaks on his clothes and his skin. He counted eight of the mene, fluttering about him like large moths, moths the size of human children, but with furry vestigial wings, hourglass abdomens, sticklike limbs. They danced about him in the open spaces, looked through the cupboards, pulled the tapes from his desk. When they had their backs to him he could see the symmetrical arrangement of dark spots which marked their wings in a pattern resembling a human face. A very sad face, very distinct. Masculine, Taki had always thought, but Hesper disagreed.
The party which had made initial contact under the leadership of Hans Mene so many years ago had wisely found the faces too whimsical for mention in their report. Instead they had included pictures and allowed them to speak for themselves. Perhaps the original explorers had been asking the same question Hesper posed the first time Taki showed her the pictures. Was the face really there? Or was this only evidence of the ability of humans to see their own faces in everything? Hesper had a poem entitled “The Kitchen God,” which recounted the true story of a woman about a century ago who had found the image of Christ in the burn-marks on a tortilla. “Do they see it, too?” she had asked Taki, but there was as yet no way to ask this of the mene, no way to know if they had reacted with shock and recognition to the faces of the first humans they had seen, though studies of the mene eye suggested a finer depth perception which might significantly distort the flat image.
Taki thought that Hesper’s own face had changed since the day, only six months ago calculated as Traveltime, when she had said she would come here with him and he thought it was because she loved him. They had sorted through all the information which had been collected to date on the mene and her face had been all sympathy then. “What would it be like,” she asked him, “to be able to fly and then to lose this ability? To outgrow it? What would a loss like that do to the racial consciousness of a species?”
“It happened so long ago, I doubt it’s even noticed as a loss,” Taki had answered. “Legends, myths not really believed perhaps. Probably not even that. In the racial memory not even a whisper.”
Hesper had ignored him. “What a shame they don’t write poetry,” she had said. She was finding them less romantic now as she joined Taki in the outer room, her face stoic. The mene surrounded her, ran their string-fingered hands all over her body, inside her clothing. One mene attempted to insert a finger into her mouth, but Hesper tightened her lips together resolutely, dust on her chin. Her eyes were fastened on Taki. Accusingly? Beseechingly? Taki was no good at reading people’s eyes. He looked away.
Eventually the mene grew bored. They left in groups, a few lingering behind to poke among the boxes in the bedroom, then following the others until Hesper and Taki were left alone. Hesper went to wash herself as thoroughly as their limited water supply allowed; Taki swept up the loose dust. Before he finished, Hesper returned, showing him her empty jewelry box without a word. The jewelry had all belonged to her mother.
“I’ll get them when it cools,” Taki told her.
“Thank you.”
It was always Hesper’s things that the mene took. The more they disgusted her, pawing over her, rummaging through her things, no way to key the door against clever mene fingers even if Taki had agreed to lock them out, which he had not, the more fascinating they seemed to find her. They touched her twice as often as they touched Taki and much more insistently. They took her jewelry, her poems, her letters, all the things she treasured most, and Taki believed, although it was far too early in his studies really to speculate with any assurance, that the mene read something off the objects. The initial explorers had concluded that mene communication was entirely telepathic, and if this was accurate, then Taki’s speculation was not such a leap. Certainly the mene didn’t value the objects for themselves. Taki always found them discarded in the dust on this side of the rope bridge.
The fact that everything would be easily recovered did nothing to soften Hesper’s sense of invasion. She mixed herself a drink, stirring it with the metal straw which poked through the dust-proof lid. “You shouldn’t allow it,” she said at last, and Taki knew from the time that had elapsed that she had tried not to begin this familiar conversation. He appreciated her effort as much as he was annoyed by her failure.
“It’s part of my job,” he reminded her. “We have to be accessible to them. I study them. They study us. There’s no way to differentiate the two activities and certainly no way to establish communication except simultaneously.”
“You’re letting them study us, but you’re giving them a false picture. You’re allowing them to believe that humans intrude on each other in this way. Does it occur to you that they may be involved in similar charades? If so, what can either of us learn?”
Taki took a deep breath. “The need for privacy may not be as intrinsically human as you imagine. I could point to many societies which afforded very little of this. As for any deliberate misrepresentations on their part—well, isn’t that the whole rationale for not sending a study team? Wouldn’t I be farther along if I were working with environmentalists, physiologists, linguists? But the risk of contamination increases exponentially with each additional human. We would be too much of a presence. Of course, I will be very careful. I am far from the stage in my study where I can begin to draw conclusions. When I visit them . . .”