Even before they got back into the escape pod – crowded with the three of them now – Salma and Zaimu were told that Meriel had already rigged up a kind of isolation area to receive them aboard the Shadow.
It hadn’t been difficult, since most of the cabins and other compartments were capable, in an emergency, of vacuum-tight self-sealing. So Meriel had simply co-opted a small med suite meant for recuperation stays, set up a clean route from the airlock they would use, and had begun bundling equipment in there – working by guesswork as to what would be needed, as far as Salma could advise.
Meanwhile, even as Salma and Zaimu struggled to use plastic sheeting to rig up isolation cells within their own little craft, Hild had tried to order them to bring up the coffin itself as well. If Feathers was a representative of some alien culture, then the coffin looked like the only piece of that culture’s technology to hand. ‘Even a mineralogical sampling would be interesting, let alone manufacturing techniques, even any evidence of aesthetics—’
But, having already dragged an alien wrapped in a plastic sheet across the surface of a planet that shouldn’t exist, and now pulling more plastic sheets across their sole minuscule cabin to improvise quarantine, Salma had kept her mouth shut about the aesthetics of coffins. Feathers alone would have to do, for now.
Feathers, though … She began to realise she was starting to think of that as a name for this impossible refugee.
After they had done customising the lander, with Feathers isolated and secure, the flight home to the Shadow, at least, was an interval of calm.
But once the lander had docked the chaos started again.
Aside from a couple of fresh isolation suits thrown into the airlock, nobody was to be allowed to help the two of them – or three. Meriel wouldn’t take any more risks of exposure than Salma and Zaimu had already suffered, and Salma couldn’t argue with that.
In the same spirit, from the moment of opening the hatch after docking, it was up to Salma and Zaimu, in the new suits, to get their passenger cum cargo, still clumsily wrapped in plastic sheeting, out through the airlock tunnel, and through the ship itself to Meriel’s isolation chamber.
The body, the size of a small adult human, was clumsy to carry through the corridors of the Shadow’s main hull, the more so given their isolation suits and face masks. Zaimu held the legs, and Salma the upper body. There was no gravity here, and it was a case of pushing or pulling the inert load, rather than carrying. But the body itself was floppy, limp, and awkward to shift, especially as they were trying to do it no harm.
It.
The body.
Her. For all you know it, she, is still alive, Salma … She found herself longing for that to be true.
And even as they struggled along Meriel kept talking, observing, speculating.
‘The problem is that it’s so like us, superficially at any rate,’ she said urgently over the comms link.
‘Which surely isn’t a coincidence,’ Hild, the captain, put in. ‘I’ve been thinking about that. If they somehow knew we were coming – they, whoever set this up – maybe it’s some kind of bait. This body, this creature. Human enough to attract our attention. To motivate us to save it. I mean, why only one … entity? Why not a crew? Why not some kind of literal message? Instead, a body, a single creature, close enough for us to recognise as being like us. Something to lure us in. It’s like a worm on a hook – or something that looks like a worm – and we are the fish …’
Salma had literally no idea what Hild was talking about.
‘Angling metaphors now,’ Boyd whispered through the comms in her ear. ‘She’s just being paranoid.’
‘Heard that,’ Hild said. ‘Just being cautious, more like. Look at the evidence, what we know so far. It’s not just that her appearance is so human-like. The air in her coffin was Earthlike, a nitrogen buffer with water, oxygen and cee-oh-two among other components. That suggests to me that, not only does she look humanoid, but her biochemistry must be – well, at least similar to ours.’
‘Very likely, from what I’ve already seen so far from Salma’s emergency sample,’ Meriel said. ‘I’ll be very surprised if she doesn’t have some kind of proteins-in-water life system like our own – if she doesn’t come from such a biosphere. Oh, and she is a she, I think now. One scan I took revealed the presence of what has to be an ovary …’
‘Unless she’s been made to look that way,’ Hild said. ‘As I said. A plastic worm on a hook.’
‘Some hook,’ Zaimu said, grunting as he hauled the inert body. ‘Some worm.’
‘We’re nearly there,’ Salma announced.
They had come to an open door at last.
