On its drive that he did not understand, the boat glided up toward his vessel. Wheels and hull swelled before him, homelike athwart these constellations. Docking facilities were incompatible. The tube that extended to mate with a personnel lock was an engineering improvisation. Air pressure had equalized en route, and the party passed through to the interior. The Tahirians were less awkward in weightlessness than untrained humans would have been, but evidently appreciated the help Nansen gave them.
Approaching, they had studied the external fittings of the plasma drive, as they doubtless had done before. Now their first concern was the zero-zero engine. Having led them to that section, he anxiously watched them and their instruments swarm over it. Though they did no damage, it was with relief that he finally decided he could blow the whistle hung around his neck, an agreed-on signal. “We should get you settled in, and all take a rest,” he urged. “You can have as much time here afterward as you like. But aren’t you also curious about how we lived, on our way to you?”
English, he noticed. Out of habit. It might as well have been Spanish or Hebrew or Chinese or anything.
They packed their apparatuses, gathered their other belongings, and accompanied him to the shuttle. It crossed to the forward wheel. Weight mounted as a railcar whisked them to the inner deck. He led them down a passageway. They peered right and left, busily conversing, although he heard few sounds, none of which his throat could make. “I wish you could tell me how you feel about this,” he said aloud, for his own comfort. “Is it splendid, primitive, pathetic, or frightening?”
In a common room gone echoey he did what nobody had managed hitherto. Humans could not yet operate the Tahirian equipment that would have provided a representation of the galaxy. Here he could spread one over a four-meter screen, shining in blackness. Of course, only the most gigantic stars appeared singly, and the display included only what his race had known when Envoy departed — a skeleton galaxy, half empty on the far side of the central clouds. A scale along the bottom was calibrated in units already standardized.
Nansen manipulated the keyboard. A spark sprang to life, an arrow pointing at it: the sun of Tahir, hue precisely correct for the extraordinary Tahirian color vision. He sent the pointer back along a signified five thousand light-years. Where it came to rest, another spark jumped forth, whiter, Sol.
Mostly he watched his guests. He thought he captured a sense of emotions and attitudes. A sound that purred or trilled added overtones of pleasure to a statement; a growling or piping note was less favorable. When the leaves of a mane rose and fell, a smooth wave through them bore a different meaning from the same sequence proceeding jaggedly. The code of odors was as subtle as the movements of a fan in a woman’s hand had anciently been, or more so, and an integral part of the language.
The languages?
Reactions exploded. Two of the beings bounded forward and hugged him, a gesture they had perhaps learned by watching humans. Others kept aside, manes ashiver, as if whispers went between them. Dubious? When Nansen made arrows expand outward from either star, trying to propose future voyages and meetings, he wondered whether what he saw on some was horror. Smells certainly got sharp.
He blanked the screen. “Well,” he said in his most soothing tone, “let’s go to your quarters, and then eat,” in the wardroom, separate foods. He smiled lopsidedly. “May the day come when we can drink a toast.”
A score of buildings, small, curved, delicately tinted, clustered among trees in the middle of a burgeoning hillscape. The tropical sky arched cloudless, the air below lay hot and pungent. Zeyd thought this was less likely a village than a node in a global city.
A large structure stood a hundred meters aside, surrounded by well-tended sward. Waiting nearby, he had ample employment. A score of Tahirians had gathered about him. Three were newly parents, infants clinging to the dorsal ridge with the help of their spurs. All knew more or less what he wanted, and were willing.