The Color of Distance

Chapter 8

Juna watched Spiral and the new alien discuss her, wishing that she could understand what they were saying. Her name sign was the only recognizable word in the complex blur of skin-speech patterns. Juna shook her head. She was too tired to even try to follow what they were saying. She gave up and went to sleep.

The next day Spiral told her they would remain here for a while. Whether that meant an hour, a day, or a week wasn’t clear. When Juna protested, Spiral merely turned over and went back to sleep. The new alien, whom she had dubbed Lizard since its name sign resembled a stylized lizard, stopped her attempts to waken Spiral.

When it was clear that further protests would get her nowhere, Juna sat with her computer, working on the aliens’ language. After about an hour the low power warning came on. Juna sighed. Oliver’s computer was wadded up in her pack. She pulled it out and told it to get ready to receive data. When it extruded the proper ports and cables, she linked the two computers and backed up her files. Then she put her own computer in one of the mesh gathering sacks, and climbed to the top of the tree, where she tied the computer securely to a sunny branch and left it to recharge.

When she got back to the nest, Lizard was examining Oliver’s computer. Spiral was still sleeping soundly. Lizard handed the machine back to her, then pointed up at her recharging computer. “Something something not good,” it told her in skin speech.

Juna shook her head. She didn’t understand. Was the alien talking about the computer, or something else entirely? Had she done something to cause offense? Were they bothered by her computer? A surge of fear passed through her. She hoped not. It was essential. Without it, she had no way of communicating with the aliens. Still, Lizard didn’t seem troubled by the computer he’d examined. She shrugged. If it was important, :t would come up again.

So who, or what, was Lizard? It was larger than any alien that she had seen thus far. Was that due to age, nutrition, gender, class, or racial differences? Spiral seemed respectful, even deferential to the other alien. Spiral’s colors were subdued, and it spoke to Lizard in complex patterns. The computer indicated a possible correlation between levels of formality and the complexity of the patterns used. It certainly seemed logical.

Why was Lizard coddling Spiral? Was Spiral sick, or was this a mating ritual? What did it know about her people? When would they start traveling again? Each passing day made it more likely that she would be marooned here.

Lizard touched her on the shoulder, interrupting her reverie. It nudged the computer and pointed to her, ears wide, purple with curiosity. Juna picked up the computer and pulled it out into a wide flat surface, then instructed it to assume a large-display format. It smoothed out into a rectangle and went rigid. Lizard ducked its chin, flickers of magenta surprise crossing its skin. Juna smiled at the alien’s reaction.

Leaning the computer against the side of the nest so that Lizard could see it, Juna called up the visual linguistic program she had been working with earlier.

“Computer,” she told it, “display symbol for food.”

The aliens’ word for food appeared on the screen. Lizard turned completely pink. It looked at her and back at the computer in amazement. The symbol for food appeared on its chest, and it picked up a piece of fruit and put it in front of the computer. Juna picked the fruit up.

“Computer, display gratitude symbol and affirmative symbol.”

They soon ran through all of the words Juna knew, and then she began questioning Lizard about the immense collection of unknown words that she had recorded.

They worked all day, with a break for lunch when Spiral woke. Then they continued on into the evening. It was very exciting and productive. Lizard tripled Juna’s stock of known words. The alien was much more attentive and patient than Spiral. Perhaps it was less bored with her.

Lizard woke Spiral for another meal around sunset. Juna, still tired from the exertion of the trip, fell asleep after dinner, her head swimming with alien words.

To Juna’s immense relief, they started traveling again the next day. Lizard assumed leadership of the group, determining their direction and pace. Although they started earlier in the morning, they stopped more often to rest.

They moved through an endless green gloom. Every day the sun rose, dispelling the heavy nighttime fog. The thick canopy filtered the few hours of morning sunlight into a dim greenish glow. Rain clouds began gathering around noon. Every afternoon it rained for a couple of hours.

Juna had no idea how far they traveled. Even with her compass, the jungle seemed directionless. The days were all alike. Without her computer she would have lost all track of time. How many more days before they got to base camp? Would she be too late?

Lizard paused often to teach her a new word or show her a new plant or animal. Her computer, wrapped around her neck to keep her hands free for climbing, recorded everything. Her stock of words grew. Soon she could understand most words pertaining to basic survival and could identify many concrete objects, especially if they were not alive. The aliens spoke slowly and clearly to her, but conversations between Lizard and Spiral were still impossible to follow.

The computer was also constructing a phonetic analogue to the aliens’ patterns. Having verbal keys for the aliens’ words made it much easier to learn to think in their language. She now had names for people and things that had some connection with the aliens’ visual language. Spiral became Anito, Lizard became Ukatonen, and Knot and Ripple became Ninto and Ilto. Ukatonen’s name for her was Eerin, which meant “stone speaker.” It was a reference to her computer, which the aliens thought of as a stone.

Her attempts to make her skin form meaningful patterns remained fruitless. By controlling her emotions, she could change her skin color, but she still could not make her skin produce patterns. The best she could do was make a cloudy dark blob appear on her chest.

One night about ten days after Ukatonen had joined them, the alien touched Juna’s arm, indicating that it had something to say to her. Juna looked at it and nodded.

“You speak with skin?” Ukatonen asked her, touching her on the chest.

Juna concentrated and made a dark blob appear on her chest, then shook her head no.

“You want speak?” it asked.

Juna nodded yes.

“You want speak, I teach,” it said.

Juna nodded again, suddenly hopeful. It would be wonderful to be able to converse freely, without the clumsy interface of the computer.

The alien held out its arms, red spurs upward. “You want speak, you must allu-a.” The computer had no analogue for what the alien wanted, but Juna knew immediately what it meant. She shook her head, flushing bright orange, and backing away, to emphasize the depth of her refusal. Her stomach was heavy with disappointment.

“Why fear?” it asked her. “No hurt. You learn speak with us.”

Juna shook her head, unable to explain her fear of allu-a.

Anito touched Ukatonen’s arm, and began talking to the other alien, explaining something about Juna’s unwillingness to link spurs with them.

Juna stretched the computer out into a display screen. The aliens broke off their discussion and watched as the computer became a smooth, rigid rectangle alive with color. Juna touched the aliens’ arms as a signal that she wanted to speak.

“Translate,” she told the computer. She selected the word allu-a, and tied it to the word link. “I link before. Was bad. I fear link,” she said.

Ukatonen looked at Anito, its ears raised in a question. Anito said something in reply. Juna recognized the word for “link” joined with the odd little hook that indicated past tense, and the name signs for herself, Ninto, and Ilto, and guessed that Anito was telling Ukatonen about that first link.

“Why link bad?” the computer translated for Ukatonen.

“Not want link. Cannot leave link,” Juna said, frustrated by the limited vocabulary available to her.

Ukatonen looked back at Anito. Anito explained something to Ukatonen. Yellow irritation flickered down Ukatonen’s back.

