The Color of Distance

Chapter 4

Juna eased forward and watched, astonished, as the blood flowing from the lizard’s wounds slowed to a trickle and its skin closed over the wound. She glanced at the aliens; they were completely entranced, their spurs stuck into the lizard, and each other. Clearly they were responsible for this almost miraculous healing. How had they done it? The researchers back at the base would be fascinated. Juna wished that she could record what was happening.

Then fear and caution overcame her amazement. She didn’t want to be there when the aliens came out of their trance. She picked up her bags and stick and fled into the forest.

The aliens dropped down out of the trees in front of her a couple of hours later. Juna backed away and stood ready to defend herself with her staff. She wasn’t going to let them keep her from going back to base camp. The aliens moved back also, flushing green and blue. One of them pulled some fruit from its bag, and offered it to her. Juna looked at it for a long moment, her stomach tight with hunger. She took it. She had nothing else to eat, and she was too familiar with starvation to refuse.

When Juna finished the fruit, the aliens picked up their bags and motioned to her to follow them. Juna shook her head, refusing to get up. The lizard attack had shaken her confidence, but she wasn’t going to follow these aliens until she knew what they wanted with her.

The aliens conferred with each other, washes of pattern and color appearing and disappearing on their bodies. They seemed uncertain about what to do next.

Juna picked up a twig, and beckoned to the aliens. Brushing aside the leaf litter, she began to draw in the red dirt. The aliens watched curiously, ears wide, as she drew a stick figure representing herself, and another figure representing an alien.

Several hours later, after a number of drawings and much gesturing back and forth, they reached a tentative agreement. Juna wasn’t sure how much of what she was trying to explain they understood. As best as she could tell, they knew she was trying to get to her people. The aliens recognized the peninsula where the base was located. They would guide her back to base camp, but they had something they needed to do back in their village first.

Juna thought it over. By now, she was fairly sure that these were the same aliens who had found her the first time. If so, they had saved her life again. These two days alone in the forest had made her realize how slim her chances were, traveling alone. A guide back to the base would greatly increase the likelihood of getting there alive. Besides, it would be best if she arrived at camp with some aliens. Despite her exhaustion and hunger, Juna smiled. The A-C specialists would be halfway to hyperspace when they found out they had a real sentient species to study.

Juna got up and, through pantomime, indicated she would follow them back to their village. When they tried to get her to travel through the canopy, Juna refused. It was a tense moment, but the aliens agreed to walk. The knot in her shoulders eased. Winning this tiny concession gave her a sense of control. Perhaps everything would work out after all.

Toward evening, the aliens stopped and built a temporary nest of branches and leaves in the crotch of a tree. Juna helped one of them gather fruit. The other one vanished into the jungle and returned with several small birds dangling around its neck on a cord.

With a glance at the alien for permission, Juna picked up one of the birds. It was small and brown, perhaps twenty centimeters long from beak to tail. There was a showy patch of green iridescence at its throat.

Juna lifted a wing with a forefinger, exposing a brilliant red underwing with a dark eyespot. It must be spectacular when courting, she thought. It wasn’t a species she recognized, but then they had only catalogued a tiny fraction of the species on this planet.

The alien touched her on the shoulder, and she handed it the bird. She felt a pang of regret at not being able to catalogue the bird before it became dinner.

It was growing dark. Her guide fished out a tightly woven basket. Inside was a chunk of wood covered with glow fungus. The alien hung the glowing wood on an overhanging branch. It cast a surprisingly bright light over the nest. The aliens skinned the birds, handing three to Juna. She ate one of the scrawny, raw birds, and then filled up on fruit.

After dinner, one of the aliens grasped Juna’s arm and tried to link with her.

“No!” Juna shouted, backing away and scooping up her bag. She would jump out of the tree and kill herself before she would let them violate her again. The aliens stopped. Glowing blue and green patterns washed across their skin as they beckoned her back into the nest. Juna shook her head. She held her arms out, spurs up, then shook her head, tucking her arms against her sides and flushing bright orange. She repeated the gesture several times. At last the aliens understood. They tucked their arms against their sides also, and huddled on the far side of the nest, ears fanned expectantly.

Cautiously, Juna climbed into the nest. Blue and green paisley patterns moved slowly across the aliens’ bodies as she did so. One of them reached out toward her. She flinched from its touch, but the alien only brushed her shoulder with its knuckles. Juna relaxed a little after that, but kept her arms tucked tightly against her sides, and slept curled in a tight, protective ball, terrified that they would try something while she slept.