It led them into an empty med suite, with a second door leading off to a room evidently rigged out as a decontamination chamber. There was a single bed in the middle of the floor. Med robots waited, squat cylinders hovering in the air with manipulator arms, and, Salma knew, veritable medicine chests in their interiors. And with the knowledge, if not the authority without explicit human permission and oversight, to perform independently even major procedures.
Robot nurses for this exotic patient, rather than human crew. For now, at least.
Once Salma and Zaimu had staggered in, the door slammed sharply behind them, sealing them in with the robots, and Feathers. Salma thought she could hear the snap of locks, mechanical and otherwise. And she could hear voices outside, muffled commands: others of the crew, evidently having followed the rescue party through the ship, no doubt decontaminating the route they had taken.
Salma and Zaimu just drifted in the air for a while, bits of vaguely medical junk floating around them.
Feathers, floating. Salma felt overheated, exhausted.
But they weren’t given long to recuperate.
‘On the bed with our feathered friend,’ Meriel’s voice snapped. ‘Then, you two, into the decontamination chamber yourselves.’
Which was a wardrobe-sized room, reached through that inner door. Salma knew that decon facilities were only here at all because of contingency planning. Those designing the mission had never expected an encounter with an extraterrestrial life form – save for perhaps some bug lodged in an icy comet – but you never knew.
Zaimu grinned through his face mask at Salma. ‘Let’s get her onto the bed.’
Salma and Zaimu got hold of Feathers, still sealed up in her floppy plastic bubble, Zaimu at the head, Salma with the legs.
‘One big heave. One – two—’
Together they pulled the body through the air, then gently guided it down to the bed. Everything was weightless, but inertia made the body awkward to handle.
Once Feathers was on the bed, Salma reflexively reached for straps and harnesses to hold the body in place.
There was no resistance from the creature, any more than there had been since the retrieval from the ‘coffin’ on the surface. No apparent expression on the sketch of a face. Visibly in repose, even as seen through the plastic layers, with large, closed eyes, a sketch of a nose, what looked like a long, hardened upper lip, no jaw to speak of – a beak-like mouth—
‘Less of the eyeballing, Salma,’ Meriel snapped, her voice again hanging in the air. ‘You’re only getting in the way of the bots. You’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other later, believe me. For now, decon tank. Both of you. Now.’
Zaimu shrugged and led the way, stripping off his decon suit and the sweat-stained under-suit he had worn during the EVA.
Salma followed him, pulling off her own gear. Once she was out of the way of the bed with its sole occupant, she saw the bots close in on the supine Feathers, with more emerging from behind wall panels, even from beneath the bed.
Zaimu called, ‘Plenty of time, Meriel? What do you mean by that?’
‘You don’t think I’m going to let you two lab rats out until we prove there’s nothing in there to die of? But don’t fret if it all goes south. Your sacrifice will be memorialised in a hundred historic technical articles.’
Zaimu dumped his coverall, vest and pants into a hopper, pulled med sensors away from his exposed skin with ripping sounds. ‘You really aren’t as funny as you think you are, you know, Meriel.’
‘Which is why I went into life support by choice, rather than the genuine medicine that I’ve had to learn to earn a place on this ship. I prefer to deal with people only as unhygienic components of my recycling systems …’
Salma dumped her own clothing in a bin. Stripped down, naked save for the black onyx pendant at her neck, it occurred to her that she had not the slightest interest in Zaimu’s bare flesh, any more than he seemed to have in hers. It had always been that way. The mantra had always been that she was an honorary niece for the rest of the crew, and there relationships ended – for better or worse.
But right now Salma felt oddly self-conscious – as if the alien presence aboard the ship emphasised her closeness, relatively speaking, to the human crew.
So Salma turned away from Zaimu, and stood there while she was sluiced down by the chamber’s systems, with water – a couple of times hot enough to sting, a couple of times cold enough to make her shiver – then a spray of liquids that smelled like disinfectants, but probably weren’t. All-over body scans came next – X-ray, MRI and other technologies. Then retinal scans, hearing probes, and a series of questions fired at her – her name, date of birth, who was the President of Earth right now? ‘Melanie Mason’. Other stuff she paid even less attention to. And finally a couple of simple blood samples.
