The Shadow of Wings

by Robert Silverberg

The children came running toward him, laughing and shouting up from the lakeside to the spot on the grassy h I where he lay reading; and as Dr. John Donaldson saw what was clutched in the hand of his youngest son, he felt an involuntary tremor of disgust.

“Look, John! Look what Paul caught!” That was his oldest, Joanne. She was nine, a brunette rapidly growing tan on this vacation trip. Behind her came David, eight, fair-haired and lobster-skinned, and in the rear was Paul, the six-year-old, out of breath and gripping in his still pudgy hand a small green frog.

Donaldson shoved his book—Haley, Studies in Morphological Linguistics—to one side and sat up. Paul thrust the frog almost into his face. “I saw it hop, John—and I caught it!” He pantomimed the catch with his free hand.

“I saw him do it,” affirmed David.

The frog’s head projected between thumb and first finger; two skinny webbed feet dangled free at the other end of Paul’s hand, while the middle of the unfortunate batrachian was no doubt being painfully compressed by the small clammy hand. Donaldson felt pleased by Paul’s display of coordination, unusual for a six-year-old. But at the same time he wished the boy would take the poor frog back to the lake and let it go.

“Paul,” he started to say, “you really ought to—”

The direct-wave phone at the far end of the blanket bleeped, indicating that Martha, back at the bungalow, was calling.

“It’s Mommy,” Joanne said. Somehow they had never cared to call her by her first name, as they did him. “See what she wants, John.”

Donaldson sprawled forward and activated the phone.

“Martha?”

“John, there’s a phone call for you from Washington. I told them you were down by the lake, but they say it’s important and they’ll hold on.”

Donaldson frowned. “Who from Washington?”

“Caldwell, he said. Bureau of Extraterrestrial Affairs. Said it was urgent.”

Sighing, Donaldson said, “Okay. I’m coming.”

He looked at Joanne and said, as if she hadn’t heard the conversation at all, “There’s a call for me and I have to go to the cottage to take it. Make sure your brothers don’t go into the water while I’m gone. And see that Paul lets that confounded frog go.”

Picking up his book, he levered himself to his feet and set out for the phone in the bungalow at a brisk trot.

Caldwell’s voice was crisp and efficient and not at all apologetic as he said, “I’m sorry to have to interrupt you during your vacation, Dr. Donaldson. But it’s an urgent matter and they tell us you’re the man who can help us.”

“Perhaps I am. Just exactly what is it you want?”

“Check me if I’m wrong on the background. You’re professor of Linguistics at Columbia, a student of the Kethlani languages and author of a study of Kethlani linguistics published in 2087.”

“Yes, yes, that’s all correct. But—”

“Dr. Donaldson, we’ve captured a live Kethlan. He entered the System in a small ship and one of our patrol vessels grappled him in, ship and all. We’ve got him here in Washington and we want you to come talk to him.”

For an instant Donaldson was too stunned to react. A live Kethlan? That was like saying, We’ve found a live Sumerian, or, We’ve found a live Etruscan.

The Kethlani languages were precise, neat and utterly dead. At one time in the immeasurable past the Kethlani had visited the Solar System. They had left records of their visit on Mars and Venus, in two languages. One of the languages was translatable, because the Martians had translated it into their own, and the Martian language was still spoken as it had been a hundred thousand years before.

Donaldson had obtained his doctorate with what was hailed as a brilliant Rosetta Stone type analysis of the Kethlani language. But a live Kethlan? Why—

After a moment he realized he was staring stupidly at his unevenly tanned face in the mirror above the phone cabinet, and that the man on the other end of the wire was making impatient noises.

Slowly he said, “I can be in Washington this afternoon, I guess. Give me some time to pack up my things. You won’t want me for long, will you?”

“Until we’re through talking to the Kethlan,” Caldwell said.

“All right,” Donaldson said. “I can take a vacation any time. Kethlani don’t come along that often.”

He hung up and peered at his face in the mirror. He had had curly reddish hair once, but fifteen years of the academic life had worn his forehead bare. His eyes were mild, his nose narrow and unemphatic, his lips thin and pale. As he studied himself, he did not think he looked very impressive. He looked professorial. That was to be expected.

“Well?” Martha asked.

Donaldson shrugged. “They captured some kind of alien spaceship with a live one aboard. And it seems I’m the only person who can speak the language. They want me right away.”