“You link with me, it not bad. You can leave. I show you how. You learn speak. Link good. Learn fast. You not need stone-speaker,” Ukatonen said, pointing its chin at her computer. “You t’al me.” The symbol for t’al resembled a stylized braid. It was a word that she had a phonetic for, but no definition.

“What means t’al?” Juna asked.

“You leave village alone. Ninto, me find you. You t’al us. You come back to village with us,” Anito explained. “Your people want find you. I say we go. You t’al us. We go your people now. You link with us. You t’al us.”

Juna untangled the meaning from the semi-translated hash the computer made of their words. T’al either meant believe or trust. She entered the possible meaning into the computer for it to cross-check against other recorded occurrences of the word. The response was “Possible. Not enough data to confirm.”

She had trusted the aliens when they said they would take her back to her people, and now Anito was taking her there. She had gone back to the village with Anito and Ninto. She had trusted Anito enough to go with the alien alone in search of her people.

Juna rubbed her forehead. If t’al meant what she thought it did, Uka-tonen was asking her to trust it while it rummaged around inside her and changed things. It was asking a lot, especially if she was only a few days from base camp.

“No,” Juna replied. “My people find me soon. Not need learn speak you.”

A ripple of olive disappointment washed over Ukatonen’s skin. The alien’s ears drooped. Its expression was comical, but Juna was too tired to manage much more than-a weak smile.

“You want link, ask me,” Ukatonen offered.

Juna nodded, and crumpled the computer into a small ball. She’d done all she could. Her brain was worn out from trying to understand and communicate with the aliens. She was exhausted by the physical demands of the trip. Once she got back, she’d turn the aliens over to Kinsey and go back to being a biologist. That is, if the Survey’s doctors could make her look human again. Juna’s throat closed tight with fear for a moment at the possibility that she would look like an alien for the rest of her life. Then she shut her mind firmly against contemplating that possibility.

Three days later, the forest ended abruptly at a set of rocky cliffs overlooking the sea. In some places the jungle actually hung out over the cliffs in a tangle of branches and long streamers of dangling roots and vines. Juna smiled, remembering how they had winched her down a cliff in a sling seat so that she could collect samples of canopy biota. She had been terrified the whole time. If she had known then what she’d have to face… She shook her head, an ironic smile on her face.

They followed the wide arc of the coastline north. On the second day, she began recognizing landmarks she had seen from the flyer. Anticipation alternated with fear. Would the Survey team even recognize her? What if they didn’t?

The sun was low on the horizon when Juna spotted the gleaming silver radio beacon. She climbed down to the ground and ran toward it, stumbling heedlessly over sharp rocks and rotting branches, calling out as she ran. She burst out of the jungle and stopped. Where the camp had stood there was now only a wide plain of baked soil and black ash. It was all that was left after decontamination procedures. Only the gleaming radio tower remained, marking the spot for future expeditions. Base camp was gone. The Survey had left.

Juna knelt to examine the soil of the burnt-over area. The rains had washed the ash into gullies and depressions. She shook her head: That ash contained most of the nutrients needed to sustain a rain forest, and it was washing away. Near the edge of the forest, where the soil wasn’t baked hard, plants were sprouting to cover the area, some of them well established. She estimated that the ship had been gone for at least three weeks. Was the mother ship gone as well? Had the Kotani Mara made the jump to hyperspace? Could they still come back for her? Juna walked across the burnt-over clearing, mind carefully held blank. She didn’t know yet. She wouldn’t know until the Kotani Mara failed to return her distress call.

Juna’s hands shook as she plugged the computer into the radio beacon and transmitted her identification code and a distress call.

There was no reply. She checked the connections, made sure there was enough charge in the radio’s massive solar-powered batteries to punch her message out into space. Everything was working, her transmission was going out. She told the computer to repeat the transmission over and over until it received a reply, and settled back to wait. If the ship had left orbit, it might take hours for her message to reach them, and then more hours for her to hear the ship’s reply.

She looked around. Except for the radio tower, there was no sign that humans had lived here. Ukatonen and Anito wandered over the burnt ground, their legs covered with blackened soot, their skins grey with un-happiness. Had the Kotani Mara vanished into hyperspace? Was she condemned to wait twenty or thirty years before the nearest human outpost heard her distant pleas for help?

Juna set her jaw. She looked out over the surging ocean toward the horizon. The setting sun turned the sea pale gold. She would not despair until dawn, she decided. If she didn’t hear from the Kotani by the time the sun came up tomorrow, then the ship was gone.

Her left foot throbbed. She had cut it on something in her hurry to reach base camp. She should have been more careful. Even a minor injury could be serious if she was marooned here. Tears welled up in her eyes. She mustn’t give up hope. She had until tomorrow.

Juna leaned against the base of the tower, thinking of as little as possible. Anito came up and examined her injured foot. Yellow streaks of irritation exploded on the alien’s chest like miniature lightning bolts.

“You bad foot,” it said. “Not good. Get sick.” It squirted a clear, sticky substance from its spurs, and rubbed it into the cut on Juna’s foot. The throbbing faded.

“Where your people?” the alien asked her.

Juna shook her head, fighting back her fear.

“Gone?” it asked next.

Juna shrugged. She didn’t know how to explain what she was waiting for. Radio and starships were beyond the scope of these aliens’ lives. Juna pointed at the setting sun, and then moved her arm in an arc until she pointed at the eastern horizon; then she pointed at herself and patted the ground. She would stay here until dawn. Anito thrust its head forward as it tried to figure out what Juna was trying to say, then nodded to show that it understood.

“You stay here. I get food.”

Juna nodded and sat back against the base of the tower, waiting. She called up her report and” reviewed it, trying to keep her mind busy with details so she wouldn’t think past dawn. She barely noticed Anito’s return. She was too anxious to eat more than a couple of bites of fruit.

It was several hours past sunset when the speaker on the radio tower crackled to life.

“This is the Survey exploration vessel Kotani Manx calling Dr. Juna Saari. We are currently 13.5 A.U. from your planet. Our estimated transmission lag time is one hour, fifty-two minutes. Our time remaining before hyperspace transition is two and a half days. We are unable to return to pick you up, but we will report you as marooned to the Survey.” There was a brief pause. “I-I’m sorry Juna. We’ll push them as hard as we can for you. This message will repeat.”

The sound of another human voice jolted Juna out of the light doze she had fallen into. She listened, her heart soaring. She wasn’t lost after all. She had gotten here in time. Then the meaning of the message sank in, and her heart dove. She was trapped here, in this alien skin, alone with these slimy aliens. The message began repeating, driving the realization home with mechanical relentlessness.

“Damn!” she shouted, striking the tower with her fist. It gave out a dull metallic gong. “Damn,” she said again more quietly, rubbing her bruised hand. She reached over and cut off another repetition of the message, fighting back tears as she spoke the command.

She sat for a moment, getting herself under control. Then when she was ready, she reactivated the computer, this time to record a message.