A driving tropical rainstorm woke Juna shortly before dawn. It was a long, sodden miserable hike back to the village. It rained hard most of the day. The footing was treacherous. She slipped and fell several times. In the middle of the afternoon, the rain stopped suddenly, as though it had been cut off by a switch.

They reached the village about an hour later, and went directly to the sick alien’s room. The sick one seemed pleased to see them. It reached out to link with her. Juna pulled away, shaking her head. One of the aliens who had brought her back intervened. A long discussion followed. Juna watched, too tired to try to comprehend what was being said. She wanted a hot meal, a bath, and a soft, comfortable bed, in no particular order.

At last the discussion was over. Another cold meal of fruit, honey, greens, and raw meat was served. Juna looked at the cold, raw food, longing for a hot plate of couscous, or a big bowl of her father’s pea soup. Still it was better than tiny bird corpses, and it beat starving. She ate, poured a couple of gourds of tepid water over herself, and burrowed into the warm, rotting mass of leaves that was her bed. She fell asleep immediately.

The next few days were agonizing. Juna endured an endless round of poking and prodding by curious aliens. They fingered her ears and manipulated her hands, holding them palm to palm against their slender four-fingered hands. Patterns flickered rapidly across their skins as they discussed her.

All of them attempted to link with her. Juna’s guide stopped them, but several times Juna had to fend off the insistent aliens herself. The first day of this was interesting, the second day tedious. By the third day, Juna’s patience had reached the breaking point. When an alien tried to examine her, she brushed its hands away, gently but firmly. The aliens persisted. At last, unable to take any more, Juna huddled against the wall, her hands over her ears and her head between her knees. Her skin burned bright orange, and she felt the strange lines of goose bumps rising along her back.

“Leave me alone, leave me alone!” she moaned, tears welling behind her eyelids. It reminded her of her first visit back to her mother’s people, how the village children had poked and prodded at her in her foreign clothes, only this time she didn’t have any relatives to shoo away the curious. She was more alone than she had ever been before.

A gentle hand brushed her shoulder. She brushed it away. When it rested on her shoulder again, Juna looked up angrily, ready to fend off another curious alien. It was her guide. She looked around. The other aliens, except for the sick one, had all left. Her guide led her to a small storeroom near the bottom of the tree. In the room was a pile of empty gourds lying with their lids askew, stacks of dried seaweed, a bundle of hollow reeds, coils of rope, neatly folded nets, empty baskets, and a big mound of dry grass. A beetle scuttled out over her feet as she stepped inside. The alien hung a mat over the door and left her alone.

Juna inspected the wall for insects. She found a section that seemed free of visible crawling creatures, leaned against it, and closed her eyes, savoring the solitude. She longed to wake up and find that this whole experience had been nothing more than an exceptionally vivid nightmare, that she was safe in her bed back at the base. Memories of home washed over her with a sudden poignant intensity. The thick milky light falling on the neat, whitewashed walls of her father’s house. The wide stretch of vineyards curving up and away toward the green fields of the satellite’s artificial sky. The sweet smell of hay in the barns, and the small comforting sounds of the horses in their stalls. All of these returned sharp and clear to her in this alien place, filling her eyes with fresh tears.

Juna shook her head. She needed to think of something else besides how homesick she was, or she would go crazy. To distract herself she imagined the reaction at base camp when she strode out of the jungle, accompanied by a pair of sentient aliens. Kinsey, the Alien Contact specialist, would kiss her feet in gratitude. A-C Specs were probably the most frustrated people in the Survey. They spent their entire careers as supercargo on Survey ships, doing scutwork, writing theoretical papers, and hoping that someday someone would discover an alien race.

Humans had so far discovered only three alien races. Two of those had been long extinct. The third, the Sawakirans, had fled human contact, whole cities vanishing into the wilderness. The few Sawakirans that humans contacted died a few hours later. It was not entirely clear whether the deaths were from fear, sickness, or suicide. The Survey put the Sawakirans’ planet on the proscribed list and left them alone.

Kinsey would cut off his right arm for the chance to be turned green and live in a bug-infested tree with a bunch of smart frogs. All Juna wanted was to go home, take a nice hot bath, eat food that had been cooked first, and talk to people she could understand.

