The boy came awake while she was checking the last of the cable connections. Crawling out from under the table, Rahel stood to find the boy squatting at the other end of the room, heels flat to the floor, hands linked in front of his shins. He didn’t look up at her, instead fixing his attention on the soft-cuff encircling his wrist. He picked at the edges, followed the curve until reaching the ball joint that connected the tether. Then he closed his hand around his wrist and sat, eyes downcast, face obscenely still.
A splash of wetness darkened the teal stripe in his T-shirt, quickly overlaid by a second drop, then matched by a third. Still, Rahel didn’t recognize the uneven splatters for tears until the boy heaved a thin, stuttering sigh and began rocking silently.
She snatched at Toad’s collar when the puppy tried to toddle over and investigate. Leave him alone, Rahel told herself as she hefted a squirming Toad and soft-footed toward the door. He’s lost everything else—at least you can leave him his privacy. The boy sobbed with his arms around his knees and his eyes squeezed fiercely closed. Maybe he hoped that when he opened them again, he’d be back in whatever world from which he’d been stolen.
Toad’s groan of frustration stopped Rahel in the doorway, surprising her more than the puppy’s desperate struggles. Toad had never seen a human cry before. Maybe it was that utter strangeness that made her so alarmed at the boy’s behavior. “My fault for raising you to be such a good girl,” Rahel whispered. She rubbed her nose against the puppy’s skull, then let Toad clatter back down to the floor and jitter across the room. The stocky terrier slipped up to the boy with head and tail slung low, ears drooping as she waggled her rear end.
Rahel watched the puppy slide her head under the boy’s arm to nose at his chin. Just like dogs, humans had evolved within a pack structure. Status, discipline, and social intercourse were a part of both species’ most basic genetic wiring. It was why dogs made such good companions, and why humans so easily passed themselves off as naked, tool using, two-legged dogs.
But maybe the needs of canines and humans overlapped more than Rahel had realized. If Toad had been manhandled and ignored for as many days or weeks as this boy had been locked up on his own, she would have exhausted herself with happiness for anyone who would interact with her, especially if that someone let her run around and chew on things and in general act like a dog. Rahel wondered how long it had been since the boy had been allowed to act like a human, no matter how uncivilized that behavior might be.
Creeping only as far as the end of the sofa, Rahel lowered herself to the floor with her back against the armrest. She listened to Toad groan and whimper, and made sure that a shoulder-width of her back remained visible if the boy cared to look up from his weeping. She wouldn’t intrude on his grief by looking at him, but at least she could try to tell him that she was there in case he needed her. That he could retain whatever he recognized as the singularity of himself, but as long as Rahel cared for him, he wasn’t completely alone.
When the airlock buzzer jolted her awake some unknown stretch of time later, Rahel at least knew what ship’s function had startled the hell out of her this time. She pushed groggily up on one elbow and blinked around the lounge while Toad climbed to her feet and stumbled around the end of the couch in search of a less active sleeping place. “What is it?” Rahel croaked, scrubbing at her eyes and trying to remember why she’d curled up to sleep next to the lounge sofa.
“There are four beings requesting entrance at the main airlock.”
She rose up on her knees to look for Toad and found the puppy on the other end of the room, flopped onto her side among a pile of blankets, pillows, and boy. “Can you tell from visual who it is?” she asked the ship, somewhat more quietly.
“Yes. It is Larry.”
Rahel jerked a startled glance toward the invisible overhead realm from which the ship’s voice always came. “Larry?” Four of them? In the middle of the night? Or maybe it wasn’t the middle of the night anymore. She gripped the arm of the sofa to drag herself stiffly to her feet. “What time is it, anyway?”
“Station time is 1157 hours.”
Almost noon. She’d been asleep longer than she thought. “All right, let them in.” At least the tlict were unlikely to care about her rumpled clothing and disordered hair. Still, she finger-combed what hair she could away from her face while quietly closing the lounge door behind her.
The staccato chatter of alien feet on metal decking greeted Rahel when she reached the end of the corridor. The four tlict tick-tacked around the main compartment, skirting the fetid shipping crate, stooping to groom each other’s belly fur, and randomly scratching themselves with their tiny lower arms as if unable to catch a persistent flea. Walking far enough into the chamber to catch at least one Larry’s attention, Rahel clapped a hand over her mouth to hide a jaw-stretching yawn.
“Good morning.” Then, remembering the ship’s time quote, she amended, “Good afternoon,” and tried not to yawn again.
The tlict froze, spiders mesmerized by a pluck on their communal silk. From just inside the airlock, the smallest—a rusty cream-and-brown as opposed to his companion’s olive green—caressed its own back with its hindmost legs and juggled a translator into position.
“Good breathing,” the translator’s passionless voice proclaimed. A background buzz, like distant voices muttering, blurred the otherwise stilted diction. “Wise air. Good breathing.”
Rahel nodded. “Right.” It was too early in the morning to sort out tlict syntax. “Are you—” She gathered all the aliens up in a single gesture. “Is one of you the Larry I met earlier this morning?”
Two of the other tlict tiptoed over to join the translator, and the ambient mumbling faded. “Larry-this. Not-visit. No. No.” A touch from one Larry’s upper manipulator arms brought the third tlict over, as well. “Larry-that. Gertrude breathing. Larry-that. Not-current. Larry-this. Not-tlict you retrieve. Yes. Yes.”
Rahel pulled back a careful step. “Retrieve?” She wasn’t sure she liked the sound of that.
“Yes. Yes.” How many of them were supplying the answers, she wondered? How many could hear and understand what she was saying? “Gertrude tastes this,” one or more of the Larries insisted. The translator blatted once with static, then cleared again. “Not-tlict you. Breathing strangeness. Answer. Worry. Answer. Strangeness.” The tlict all knotted together, lower arms striving to interlink. “Answer. Gertrude.”
Gertrude. Rahel scrubbed at her face, suddenly climbing toward full wakefulness as she analyzed the partial sentences collecting around her. “Who’s Gertrude? Another Larry?”
Only with an alien could that question come close to making sense.
“No. No.” Three bloated abdomens cringed close to the floor. “Not-Larry. Gertrude. Not-roaming. Gertrude. Not-simple. Gertrude.”
“Gertrude,” Rahel said, her stomach chill with understanding, “is a female.”
“Not-Larry. Yes. Gertrude. Yes.”
A female tlict. The creature the mazhet had said she would never live to see.
“She’s not planning to eat me, is she?” Rahel stuffed her hands into her trouser pockets, finding the snooze pistol still pushed into the folds of fabric. She closed her fist around it protectively. “I mean, I don’t usually visit people who are planning to eat me.”
“Gertrude. Worry. Answer.” The translator tlict pushed back between two of the others. “Not-tlict you. Answer. Not-ingest. Answer.”
She nodded slowly, but didn’t take her hand off the snooze pistol. “In that case, I can probably stop by long enough to talk with her.” Would the mazhet pay for details of the first human-tlict coffee klatch? She’d have to ask when she and Gertrude were done. “Just let me get my boy—”