Zaimu just stood and endured it, as she did.
At last Meriel told them they could have a final shower, a dry-off, and then dress again.
That was when Salma heard a scream. Thin, high-pitched, apparently wordless – but a scream.
She glanced at Zaimu, stark naked and dripping as she was.
‘Feathers,’ he said.
‘Let’s get out of here.’ She tried pushing at the door out of the chamber, but it wouldn’t shift. She called into the air: ‘Meriel? Open the damn door. We have to help her.’
She could hear Meriel sigh.
‘OK. My instinct is still to keep her isolated. Evidently we can’t rely on the bots – but you two are the only crew I’m about to let get close to the specimen for now.’
‘Meriel, her name is Feathers. Not the specimen. Let us out of here!’
‘OK, OK.’ A door folded out of the wall, revealing a compartment with towels, fresh coveralls, slip-on shipboard shoes.
The two of them rubbed down hastily with a last towel each, and pulled on coveralls and shoes.
‘Underwear’s for losers,’ Zaimu said, breathing hard.
Once dressed, or as dressed as she was going to be, Salma tried the exit door again. This time it opened easily, and she pulled herself back into the main room.
And faced a mess. There were plastic shreds all over the floor, all around the bed, evidently the remains of the wrap in which they had carried Feathers out of her coffin to the lander, and all the way up here. Bots swarmed all over the bed, each about the size of a human head, and equipped with a variety of tools, mostly medical instruments and probes. One bot was still clearing away more torn remnants of their improvised isolation tent.
Salma could barely see the occupant of the bed, save for a blur of brown and white, twitching, trapped movements beneath the machines. She had a sense of utter fragility.
And then another scream – no, it was weaker than that, more a crying out, and not a featureless noise – ‘Chkah! Chkah!’
Salma and Zaimu exchanged wild glances.
‘Words,’ Salma said. ‘Those sound like words to me.’
‘Yeah. Me too. And I’ll wager my salary for this trip that those “words” mean something like “Get these floating garbage pails the hell off me”. Or, “Where the hell did the gravity go?”’
A wordless glance at each other.
‘Let’s fix this,’ Salma said. ‘Bots. Move back.’
The bots ignored her, even when she repeated the command.
So they both pushed forward, into the cloud of bots. Salma just grabbed one and pulled it aside. Zaimu actually punched another.
Salma knew that the bots were heavily programmed not to harm a human, not even by passively resisting – only if they were stopping you coming to obvious harm would they disobey verbal orders, or resist this kind of physical control. As Salma and Zaimu worked, soon they started to move to a wider distance.
And then, as the bots cleared out of the way, the alien was exposed.
Feathers had been strapped, loosely, to the bed. Loosely, but her four spindly limbs were held, at wrist and ankle.
Cuffed.
Salma exchanged a glance with Zaimu. ‘Let’s get her out of all this.’
‘Agreed.’
They got to work breaking the bonds that held Feathers down on the bed. The bots just stood by, and Meriel stayed silent, evidently outvoted. Wrist, ankle. Salma had no trouble assigning these labels to the joints of the limbs of this alien, as she worked at the bonds.
This was the first time Salma had had a chance to see the creature she had saved (abducted?) down on Nine – to see her properly, and not in the middle of wrapping her up in plastic sheets and bundling her into a spacecraft.
And she looked more human than not. Feathers. A person, with a name, human or not.
If she had stood straight Feathers might have topped out at a metre and a half in height – a short human adult. She was as naked as when they had found her, but now, with the wrapping gone, her skin, covered with those feathers, was easily visible. The feathers were flat, plate-like growths in brown, black, white, which Salma would have had no trouble calling feathers on a terrestrial bird. (Not that she had ever seen a terrestrial bird live.) The feathers were ragged, though, as if disordered. Some missing altogether. No doubt a result of the handling she had received en route from her casket to here, for all the care they had tried to take.
Feathers seemed to have no breasts – no nipples.
Her face was distorted, if you took the human as a norm. Soft, short feathers brushed back from a low brow. The beak-mouth seemed drastically different to the human arrangement, with a hard plate where nose and upper lip might have been—
Suddenly Feathers’ eyes were open.