“You’re going?”

“Of course. It shouldn’t take more than a few days. You can manage with the children by yourself, can’t you? I mean—”

She smiled faintly, walked around behind him and kneaded the muscle of his sun-reddened back in an affectionate gesture. “I know better than to argue,” she said. “We can take a vacation next year.”

He swiveled his left hand behind his back, caught her hand and squeezed it fondly. He knew she would never object. After all, his happiness was her happiness—and he was never happier than when working in his chosen field. The phone call today would probably lead to all sorts of unwanted and unneeded publicity for him. But it would also bring him academic success, and there was no denying the genuine thrill of finding out how accurate his guesses about Kethlani pronunciation were.

“You’d better go down to the lake and get the children,” he said. “I’ll want to say good-by before I leave.”

They had the ship locked in a stasis field in the basement of the Bureau of ET Affairs Building, on Constitution Avenue just across from the National Academy of Sciences. The great room looked like nothing so much as a crypt, Donaldson thought as he entered. Beam projectors were mounted around the walls, focusing a golden glow on the ship. Caught in the field, the ship hovered in midair, a slim, strange-looking torpedolike object about forty feet long and ten feet across the thickest place. A tingle rippled up Donaldson’s spine as he saw the Kethlani cursives painted in blue along the hull. He translated them reflexively: Bringer of Friendship.

“That’s how we knew it was a Kethlani ship,” Caldwell said, at his side. He was a small, intense man who hardly reached Donaldson’s shoulder; he was Associate Director of the Bureau, and in his superior’s absence he was running the show.

Donaldson indicated the projectors. “How come the gadgetry? Couldn’t you just sit the ship on the floor instead of floating it that way?”

“That ship’s heavy,” Caldwell said. “Might crack the floor. Anyway, it’s easier to maneuver this way. We can raise or lower the ship, turn it, float it in or out of the door.”

“I see,” Donaldson said. “And you say there’s a live Kethlan in there?”

Caldwell nodded. He jerked a thumb toward a miniature broadcasting station at the far end of the big room. “We’ve been in contact with him. He talks to us and we talk to him. But we don’t understand a damned bit of it, of course. You want to try?”

Donaldson shook his head up and down in a tense affirmative. Caldwell led him down to the radio set, where an eager-looking young man in military uniform sat making adjustments.

Caldwell said, “This is Dr. Donaldson of Columbia. He wrote the definitive book on Kethlani languages. He wants to talk to our friend in there.”

A microphone was thrust into Donaldson’s hands. He looked at it blankly, then at the pink face of the uniformed man, then at the ship. The inscription was in Kethlani. A language, for which Donaldson was grateful. There were two Kethlani languages, highly dissimilar, which he had labeled A and B. He knew his way around in A well enough, but his mastery of Kethlani B was still exceedingly imperfect.

“How do I use this thing?”

“You push the button on the handle, and talk. That’s all. The Kethlan can hear you. Anything he says will be picked up here.” He indicated a tape recorder and a speaker on the table.

Donaldson jabbed down on the button, and, feeling a strange sense of disorientation, uttered two words in greeting in Kethlani A.

The pronunciation, of course, was sheer guesswork. Donaldson had worked out what was to him a convincing Kethlani phonetic system, but whether that bore any relation to fact remained to be seen.

He waited a moment. Then the speaker emitted a series of harsh, unfamiliar sounds—and, buried in them like gems in a kitchen midden, Donaldson detected familiar-sounding words.

“Speak slowly,” he said in Kethlani A. “I… have only a few words.”

The reply came about ten seconds later, in more measured accents. “How… do… you… speak our language?”

Donaldson fumbled in his small vocabulary for some way of explaining that he had studied Kethlani documents left behind on Mars centuries earlier, and compared them with their understandable Martian translations until he had pried some sense out of them.

He glimpsed the pale, sweat-beaded faces of the ET men around him; they were mystified, wondering what he was saying to the alien but not daring to interrupt. Donaldson felt a flash of pity for them. Until today the bureau had concerned itself with petty things: import of Martian antiquities, study visas for Venus, and the like. Now, suddenly, they found themselves staring at an extra-solar spaceship, and all the giant problems that entailed.

“Find out why he came to the Solar System,” Caldwell whispered.

“I’m trying to,” Donaldson murmured with some irritation. He said in Kethlani, “You have made a long journey.”

“Yes… and alone.”