Tears of self-pity welled up. Juna shook her head, angry at herself. Tears wouldn’t change things. It was time for her to stop acting like a frightened child and start acting like a scientist. She had been given an incredible chance to study an alien race. This discovery could make her career; she shouldn’t waste time being homesick.

First she needed to learn to communicate. She reviewed everything she had learned about the aliens’ language. The patterns on their skin seemed to carry information; the colors showed the emotional content of their words. Blues, particularly turquoise, were associated with pleasure, and greens with approval or agreement. Reds and oranges were related to anger and fear. Purple was connected with curiosity and questions.

She could now recognize a few very simple words: yes, no, food, water, their term for her, and some names. “Yes” was a series of three horizontal bars. “No” was three vertical bars. Food was a colored dot or circle inside a green oval. Water was a series of three vertical dots, usually blue or green. Her guide’s name-symbol looked like a connected pair of blue spirals. The alien who had accompanied Juna’s guide in the forest had a name sign resembling a complex triangular looped knot. The sick alien’s name-symbol consisted of three sets of concentric circles, like ripples from a raindrop falling into water. The rest of the aliens’ language was an incomprehensible blur of colored patterns.

“How am I ever going to keep any of this straight?” she wondered aloud to the glowing, bug-infested walls. There was nothing permanent to write on, nothing permanent to write with, and no way to explain what she wanted to the aliens. If only she had her computer. Every Survey-issue computer came with sophisticated linguistic analysis programs hardwired in. But her computer was lost, along with her suit and everything else she had been carrying when she collapsed. It hadn’t been much: a compass, some hard-copy maps, a knife, some rations, a canteen, a standard-issue first aid kit, and, of course, her computer.

Well, she would simply have to do the best she could. The aliens had learned a few of her gestures. Perhaps they could invent a common pidgin that would serve until she got back to base. Then the experts would take over, and she could go back to being the xenobiologist that she was trained to be.

Juna visualized the few alien symbols for which she had meanings, repeating the meanings out loud to engrave them in her mind. When she was too tired to think anymore, she curled up on the dry grass and slept.

The next morning, she went in search of her guide. She had decided to call the alien Spiral until she learned its real name. Spiral was sitting on the edge of the raised platform in the room it shared with the sick alien. It was weaving a large basket. The sick alien was buried in its bed of leaves, asleep or unconscious. A complex pattern flickered across Spiral’s chest when Juna came in. The alien beckoned her closer and gestured to a broad leaf heaped with fruit, meat, and honey. Juna sat and ate, watching Spiral work. The basket it was weaving was over a meter long, and oval, like a large cocoon. The weaving was intricate, full of strange patterns. Juna wondered what it was for.

Spiral had completed several rows of basket work when the sick alien stirred and made a low, creaking noise. Spiral squatted next to its bed. Colors flickered over the aliens’ skins as the,y conversed. Spiral brought over the basket and handed it to the alien. The sick one examined the basket, and turned deep green. It was pleased. Spiral helped the alien out of bed and over to the edge of the platform. It picked up the basket and began working on it.

Spiral picked up several woven grass shoulder bags, handed two of them to Juna, and slung the others over its shoulder. Then it led Juna out of the tree and into the canopy. The alien seemed to have grasped how frightened she was of falling. They moved slowly, Spiral helping Juna across the difficult spots, until they came to a heavily laden fruit tree. As they picked fruit, Spiral began teaching Juna to climb, guiding her foot to a more secure perch or pointing out a hand grip. The alien was a good teacher. After an hour, Juna was moving with more confidence through the tree.

Sometime around noon, rain clouds began building in the skies overhead. Spiral handed her bulging bag of fruit to Juna and left, motioning that she should stay in the tree and wait.

Juna settled herself into a comfortable, secure perch and watched life in the treetops unfold around her. Off in the distance, a bird called over the clamor of the jungle, letting out a long, mournful hoot with a rising note on the end. Back at the base, they called them pooo-eet birds, after the sound of their call. Closer by, a troop of squirrel-sized lizards glided from branch to branch. Long loose flaps of skin between their front and back legs billowed out like sails. The lizards hung from the branches by their tails, eating plump purple fruit, red juice staining their lips. As Juna watched, a baby lizard’s head poked out of its mother’s pouch. It nibbled at the bottom of the fruit while its mother ate the top, pausing occasionally to peer wide-eyed at the world around it.