She was staring at Salma. Large, dark eyes (did they have pupils?).
Salma forced a smile … No, she found. It wasn’t forced.
Feathers stared back. Those eyes were huge, unblinking.
Zaimu said, ‘She does have a beak. She really does. But – look, with small teeth …’
Meriel spoke out of the air. ‘I can confirm it’s female, from more evidence. It, she …’
The disembodied voice seemed to alarm Feathers; she looked round uneasily, as if seeking the source.
‘The scans show it,’ Meriel said. ‘There’s an ovary, I’m sure. But – I’m drawing on loose terrestrial parallels here, parallels to the structures I see – she doesn’t have the facility to deliver live births. Salma, I think she lays eggs.’
Feathers seemed to be growing still more alarmed. She cowered back, staring at Salma, Zaimu. She was shuddering, or shivering.
Salma reached forward, hesitantly, stroked her head. ‘Hey. It’s OK.’
Feathers just stared back with those huge eyes. But she seemed to calm.
Salma pulled back her hand.
Captain Hild’s voice boomed in the air. ‘Feathers and eggs and a beak? Watching in here. Well, we all are. You know what, Meriel? If you made a human out of a bird, that’s pretty much what it would look like, isn’t it?’
That second voice coming out of the air seemed to be the final straw for Feathers. After a few seconds of it, she threw back her head and screamed.
Not a human scream, Salma thought immediately. All she had seen or heard of birds had been in virtual dioramas recorded in the renewed wilderness areas of Earth. But that call had sounded like the call of a bird, a caw, a cry of alarm.
Meriel’s voice was louder than Hild’s. ‘That’s it. I’m closing this down. You two, out; I’m leaving it to the bots.’
Salma glanced at Zaimu.
He shook his head, a small gesture, but firm. ‘We stay,’ he said.
‘Damn right,’ Salma said. ‘But we shut everybody else out. And shut up. The voices in the air are spooking her.’
A bot descended right in front of her, hovering between Feathers and herself. She peremptorily shoved it out of the way. ‘That’s not negotiable.’
‘Crew Salma.’ That was the captain’s voice.
Feathers cringed even more at the new sound, yet another new voice. She curled up on the bed.
‘Crew Salma. Do as Meriel orders. You and Crew Zaimu, out of there, now.’
‘Like hell. Zaimu—’
‘I’m on it.’
Zaimu was useful in zero gravity, Salma knew. And he knew the ship’s systems intimately. Now, quickly, nimbly, he cleared away the cloud of hovering bots. When he grabbed one, it would not resist, not risk injuring him, even as he threw it aside. Salma saw how he didn’t shove hard enough to do any damage, or not significantly, though one bot did catch on the frame of the bed and went spinning out of control.
Once the bots were cleared away Zaimu hovered by the bed, waiting to fend off any more intrusions.
As soon as she got the chance, as soon as the bots were out of the way, Salma leaned forward – slowly, gently, but deliberately – and put her arms around Feathers. Lifted her to a sitting posture. The feathers at arms, legs and waist had been damaged by the cuffs, she saw. And immediately she could feel how Feathers was trembling – or shivering, she thought.
At first Feathers resisted. She twisted her head in panic, as if looking for a way to escape.
But Salma held her, not tightly, in a loose embrace. ‘It’s all right. They won’t hurt you. They’re only trying to help … Damn it, she’s still shivering. She’s cold. What if this room is too cold for her? And she’s wet – did you sluice her down as you did us?’
‘Crew Salma—’
‘She’s cold, and she’s alone, and she’s terrified. Zaimu, help me—’
‘On it.’ He sailed through the room, grabbed a towel from a holder on the wall en route, passed it to Salma who caught it neatly.
Gently she drew Feathers towards her again, wrapped the towel around to enclose her but not so tightly that Feathers might feel trapped, and started to rub her back through the towel. Still Feathers shivered, and twisted, as if restless, though her moans were dying down.
‘Smooth downward,’ Zaimu said. ‘The way the feathers lie. That will be easier for her – more comfortable.’
‘Yeah. Good thinking.’
Stroking Feathers’ back softly, smoothly, Salma felt her relax – although she could sense what felt like a heartbeat, oddly rapid. Now Salma was able to look into the creature’s face once more. Her eyes were pools of darkness that showed her own reflection.
