The first sight of the alien being had alarmed Een, though he truly should have been prepared. They had watched transmissions from this planet before running afoul of the gravity well and he had been able to observe the dominant builder species in communication with one another. But the reality of that alien face up close had been shocking, the strange faiina, both wiry and sparse, the absurdly thin lim that sat so unnaturally still atop its head—it was a shock to his ailing system that set his respirations heaving.
Soft, though, that deep-toned voice, and the hands had been gentle. A lively intelligence resided in those odd multicolored eyes. Even if the being didn't understand why Een needed the light, he had well-developed powers of observation and enough empathy to deduce that he did. Dangerous to assign familiar emotions to aliens without sufficient data, but it was so tempting to think of the being's actions as connected and mindful.
Harmonious.
The little samples of languages from the planet had been out of context, disconnected sounds his translation implant couldn't process. When he was stronger and could think clearly, he would concentrate on communication issues. For now, he could barely lift his head.
He shivered as the solar rays began to fade in the evening, and the being brought the warm wrappings again. This time, Een didn't protest the coverings since the light was gone and the heat from his rescuer's body was welcome. The sleeping platform was an odd shape, though soft. His aching body welcomed it. Een let his eyes drift shut again, grateful that the alien hummed as it moved about the room. Strange, thin, singular notes, but at least his species could conceive of tones. He had encountered some species who had no ability to process notes or rhythm at all.
Alone. I am so alone. Aal was the one who understood strangers. Laiin was the one who was so brave. And only I am left. The least of us. The one who hid in mundane, everyday decisions, who navigated and procured supplies. The one who was always afraid. I am still afraid with no one to tell my fears to, no one to continue the struggle for. Why reach for the light when there is nothing left to illuminate?
Yet he still reached, still struggled to survive. Stubbornness, perhaps, or merely the habit of survival. There would come a time soon when the struggle no longer mattered. He was alone, after all. He could hope for peace in his last days. That would be enough.
Serge sat in the guestroom, strumming his lute, not the fancy Venetian-style one he used for Faires and concerts, but the little six-course one he used for his classes at the university. While he didn't have the academic background for a position as a professor, he'd been hired on as a lecturer ten years before. His specialized skills helped the music department round out its courses, allowing them to offer lute and mandolin and Renaissance dance in the summer sessions. While the department chair had understood his need to take some time off, Serge had to wonder whether they would consider taking him back after his extended absence.
He bent his head over his strings, letting his fingers wander through bits of tunes. Until that moment, he hadn't thought about going back or what came next. Josh would've been furious with his apathy and inaction. Don't overthink yourself into a funk, Serge. Get up and do something. He supposed he was. Doing something. A strange, ill-advised something, but maybe in his self-imposed silence, Josh's voice had never left him. Somewhere in the dusty corridors of his mind, Josh had still been whispering all this time.
Do something.
The alien had shown definite signs of settling while Serge was humming, so he took a not-so-wild guess that music might be a point where their cultures intersected. So far, the experiment had gone well, the alien's gaze fixed to Serge's fingers on the strings. Eyes sleepy and half-lidded, the poor alien looked like they were fighting sleep hard, trying to pay attention to the impromptu concert.
He still had no idea whether his guest was male or female. Probably neither. He, she, or something else entirely had spread out naked on the floor most of the day, making it obvious that there was nothing between those long, slender legs. Not a thing. That didn't mean anything, of course. Genitals didn't have to be external or in the same location. Maybe this species didn't do sexual reproduction at all.
As a geeky kid, he'd wanted to meet aliens but in a Star Trek kind of way—familiar-looking aliens with compatible anatomy who would take him away from the bullies at school and his parents who wanted him to be many things he was not. This situation wasn't at all what he'd envisioned.
Out of habit, he started playing Greensleeves. He often used it as the initial demonstration piece, simple and languid, a good showcase for the instrument. It also seemed to get his visitor's attention. The silver eyes opened wider. The hand on the unburned side stroked the side of the bed in time to the music. At first, Serge thought the alien was simply enjoying the music, but as he hit a softer patch, clear notes reached him from across the room, not quite humming, not quite singing, but recreating the refrain pitch-perfect. Serge stopped playing and the alien gave him the lute's notes in response, not merely the melody, but every chord.
The interpretation in an alien voice was eerie and beautiful. Serge held his breath, not wanting to disturb the astounding impromptu concert, awestruck that a single voice could sing three and four notes at once with such bell-clear perfection. The timbre reminded him more of a hang drum than a voice, but the sounds obviously issued from the alien's throat. The notes stopped in mid-refrain and the alien stared at him silently for a moment that stretched Serge's nerves.
When the alien opened their mouth again, the notes they sang had gained vowels and consonants. Serge cocked his head, trying to separate what might have been words. The alien finally waved a hand at their own body, repeating one syllable. Een.
"Your name? Een?"
The syllable repeated several times, and Serge realized he was being dense. He couldn't imitate the way Een said it as a C-major chord, but he could sing the bottom note while he plucked the third and the fifth on the lute. Een nestled back into the blankets and Serge interpreted the movement as pleased or at least satisfied.