These lizards were marsupials, like the large grazing reptiles the Survey team had found on the great central savanna on the other side of the mountains. These were the first marsupial lizards recorded in the jungle. She wondered if they followed the same reproductive pattern as the savanna reptiles. Juna’s fingers flexed. If she had her computer, she could record their picture for the Survey. Nine months wasn’t long enough to sample more than a tiny fraction of the species on this planet. With so little time, each new species was important.

A large black pooo-eet bird landed heavily in the tree, causing the lizards to scatter and regroup on another branch, scolding the bird with high-pitched, liquid notes. The bird pulled branches toward it with the claws on the bend of its wing, and fed greedily on the plum-sized fruit. The bird tossed a fruit into the air and caught it in its enormous red beak. Juna laughed at the bird’s antics. It eyed her suspiciously, then dropped from the branch, spread its broad, stubby wings and flew heavily oH into the next tree. It preened itself, then shuffled its wings into place and began letting out mournful pooo-eet calls. This close, the bird’s calls were painfully loud. Juna hefted an overripe fruit, preparing to throw it at the bird and scare it off.

The calling ended with a sudden squawk as the bird went limp and began to fall. Spiral leaped from a nearby tree and caught the bird as it fell, then grabbed a passing branch and swung up onto it. The alien pulled a long, down-tipped dart out of the bird and held it up triumphantly. Then Spiral swung back up to the tree from which it had shot the bird, and retrieved a reed blowgun about a meter long. It gave the blowgun a quick twist, and the long tube collapsed into itself, making a package about as long as Spiral’s hand. The alien stuffed the bird and blowpipe into a bulging bag, and swung easily through the trees [[fo]] where Juna was [[smmg-]] Then it pulled the bird and several limp lizards from its satchel, fuming them to Juna. Spiral turned a brilliant blue and the symbol for inod appeared on its chest.

[[Tfs fpod ]]food?” Juna asked, nodding to show that she understood. A cool, moist gust of wind shook the treetops, and a few loose drops of rain spattered them. The alien stuffed its prey back into its satchel, and beckoned Juna to follow. There was a great crack of thunder, a brilliant flash of lightning, and then the rain began. It fell as though poured from buckets, pounding against the green canopy with a sound like falling gravel. A stiff wind made the trees sway sickeningly, sending a shower of leaves and debris to the forest floor. To Juna’s immense relief, they climbed down to the ground and walked back to the village instead of crossing through the wet, storm-tossed branches of the canopy. It was a cold, weary trek. Juna was shivering when they reached the village.

Sheets of water cascaded down the inside of the village tree, splashing into the pool at the base of the trunk. Villagers filled water gourds or played, leaping about under the sudden waterfalls, splashing and calling to each other.

Ripple, as Juna had decided to call the sick alien, was seated at the door to their room, watching the other villagers enjoy the rain. Much to Juna’s relief, the sick one’s room was dry and warm. She sat in a miserable shivering huddle, longing for dry clothes and the warmth of a fire. Ripple came up to her, purple with curiosity. The alien felt her skin, then beckoned her to one of the piles of leaves that served as beds. Scooping a hollow in the pile, it gestured that she should lie down. When she did so, Ripple heaped leaves around her. The mound of damp leaves, heated by its own decay, was more warm and comforting than Juna would have believed possible, though she still would have preferred a nice hot fire. She remembered her mother’s village, sitting in a circle of aunts, grandmothers, and cousins around an open hearth, warmed by good food, the tight web of kinship, and the fire itself. Her shivering stopped, and comforted by that distant memory of belonging, she fell into a light doze.

A touch on her shoulder awakened Juna. It was Spiral. Ripple and several other aliens sat on the edge of the raised ledge. Mounds of meat, fruit, greens, and honeycomb were laid out on leaves. They were waiting for her to join them. Juna got up, picking bits of decayed leaves off her damp skin. Spiral handed her a water gourd, and she washed herself off before sitting down to eat.

There was enough food for fifteen people or more, instead of the six or seven aliens in attendance. Meat from Spiral’s recent kill as well as several other kinds of meat, some familiar and some new, had been neatly sliced and arranged in patterns on a large polished shell platter. Three large baskets heaped with fruit, and another leaf piled with dripping honeycomb were set out with the meat. Sheets of leathery-looking dried seaweed, smelling of salt and iodine, two baskets heaped with mixed greens, and a large gourd bowl filled with a starchy brown mush completed the feast.