“Kotani Maru, this is Dr. Juna Saari. I am in good health, although somewhat changed.” That, she thought, was an understatement. “My prospects for survival are excellent, even without my suit. Tell Kinsey that I’ve got some intelligent aliens for him. A full report follows. Computer, transmit message and append report.”

She sat back while the computer transmitted the verbal and visual report she had prepared for the Survey, and contemplated her situation. She was stuck here for several years at least. But her discovery of the aliens would give top priority to a return mission.

Still, it would take the Kotani eight months to get back to Earth. Then, once the news got out, there would be an incredible academic turf battle as every A-C specialist on the planet vied for a spot on the return expedition. A ship would have to be yanked from its schedule, prompting another squabble. Add in the time necessary to outfit the expedition and brief the crew, and then the months it would take for the ship to actually get here. It would be years.

Juna shook her head. Years without simple human contact and the sound of human voices. Years alone. She finally let her stinging tears flow.

The next transmission woke Juna. It was Kinsey, the ship’s Alien Contact specialist, full of questions, most of which she couldn’t answer, and useless orders on how to deal with the aliens, most of which she had already violated. Juna sighed, wishing Kinsey weren’t such a by-the-book idiot. But then, anyone with a lick of sense stayed out of a discipline with so little future. Perhaps when he read her report, he would understand how helpless she was down here.

After Kinsey was through, Takayuki Tatsumi, the head of the life sciences team, began questioning her.

“What does it feel like down there? What does it smell like?” Tatsumi wanted to know.

She could feel Tatsumi’s longing to be on the planet, able to wander around without a suit, able to touch, smell, and taste things. She was living the dream of every Survey tech.

Juna wanted to shout at the radio, to tell them it wasn’t worth the isolation, the loneliness, the discomfort. Their envy made her angry, and worse, it made her feel ashamed. Hadn’t she wanted this too? To shed her bulky, uncomfortable suit and be able to touch and smell an alien world? Dreaming about such things while sitting comfortably around a table in the lounge was cruelly different from the reality of her situation.

“It smells like a jungle,” Juna told him, “hot and wet and full of things rotting.” She paused, trying to control her bitterness. They were hungry, as she had been, to experience another world. It was why they were all here, in the Survey, instead of at home, surrounded by friends and family. She described the smells and tastes of the food she had eaten, both good and bad. She was longing for a hot meal, as much as the Survey team was longing to taste alien food.

Juna cued the computer to continue. There were more questions, all variants of “What does this smell/taste/feel like?” She answered them as well as she could. She clung to their human voices. Soon she would be the only human for hundreds of light-years. She wanted to savor every moment of human contact left to her, even when their questions were stupid or impossible to answer.

At last the questions came to a close. Personal messages would follow. She paused the computer, and drank deeply from her water gourd. All of this talking was a strain on her voice. She had become used to the aliens’ silence, and spoke only rarely.

She corked the water gourd, and told the computer to continue.

“Juna, this is Ali.” The sound of Ali’s deep voice, with its lilting accent, brought fresh tears prickling at the back of her eyelids. She paused the message, suddenly overwhelmed by memories of Ali’s ebony skin, the feel of the tribal cicatrices on his chest, the sharp, warm smell of him. She wanted to curl up in his arms and cry for a week. Glancing down, she discovered to her surprise that her skin had turned a rich, metallic shade of gold. She cued the message to continue. “… I saw the pictures of what’s happened to you, and I’m sorry. You were so beautiful. I’ll miss you.”

Ali continued on, telling her how much he would miss her lovely body, and filling her in on what he had been doing after she disappeared. Juna sat, the words flowing over her in a meaningless murmur of sound. He was saying goodbye. His words burned deeper than her tears. Even though this relationship was only a shipboard convenience, she had expected a little more from him than this self-centered farewell. It hurt more than she would have expected. She looked down at her transformed body. No wonder he was pulling away. No one would want her, not when she looked like this.

Ali’s words left her too drained to listen to the other messages. She dictated a brief request for hypertexts on tropical rain forest biomes, jungle survival, and a variety of anthropological and linguistic works, as well as a complete Survey inventory of the rain forest biome. Then she curled up at the base of the tower and fell asleep.

Dawn brought more messages, from friends and co-workers, and a steady transmission stream of hypertext books on the data line.

There was a note from Alison, her closest friend on the ship. Alison was in her seventies, and was retiring after this trip. Juna would miss her.

“You seem so changed that I fear for you,” Alison told her. “I know that the next few years are going to be very hard for you, all alone amongst aliens. Be strong, and remember that there are people who love you back home.

“I’ll drop in on your father as soon as I can and make sure that he’s all right. When you get back to Earth, come and visit. Tell me stories of the forest and the aliens.”

Juna felt a surge of gratitude well up in her. Juna had brought Alison home on leave a few years back. Alison and her father had had an affair, and still remained close. Juna suspected that Alison was keeping an eye on her for her father. She was glad that Alison would be there for him while she was away.

Padraig, who carried on a continual flirtation with all of the women, and most of the men, regardless of age, looks, or marital status, said:

“You should never have let that handsome alien kiss you. I’m downloading a file of things to make you smile. I hope it helps. When you get back, come kiss me, and I’ll turn you into a handsome prince. Be well, m’acushla, be well.”

Juna laughed in spite of herself. They had been lovers, briefly, before she settled in with Ali. They were still close friends. Perhaps it would have been better to be one of Padraig’s dozen lovers than to have paired off with Ali.

Anger at Ali flooded Juna. She hoped that the waste evac tube on his e-suit would get stuck shut on a hot day.

There were several other messages from good friends. Then there was an official communication from Chang, the Morale Officer. Juna grimaced. Chang had been on the Next Great Leap Forward People’s Generation Ship. A Jump ship retrieved the crew about ten years ago. Almost all of the crew had joined the Space Service; it was the only place where they didn’t feel completely lost. Rumor had it that Chang landed her present berth because they wanted to get rid of her groundside. Juna could believe it. Chang was a stolid, humorless, by-the-book sort, and shipboard morale was high more or less despite her.

“Juna,” Chang said in her message, “on behalf of myself and the entire crew, I want to extend our most sincere regrets about the misfortune that has befallen you. I assure you that Captain Rodrigues and myself will make every possible effort to expedite a return expedition. I urge you to abide by the Survey nonintervention guidelines, and to be a credit to the Survey’s century-long tradition of cautious, nondestructive exploration. I will be downloading all of the Survey regulations pertaining to alien contact and environmental quarantining. I trust that you will do your best to obey them. Sincerely, Mei-Mei Chang.”

Juna rolled her eyes, and switched off the sound, leaving the computer to record the rest of her messages. She got up and went into the forest. Finding refuge high in the branches of a tree, she listened to the clamor of the forest, and the distant, barely audible hush of the surf.

