until Yoshi started the foil again and it lifted out
of the water. Her skin still tingled with the shock of it; she
couldn't seem to get her hands clean. Now she forced
herself to take a wad of sterile gauze from the
medikit, dampen H with cool water from the
galley, and swab the blood off the female
patient's face, making sure none of it got on
her hands. When they got back to the station, she'd have a
proper scrub and put on her gloves and
She finished what she was doing and tossed the gauze
in the disposal, trying not to look too long at the
strange female's face, which
disturbed her deeply. The alien's nose was
shattered, several of her teeth were loosened and the gums
bleeding, at least one cheek bone was broken, the
surrounding tissue
bruised and beginning to swell. She must have
impacted against the helm console during
splashdown to do that much
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
damage. It wasn't anything Tatya hadn't
seen before. What disturbed her was not the extent of the
injuries, but the alien's response to them.
The alien, Tatya thought. Well, all
right, what else am I supposed to call her?
She's the alien, until someone tells me
otherwise.
The alien, unlike her male counterpart, was at
least semiconscious most of the time, and the broken
facial bones, along with second- and
third-degree burns similar to those the male had
sustained, must have been excruciating. But except that
the broken nose forced her to breathe through her ravaged and
swollen
mouth, she made no sound. Only her eyes
moved. And those eyes . . .
The swelling had reduced them to slits, but they
remained open as long as she was
conscious the color of jet, as sharp as lasers and,
to Tatya, positively chilling. They fixed themselves
on some distant point beyond
Tatya's shoulder, and they made her insides
quiver. If they ever looked right at her . . .
Tatya shivered, turned her attention to the male,
whose eyes, mercifully, were closed. Fingertips
tingling, Tatya forced herself to reach over and gently
slap his face several times, bringing him up to a
less profound level. When he'd stabilized, she
sat back on her heels and studied him.
She had to admit he was beautiful. Even with
burns covering a third of his face (further burns
on his hands and visible through the charred fabric of his
uniform), he was more beautiful, God help her,
than Yoshi his face all planes and angles beneath
golden skin, his eyelashes thick and black and
centimeters long, his dark hair silky to her
tentative touch. She could almost forget that the blood
beneath that golden son was green, so mesmerized was she
suddenly by the exotic upsweep of those alien
eyebrows, and those ears.
Those ears. She'd thought at first they were the result
of some form of cosmetic mutilation, like the 36
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
custom of piercing on Earth, but on closer
examination she could find no surgical scars, and the
pinnalcurve was simply too natural. They were
supposed to be that way.
Tatya sat back on her heels and tried
to imagine a whole race of beings like him.
Perhaps a whole planetfull, a solar system, a
galaxy. She wondered what they would think of
humans, red-blooded, stunted-eared, bizarre.
With a sudden thrill up her spine she realized that
the female, still gasping for air through swollen
lips, was looking directly at her. Tatya would
have jumped up and fled (fled where, though, in a
hydrofoil in the middle of the Pacific?) anywhere
to escape those eyes, if just then the foil hadn't
nosed against the dock, its motor dying to silence as
Yoshi called down unnecessarily:
"We're here!"
"By virtue of his service, T'Kahr Savar
could have requested and been granted a place on your
expedition without your intervention," Prefect
T'Saaf said to Commander T'Lera with particular
emphasis. Let the proud one know that the exception
was made because of who and what her father was, not she.
is
insupportable."
"On what grounds, Prefect?" T'Lera's
voice once again held that dry, almost ironic
tone. "Because he is without rank, or because he is my
son?"
"There are six others of fun rank as qualified
as he," T'Saaf replied, and to address both
issues: "Nepotism is not only illogical,
it may in this instance prove dangerous!"
The charge of nepotism was grave,
freighted as it was with implications of favoritism
and a lack of judgment, equally serious violations of
both a commander'@. code of ethics and a
Vulcan's honor. T'Lera did not permit it
to perturb her; she knew T'Saaf's
methodology and had been prepared for this.
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
"If the Prefect will refer to the addendum to my
preflight report." She struggled mightily
to control her voice, which had slipped beyond the bounds of
dryness into outright irony, if not sarcasm. "She will
note that of the six of rank whose skillscans equal
or surpass Sorahl's, four are already assigned
to other ships, one is on leave of absence, and the
sixth is Selik, who is already aboard my
vessel as astrophysicist and cartographer. It was
in fact he who recommended Sorahl, as the
most promising of the senior cadets, to accompany
us."