“Why have you come?”

There was a long moment of silence; Donaldson waited, feeling tension of crackling intensity starting to build within him. The unreality of the situation obsessed him. He had been fondly confident that he would never have the opportunity to speak actual Kethlani, and that confidence was being shattered.

Finally: “I… have come… why?”

The inversion was grammatically correct. “Yes,” Donaldson said. “Why?”

Another long pause. Then the alien said something which Donaldson did not immediately understand. He asked for a repeat.

It made little sense—but, of course, his Kethlani vocabulary was a shallow one, and he had additional difficulty in comprehending because he had made some mistakes in interpreting vowel values when constructing his Kethlani phonetics.

But the repeat came sharp and clear, and there was no mistaking it:

“I do… do not like to talk this way. Come inside my ship and we will talk there.”

“What’s he saying?” Caldwell prodded.

Shaken, Donaldson let the mike dangle from limp fingers. “He—he says he wants me to come inside the ship. He doesn’t like long-distance conversations.”

Caldwell turned at a right angle and said to a waiting assistant, “All right. Have Mathews reverse the stasis field and lower the ship. We’re going to give the Kethlan some company.”

Donaldson blinked. “Company? You mean you’re sending me in there?”

“I sure as hell do mean that. The Kethlan said it’s the only way he’d talk, didn’t he? And that’s what you’re here for. To talk to him. So why shouldn’t you go in there, eh?”

“Well—look, Caldwell, suppose it isn’t safe?”

“If I thought it was risky, I wouldn’t send you in,” Caldwell said blandly.

Donaldson shook his head. “But look—I don’t want to seem cowardly, but I’ve got three children to think about. I’m not happy about facing an alien being inside his own ship, if you get me.”

“I get you,” said Caldwell tiredly. “All right. You want to go home? You want to call the whole business off right here and now?”

“Of course not. But—”

“But then you’ll have to go in.”

“How will I be able to breathe?”

“The alien air is close enough to our own. He’s used to more carbon dioxide and less oxygen, but he can handle our air. There’s no problem. And no risk. We had a man in there yesterday when the Kethlan opened the outer lock. You won’t be in any physical danger. The alien won’t bother you.”

“I hope not,” Donaldson said. He felt hesitant about it; he hadn’t bargained on going inside any extra solar spaceships. But they were clustered impatiently around him, waiting to send him inside, and he didn’t seem to have much choice. He sensed a certain contempt for him on their faces already. He didn’t want to increase their distaste.

“Will you go in?” Caldwell asked.

“All right. All right. Yes. I’ll go in.”

Nervously Donaldson picked up the microphone and clamped a cold finger over the control button.

“Open your lock,” he said to the alien being. “I’m coming inside.”

There was a moment’s delay while the stasis field projectors were reversed, lowering the ship gently to floor level. As soon as it touched, a panel in the gleaming golden side of the ship rolled smoothly open, revealing an inner panel.

Donaldson moistened his lips, handed the microphone to Caldwell and walked uncertainly forward. He reached the lip of the airlock, stepped up over it and into the ship. Immediately the door rolled shut behind him, closing him into a chamber about seven feet high and four feet wide, bordered in front and back by the outer and inner doors of the lock.

He waited. Had he been claustrophobic he would have been hysterical by now. But I never would have come in here in the first place then, he thought.

He waited. More than a minute passed; then, finally, the blank wall before him rolled aside, and the ship was open to him at last. He entered.

At first it seemed to him the interior was totally dark. Gradually, his retinal rods conveyed a little information.

A dim light flickered at one end of the narrow tubular ship. He could make out a few things: rows of reinforcing struts circling the ship at regularly spaced distances; a kind of control panel with quite thoroughly alien-looking instruments on it; a large chamber at one end which might be used for storage of food.

But where’s the alien? Donaldson wondered.

He turned, slowly, through a three hundred sixty degree rotation, squinting in the dimness. A sort of mist hung before his eyes; the alien’s exhalation, perhaps. But he saw no sign of the Kethlan. There was a sweetish, musky odor in the ship, unpleasant though not unbearable.

“Everything okay?” Caldwell’s voice said in his earphones.

“So far. But I can’t find the alien. It’s damnably dark in here.”

“Look up,” Caldwell advised. “You’ll find him. Took our man a while too, yesterday,”

Puzzled, Donaldson raised his head and stared into the gloom-shrouded rafters of the ship, wondering what he was supposed to see. In Kethlani he said loudly, “Where are you? I see you not.”

