Free Strangers From the Sky by Margaret Wander Bonanno Page A

seemed not to have seen each other for hours. “She’s due tomorrow anyway.”
    They had always called Delphinus the Whale, as a play on her name, because of the size and shape of the ship itself, and as an affectionate joke at the expense of her captain, though never to his face. Jason Nyere was sensitive about his size. Suddenly the joke wasn’t funny anymore. Nothing was.
    “How are they?” Yoshi nodded toward the room behind Tatya; no need to specify who “they” were.
    “Stabilized, I think.” Tatya looked drawn, exhausted. “The male seems to be coming around a little. I don’t dare medicate either of them, not even painkillers. As nearly as I can tell their entire physiology is different from ours. Organs in the wrong places, vital signs all screwy. I can’t get accurate readings on anything, not even a blood pressure…”
    Her voice trailed off. Yoshi had never seen her too exhausted to talk.
    “Yoshi, what are we going to do?”
    Yoshi shrugged. He didn’t want to do anything. He wanted to fall into the Mayabi Fault and disappear.
    “Pass them off as a couple of my relatives?” he suggested, groping for humor.
    Tatya was not amused.
    “I’d like to see you try telling that to Jason,” she said grimly.
    “I don’t hear any brilliant ideas from your corner of the room,” Yoshi snapped back.
    Alone out here, they were accustomed to arguing as loudly and as often as they chose, but the presence of their unwanted guests had changed all that. Argue they did, but softly, counting on the rising wind stirring up whitecaps and howling around the corners of the station to keep them from being overheard should one of the aliens waken.
    It did not occur to them that pointed ears had evolved on other worlds for a reason, that the wind had already wakened one of their guests, and that one such pair of ears was absorbing every word.
     
    “They seem so primitive,” Sorahl had said to his mother the first time she observed the frown with which he studied his private viewer and inquired as to what might be puzzling him. “I mean no disrespect, but I cannot help wondering why you and my grandfather find them so fascinating.”
    They had been two days from the Sol system, the scoutcraft traversing the Oort Cloud where so many of the comets visible from Earth originated. T’Lera and Sorahl were in the living quarters, she at the beginning of her offshift, he nearing the end of his. Shortly he would take over from Selik, who, with seemingly effortless proficiency, navigated with one hand while recording new comets with the other.
    “‘Primitive’?” T’Lera had inquired, making no effort to disguise her dryness of voice; of all beings, surely her son was most accustomed to it. “Specify.”
    Sorahl’s gesture encompassed a number of record tapes strewn about his workspace, particularly those gleaned from Earth’s holovision broadcasts by previous expeditions.
    “Their forms of entertainment,” he began, with the wariness of youth expecting to be criticized for its naiveté. “Their obsession with violence, with maudlin emotions, with humor at the expense of others. If these are the things they value…”
    “Is this what your study indicates, my son?” T’Lera allowed herself to address him informally when they were alone and off duty. Were her father in attendance she would have refrained; where Savar had commanded, formal mode had been all.
    “Mother, I am aware that I lack the experience of those who have made this their life work, but my observations indicate that this is a species perpetually on the verge of self-destruction.”
    “So many of its great thinkers would concur,” T’Lera said dryly. “But what you have observed is not the sum total of what they choose as diversion for their leisure, much less what they consider of value.”
    Sorahl lowered his eyes. His observation had been naive, and presumptuous. Before he could ask his mother’s forgiveness she interrupted him.
    “And