The sick alien picked up a sheet of the dried seaweed. Reaching into the bowl of mush, it scooped up a gobbet of it and put it on the seaweed, folding it into a neat package. Ripple passed the completed packets to the guests. The guests waited until everyone had one, then began eating.

Juna bit into her package of mush. It was sour and faintly bready, like her mother’s injera, but there was also a sharp cheddar cheese taste, with a hint of iodine and a salty tang like soy sauce. It would, she thought with a sudden surge of homesickness, go well with her father’s Burgundy. She closed her eyes, feeling tears prickle as she remembered her home, with its neat rows of vines filing off into the distance. Would she ever see it again?

She opened her eyes. The aliens were looking at her, purple with curiosity. She blinked back tears and took another bite, concentrating only on the taste. It was delicious. She flushed turquoise, and nodded to show the aliens how good she thought it was. They relaxed, and began talking among themselves, handing her other foods to try.

Juna finished first. She was full, but the aliens kept pushing more food on her. They continued to gorge until their flat bellies bulged. Instead of water, they washed their food down with large gourds of sweet fruit juice. They chewed on great chunks of honeycomb, spitting out the chewed and sucked comb. Brilliantly colored bees settled on the chewed combs and began eating the wax.

At last the aliens were full. They leaned back, stroking their distended bellies, letting out a chorus of loud rumbling belches that sounded almost human. Juna laughed. The aliens looked at her, ears raised in curiosity.

Embarrassed, Juna blushed brown. Blue and green ripples burst across the aliens’ skin and they belched again. Juna’s embarrassment deepened, and there were more ripples from the aliens. Spiral touched her arm, and turned a dark blue. A pattern rippled across Spiral’s chest. The other aliens’ ripples died away. One by one, they touched Juna’s arm, in apparent apology. Juna nodded at Spiral, and then belched. The aliens rippled again, and Juna laughed with them.

After that, the aliens relaxed, flashing symbols among themselves and occasionally to her, though she couldn’t understand them. She decided to try communicating with them in their own language. Picking up one of the large leaves that they had used as dinner plates, she reached up and rubbed her finger across the ceiling to pick up some of the glowing blue fungus on her finger. Then she smeared three lines of the glowing blue substance across the leaf. The seated aliens watched her as she touched Spiral on the arm. Holding the leaf so that the lines were horizontal, she nodded, then turned the leaf so that the lines were vertical, and shook her head. She repeated this several times, then Spiral nodded, and flashed an explanation to the other aliens. Their ears went up, and they looked at her, deeply purple. They began talking among themselves in shades of pink and purple.

Juna watched and waited. She had created a stir among the aliens. One of them flushed purple and held out a fruit, its ears raised inquisitively. Juna turned her leaf so that the lines were vertical and shook her head, refusing the fruit. A blue and green ripple of amusement passed across the aliens.

Another alien offered her a gourd of water. She turned the leaf so that the lines were horizontal, and drank a few sips. She offered the gourd to another alien. The horizontal bars of agreement appeared on its chest. She handed it the gourd. The alien took the gourd from her and drank.

Her attempts at communication became a game. The aliens offered her things, and she would accept or refuse them. Juna learned the symbols for several kinds of food, the symbol for basket, and what was probably a verb for show or offer, or perhaps try. She wrote approximations of these symbols on leaves with the glowing blue fungus, much to the amusement of the aliens.

Then a complex pattern appeared on Ripple’s chest, and the alien held out its wrists, bright red spurs pointing upward. Juna panicked for a moment, thinking that it was asking her to join spurs, but it ignored her, looking instead at the other aliens. It was asking something of them. The aliens turned a soft, misty grey. One by one horizontal bars flickered across their chests as they agreed.

Spiral touched Juna lightly on the shoulder, and pointed to Juna’s bed of leaves. It indicated that she should lie down and sleep. Then it left her and joined the other aliens. The game was over; she had been dismissed. Juna watched as the aliens linked arms in a large circle, and abandoned themselves to their strange communion. It reminded her of the two aliens healing the lizard in the forest, only there was a ritual solemnity to it.

Juna yawned. The huge meal on top of a long, stressful day had made her sleepy. She burrowed deeper into the warm, moist pile of leaves and slid down into sleep.