The forest was a refuge now, from lovers she couldn’t touch, from the uncomfortable comfort of well-meaning friends, and from the impossible expectations of the Survey. The green shade soothed her sun-blasted eyes, and the humidity eased her dry, drawn skin. She must have a touch of sunburn. She scratched at her itching skin, wishing an unpleasant fate on Morale Officer Chang.

The branches nearby swished and rustled, sending a shower of dead leaves pattering to the forest floor. It was Anito. The alien swung down beside her, touching Juna’s shoulder to get her attention.

“People come?”

Juna nodded.

“When people come?”

Juna shook her head, then waved her arm as though gesturing at something very far away.

Anito made some response that Juna couldn’t interpret. Her computers were out at the radio beacon, one controlling the radio, the other recharging in the sun. She shook her head, indicating that she didn’t understand.

Anito touched her itching back. “Skin bad. Something something not do.”

Juna shook her head. She didn’t understand what Anito was trying to tell her.

Anito squirted a cool liquid on her skin and the itching eased. Juna flushed lavender with relief. Anito handed her a large, sloshing gourd of water, which she drained, wishing for more. The alien then fished in its satchel and gave her a brilliant red fruit that tasted rather like a sweet honeydew melon, and a chunk of raw meat wrapped neatly in a large leaf. Juna nodded her thanks, and the two of them ate in companionable silence.

When they were through, Juna got up to return to the beacon. Anito followed her, pausing briefly to refill her gourd from the tank of a large bromeliad, using a hollow green reed as a siphon. Just as Juna was about to push through the tangled brush at the hem of the forest, and emerge onto the rocky, sunlit cliffs, Anito stopped her.

“No. Skin bad. You make more bad.”

Juna shook her head. She didn’t understand. She needed to contact the ship before they started to worry. There was no way to explain this to Anito, though. She started out again, but the alien moved in front of her, blocking her way.

“No go,” Anito insisted. It flushed a pale white, and pointed at the sun. “Sick you get,” Anito told her in emphatic tones of dark brick red.

Juna pointed insistently out at the beacon. She had to go.

“Wait. Rain come, you go. Skin not bad then.”

Clouds foretelling the afternoon shower were already beginning to build. It wouldn’t be more than a couple of hours before it started to rain, juna needed a rest. Anito led her to a clear jungle stream and the two of :hem bathed and wallowed in it until the first fat drops of rain began to fall.

Juna returned to the beacon and began answering more questions from the Survey team. Many of them were impossible to answer. She had been too busy surviving to take notes. Still, she documented the bee-fungus-tree ecosystem* that the aliens lived in, and she described what new animals and plants she could remember. She would have to start keeping better records.

The sun was a big red ball breaking through the clouds on the horizon when she heard from the ship again. She checked the computer’s clock. The radio lag time had stretched another twenty minutes each way, and her last contact with humanity was growing more tenuous with each passing minute. It was Morale Officer Chang again. She sounded suspicious about Juna’s two-hour disappearance. Juna listened unhappily to Chang’s inquisition. She had one more day before her last contact with humanity for several years would vanish. She didn’t want to spend that time in petty wrangling with Chang. She listened politely, trying to say nothing that would trigger a tirade.

When Chang’s lecture was over, Juna repeated the reason that she had given them when she had returned, that Anito had advised her against coming back sooner, for reasons she didn’t entirely understand. No, the alien had not threatened her. Juna believed that the alien didn’t want her to get sunburned. Then Juna returned to answering the backlog of questions from the Survey crew.

It was fully dark when she finally signed off for the evening. She was exhausted, her skin felt raw, and her back hurt from sitting too long in one position. She picked up Oliver’s computer, which she was using as a spare, and headed into the forest. Anito was waiting for her with a glow basket on a stick to light their way. She followed the alien through the velvety darkness. The forest shimmered with the sounds of insects and the cries of nocturnal animals. Something close beside her let out a deep, rumbling roar. Juna started, and looked at Anito. A glowing ripple of laughter flowed silently over the alien’s body. Anito lifted a large overhanging leaf, and holding the light up, beckoned to Juna. Huddled on the underside of the leaf was a small green frog with enormous black eyes. Juna nodded, and Anito let the leaf drop. A few minutes later they heard the little frog roar again. Juna wondered whether the noise was to frighten predators or to attract potential mates.

They walked for a couple of hours until they came to an enormous tree. They climbed it and were greeted by a group of aliens as they reached the multibranched crotch. It was another alien village. Juna’s shoulders slumped. She was too tired to cope with more alien diplomacy tonight.

Anito led her to a large room near the base of the giant tree, where Ukatonen and a group of nearly twenty aliens were waiting. Juna sat between Ukatonen and Anito. Ukatonen began to speak. It was a very formal speech. Ukatonen’s skin-speech patterns were very complex, and its gestures were stiff and stylized. Juna concentrated on staying awake, but even so, she was dozing off by the time the food was served. There were several different kinds of seaweed, fish, honey, and a number of new kinds of fruit. One fruit, which looked like a large purple peach, was horribly sour. She set it aside after one bite, to the amusement of the local aliens, who ate the sour fruit with obvious relish.

After the meal, curious aliens clustered around Juna. They poked and prodded her, examining her hands and ears, their own ears wide and their skins deep purple with curiosity. These aliens handled her much more roughly than the people of Anito’s village. Juna bore it stoically, flinching away only when something threatened real harm. Finally she gave Anito and Ukatonen a pleading look. Anito noticed it and said something to Ukatonen, who addressed the rest of the aliens. Then Anito led her up the tree to their room. Three fresh leaf beds were laid out for the travelers. Juna crawled into the moist warmth of the nearest one and fell asleep.

Juna’s skin was tender and sore when she awoke the next morning. It was vaguely reassuring to know that not all of Anito’s magic potions worked perfectly. She would have been more reassured if her skin didn’t feel two sizes too small. She got up and washed herself off, then sat back to think over her situation. She was going to be stuck here for a very long time. After three weeks of trying, she still couldn’t control her skin coloring well enough to “speak” skin speech. It was proving to be a serious handicap. Now that she was stuck here, she needed to speak the aliens’ language. That meant linking with Ukatonen.

Juna swallowed, her throat dry with fear as she remembered the violation of that first link. If only there were some other way; but the problem was physical, and only a link would fix it.

Ukatonen came in bearing breakfast. Fighting back the orange glow of her fear, Juna touched Ukatonen on the shoulder to get its attention, and extended her arms, spurs uppermost. Their eyes met. Ukatonen flushed a dusky purple, like shadows on a ripe plum, its ears spread wide. “Talk want you?” it asked her. “You want allu-a?”

Juna nodded. Part of her wanted to run screaming, but she fought down her fear. She needed to be able to speak with the aliens. Her life would depend on it.

“You trust me?”

Juna nodded again. She had to trust the alien, and endure the violation of linking.

“Good,” the alien said, turning a dark, reassuring blue. “You no fear me. I not hurt you.”