He pointed to himself. "Serge."
The fronds on Een's head waved and twitched. "Errr," came out as a minor triad.
"Ssssserg-eh." Serge exaggerated the missing letters.
The silver eyes narrowed, perhaps trying to focus on how Serge made the sounds and the next effort was a little better. "Ssserd."
Serge smiled and nodded. "Close enough. I'll take it."
He played a few more songs, humming along when Een picked up the melodies and harmonies. Maybe they didn't have words, but words didn't have a monopoly on communication. Soon Een's eyes closed and their notes quieted to slow respirations, breathing something soft and warm to life in Serge's chest, the warmth occupying a raw, aching spot where he didn't necessarily want it.
The house, not much more than a cabin, had echoed in its emptiness since Josh had died, a giant gourd from which someone had scooped all of the insides and left the shell to rot in terrible, gray silence.
It had all been too obvious after the fact, the aching joints, the fevers, the sudden loss of what had been a bottomless appetite, but Josh had dredged up one excuse after the other. It was a cold or lingering flu, there was something going around campus, anything to avoid making a doctor's appointment. Between the eventual diagnosis and the end had been a horrible three-month whirlwind, the lymphoma dragging Josh under almost too fast for him to put up a fight. Then one morning, Josh didn't wake up and the doctors told Serge that was it. All he could do was sit by the hospital bed, watching the rise and fall of a too-thin ribcage that couldn't belong to his barrel-bear of a man, holding his hand until the breaths stopped.
No dramatic scenes of medical intervention or wailing and crying, no last flailing struggle to hang onto life, the breaths just stopped. Confusion, anger, guilt and pain paralyzed Serge in that terrible moment, howling through him in jagged shards of rusted iron. He sat there, unable to react as the doctor pronounced time of death, as they asked him questions he couldn't answer. Josh had no living family, no one to interfere in any way, either to wrest Josh away from him or to help Serge through the miasma of his dying.
He'd asked for cremation and was eventually handed a brass urn, no fuss, no funeral full of crying friends, and everything about Josh's death was so fucking quiet on the outside while a shrieking hurricane battered Serge's insides. But the world around him had gone still, deafeningly still, so he took a leave of absence from his teaching position and spread Josh's ashes in the woods he had loved, leaving the urn under a mountain laurel like he was setting up some pagan shrine. Maybe he had been.
The anger had died slowly, raging at first, then whimpering, anger over the what-ifs and might-have-beens, but the rest remained like a mold infestation under Serge's skin. With a start, he realized that evening had been the first time he'd picked up his lute since Josh's death. It had taken someone else's need for him to start pulling his head out of his self-pitying ass. Odd that this someone wasn't even human, or maybe that wasn't odd at all. There were days when he felt disconnected from humanity, like a lost button that had fallen out of the big mason jar of just-in-case sewing flotsam and jetsam that sat by the toaster.
Serge got up quietly to put away his lute and go to bed, relatively certain his guest wasn't moving until morning.
Input. Een needed input. His host—Serd—had left water by the sleeping platform. Feeling strong enough for absorption rather than ingestion, Een shoved a lim into the mouth of the container and forced himself to stay still until he'd absorbed all the water. The water here tasted sharp and strange, not at all like the flat, musty recycled station water to which he'd become accustomed. Whatever chemicals or minerals gave it extra heft hadn't made him ill. Another issue resolved.
He crawled from the sleeping platform into the patch of morning light. Morning. He hadn't been on a planet's surface with mornings since he'd been small. Waving his lim in negation, admonishing himself to stop focusing on minutiae, he examined the room for any signs of communication devices, anything he could use to begin absorbing information.
The room contained little beyond the sleeping platform and the seat Serd had used while he spoke using that lovely instrument. Movement was still excruciating, the bruising beneath his skin, the burns that had begun to weep sticky rah, his system fighting hard to repair the damage. One limb at a time worked best, slow movements on his knees. He wasn't ready to try to stand yet. Not far from the rectangle of morning light, recessed shelves ran along the bottom half of the wall, shelves with…what were they? Manuals? Data cards? It was clumsy to take them down one-handed and he dropped the first one, his gaze flicking guiltily toward the doorway. When he picked the little rectangle up again, it was undamaged, but its leaves didn't help him decipher use or meaning.
Carefully, he took rectangles down and replaced them one by one, until he opened a larger one that contained not only the strange, stiff alien characters, but also beautiful images. This one was potentially more helpful. The images of life forms had to be from this planet. As far as Een knew, the dominant builder species had only the most rudimentary off-planet technology, so a catalog of life forms from other planets would be unlikely. If this book was a catalog of native species, perhaps with the classifications listed underneath, his language implant might have a starting point. Een moved back to his spot of light and sat carefully, balancing his find on his knees, and began to leaf through, completely absorbed by the beauty and variety of life displayed for him.
A shift in air currents and scent alerted him to his host in the doorway. Serd stood motionless, still as a piece of Antonian digital art, and Een had a bad moment wondering if perhaps he had perpetrated some terrible breach of etiquette by looking at the image manual. Then Serd continued into the room, and the anxious knot in Een's core gave a bit. Serd spoke in that flat, tuneless way, though it was a deep, warm sound like an air circulator humming. While Een couldn't understand meaning or intention, the voice comforted him.