The next morning Spiral nudged Juna awake, beckoning for her to follow. Juna followed the alien down the inside of the trunk to the pool at the tree’s base. Spiral dove in. Juna, eager to rid her skin of the rotting leaves from her bed, plunged in too. The tepid water felt wonderful. Curious, she dove for the bottom. The pool was surprisingly deep, at least three and a half or four meters. The bottom was soft mud. Something wriggled under her questing fingers. Startled, Juna shot toward the surface, emerging with a splash that drew curious stares from the aliens seated around the pool. She swam to the edge of the pool and sat on a low ledge.

Spiral emerged a few moments later, carrying a fat, wriggling burden. Juna thought it was a fish. When Spiral handed it to her she realized that it was an enormous tadpole. It was the size of a large house cat, mud-brown, with an oily, iridescent sheen. Its tail was horizontally flattened like a dolphin’s and its eyes were large and golden, with vertical catlike irises. The hind legs were strong and well-developed. Beneath the translucent skin, the small dark lump of its heart pulsed slowly and steadily behind its gills. It was soft, slippery, and cool, like the mud at the bottom of a lake.

Juna wondered what species it was, and how closely related it was to the aliens. She wished again for her computer, so that she could catalogue the tadpole. So much knowledge was slipping through her fingers without it.

The tadpole wriggled wildly, slipped out of her grasp, and fell back into the pool with a soft plop. Spiral shot after it, caught it with both hands, and stuck a wrist spur into it. It ceased wriggling and lay motionless. Spiral handed it to Juna, and dove into the depths of the pool.

A small, dark green alien climbed down to the edge of the pool, carrying a bulging satchel. Juna watched curiously. There were at least a couple dozen of these smaller aliens in the village. They were darker in color and lacked the red stripes that ran along the back of the others. Juna had never seen them change color. The larger aliens ignored them. They moved quietly in the background, cleaning up, helping prepare meals, and carrying things. They puzzled Juna. If they were juveniles, where were their parents? If they weren’t juveniles, what were they? A related, less intelligent species? A neuter form, like worker bees?

The small alien pulled handfuls of food scraps out of its satchel, tossing them into the pool. The calm surface churned and boiled as hungry tadpoles gobbled the food scraps. They devoured it all—meat, fruit, vegetables, even the huge, tough leaves that the aliens used as plates. Juna opened the mouth of the limp tadpole in her lap, revealing sharp, predatory-looking teeth in front, and flat, powerful molars in back. They certainly had the dental equipment to eat almost anything.

There was a sudden surge in the water as Spiral caught a feeding tadpole. The alien stung it with a wrist spur and flung it toward Juna. Spiral watched her until she had hold of it, then dove again, emerging with another tadpole in its grasp. It caught nearly a dozen tadpoles, then climbed out and began butchering them with a wooden knife. The alien flung the offal into the pool, where it was eaten as soon as it hit the water. Juna was shocked that the aliens would eat tadpoles, then reminded herself that some humans ate monkey meat. The tadpoles must be some sort of related species. Perhaps the worker species was trading some of its voung for the protection afforded by the aliens. She shook her head; it was a nice theory, but it didn’t feel right to her. Clearly she was missing some important piece of the puzzle.

When the tadpoles were reduced to bite-sized pieces, the alien wrapped the meat in a large green leaf and carried it back to their room. Then they went out into the canopy. Juna spent the morning gathering fruit, while Spiral hunted. They returned with heavy, bulging bags full of game and fruit.

Back in the room, preparations were underway for a feast of epic proportions. There were large leaf-lined baskets full of meat and fruit, and leafy platters piled high with honeycombs. Even Ripple was busy helping out. Its color looked better today, and it no longer seemed as weak. Perhaps the circle last night had something to do with it. Could the other aliens have been healing it? Were they celebrating the alien’s recovery?

Juna was set to work helping the dark green workers fill baskets with food and carry them up to the top of the tree, where some of the elders oversaw the food’s arrangement. There was an air of subdued excitement, and much bustling about as they chittered loudly and flickered to each other.

Juna was sitting in the crotch of the tree arranging a platter of food, when she heard a scream. She looked up. In the next tree, the largest snake she had ever seen was coiled around a worker. The alien’s legs quivered and gave an occasional reflexive twitch, but already its head had disappeared inside the serpent’s huge maw. The worker’s skin turned silvery white as Juna watched. The other workers had scattered. They huddled in frightened groups, watching the snake consume its prey. Several of the larger aliens glanced up and then continued with what they were doing.