It was all she could do to keep from pulling away as Ukatonen reached out and laid its arms over hers. Her fingers shook as she grasped the alien’s forearms. She closed her eyes, afraid to watch as its slender four-fingered hands grasped her wrists. Then their spurs touched, connecting with a slight prick.

Entering the link felt like diving beneath the surface of a warm pool. There was a faint sensation like surface tension breaking, and then Juna was inside herself. It was a blind world, full of sound—the rush of blood through her veins, the swish-beat of her heart, quickened by her fear, the gurgle of her stomach. She could taste it as well, the rough, dark tang of her blood, the soft furry-peach feel of her skin, and the coppery tang of the alien skin that protected her. Juna could feel/taste it extending down through her gut, and into her lungs, filtering out the deadly alien poisons. She could sense her fear, bright, and sharp, flavoring the link.

Then she became aware of Ukatonen’s presence. It felt like the current of a mighty river. Terrified, she struggled, but the alien’s presence swept her up and carried her along, helpless as a leaf caught in the current. She watched as Ukatonen’s presence pooled up at the barrier between her human and alien skin. He was male, she realized, without really knowing how she knew. Her skin tingled and stung. It was like taking a bath in champagne, only on the inside of her skin. She felt the alien presence move through her, pooling briefly in her aching muscles and stiff tendons, leaving them loose and relaxed. It cleared away the bitter traces of stress and fatigue that clung to her even after sleep. Then Ukatonen’s presence receded from her body like a wave from a beach. A cool ghost of the alien lingered for a moment. Juna opened her eyes and the ghost disappeared like the sheen of water on the sand after a wave recedes.

Juna stood up and stretched. She felt fresh and pure, like one of her mother’s starched linen festival shirts fresh from the clothes presser. Her skin no longer felt as if it had been sandpapered. Taking a deep breath, she stretched again for the pleasure of feeling the ease in her muscles.

Holding out her right arm, she spelled out her name in turquoise letters edged in black, then made her name creep up her arm, across her chest, and down her left side, vanishing as it reached her left knee. She pictured a flower, and a flat, crude flower appeared on her skin. She concentrated, trying to make the flower look more realistic, and the image improved. It was strange, watching pictures appear and disappear on her skin. She couldn’t feel the images, but she knew exactly where they were on her body without looking. She visualized an image and it appeared. It was as easy as lifting her arm.

She looked up at Ukatonen, who rippled approval. “Hungry?” he asked her.

She was ravenous. “Yes,” she thought, and horizontal black bars of agreement appeared on her chest. “Food,” she thought, visualizing the green oval symbol for food, and the sign for food appeared on her chest. Ukatonen handed her a basket of fruit, and some chunks of honeycomb.

“I go bring more food. Come back soon,” the alien told her, and left.

Juna played with making skin speech while she ate, practicing big and little signs. The versatility and responsiveness of her new ability was amazing. Anything she could visualize would appear on her skin. Even though she could make her skin “speak,” Ukatonen had not given her instant knowledge of the aliens’ language. She could skin-speak only those symbols that she knew well enough to visualize. Juna sighed, thinking of all of the memorization that she had to do in order to become fluent in the aliens’ language. Still, she felt relieved that Ukatonen hadn’t violated her trust by tinkering with her mind. She wondered what limits the aliens had when they linked. Clearly it took energy. She was extremely hungry after linking, and she noticed that the others always ate big meals before and after allu-a.

Juna finished her breakfast and was wishing for more when Anito came in carrying a leaf cone full of freshly filleted fish. The alien handed some to Juna.

“Thank you, Anito,” Juna said in skin speech.

Anito’s ears lifted and it flared a surprised pink, fading to a questioning purple.

“Ukatonen,” Juna said, and held her arms out, spurs upward. It was a trifle crude, but Anito understood what had happened.

The alien flushed a deep, concerned ochre. “Not good,” Anito said. “Ukatonen get sick from allu-a with you. I fix.”

Ukatonen returned a few minutes later, carrying more food. Anito grabbed his arm and began flickering away at him, too fast for Juna to follow. Ukatonen looked at Juna, ochre concern tingeing his skin. He handed her a leaf-wrapped package of meat and seaweed, and told her to eat. The two aliens settled themselves in a corner, and linked spurs. Juna ate a third of the meat and seaweed, wrapping the rest up and setting it beside the water gourds. Anito and Ukatonen would be hungry when they unlinked.

She needed to get back to the radio beacon. There was so little time before the ship went through transition! Her need to be at the beacon was a hot ache. She wanted to spend every minute she could there. It was her only link to humanity, and it would soon be broken.

Could she find her way back to the beacon alone? She looked at the two aliens, locked into their strange communion. There was no way to tell how long they would stay like that. It could be ten minutes, it could be all day.

Juna went out and tried to talk with the other aliens, but she didn’t know enough skin speech to get very far. The aliens of this village weren’t interested in trying to talk with her. They brushed past her impatiently, ignoring her questions. A few seemed outright angry, flattening their ears against their heads and hissing at her like cold water on red-hot metal. Not since the funeral had an alien treated her with such hostility.

Juna wondered what she had done to deserve their anger. Had she committed some alien faux pas? She couldn’t think of anything she had done to offend them. Perhaps they were afraid of her because she was an alien to them. Or maybe they were angry at her because of something the Survey did. There were just too many possibilities. She would ask Anito or Ukatonen about it later.

Juna climbed out of the trunk of the tree, emerging into the bowl formed by the huge tree’s branches. She glanced up through the branches of the canopy, checking the weather. Fleecy white clouds were already gathering. Soon the sky would be clouded over. In two or three hours it would rain. She needed to be on her way.

She climbed to the topmost branches of the village tree and looked out. The forest fell away toward the distant blue expanse of the sea in monotonous green humps and bumps, broken occasionally by a bright burst of flowers, or the stark grey branches of a dead tree.

Juna could see the beacon off to the north, a slender silver gleam set on a rocky promontory, surrounded by an empty, blackened expanse where the forest had been burned away. If she hurried, she could get there in an hour and a half. She settled her net bag more firmly on her back, checked her water gourd, and set off.

She moved steadily through the canopy, pausing now and again to check her bearings. When she was only fifteen or twenty minutes from the beacon, Juna stopped to rest in the topmost branches of an emergent tree. She ate one of the sweet red fruits left over from last night’s feast and admired the view. The sea was a sheet of silver, dappled by shafts of light breaking through the majestic grey clouds heavy with the day’s rain. A fresh sea breeze gently rocked the branch on which she was seated. She felt like the queen of the forest here. Why did the aliens spend all their time buried in the gloom of the canopy, when they could be up here in the fresh air and sunshine? Were they agoraphobic? Did they hate the sun?

It was time to go. Juna tossed the last fruit pit out into space and shouldered her bag. Just as she was swinging down to the next branch, an immense shadow tore “out of the sky like a black thunderbolt. Something sharp struck her shoulder, knocking her from the branch. She fell, tumbling. The tree branches seemed to move past her with preternatural slowness as she fell. She reached out and grabbed a passing branch.