“I am here,” came the harsh voice, from above.

Donaldson looked. Then he backed away, double-taking, and looked again.

A great shaggy thing hung head down against the roof of the ship. Staring intently, Donaldson made out a blunt, piggish face with flattened nostrils and huge flaring ears; the eyes, bright yellow but incredibly tiny, glittered with the unmistakable light of intelligence. He saw a body about the size of a man, covered with darkish thick fur and terminating in two short, thick, powerful-looking legs. As he watched the Kethlan shivered and stretched forth its vast leathery wings. In the darkness, Donaldson could see the corded muscular arm in the wing, and the very human looking fingers which sprouted from the uppermost part of the wing.

Violent disgust rose in him, compounded from his own general dislike for animals and from the half-remembered Transylvanian folktales that formed part of every child’s heritage. He felt sick; he controlled himself only by remembering that he was in essence an ambassador, and any sickness would have disastrous consequences for him and for Earth. He dared not offend the Kethlan.

My God, he thought. An intelligent bat!

He managed to stammer out the words for greeting, and the alien responded. Donaldson, looking away, saw the elongated shadow of wings cast across the ship by the faint light at the other end. He felt weak, wobbly-legged; he wanted desperately to dash through the now-closed airlock. But he forced himself to recover balance. He had a job to do.

“I did not expect you to know Kethlani,” the alien said. “It makes my job much less difficult.”

“And your job is—?”

“To bring friendship from my people to yours. To link our worlds in brotherhood.”

The last concept was a little muddy to Donaldson; the literal translation he made mentally was children-of-one-cave, but some questioning eventually brought over the concept of brotherhood.

His eyes were growing more accustomed to the lighting, now, and he could see the Kethlan fairly well. An ugly brute, no doubt of it—but probably I look just as bad to him, he thought. The creature’s wingspread was perhaps seven or eight feet. Donaldson tried to picture a world of the beasts, skies thick with leather-winged commuters on their way to work.

Evolution had made numerous modifications in the bat structure, Donaldson saw. The brain, of course; and the extra fingers, aside from the ones from which the wings had sprouted. The eyes looked weak, in typical bat fashion, but probably there was compensation by way of keen auditory senses.

Donaldson said, “Where is your world?”

“Far from here. It—”

The rest of the answer was unintelligible to Donaldson. He felt savage impatience with his own limited vocabulary; he wished he had worked just a little harder on translating the Syrtis Major documents. Well, it was too late for that now, of course.

Caldwell cut in suddenly from outside. “Well? We’re picking up all the jabber. What’s all the talk about?”

“Can’t you wait till I’m finished?” Donaldson snapped. Then, repenting, he said: “Sorry. Guess I’m jumpy. Seems he’s an ambassador from his people, trying to establish friendly relations with us. At least, I think so. I’ll tell you more when I know something about it.”

Slowly, in fits and starts, the story emerged. Frequently Donaldson had to ask the Kethlan to stop and double back while he puzzled over a word. He had no way of recording any of the new words he was learning, but he had always had a good memory, and he simply tucked them away.

The Kethlani had visited the Solar System many years ago. Donaldson was unable to translate the actual figure, but it sounded like a lot. At that time the Martians were at the peak of their civilization, and Earth was just an untamed wilderness populated by naked primates. The Kethlan wryly admitted that they had written off Earth as a potential place of civilization because a study of the bat population of Earth had proved unpromising. They had never expected the primates to evolve this way.

But now they had returned, thousands of years later. Mars was bleak and its civilization decayed, but the third world had unexpectedly attained a high degree of culture and was welcome to embrace the Kethlani worlds in friendship and amity.

“How many worlds do you inhabit?”

The Kethlan counted to fifteen, by ones. “There are many others we do not inhabit, but simply maintain friendly relations with. Yours would be one, we hope.”

The conversation seemed to dwindle to a halt. Donaldson had run out of questions to ask, and he was exhausted by the hour-long strain of conversing in an alien language, under these conditions, within a cramped ship, talking to a creature whose physical appearance filled him with loathing and fear.

His head throbbed. His stomach was knotted in pain and sweat made his clothes cling clammily to his body. He started to grope for ways to terminate the interview; then an idea struck him.

He quoted a fragment of a document written in pure Kethlani B.