Prefect T'Saaf did not condescend to look
at the addendum; she knew it would read as
T'Lera said it did.
"As to the matter of rank . . ." T'Lera
continued. Salt in the wound, a human might
have called it; the Vulcan had no equivalent
metaphor. "I respectfully remind the
prefect that this is a technicality. The commencement
ceremony for senior cadets transpires six
days after our optimum departure date. Am I
to delay my ship's departure by what may prove a
dangerous margin? Or am I to deprive my
crew of the best available navigator because he
lacks the formality of rank designation on his
uniform?"
She would not burden T'Saaf with the tale of how
she herself had accompanied her father on his second
voyage to the Sol 111 system when she was a child.
T'Saaf would point out, and rightfully so, that
regulations had been less stringent then and that as
prefect Savar had been free to take certain
liberties no longer permitted. That T'Lera had
departed Vulcan a half formed child of eleven years,
to return two full decades later in the days before
warp speed the journey took that long as a mature
adult and unique among her
kind for having spent
those years in the void, was self-evident. Never again
could a planet entirely contain her, and that was both
her gift and her burden.
Did she presume to visit the same
fate on her son?
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
But Sorahl was older, in his nineteenth year,
and with the breaking of the light barrier a scout craft could
now reach Earth within ten days, not ten years. The
entire journey,
including mapping and research, would be
completed in a matter of months. It was not the
same.
But these were deeply personal things, and none of the
desk-bound, planet-bound,
convention-bound T'Saaf's concern. The
unarguable fact was that Sorahl was qualified and
available, and his commander wished him to go. That his commander
also wished to show her son what her father had first shown
her that there was that to be found in the misnamed void between
the stars which knew no words in Its exquisiteness, that
there was that on other worlds which was as beautiful and diverse
as Surak had envisioned it, juxtaposed with
strangeness and squalor and a striving for perfection that
no matter how imperfect was fascinating to observe
would not be spoken of in this official context.
But T'Lera would have her will in this as well.
"And if it is necessary for you to act upon the
Prime Directive?" Prefect T'Saaf
demanded. It was a last resort; she knew the
answer.
Destruction before detection. It seemed
to T'Lera that she had ingested it with her
mother's milk.
"It is not given to me to violate that which Surak
has taught and which Savar my father has labored all
his days to promulgate," T'Lera said evenly.
"The commander accepts the
responsibility for the lives of all her crew,
whether blood relative or no. I accept, and
I will act accordingly."
Within moments Commander T'Lera was
crossing the quadrangle of the Prefecture, on
her way to the Academic Hall to bring the news
to her navigator in person. There was no
lightness in her step, no sense of triumph.
Having argued for her father's fitness and her son's
qualification, she had added to the already heavy
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burden of every scoutshipcommander. She,
above all others, must not fail in her mission.
"We've got to be out of our minds!"
Tatya muttered frantically as they brought the male
inside and Iffted him onto the waterbed in the
sleeping room. "He's got a concussion,
possibly a serious one, and my instruments can't
detect intracranial pressure. He ought to be
flown out by MedEvac or he could die on me. The
other one's lost a lot of blood and she's going
to need reconstructive surgery. What are we
going to do? I can't his
"Tatiana!" Yoshi was winded, more out of fear
than exertion, and his nerves were shot. "It's too
late to think about that nowl We're committed. Pull
yourself together!"
"All right," she whimpered meekly, all out of
character. "I'll try!"
What was the matter with her? All her life she'd
dreamed of space flight, of discovering life on
other planets. Only a couple of mediocre
scores on a simulator test had disqualified
her from the Aeroationav program and she'd opted for
agronomy instead. Last night it had seemed so
exciting. Why was it so terrifying now?
"Let's get the other one," Yoshi was saying,
tugging on her arm. "Hurry!"
This time they both scanned the horizon for
visitors.
Yoshi went below first, getting his first real look
at the female alien. Her shattered face didn't
bother him as much as he'd expected, but her eyes
had the same effect on him as they'd had on
Tatya.
"We won't hurt you," he blurted before he could
stop himself. "We're trying to help."