There was a wrenching jolt. Pain shot up her arm. She wasn’t falling anymore. Time moved normally again. For a moment, Juna just hung there, too shocked to move, not quite able to believe that she was alive. She reached up to grasp the branch that she clung to with her other hand, and felt a sharp pain in her shoulder. Setting her teeth and grunting with the pain, Juna pulled herself up onto the branch.

Something warm oozed down her back. She reached back with her good arm. Her hand came away sticky with blood. She probed higher with her fingers and found two deep scratches in her shoulder. What the hell had hit her? She felt as if she’d been struck by lightning out of a clear blue sky.

A black shadow crossed the sun, too quickly for it to be a cloud. Juna looked up in time to make out the form of an impossibly large raptor gliding above the treetops. She recognized it immediately. She had spotted several of them during trips over the jungle in one of the Survey flyers. They were massive, powerful creatures with a leathery wingspan of over five meters. She had been impressed by the raptor, but, with typical human arrogance, believed that it couldn’t harm her, and so had dismissed it. Now she knew why the aliens avoided the topmost branches of the canopy.

Juna took a deep breath. It was over. She was all right. Her shoulders hurt like hell, one injured, the other strained, but she was alive. Settling herself securely in a nearby crotch, she took out her med kit and doctored the wound. It was awkward and painful. The wound was in a hard-to-reach place and it hurt to lift her arm. Still she managed to clean it and cover it with antiseptic fleshfoam. Then she climbed slowly and painfully to the ground and walked the rest of the way.

The first drops of rain began to fall as she reported in. She summarized her activities of the night before and documented her link with Ukatonen, and how it had given her the ability to depict skin speech. The physiology people would be fascinated by what had happened to her, as would the Alien Contact specialist and the linguists back home. The more excited they got, the sooner they would return for her.

Then she turned to the messages she had received. There were several hundred K of personal messages and mail. They would be precious and painful. Juna decided to shelve them for later. She needed to attend to business. The ship would make the jump to hyperspace just past midnight, and she had a lot more information to send in before that happened. She sat in the pounding downpour and dictated reports for a couple of hours. Her voice was rough and hoarse, and the wound on her shoulder throbbed. Something touched her wounded shoulder.

She jumped and looked around. Ukatonen and Anito were standing there.

“Come,” Anito told her, beckoning her to follow.

Juna needed to take a break; her voice was wearing out. She signed off and followed the aliens into the jungle. When they were safely ensconced in a large tree, Anito touched the fleshfoam covering her wound.

“What is on your arm?”

“Bird hurt me. I fix hurt,” Juna explained.

“You allu-a with me. I fix better,” Anito told her. The alien held out its arms to Juna, indicating that it wanted to link with her.

Juna shook her head. Linking still terrified her.

Anito persisted, flickers of yellow irritation crossing its ochre skin. Ukatonen watched them talk, saying nothing.

Juna shook her head again, rubbing at her itching eyes. If she gave in to Anito, all of the aliens would want to link with her, and there would be nothing of herself left by the time they had satisfied their curiosity.

Anito touched her arm again, pleading with Juna for a link. “Shoulder bad. You get sick.”

Juna shrugged off the alien’s touch and looked away. She was tired of telling the aliens to keep out of her body. Her shoulder burned and her eyes itched. She sneezed as she got up to go back to the beacon. Her head felt thick and heavy. What a time to be coming down with a cold. She couldn’t get sick, she had too much to do…

Anito grabbed Juna’s arm and jerked her around so that she was looking at the alien.

“Sick you! Bad sick you!”

A picture appeared on Anito’s chest. It was a picture of Juna, before the aliens rescued her, dying in the forest. Then the alien superimposed a picture of Juna as she looked now, with two red scratches on her shoulder, and flickered between the two. Then Anito’s skin turned silvery-pale. The sick elder, Ilto, had looked like that after it died. Anito extended its arms again, asking for a link.

The alien had always accepted Juna’s refusals to link before. Something else was going on. Juna rubbed at her itching eyes and tried to think. She felt terrible. She hadn’t felt this bad since her suit had been breached. Her skin flared orange as a sudden surge of fear jolted through her. She was on the verge of anaphylactic shock. She looked at the two aliens. They knew what^vas happening to her. Anito was asking for permission to save her life.

“Yes,” Juna said in skin speech. “I understand.” She held out her arms to Anito, wordlessly requesting a link.

Anito’s skin turned a deep, reassuring dark blue, as it grasped Juna’s arm with one hand. Ukatonen took the other arm, and the two aliens linked with her. Juna was inside the link so quickly that she barely had time to be frightened.

Anito’s link felt less controlled and subtle than Ukatonen’s. There was less sense of focus, of flow and control. It was clear that Anito was younger and less experienced. Juna could sense Ukatonen hovering in the background watching over the two of them in their link.

Despite Anito’s youth and lack of subtlety, the alien was a competent healer. Juna’s eyes stopped itching within seconds. Her head cleared, and her sore throat eased. She felt a warm tingling in her shoulder, and a sudden tightness as the edges of the wound closed over. She felt the pain lift from her bruised muscles as Anito’s presence healed them. Something in the flavor of the link made Juna aware that Anito was female. She became so involved in sorting out what it was that made Anito’s presence so ineffably female that the breaking of the link caught her by surprise.

Juna sat for a few minutes, disoriented by the sudden shift from linking to not-linking. It was like being awakened in the middle of an extremely vivid dream. There was an unreal feeling to allu-a. She blinked a few times and took a deep breath. Her throat was no longer sore, her eyes weren’t itching, and her breathing was clear. Anito had saved her life again.

“Thank you,” she said at last. “I not know I sick.”

“You not go in top of tree again?” Ukatonen asked her.

Juna shook her head, then remembered to use skin speech. “I need feed my talking stones,” she said using the aliens’ term for her computers. “They need sun.”

Anito and Ukatonen conferred.

“Next time you need feed talking stones, one of us goes with you,” Vkatonen said.

Juna looked from Ukatonen to Anito and back again, wondering what fhe should do next. Ukatonen got up and headed out toward the radio reacon. Anito and Juna followed. Ukatonen squatted beside the computer, and looked at Juna, ears raised inquisitively.

Ukatonen placed his hand on the silver radio tower. “What this is?”

Juna frowned. This was going to be hard to explain. “I talk to my people. My people very far. This tower sends talk.”

“How you talk?” Ukatonen asked, ears wide in puzzlement.

Juna shrugged. “I show you.”

She signed on, checking the chronometer and the estimated lag time. The link with the aliens had taken less than half an hour, she noted with surprise. Subjectively it had felt much longer. It was actually about 1500 hours. There was time for one last exchange with the ship before it ’umped to hyperspace and left her here. It was time to introduce the aliens to the humans and vice versa.