There was an instant of stunned silence; then the alien asked in tones of unmistakable suspicion, “Where did you learn that language?”

“I haven’t really learned it. I just know a few words.”

He explained that he had found examples of both Kethlani A and Kethlani B along with their Martian equivalents; he had worked fairly comprehensively on the A language, but had only begun to explore the B recently.

The Kethlan seemed to accept that. Then it said: “That is not a Kethlani language.”

Surprised, Donaldson uttered the interrogative expletive.

The Kethlan said, “It is the language of our greatest enemies, our rivals, our bitter foes. It is the Thygnor tongue.”

“But—why did we find your language and the other side by side, then?”

After a long pause the alien said, “Once Thygnor and Kethlan were friends. Long ago we conducted a joint expedition to this sector of space. Long ago, before the rivalry sprang up. But now—” the alien took on a sorrowful inflection—“now we are enemies.”

That explained a great many things, Donaldson realized. The differences between Kethlani A and Kethlani B had been too great for it to seem as if one race spoke both of them. But a joint expedition—that made it understandable.

“Some day, perhaps, the Thygnor will visit your world. But by then you will be on guard against them.”

“What do they look like?”

The alien described them, and Donaldson listened and was revolted. As far as he could understand, they were giant intelligent toads, standing erect, amphibian but warm-blooded, vile-smelling, their bodies exuding a nauseous thick secretion.

Giant toads, bats, the lizards of Mars—evidently the primate monopoly of intelligence was confined solely to Earth, Donaldson realized. It was a humbling thought.

His face wrinkled in displeasure at the mental image of the toad people the Kethlan had created for him, as he recalled the harmless little frog Paul had captured by the lake.

He spoke in English, attracting Caldwell’s attention, and explained the situation.

“He wants me to swear brotherhood with him. He also says there’s another intelligent race with interstellar travel—toads, no less—and that they’re likely to pay us a visit some day too. What should I do?”

“Go ahead and swear brotherhood,” Caldwell said after a brief pause. “It can’t hurt. We can always unswear it later, if we like. Say we had our fingers crossed while we were doing it, or something. Then when the frogs get here we can find out which bunch is better for us to be in league with.”

The cynicism of the reply annoyed Donaldson, but it was not his place to raise any objections. He said to the alien, “I am prepared to pledge brotherhood between Earth and the Kethlan worlds.”

The Kethlan fluttered suddenly down from its perch with a rustle of great wings, and stood facing Donaldson, tucking its wings around its thick shaggy body. Alarmed, Donaldson stepped back.

The alien said reassuringly, “The way we pledge is by direct physical embrace, symbolizing harmony and friendship across the cosmos.” He unfurled his wings. “Come close to me.”

No! Donaldson shrieked inwardly, as the mighty wings, rose high and wrapped themselves about him. Go away! Don’t touch me! He could smell the sweet, musky smell of the alien, feel its furry warmth, hear the mighty heart pounding, pounding in that massive rib cage…

Revulsion dizzied him. He forced himself to wrap his arms around the barrel of a body while the wings blanketed him, and they stood that way for a moment, locked in a tight embrace.

At length the alien released him. “Now we are friends. It is only the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship between our peoples. I hope to speak with you again before long.”

It was a dismissal. On watery legs Donaldson tottered forward toward the opening airlock, pausing only to mutter a word of farewell before he stumbled through and out into the arms of the waiting men outside.

“Well?” Caldwell demanded. “What happened? Did you swear brotherhood?”

“Yes,” Donaldson said wearily. “I swore.” The stench of the alien clung to him, sweet in his nostrils. It was as though throbbing wings still enfolded him. “I’m leaving now,” he said. “I still have a little of my vacation left. I want to take it.”

He gulped a drink that someone handed him. He was shaking and gray-faced, but the effect of the embrace was wearing off. Only an irrational phobia, he told himself. I shouldn’t be reacting this way.

But already he was beginning to forget the embrace of the Kethlani, and the rationalization did him no good. A new and more dreadful thought was beginning to develop within him.

He was the only Terrestrial expert on Kethlani B, too—the Thygnor tongue. And some day, perhaps soon, the Thygnor were going to come to Earth, and Caldwell was going to impress him into service as an interpreter again.

He wondered how the toad people pledged eternal brotherhood.

Content

The Shadow of Wings
by Robert Silverberg