Tau Ceti (an Ell Donsaii story #6) (21 page)

“Hey Roger,
Come in, if you can stand watching me getting suture
s
.” The curtain moved back and Roger came in, “Hey, Em’, what are you doin’ getting’ yourself shot?!” He noticed Ell, “Hey
,
Ell.”

With
delight
,
but
also
some sadness at the
depth
of concern in Roger’s voice,
Ell said, “Hey Roger, I
told
you you should go to the Velos concert.”

Roger sat down and took Emma’s other hand
, looking into her eyes he said, “I
wish I had. I
heard that it was Bridget’s crazy ex?

“Yeah, he escaped the psych eval unit. Hopefully they’ll put him in higher security this time.”

Ell said, “Rog’
?”

He turned to her, “Yeah?”

“Can you take Emma home? I’ve got to go deal with the police some more.”

“Sure!”

Ell stood and squeezed Em
ma’s hand, winking with the eye
Roger
couldn’t see and putting on a brave smile.
She turned to Roger,
“Take care of her.”

After she stepped outside the curtain
,
Ell wiped the corner of her eye.
Buck up!
she told herself,
They deserve each other and you should
not
be sad that your two good friends
are
getting together.
As she walked
out into the cool evening
she snorted,
jealous over a guy I don’t
even
love. What an idiot!

Though it was Saturday
,
the team had been so excited about their alien observations that they had agreed to meet at nine to talk about what was going on with Goldy and Silver. Wheat was so excited he’d arrived early to be sure he found his way to the right place, especially since he’d never been to D5R. Donsaii looked up when he arrived. “Sorry about being a little late taking over the observations last night.”

“Hey, no problem.
Congratulations on your award
Thursday night
!”

“Thank you.”

“Actually,
I was so excited I hadn’t even noticed the time until you called
last night
. That’s even though the
Teecees
had gone to sleep and nothing was happening. I was using one of the screens to
go back through
the trek
I’d already watched
, trying to
categorize
all the plants and animals.
”

“Well after you signed off
,
I didn’t have much to do
because
the
Teecees
were
sleeping
,
so I went through the parts you’d highlighted. I think you’re right.”

“Right about what?” Norris asked as he came in the door.

“Dr. Norris. Hi. Let me introduce Dr. Wheat.” She turned to Wheat, “I told everyone on the team about you so they all already know who you are. Dr. Norris here is from the Astronomy Department at UNC and is an expert in solar systems. He’s been great and really helped us
when we were building
the rockets we sent to TC3 so we wouldn’t contaminate their world with our
microbes
and vice versa.
”

While Ell introduced Norris
,
the rest of the team came in.
Emma was with them!
Roger accompanied her
and
she moved quite gingerly
.

Ell’s eyes widened when she saw
her
, “What are you doing here?
Aren’t
you
supposed to
be resting?”

“No, I’m not even taking much pain medicine, just some Aleve. It doesn’t hurt much and I’m not in any danger.
And I wasn’t
gonna miss hearing what’s going on with Goldy and Silver!”

Roger
sighed exasperatedly
.

Manuel
turned to Emma and
asked, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing! D
on’t want to talk about it.
” She turned to Harald and smiled, “You
must be Dr. Wheat?”

Ell introduced the rest of them around. “Dr. Wheat had a pretty good idea last night. Rememb
er how we’ve wondered about why
Goldy and Silver
are walking through the forest when they have wings and can fly
?”

The group nodded, then Ell
waved a hand at
Wheat. “Fill them in.”

“Um, well, I think that only Goldy can fly. As far as I’ve been able to see from
y
our notes
,
Silver’s never been off the ground. Have any of you seen Silver flying?”

They all looked at one another, shaking their heads.

“Look at this zoomed image,” Wheat continued, pointing at the big screen which
zoomed in to show
an enlargement of Silver’s wing.

“Oh,” Emma said, “th
ose look
like stitches! I thought it was a tattoo or some other kind of decoration when I saw it before.”

“Exactly!” Wheat said, “I think Silver’s injured and Goldy’s accompanying it somewhere. Now near the end of my shift watching
them,
they reached a cliff,” he pointed to the big screen showing the cliff in the rocket’s camera as Goldy flew over it. “Goldy took off and flew along it, first one way, then the other
.
I
believe
,
looking for a way up
. So far it seems to have stymied them. Goldy
made a brief attempt
to climb the cliff but it seems to be made of soft material, at least on the surface and Goldy’s claw holds broke quickly. Then they tried climbing trees but the bark on the local trees
tore
loose
when they sunk their claws into them
. I had the
strong
impression
that
they’d never tried climbing anything befo
re. Why would they? A
fter all, normally they can just fly to the top of anything, rather than having to climb at all.
If they did have experience climbing trees, they’d probably just rip off the bark and sink those
impressive
claws into the deeper layers.
”

Roger said, “So they
weren’t able to get
up the cliff?”