Juna began updating the ship on her activities since the break, explaining that Anito and Ukatonen were with her. She paused and looked at Ukatonen, who watched her, ears spread wide, deep purple with wonder.

“How they hear you?” he asked.

Juna thought of trying to explain how radio worked, with her limited vocabulary, and shook her head. “Hard tell you,” she explained, hoping she was using the right words.

“I talk them?” Ukatonen asked.

“You talk me, I tell them what say you. Good?”

Ukatonen flickered agreement.

Juna set up the computer for visual and vocal recording, guided Ukatonen within range of the computer’s camera, then nodded to him to begin.

“Formal greetings, Eerin’s people. I am Ukatonen, an enkar {untranslatable social status term}. I speak to you through Eerin. The village of Lyanan {untranslatable village place name} is in {untranslatable} because the {long list of plant, tree, and animal names}”—here Ukatonen pointed to the burnt, black gap in the green forest—“is through your actions, no longer there. The village is angry. What may be done to bring {untranslatable}?”

Juna sighed. This was going to be difficult. She looked at the charred expanse of burnt forest, destroyed during normal Survey sterilization pro cedures before leaving the planet. It helped ensure that no Terran bacteria survived to contaminate the planet. If the Survey had known about the aliens, they would have acted differently. It would be up to her to make reparations.

“The alien sends formal greetings from its people, and wants to know what we are going to do about that piece of forest that we burned down. Apparently it belonged to a nearby village. I will do what I can to make reparations. Please advise.” Juna sent along the visual clip of the alien’s speech with her translation for their computers to analyze.

Juna nodded at Ukatonen. “It’s done,” she told him.

Ukatonen’s ears spread wide. He watched the radio intently, waiting for a reply.

Juna touched Ukatonen on the shoulder. He looked at her.

“My people are far,” Juna said, gesturing into the sky. “They not speak—” She paused; duration was one of the aspects of skin speech that she didn’t understand. She pointed at the sun, which was a low, bright spot behind heavy clouds. “It be night when they speak back to us.”

Ukatonen’s ears spread wide again. “Where your people? How they hear you?”

Juna hesitated. It was against Contact regs to explain space travel to such low-tech people. She had half a dozen plausible cover stories, but she simply couldn’t bring herself to lie to Ukatonen.

So going slowly, groping painfully for the words that she needed, she explained that their planet circled a star, and that her people were from another star, and had traveled there in a ship. She had to use rocks as visual aids, but eventually the aliens understood.

Ukatonen shook his head. “Not can be,” he said, deeply purple. Anito, watching, echoed his words.

“It true. My people do,” Juna insisted. “I speak my people. That”—she pointed at the silver radio tower—“throws my—” she paused, not knowing the word for “voice,” or even if the aliens had such a word in their language—“words to them. They understand my words; they talk back.” She pointed to the tower again. “That catches their words and shows them to me.”

Ukatonen looked from the tower to Juna and back again, and turned an odd shade of puce, probably indicative of doubt or disbelief. “Not can be,” Ukatonen repeated.

“My people can do,” Juna insisted.

Doubt, wonder, and a tinge of fear rippled across the alien’s skin. “When your people return?”

Juna shrugged and fought back a sudden surge of fear and grief. She shook her head. “Many, many, many—” She paused, and pointed to the eastern horizon, sweeping her arm across the sky to the west, the pattern for sun on her chest.

Ukatonen supplied what Juna hoped was the term for “day.”

“Many days,” she said. She tried to explain what a year was, gesturing to the rocks she had used to represent their sun and planet, but Ukatonen shook his head.

Juna searched for the words to explain, but couldn’t find them. She picked up a pebble. “My people’s ship,” she said.

Ukatonen rippled understanding.

“My people leave,” Juna moved the pebble farther from the planet. “They go so far and—” Juna picked up the pebble and threw it. It landed several meters away. “Now they can’t hear my words. I can’t hear their words.”

Juna picked up another, fist-sized stone. “My people’s sun.” She picked up another rock. “My people’s world,” she said. She picked up the ship pebble and placed it beside the rock representing her home planet. “My people leave your sun, go my sun. Then they come back.” She picked up the ship pebble and tossed it back toward the aliens’ solar system. “Many, many, many days.”

Ukatonen turned puce again.

“My people can do,” Juna insisted. “This day, my people hear my words. When the sun is there”—she pointed at the eastern horizon—“my people no longer hear my words. I wait many, many, many days before they come back. I am—” She paused, not knowing the word for “alone” in the aliens’ language. She flushed a dark, funereal grey and looked away, as the depth of her isolation sunk in.

Ukatonen’s knuckles brushed her shoulder. Juna looked up. Anito was gone; she and Ukatonen were alone beneath the gleaming metal tower.

“I am like you,” Ukatonen said, “Always one person. Never with others. I understand. I am erikar,” he said, using a term that Juna didn’t understand, though she had seen it before. “Enkar are always one person.”

Ukatonen got up and walked back over the rocky expanse of the cliff mto the jungle. Juna stared after the alien until he disappeared into the solid mass of green. She returned to her reports feeling as though a tight cord binding her heart had been released. She worked steadily, updating and finishing reports on the aliens and their ecosystem. She finished her work as the sun touched the horizon.

She stood up and stretched, feeling empty. Every detail in her log had been transferred to the ship, she had answered all of the questions she could. The Survey had everything she knew about the aliens. She got up and walked to the edge of the cliff. Clouds of seabirds whirled to and fro, riding the rising air currents. One of them rose up from beneath the edge of the cliff, hanging a couple of meters in front of her, holding its position with tiny movements of its iridescent blue-grey wings and tail. It wasn’t a true bird; its face was scaled and it had a toothy lizard’s snout instead of a beak, but it filled the place of a sea gull in the ecosystem. It regarded her with its beady, enigmatic black eyes for a moment, then slid away on the wind, arcing out over the ocean until she lost it amongst the other birds.

Her mother would have loved to see that. She had always gloried in birds, especially seabirds. Juna remembered that when they still lived on Earth her mother used to take her to the coast. They would sit on the cliffs, watching the birds fly. They would hover just as this bird did, on the strong updraft from a windward cliff. She remembered her mother, standing near the edge of a cliff, the wind streaming back through her sun veils, laughing at some hovering bird.

She turned back to the radio tower. She had a little over an hour before her final transmission window closed. She wanted to send a letter to her father, and take care of as many personal details as she could before the ship entered transition.

“Father, this is Juna,” she dictated. “The good news is that I’m still alive. By now the Survey has told you the bad news. It’s going to be a long time until I see you again. I miss you, and Toivo, and Danan. I won’t be entirely alone. There are aliens here. They’re very strange, but I think we will come to understand each other better. The world is beautiful, and I’m the first human ever to survive without an environment suit on a living world.

“The aliens here are like zero-gee trapeze dancers, only more graceful and agile. I’ve gotten very good at climbing. I had to, in order to keep up with them. I spend most of my time in the trees now.”