"My breath greets yours," Een said in answer to whatever Serd said. He could still be polite, even if they had no language in common yet.
Frustrating, the lack of a language interface, the lack of any tools to help him decipher this new world. He held up the image collection to Serd, hoping that this might be a start. Serd cocked his head and set aside the pile of textiles he carried before he joined Een at the window. He held a round vessel out to Een, gesturing for him to take it. Since he had no idea what to do with it, Een pushed it gently back toward his host.
Serd solved the mystery by picking up the metal utensil stuck in whatever steaming mess was in the vessel and popping it in his mouth. Ah. Ingestion. That answered one question, at least. Serd's species were matter-consumers. While the ingestion of other life forms was repulsive to Een on a purely physical level, he had nothing against matter-consumers. Some of his closest acquaintances on the station had needed bio-matter to survive. He was simply disappointed that the dominant species on this planet was not photophagic like himself.
He lifted the manual toward Serd again. "What are these? Can you read the names?"
No, Serd wouldn't understand the words, but perhaps he would comprehend that there was a question. The strange shaggy head bent over the open pages, and Serd pointed to the image of a yellow and white life form, saying something in his flat, single tone voice.
Een pointed to the symbols underneath the image, running his finger over them. "Can you read it for me? Tell me the words?"
He repeated the action several times and Serd's eyes widened. He began to point to the words, speaking slowly and softly. Een clutched the bare finger and moved it over the words again, silently asking him to repeat the sounds.
"Shaza daezee," Een finally tried the words, pleased when Serd bobbed his head up and down.
At least, he'd puzzled that out as an affirmative gesture. He ran Serd's finger over the symbols underneath, words that most likely contained information about the shaza daezee, and Serd read those as well, his patience seemingly unending. Serd's warmth was welcome nestled close to him and Een dared to feel a spark of companionship, despite the dangers of such assumptions. Serd might be planning to eat him or vivisect him the next day. Een might suddenly stumble over something that gave unforgivable offense, and find himself abandoned in the wild. Until he understood more, he couldn't afford the luxury of assigning motives to actions.
The language implant began to process, slowly building symbols in relation to sound. Meaning would come over time, with context, but the beginning filled Een with hope that he might not be entirely mute and helpless for long.
Een had refused both the oatmeal and the pajamas, both of which would have worried Serge if they weren't obviously improving hour by hour. It didn't make sense to Serge that they were more alert and moving better without any fuel besides the little bit of water they drank, but they were. When the sun moved from the guestroom, Serge carried them to the front room again, the guide to North American wildflowers clutched to Een's chest.
His heart had nearly stopped when he'd spotted the book in alien hands, Josh's last work, with his painstaking photographs and descriptions. Serge had accepted the book, published posthumously, from the university. He'd set it reverently on the shelf with Josh's other books and hadn't been able to bring himself to touch it since. But Een didn't know that. How could they? Serge had gathered his misplaced anger, shoved it somewhere dark, and sat beside Een to read the words written by a beloved hand. Forever lost and stilled, but in this, preserved. Josh had poured so much of himself into that book, each photograph a spot of time, each paragraph a morsel of that sharp, fiercely independent mind.
Serge's fingers had trembled at first, his voice shaking as he tried to read words that kept blurring on the page. It was Een, warm from the sun, insistent in their need, who helped him continue. Before long, Serge had been smiling, knowing that Josh would've loved his book used as a primer and as an instrument of first contact with Earth's biodiversity.
Sitting with Een, a naked being covered in feather-scales with tubular snakes on his head, had calmed Serge. Not something he wanted to look at too closely right then, though Een's melodic humming probably had something to do with it.
Een still hummed in his box of light on the floor, leafing carefully through Josh's book, while Serge stared out the window. The snow was melting already. He probably could make it into the city safely later that afternoon.
I should take Een to the university. They really should be the professors' problem, not mine.
The thought brought a flush of shame faster than a copperhead strike. Een wasn't a problem. They were a person, one who was struggling to communicate and probably wouldn't do well in an environment full of authority figures and bureaucratic types insisting that they communicate. No, it made more sense to let them stay in the cabin's quiet environs until they were more mobile and had their bearings. It was only right, and it wasn't as if Serge was hiding them from the authorities.
Though if he thought too hard about it, he really was.
The thought of handing Een over felt wrong, as if they were a stray puppy who had needed help and Serge was considering taking them to the closest shelter. Not that he thought of Een as a homeless canine. Een was his guest and it sure as hell was wrong to take a guest to a kill shelter.
Since early spring, the government had held televised press conferences, stating clearly that the landing aliens were to be met with compassion and every possible assistance. Serge didn't trust it. Not entirely. Not everything his parents taught him growing up had stuck, but he couldn't help the constant hum of mistrust for government entities itching beneath his skin. Maybe they would treat Een well and allow them to live their own life. More likely they'd be a lab rat, poked and prodded, kept in a sterile room.
I can't betray them like that. Until they can figure out what's going on around them, I'll protect them.