Juna clung to the branch, watching the worker disappear down the throat of the snake. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The death of this alien apparently meant no more than the death of a mouse or a bird to the rest of the village. Juna looked away as the snake, with the feet of its prey still protruding from its mouth, slithered off. Juna left the half-finished platter for someone else to arrange, and walked to the end of a branch. She was sickened by what she had seen.

She stared off into the jungle. Why had none of the others tried to save the alien? Clearly they couldn’t be juvenile forms of the aliens; she couldn’t imagine any intelligent species allowing its children to die without lifting a hand to save them. The aliens seemed to regard the workers as expendable. So much for her protection theory. So what was really going on here? She looked at the now-empty branch where the snake had been, and shuddered. It had been a horrible death, made more horrible by the fact that no one had lifted a hand to help the little alien.

A great, hollow booming resonated throughout the tree, interrupting Juna’s thoughts. The feast was about to start. Looking down, she saw several aliens pounding hard on the huge buttresses of the tree with large sticks. Clouds of bees streamed out of the tree like iridescent smoke.

After the bees dispersed, a group of aliens climbed out of the tree’s great hollow. They wore garlands of flowers or necklaces of shells, teeth, or fish scales. Some even* wore necklaces made from the strung-together corpses of tiny dried birds. Others carried sprays of branches. Juna found herself wondering if there was any way she could trade for some of the necklaces, especially the one with the dried birds. It would be a treasure trove of specimens.

The aliens moved with slow solemnity, seating themselves in a large circle around the tree crotch. Then another group of slightly smaller aliens followed them out of the hollow tree, their bodies plain and undecorated. Each one sat behind and slightly to the left of the decorated aliens.

Finally, Spiral and Ripple came out of the tree, seating themselves in the gap made by the others, in a slightly higher and more visible spot. The other villagers turned to look at them as they arrived. The huge, unfinished basket was set before Ripple. Clearly, he was the guest of honor. Spiral beckoned Juna over to sit with them.

If this was a celebration of Ripple’s recovery, it must be an important event. The entire village was present, almost eighty adults, with a dozen or so workers busy serving them. Brilliant patterns flickered over the aliens’ skins—blues, greens, and softer pastels occasionally muted with grey.

Something strange was going on. Ripple wasn’t eating. Spiral seemed withdrawn and remote, picking at its food, despite Ripple’s obvious en-joinders to eat. Though they were guests of honor, neither of them seemed very happy.

After the aliens were sated and the workers had cleared away the remains of the feast, Ripple rose and addressed the assembled villagers. The brilliant, flowing patterns were extremely lovely, even though Juna couldn’t understand any of it.

When Ripple finished speaking, each of the decorated aliens stood up and addressed the gathering, then came forward and laid its decorations in the large basket in front of Ripple. Halfway through the speeches a soft rain began falling. The aliens ignored the rain and went on speaking.

The speeches went on for most of the afternoon. Juna sat there, warm rain drumming on her naked skin, bored out of her skull by the endless, incomprehensible ceremony.

At last every decorated alien had spoken. Ripple rose again, beckoning Spiral to its side. Another speech ensued as Juna sat shivering in the rain. Then Juna was summoned forward and displayed to the assembled audience. When the speech was over, Ripple walked out onto a high branch and jumped off. Juna heard a distant, wet thud as the alien’s body struck the forest floor far below.

Numbed by hours of boredom, Juna stared at the spot where Ripple had stood, unable to believe what she’d just witnessed. She peered down at the distant forest floor. Ripple’s mangled body lay there, a bright splash of red beneath it, its limbs twisted, its head at an impossible angle. Swallowing hard, Juna looked away. Spiral sat hunched and grey beside her. The other aliens sat, watching Spiral expectantly, ignoring Ripple’s fallen body.

After several minutes, Spiral rose and addressed the assembly in somber tones of grey and black. When Spiral was done, the enormous unfinished basket full of decorations was set in a sling and lowered to the ground. The villagers and Juna climbed down and stood around the corpse and the basket. They watched as Spiral cut open the dead alien’s stomach and placed a dark brown, fist-sized lump inside it. Then Spiral gently placed the mangled corpse in the basket, on top of the decorations. The alien covered the corpse with fern leaves, and methodically wove the basket shut.

The other villagers had known that Ripple was going to die. The whole ceremony had been in honor of Ripple’s suicide. Juna sat down heavily on a tree root. First the death of the worker, and now this. She felt suddenly very alone as she realized how deep the gulf between her and the aliens was. Juna felt a sudden, fierce longing for the safe familiarity of home.