Gradually the shivering slowed.
‘Shit,’ said Meriel, quietly, as if whispering. ‘If I really were a doctor I’d probably say you were doing exactly the right thing, Salma. Do you want my job?’
‘She was scared, and alone, and wet,’ Salma said. ‘All she needed was a hug.’
‘OK. But listen, try to do a little science while you’re there. We need to understand her to be able to help her. Don’t put any stress on her. But do you get any sense of – of weight, robustness?’
‘I … maybe. I’m holding her, not lifting her. I get the sense she’d be lighter than a human, though.’
‘That’s what I’d expect from the scans we’ve already done. Her bones look built for strength with lightness – not as solid as human bones, but with hollow cavities, struts for strength. And a big breastbone, an anchor for powerful muscles—’
Zaimu said, ‘Like a bird. A bird has such features, a skeleton built for flight. The big breastbone to ground the flight muscles.’
‘Correct …’
Feathers still seemed relaxed, but a little more restless; she turned her face this way and that, her beak-mouth opening and closing.
There really were teeth in that beak. Did any birds have teeth? Salma knew that some dinosaurs, relatives of the birds, once had teeth …
‘I think she’s thirsty,’ Zaimu said now. ‘Look. The way she’s opening her mouth. Not surprising. We’ve given her nothing since we picked her up on the surface. Can she have water?’ Anticipating the answer, he went to a spigot, filled a covered cup.
‘I’m pretty sure she can,’ Meriel said. ‘We’ve already analysed some body-fluid samples, including the spittle you collected and what the bots have managed to retrieve. As non-invasively as possible, from scrapes and scraps, before you launch into me … We have blood, tissue. Her biochemistry is like ours, but not identical. Proteins in water, as I thought. What looks like a genetic system based on amino acids – but not our DNA. More like our RNA, in fact. So – water, yes.’
Zaimu came over. Salma gently rested Feathers’ head back a little, pushing back the towel, so that the creature could see Zaimu’s offer. The lidded container seemed to baffle her. So Salma took a sip herself, to show how it was done, and then let Feathers take the cup herself.
Feathers reached, a wing-arm unfolding with a rustle of feathers, and fragile, bony fingers extended from the wingtip.
Meriel said softly, ‘Look at that limb. It’s more like a wing with a claw, than an arm. But if it’s meant for flight it’s evidently devolved. Her ancestors may have taken to the skies, but this bird never flew …’
It took a couple of tries, but soon Feathers was holding the cup for herself and sucking water into her beak-mouth with ease.
Salma, feeling protective, took back the cup after a few mouthfuls. ‘Maybe we ought to take it easy for now … Meriel, what about food?’
‘Well, I have her genetics. And we know she’s a meat-eater, or I think so—’
‘The teeth in the beak.’
‘Yeah. I’m thinking of synthesising some kind of meat-substitute based on her own flesh’s composition. It feels a little queasy to feed her back her own kind’s flesh, but it will keep her alive until we can do better.’
‘Or until she can tell us what she wants,’ Hild said. ‘That sounds like good work, Meriel. And you, Salma.’
For once, no smart come-back from anybody. All Salma cared about now was Feathers.
But Hild said, ‘So we made a start on what she is. Now we also need to know why she’s here. What the hell this is all about.’
Zaimu murmured, ‘All in good time. And it’s going to take a good long time, I think. A lot of patience.’
Hild said quietly, ‘Patience we’ve got, it seems. And – empathy.’
Feathers, resting now, wrapped in the towel and Salma’s arms, looked up at Salma with those big, watchful, unblinking eyes.
‘Well,’ Salma said, ‘I don’t know where you came from, or how you got here, or why you are here. But I guess we’re stuck with each other.’ She pointed to herself. ‘Salma. Salma.’ And at Feathers. ‘Feathers. Feathers.’
The creature reached up one wing, feathers rustling. One of those fingers at the end of the wing touched the black amulet at Salma’s neck. Those big eyes fixed on Salma, and the beak-mouth opened and closed.
‘Shh – aa – maa …’
And, her eyes closing, Feathers slid into sleep.