“Well, I’ll be damned,” someone else drawled in a tone of revelation. “I’m willing to bet some of these folks might’ve dropped in on us once or twice, you know?”
“This is truly remarkable. You people look just like our old stories.” The speaker shook his head. He also grinned, but he couldn’t help that. The species-name of the inhabitants of Keelisika was enkheil, with the last e pronounced more like long a, and their name for their planet sounded more like Kheeyithikha to Peters than what he’d heard from the Grallt.
Khrog Dhakgo and his mate Ghnal Dhango had large, deep-sunk eyes, pug noses with the nostrils facing almost directly forward, and long canines that slipped past one another to allow upper and lower teeth to meet. Neither of them shared the spectacular monochrome coloring of the ship pilots. Khrog Dhakgo’s hands and facial skin were a bit darker than Peters’s, and his all-over fur, or hair, was black, with reddish-brown overtones where the light struck it; his mate’s facial skin was darker, and her fur was the rich coppery red associated with freckles in humans. Their eyes had round pupils and irises shading from reddish brown around the pupil to electric green at the edges. They spoke Grallt fairly well, though with gargling accents; their native language ran heavily to things in the back of the throat. Peters’s name was impossible, so they called him John.
Ghnal Dhango laughed, high-pitched notes on an ascending scale like a showoff riff on a marimba. “Yes, the resemblance is notable,” she agreed.
“I hope the stories give us a good reputation,” Peters remarked, and both enkheil laughed again. “No?”
“Yes and no, both,” Khrog Dhakgo said.
“It’s different according to culture,” Ghnal explained. “Where I come from, the Mud People live in grass huts on distant islands. If you are shipwrecked there they’ll repair your ship better than it was before, but they won’t teach you to sail it the new way. You have to find that out for yourself.”
“In my home culture we have almost the same story,” Khrog Dhakgo put in. “Except that the houses are made of mud and straw, and you find them in the middle of the desert, and it’s wagons they’ll fix. The part about making you figure out for yourself how to operate the new machine is the same, though.” He grinned, or at least Peters assumed it was a smile, a matter of stretching his lips to show his gums. “Do you have any stories about us?”
“I can’t be sure,” Peters said with a smile of his own. “The ones with white wings look very much like our concept of angels, the assistants to God.”
“God? This is a name?” Khrog Drakgo asked.
Peters shook his head. “It’s our name for the first one, the one who created everything.”
“Oh, how nice!” Ghnal Dhango exclaimed. “Why, they even have the name approximately correct!” She frowned. “Khrog, we have to do something. It isn’t, oh, symmetrical that they should have such a nice story about us, and our stories about them should be so cruel.”
“Don’t worry,” Peters assured. “They’re only stories.” He grinned. “Building machines and not explaining how to work them properly does happen sometimes with us. Much more often than it should.”
“Perhaps so, but stories can affect your reputation,” Khrog Dhakgo said. He paused, nodded, and went on, “It is good, though, to hear from someone who makes sense about things. These Grallt and their friends would have us believe our long-ago parents crawled out of mud, can you believe it?” The two enkheil waited expectantly, but Peters forebore to reply, and after a moment Khrog Dhakgo laughed. “Ghnal, here we have a wise person. John, now that that’s out of the way, do you have any opinion on politics?” It took a moment for that to get through, but when it did, Peters laughed as heartily as the aliens.
Mealtime was winding down, Grallt, humans, and a sprinkling of enkheil wandering out in ones and twos and small groups, some stopping to chat with others who hadn’t finished. “We should go,” Peters suggested. “Operations will begin soon.”
Khrog Dhakgo shrugged, generating a pop of wing membrane. “Yes, I suppose so,” he said. “Preparations always take longer than they should.” He stood, looked around to check for clearance, and did a quick stretch, flourishing his wings. “On the way, would you mind giving me a closer look at your ship? The dancers have already had a full tour, but I wasn’t able to get close enough.”
“Certainly,” said Peters as he stood. The male kheil was a good six inches taller than his own six feet, but still stood a full head shorter than the ship crews. Neither of the enkheil wore much clothing; snug but not tight briefs covered their genital areas, and both had arrangements of straps running from neck to hipline. It was hard to see how they might be able to wear more, because their wing membranes joined their torsos from armpit to hipbone.
“Excellent. Ghnal, will you come with us?”
“Well, of course,” she said indignantly. “I’ll probably know more about what I’m seeing than you do.”
“The really terrible thing is that she is probably right,” Khrog Dhakgo told Peters with an air of confidentiality.
“Well of course I’m right,” said Ghnal with a sniff. “Males!” She stood in turn, doing the same scan for clearance and wing-flourish her mate had. Standing, she was about Peters’s height. “Ah, that feels better,” she said. “We don’t use chairs with backs. They’re confining.”
“I can understand that, I think,” Peters said. “If you are accustomed to flying, it must be hard to be forced into a small area.”
Both enkheil laughed at that. “We can’t fly,” Khrog said. “No enkheil can fly, except in zero gravity, or nearly zero. Our wings aren’t big enough to support us.”
“The best we can do is extend our jumps,” Ghnal added. “And if we fall from a height, we usually aren’t injured if we have time to spread our wings. But we have always dreamed about flying. It’s one of the reasons we adopted the zifthkakik so completely, and have so many space facilities. It’s very satisfying to live and work in a place where we really can fly.”
“And don’t try to tell me your people don’t feel very much the same,” Khrog chided. “That ship, the T’hongcat—”
“Tomcat,” Peters corrected.
“You know I can’t say that, any more than you can pronounce Ghnal’s name without hurting your throat.” Khrog grinned again. “The Tommcat,” giving himself the lie by carefully stretching his lips to make the sound, “was built by somebody who wanted very badly to fly, and spent a lot of effort achieving that.”
As the elevator clanked and banged its way to ops level Khrog Dhakgo remarked, “When I first came aboard, I thought perhaps the Traders had changed their ways. I have dealt with them before, and I have never seen their ship look so neat and clean.” He looked around. “But I see the change is superficial, if it exists.”
“Do you mean the cleanliness of the ship bay, and the fresh paint?” Peters asked. When Khrog Dhakgo nodded and looked at him he went on, “That is our work. We use large waterships, and have learned that they don’t continue to work well if they aren’t maintained properly. We convinced the Grallt to let us continue our habits.”
“I see.” Khrog regarded Peters steadily.
Ghnal produced another musical chuckle. “Oh, how wonderful! But you haven’t been aboard this ship very long, I see,” she said as they emerged in the ops bay. “The paint isn’t finished.”
“No, it isn’t,” Peters agreed with a nod. “And we still have a lot of other work to do. The aft door is working fairly well, but we haven’t had a chance to look at the forward one.” He smiled in retrospect. “And there are the elevators, of course.”