He found the bird collapsed in the square, not too far from the door. It lay near one of the pillars, its huge wings folded into fleshy carapace against its back. It was breathing shallowly, rapidly, its eyes covered with a whitish nictating membrane. Rate of metabolism and body temperature were even higher than he’d expected, but it would take a lot of energy to get that big a creature into the air. The bird was quasi-mammalian, as he had known: they were really more like bats than birds. Its long body was lightly muscled except for the powerful extensors that ran from beneath its wings, over its shoulders to the chest. It was covered with fine mauve down, a marsupial-like pouch on the abdomen. A female? Perhaps the term was irrelevant here.
He turned his cooling unit up another notch. Must be fifty degrees in the sun. The overheated air, despite its high oxygen content, was oppressive. Perhaps, Alex thought, it had been foolish of him to refuse an assistant: the stifling heat put an unexpected limit on his strength. But there were too few left on the expedition anyway, since the accident. He slid the tractor awkwardly under the animal’s body and rose into the air, pulling the unconscious bird with him.
It was beginning to revive as he got back to camp. He barely had time to get it into the collection cage and turn on the field. The great, downy creature stirred in the cage and opened its eyes. Large as a lemur’s, they shone a luminous violet, compelling his attention. The bird clambered to its feet, shook itself briefly, and flapped its wings to unfold them. Standing erect, it was easily two meters tall, knobby and angular, sharp bones emphasized by its loose skin, emaciation unsoftened by the sparse down.
Alex had the trank gun ready, just a blur dose in case it became violent enough to damage itself. The bird saw him and moved hesitantly in his direction, stopping when it saw the gun. Alex pointed it away from the creature: it seemed to relax. Did it recognize the gun? The bird approached him until it hit the invisible beams of the cage. Examining the force-field in front of it with its paws, it made a series of short, liquid noises. It explored, in silence, the extent of the cage, then turned back to Alex and approached him as closely as the cage would allow. Turning its hyacinth eyes on him, it said, in clear, unaccented Russian, “How do I get out?”
Awareness filtered into Girat’s mind. The air was thick with electromagnetic waves, and something was watching her. She opened her eyes, got to her feet; she was in the visitor’s camp. The visitor itself was standing in front of her, its body in the pose of formality and distance. She wouldn’t press it, since it seemed incapable of controlling a tendency to sting.
The visitor made a gesture of approach, and Girat drew closer, until she encountered the force shield between them. She felt for the door, but the field extended all the way around her. Perhaps she’d overlooked the controls: the visitor’s technology was alien to her, and she’d been away from the city for a long time.
She spoke slowly, groggy from the vibrations, directly into the visitor’s head.
“How do I get out?” she asked.
The visitor gave a start and invoked a mythical being. It approached her, its thoughts stumbling. What an odd creature. She felt her feet warming to it, it was so tentative and unsure. And no wonder, with all these thought-scrambling devices around it. Her head ached unbearably. But despite the pain, Girat was tempted to interrupt her deathflight, to stay and study this visitor for a while. She’d consider it later. At the moment, she must find a way out of this vibrating shield. There must be controls.
There were. The visitor pulled them from the folds of its clothing, adjusted a knob, and walked right through the field. Inefficient way to run things, Girat thought. She couldn’t reach the controls at all.
“You speak Russian!” it said.
“Don’t you?” she replied.
It stared at her with a peculiar lack of expression. But with such small eyes, it must have difficulty expressing the visible emotions. It shook its head slowly.
“Yes, yes I do.” There was a pause, and it looked at her. “But are you actually, uh, speaking Russian? Or…”
“No, of course not, I’m just floating the words. Our structures are not compatible.” That explanation was a little vague, she thought, but the visitor seemed to accept it.
With barely a pause, it launched into a detailed description of the astronomical location of its planet of origin.
Girat wasn’t interested. This information couldn’t contribute much to her deathflight, and the vibrations from the force field disrupted her thinking. She scratched politely beneath her pouch and asked if they could perhaps continue their discussion outside the fields of force.
The visitor stopped talking and tinted its skin warmer. Control of its body fluids, thought Girat. Charming, and very polite.
“ — most distressing to me,” it was saying. “This is our first contact with, uh, other species. No knowledge of what to do. I should, of course, have been prepared, but I wasn’t really expecting that you would speak my — well, you know. Please come into the tent. Certainly. Much more comfortable there….”
It led her out of the force field, across the tablerock to the circular tent. Vibrations came from a small cluster of containers next to it. Girat could tell that the tent wasn’t going to be much more pleasant than the force field.
The tent was quite cold, as she had known when she first saw it from the air, and the combination of cold and vibration must have had a visible effect on her, for the visitor noticed her recoil when she entered the tent.
“Is there something the matter?” it asked.
She told it about the vibrations, which apparently it couldn’t even detect. Nevertheless, it considerately shut most of its equipment down.
“No wonder we never saw any of you close up. We were driving you away.” It seemed to think that, but for the vibrations, Girat’s people would have flocked to the visitors’ camps. Girat did not correct the impression. “This tent will heat up pretty fast without the cooling unit,” it continued, pulling off its clothing. “But the heat doesn’t seem to bother you.”
Squatting comfortably on the floor, Girat watched the visitor while it talked rapidly and enthusiastically about establishing contact with an alien species. Girat was still feeling a bit dizzy from the vibrations, and she wasn’t listening much to what the visitor was saying. Its words were irrelevant to her death, which had been interrupted, but would proceed as planned. It was a handsome animal, she thought, though its species must be a lonely one, to be so excited by contact with another.
Alex watched as the huge bird settled itself on the floor. This was the moment, he thought, that the human race had been moving toward for more than a century: contact with another species. They’d prepared speeches for everything else: the first person on the Moon, the first on Mars, the first on every moon and half-assed asteroid since. His captain had made a speech as they prepared the cryogenics after clearing Pluto’s erratic orbit. And had sent a lengthy speech back through four light years of empty space when they were awakened, a month out from Alpha A, which later proved to have a great selection of cosmic debris, but no planets at all. Then another lengthy speech went out when they landed on the most likely-looking planet of Alpha B, the first extrasolar planet to be explored by humans. It had been named Pyerva, The First, by Grisha, who was a Georgian and sentimental, but it was only the most recent of a long line of firsts. And now it was superseded by yet another first, the first “alien.”