“No, and I think we could
get a
start on making friends
with them
because of th
is
situation.”

Ell turned
to him curiously, “Really? Y
ou didn’t tell me about that.”

“
Yeah,” Wheat said excitedly, “gesturing at the cliff on the screen.
W
e
know how to climb
cliffs
.
They’ve never had any reason to so
they
don’t have any ideas.
Isn’t there any way we could show them how to do it?”

Ell raised her eyebrows and turned to the
others
.

“Really? Should we be interfering in their lives?” Emma asked.

Ell shrugged.

Norris said, “Hmmm, first
communication
with an alien
intelligence
.
It might be
that
the government has some rul
es or regulations about how it’
s to be done.”

“I looked that up the first day
we saw Goldy and Silver
,” Roger said, “There have been think tank discussions and
the
military
has
worked out
protocols
,
but no laws
have been
passed restricting what we can or can’t do
as private citizens
.”

“I don’t know
;
a lot of harm
befell
primitive societies
here on earth
when advanced civilizations made contact
with them
.”

Manue
l looked around at the group, “Oh there’s n
o doubt that Columbus brought some nasty diseases to the Western hemisphere and that the Europeans
subjugated, enslaved and exterminated the Native Americans…
but we’re doing everything we can think of to keep from transmitting disease and we can hardly exploit them when we can’t even get there.” He shrugged, “Also, even though some of my ancestors were ill-used, I myself am happy to be living in a modern society. It’s a two way street with some bad things and some good
things
on it.”

Wheat said, “Personally, if some alien was watching me struggle with a difficult problem, I’d certainly appreciate a little help. Those people who think that the li
ves
of
primitive peoples were
noble and peaceful shou
ld look into how most of them
actually lived. I’m not saying that
primitives are
bad
people.
I’m saying that living without modern technology
would suck
.
Big time.
In the United States today, e
ven the
poor
have access to bathrooms, sewers, immunizations, antibiotics,
communications,
entertainment,
air conditioning,
spices and innumerable conveniences that the
kings
of yore would have been ecstatic to have. Anyway,
I think
one of the b
est ways for us to make contact
would be
to help them solve a small problem. We don’t have to give them blueprints for how to build a steam engine and hook it up to an
elevator;
we
could
just show them how to use a vine as a rope.”

Ell looked around the group, “Just knowing that Goldy is helping Silver
when she’s injured
is making me feel pretty kindly toward these two. I don’t know if they
are
representative of their people
,
but I like them and want to help them if I can. Does anyone have a
serious
objection to trying to provide
simple suggestion
s
?”

Shrugs and shakes of the head greeted her query
. “But how are we goi
ng to suggest anything to t
hem? S
o far we can’t even he
ar them, much less talk to them.
”

Emma put her hands up, “I’ll have the laser acoustic pickup working early in the week and we’ve got most of the parts for our second rocket. But it’ll have to be assembled, then sterilized
,
then flown from the deep space port
al
to TC3. And don’t forget we need to put another intermediate pipe out there in a plunging solar orbit before we can use the new rocket.”

Ell said, “Hey, no o
ne’s accusing you of being slow…
though we do wish you could be faster,” she grinned, “but even after we have acoustic reception and eventually transmission it’ll probably take a long time to understand them and translate what we say into something they can comprehend. What I’m thinking is that there might be visual means of communication? Like hieroglyphics maybe?”

Manuel pulled his screen to himself and started marking on it like he often did when he was planning out how to
build
something.

Roger frowned, “Hieroglyphs weren’t really ‘word pictures’ the pictures were kind of like our letters, representing sounds.”

Ell said, “Yeah
,
but maybe we could make ‘word pictures’ work for us?”

“Couldn’t we just send them a drawing of someone climbing a cliff using a rope?” Wheat said, “Or not someone
, it would need to be a
Teecee
. We’d need an artist.”

“Wait a minute, it’s all very well to talk about showing them pictures but there aren’t any
vid scr
eens on the rocket either you know?”

“But there is a window we can shine a laser through.” Ell waggled her eyebrows
.