He realised what he was doing and struck hfs
forehead with the heel of his hand.
"Stupid! What's wrong with me? She can't
possibly under his
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
Tatyasaw the alien's swollen lips form a
single word.
"Under understood," she breathed, and
Yoshi felt the hair on the back of his neck
stand on end.
"Our mission is to observe," then-Prefect
Savar had written. "We will exert every effort
to elude their observation telescopes and
scanners, and avoid activating the defensive
weaponry which every advanced world will
perforce have pointed skyward against invasion.
"Approaching no nearer than their own
artificial satellites, we will study the
topography of their world, and learn their dwelling
places and their natural phenomena. We will
monitor the carrier wave messages with which they
communicate with each other and those which they hurl
into space in search of otherworlders. By analysing all
of their forms of visual communication, we will learn their
arts and cultures, for these will tell us how they perceive
themselves in relation to their world.
"Above all we will master their languages, for how
else are we to communicate with them
when the time comes?"
"Understood," T'Lera said in the officiali
standard language of Earth, gleaned by
previous scoutcraft crews from the
audiovisual programs they had monitored over
the years, computer-analyzed for grammatical
structure, and stored in universal translators,
a language she had learned from her father's lips as
a child and spoken fluently with him and others in the
Offworld Service ever since, though never before with one of
its native speakers.
"Understood."
She had spoken only to allay the fear
she heard in the male Terran's voice, the
anxiety she read on both of the concerned faces
floating before her blurred and darkening vision. Had
she not been in shock from her
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
injuries and the hours of exposure in the shattered
craft, had she been less uncertain of
Sorahl's condition and therefore better able to formulate
a logical course of action, she might have taken
inffconsideration the fact that a human's curiosity is
as all-consuming as a Vulcan's, and kept her
silence.
"You speak our language!" Yoshi whispered,
incredulous. "But how?"
TiLera's fading consciousness did not permit her
to explain.
"I'd have thought," Melody Sawyer said, doing a
visual all-points from the conning tower as
Delphstnus cruised at a leisurely three
knots, searching, "mey'd have everything that could float
or fly out here looking. If it's what you say it
could be. A worldwide alert, like In tho
se old
2-D movies about men from Mars. You
remember the one his
She and Nyere were alone on the bridge for the
moment, Jason working the scanners for the regular
tech, who had gone below for a late breakfast, and
Sawyer could afford to be
loose-lipped.
was the one we took the kids to at the Antique
Films Festival? Where they buiHave that whole
military installation near some mountain in Wyoming just
to welcome those lithe
bald-headed, goggle-eyed critters coming down in
this big old glittery flying whatsis . . ."
Her voice trailed off. Jason wasn't
listening to her, wasn't looking at the scanners
he'd so meticulously calibrated, sat squinting
grimly at the far horizon hoping against hope that
they wouldn't find what he knew was out there, though he
was honor-bound, dutybound, to try his damnedest
to find it, and if he didn't, Aeroationav would
simply send out someone else who would.
"So how come, Jason?" Melody broke
into his thoughts, grating. "How come it's just us out
here?"
"Because the fewer people know about it, the fewer
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
have to be reeducated later," Nyere said, watching
with perverse satisfaction as Sawyer's eyes went
wide.
"You mean we'll have to be 'wiped"?" she de-
manded, hands on her hips. "The hell you say!"
Ah, the power of euphemism! Jason Nyere
thought. "Reeducated," "wiped," whatever one chose
to call it, it amounted to several
mandatory hypnosis sessions to excise
classified information from the memories of those who
no longer needed it, and it was contained in every
Aeroationav reg book, a
holdover from the reactionary days Sawyer pined for.
Odd that she should be the one to object to it.
"Take it to a higher court," Nyere rumbled.
Sawyer sensed it was best to drop it for the moment.
"What'd you tell the crew?" she wanted to know.
"Told them it was routine salvage op.
Derelict satellite with the databank intact."
"Think they bought that?"
"No. But as long as we're on radio silence
they can speculate to their hearts' content." The
captain glanced toward the stairwell to see if the
tech was on her way back. "And that goes double for
you. We don't want to risk alarming
anyone else who might already have found
what we're looking for."
He nodded unnecessarily in the direction-of the