Juna paused, not quite knowing how to say the next few necessary words.

“If I don’t come back, please give my extra Survey pin to Danan. I know he’d like to have it. Keep half my money for Danan, and the other half should go to you and Toivo.

“Just before I wrote this letter, I stood on the cliffs and watched some birds flying out over the ocean. It made me think of Mama. Please put some flowers on her grave for me. Tell Toivo and Danan that I love them. I love you too. Take care of yourself.”

Juna replayed the message. There was so much that she wanted to say, but she was tired and drained by the long reports she had filed. She thought of her father, stocky and slightly bowlegged, as he walked between his vines. Tears rose to her eyes. He was getting old. Would he still be there when she came home?

She sent other messages, to family, friends, and to her ex-wives and husbands. Survey members shouldn’t bond with the system-bound. She hadn’t been able to keep up with her group marriage. She was away for years at a time, and the marriage couldn’t stand the separation. Still, she cherished the memories, and from time to time she would visit, to catch up with her former spouses and to see how the children had grown.

Her computer’s chrono chimed softly, reminding her that she had twenty minutes left. After that, her messages wouldn’t reach the Kotani Manx before it made trie jump to hyperspace. She finished her last letter and sent it only a few minutes before her transmission window closed. Then she got up and walked to the cliff edge again. The sun was a red ember on the horizon. As she watched, it sank below the sea and vanished. Juna went back to the forest.

Ukatonen and Anito were waiting for her. They beckoned her on, their words glowing like fireflies in the dark jungle, to the nest they had built in a tree near the edge of the forest. Juna was relieved that she wouldn’t have to face a village full of curious aliens tonight.

“When your people speak back to us?” Ukatonen asked her when they were settled.

Juna shrugged. It would be almost two hours before the ship responded to Ukatonen’s translated message.

“We eat, go out and wait. Their words come,” Juna told them.

She was so exhausted that she was almost looking forward to the Kotani Manx’s final transmission. At least then she could get some sleep.

They ate, washed themselves in a nearby stream, and filed out to the radio beacon to await word from the ship.

Twenty minutes later, Kinsey, the Alien Contact specialist, signed on, telling Juna that he wanted to speak to Ukatonen. He paused for a couple of minutes, so that Juna and Ukatonen could prepare themselves, then began.

“My name is Arthur Kinsey. On behalf of the Solarian United Government, the Interstellar Survey, and the Interstellar Survey Vessel Kotani Manx, I accept your formal greetings, and offer you ours in return. We deeply regret the destruction of the forest. If we had known that there were intelligent aliens with land-rights to that section of forest, we would never have disturbed it. We will do our best to make reparations for such damage when we return. We thank you for the care and healing of Dr. Saari, and ask that you continue to treat her well until we return. We will do our best to repay you for your efforts in this matter. Our people live very far away. We estimate that it will be four to six of your years before we are able to return, but we will return for Dr. Saari, and to learn more about you. Until then, we wish you peace and prosperity. Thank you. This is Arthur Kinsey signing off.”

Juna frowned, and glanced up at Ukatonen, who was leaning against one of the beacon supports, ears spread expectantly. This was going to be very hard to translate.

“The person who is speaking sends greetings from all of my people. We apologize for burning (here Juna appended as much of the detailed description of the forest as she could remember). My people will try to make this better when they come back for me. He also thanks you for taking care of me, and says that my people will be very grateful for that. He says that my people live very far away, and that it will be many, many, many days before they come back. He also says that we want to learn more about your people. He asks you to teach me about your people so that I may teach my people when they return. He hopes that you have good hunting and much good food until they come back. He thanks you.”

Ukatonen looked puzzled. “That was very strange,” he said at last.

Juna touched him on the shoulder. “I not do a very good job. I don’t have the words. I try again when I know more,” she offered. “This person knows only what I have told him about you. Your people and my people are very different.”

“Yes,” Ukatonen said with a glowing ripple of amusement. “I see that.”

Juna smiled and rippled with shared amusement, then turned back to the radio, to listen for more messages and instructions. The two aliens touched her shoulder and slipped back into the forest.

Following his message, Kinsey downloaded the Survey’s alien contact protocols, and noninterference guidelines for alien cultures. Juna rolled her eyes when she saw them. They were completely impractical. She had broken the rules on food and personal contact only minutes into her first meeting with Anito. Her explanation of space travel to the aliens was in direct violation of the technology transfer dictates, as was using the computer in their presence. These guidelines were for someone with a Survey base to retreat to between contacts. She simply couldn’t follow them.

She also was not empowered to make treaties, or agree to reparations. Juna sighed. She would be returning to the radio beacon periodically to send updates to the Survey satellites so that they would have a complete record in case she was lost or killed. She needed the goodwill of the neighboring village. To get that, she might need to make up for her fellow humans’ mistakes.

After Kinsey’s report, Morale Officer Chang came on with another of her sententious little speeches. She expressed deep concern over Juna’s link with the alien, and ordered her not to do it again. Juna turned down the sound. Leaving the computer to record her messages, she got up and walked to the edge of the cliff. Sitting cross-legged near the edge, she looked out at the quiet alien night. The shadows of shy night birds flickered past her as they emerged from their holes in the cliff-side and flew out to sea to fish.

The sea was phosphorescent tonight. The waves glowed green as they struck the shoreline. Out at sea a school of fish left a trail of brilliant green streaks in the water…

She used to come out here in her environment suit, before she had been lost, just to watch the stars and the ocean. How different it all seemed, now that she wasn’t trapped inside her suit. Then she had been hot and stuffy, unable to feel the night breeze. The clatter and hum of the base’s machinery, and the whirring of her suit had drowned out the cries of the birds and the shimmering sounds of the insects.

It was a beautiful night. Only a few clouds obscured the heavens. Juna looked up at the stars. Sol with its jeweled necklace of colonies, and the bright, diseased gem that was Earth, was not visible. It could only be seen from the planet’s northern hemisphere. Just as well, she thought to herself. If she could see Earth, she would yearn for it even more.

She began to hum a tune her mother had loved, an old tune from before The Collapse. Her mother had learned it as a child, and passed it along to her daughter. It was about a bird called the albatross, one of the first Antarctic birds to die as the ozone hole spread north. The long-winged, graceful birds spent nine months flying alone over the open ocean, returning to the same mate every year. Juna sang to herself about going away and coming back again, about someone waiting for her return. As she sang, her grief eased.

She fell silent, watching the stars. She heard the sound of surf pounding against the cliffs, the thin high cries of the night birds, and the sound of her own breathing. The computer chimed, signaling the time that the Kotani Maru made the jump. She was alone now, an alien on an alien world. She got up and walked into the jungle, where Anito and Ukatonen slept. She would parcel out the news and messages from the Survey ship, making them last as long as she could. They would be the only human voices she would hear for years.