I had a feeling our return wouldn’t be so informal.
But we had no sooner left the Transport, Lazz letting me go first, than it was as if someone had flipped off a light switch. I almost tripped and fell flat on my face in surprise and I heard a soft curse behind me as Lazz grabbed my shoulder briefly.
Darkness. Once again, a blackness so complete that I couldn’t describe it. It was a double shock now because the first time I had expected it. But here on the Traveler ship, I had been counting on my electronic eyes and signal-permeable visor. The darkness seemed even more threatening because of the insulating layer of our atmosphere suits. The sound of my breathing seemed unnaturally loud and after my initial moment of panic, I reached behind me for Lazz, getting angry. I’d need his guidance again—just as I had become comfortably independent. For Lazz, this wouldn’t be as much of a shock because he had been blinded in a plane crash twenty years earlier and had only used his invention for the past six months, as the first test case of them. I was the second.
“Relax, Mitch. It’s okay.” Lazz grabbed my arm as I touched him, mistakenly thinking that I was nervous.
“I’m fine, buddy. Just pissed off because I’m suddenly back to lesson one!”
“Just think back to the first few days,” Lazz advised. “Remember the visualizing lessons?”
I did. We had an advantage, he had lectured: we had lived some or most of our lives sighted and had a vast storehouse of visual memories to draw on. If we knew what we were looking at, then the use of other senses, combined with imagination and memory, could fill in the blanks, even removing any imperfections that might exist. If we didn’t know what we faced, we could select an appropriate memory image and work from that, modifying it as we learned more. Feel the texture, hear the sound, breathe in the scent, and use all available clues to build a comfortable image.
I relaxed and started ‘feeling’. I whistled, and from the feedback from the external speaker and microphones, confirmed the size and emptiness of the large cargo bay. And turning up the microphone gain, I could hear our escorts. I concentrated. Slight rustling up ahead and to the left, and also to the right. Two Travelers. No scent clues obviously, other than my own lingering nervous perspiration that was quickly removed by the environmental control of my suit. It helped that the suit was loose around me because of the slightly lower external pressure.
“That’s better.” Lazz must have realized I was thinking clearly. “Now, think about what they look like and make that image clear in your mind. There are two of them—”
“Eleven and one o’clock, I know, but did I mention that I have no idea what they look like? They never sent any pictures or self-description.”
“Oh.” A moments silence, then: “Well, you also collected classic comics, so picture pink Shmoos or anything else ridiculous that you can think of. It’s better than building up scary images. If all else fails, improvise. Hell, I’ve been married to Liza for ten years and I still don’t know what she really looks like. But she’s beautiful to me. From her voice and what I can feel, I picture a lush Marilyn Monroe. I’ve always had a thing for her old movies.”
His advice made sense, and instead of the shadowy and looming predators my imagination had been trying to tickle me with, I saw two of Al Capp’s bowling-pin-shaped beings with tiny little feet and happy grins and big eyes. How the hell could anyone be afraid of them?
“Got your braille-pad handy?” Lazz broke in.
“Yes.” I nodded, feeling briefly stupid. “A good thing I learned this before I was blinded.” Speech recognition, as good as it was, had been vetoed because of fear that an accidental homonym error might confuse things in real-time conversation.
I reached down and pulled up the pad, feeling the locations of the buttons out before I started typing in my question so that the tiny computer could vocalize my question in halting Traveler speech. The six character buttons and space bar of the Braille pad were a hell of a lot easier to handle than a full keyboard, now that I had learned to use it.
We had painstakingly worked out a compromise language based on the audible portion of the Traveler language since they were unable to communicate as we did. It was limited and dependent on a sophisticated parser and on fill-phrases to try to simulate a more normal conversation, and it meant that there were major nuances of their language we were totally missing. For one thing, much of their ‘speech’ consisted of visual and tactile sonic imagery incorporated into their ‘words’. Our eye-sets were simply not sophisticated enough to perceive that degree of complexity. But as basic as our translation program was, it was the best we could do, and I let my fingers do the talking.
“Why are you blocking our ability to ‘see’?” I asked. The speaker on my suit echoed what I was typing with a warbling squeal combined with a rhythmic clicking.
The return squeal was immediate and my helmet speaker responded after a split second with a stiff male voice.
“You are a race of one, and I invited one. You are two. What other violations?”
“Okay, you said you could explain,” Liza’s voice cut in with a burst of static. “Now’s your chance. Do it.” Apparently she was still able to monitor us.
“Yea, go to it,” Lazz chuckled nervously. “What a marvelous way to start first contact!” I heard him swallow. “I’m starting to regret crashing this party. And… ah… shouldn’t we be answering them?”
I had actually been prepared for a negative reaction, and I reached down for the keyboard again as my idea focused.
“There are no violations. Only balance. The second one is here because I am not fully trained in your type of seeing yet. There are two of you, there are two of us. If I was alone, there would be no balance and I would be at a disadvantage instead of you. I let myself be injured to assure balance. My teacher must remain to preserve it. I will allow the imbalance of two of your crew who are able to see better than I am. But as long as you block all of our vision, there is no balance. You asked to speak to us. I say restore our vision or we leave.”
“Hot damn, kick ass,” Lazz muttered next to me.
“Well, they do say that the best defense is a good offense. I hope they’re right! Whoever ‘they’ are. But I do know that the Travelers want me here for some reason.”
I wasn’t sure exactly what had come out of the speaker, but the darkness around us vanished and I reeled as I was suddenly surrounded by the eerie three-dimensional vision my new eyes gave me. It felt strange since the signal I was now using came from external transmitters and receivers installed on the suit, and it was is if my eyes were a couple of inches ahead of me and unable to look anywhere but straight ahead.
“They do look like Shmoos!” Lazz exclaimed, trying not to laugh. “Sort of.”
It took me a second to focus on our hosts, but I had to agree with him and face the fact that I had lost my mental bet. Based on the preponderance of triangles, I had expected some kind of three-legged critter like in a couple of classic science fiction books, but Lazz’s “Shmoo” joke had a certain accuracy to it.
The Travelers were only around two-thirds our height and had very stable-looking and bulbous lower bodies with six thin, stubby legs with broad flat feet that had multiple fringed toes. The apparently naked body narrowed about halfway up and the long neck extended up to a top crowned with a bush of short cilia-like hairs. I could ‘see’ no mouth or eyes, no matter how hard I focused my vision, but there seemed to be a large round organ in the center of the body that gave me the same sick headache from looking at it that I got from facing Lazz when he was looking at me. I really couldn’t make out a great deal of detail, though. When I described what I was seeing to Lazz, he couldn’t add much. I guess he was right about us facing a pair of multipedic alien Shmoos. Except that they had a single folding arm that extended up from the lower front of the body, tipped with tentacle-like ‘fingers’. I wondered if the Travelers were pink.