The Color of Distance (61 page)

The bathtub was a Japanese-style
ojuro,
small, square, and deep enough for the water to reach up to her neck. With a sigh of relief, Juna started the water running, slipped out of her clothes, and stepped in. She turned a clear, bright turquoise as the hot water embraced her. Juna relaxed in the hot water and spent the next hour contemplating the joys of indoor plumbing and hot water.

It was nearly dinner time when she emerged from the tub. Someone had delivered a fresh set of uniforms while she was bathing. Juna hung them up, pausing, as she always did, to admire the deep forest green and black dress uniform of the Interstellar Survey. She decided to wear it to dinner, in celebration of her release from quarantine.

She put it on and appraised her reflection in the mirror. The deep green of her uniform clashed oddly with the yellowish celadon of her skin, and her bald head seemed naked and out of proportion to the rest of her trim, neatly clad image. Her features were leaner than she remembered, and her eyes seemed huge without her eyebrows. She looked delicate and fey. She darkened her skin till it was close to the shade of her original, brown skin. It wasn’t bad, she decided, just different.

A chime sounded, announcing that the mess hall was open for dinner. Juna closed the wardrobe door, and tugged the sleeves of her shirt out from under the cuffs of her jacket. She was looking forward to sharing a meal with other human beings.

Everyone in the mess hall stood and applauded as Juna walked in. She looked around in amazement.

“Thank you,” she said, as the applause died down. “Thank you very much. It’s good to be out of quarantine.”

She turned and joined the line waiting for food. Laurie came up beside her.

“We’ve saved you a seat,” she said, “over by the window.”

“Thanks,” Juna replied. She loaded her tray and followed Laurie to a long table near one of the windows. Bruce, Kay, Marguerite, and Patricia were there.

“I’ve been getting all kinds of requests for time with you,” Patricia told her. “Everyone on the ship has questions. Perhaps you should schedule some seminars with various divisions.”

“We’ll work out some kind of schedule tomorrow,” Juna decided.

The talk turned to shipboard gossip. Juna listened intently. She knew very few of the people involved, but it felt familiar and the sheer human-ness of it was comforting.

She turned to Bruce. “Tell me more about your nephew,” she said.

They spent most of the meal talking about their families. Like her, Bruce came from one of the satellite colonies. His family lived in one of the colonies clustered in the L-4 region. His parents had died in a shuttle accident, and his sister had married into a line marriage. His in-laws had adopted him as part of their extended family, and he spent most of his leave with his sister’s spouses and their children.

Juna told him about her father, how her mother died, how the harrowing experience of the camps had made her feel like an outsider among the sheltered children of the colony. She had joined the Survey, drawn by the thrill of new discoveries as well as the chance to be an outsider among other outsiders. Bruce was here because the pay was good. After another couple of trips, he would have enough saved up to buy a place in one of the better colonies, and maybe even enough for an extra fractional child-right, enabling him to become the father of two children.

Juna smiled wistfully. She had wanted children, but her marriage hadn’t worked out. She had been gone too often and too long. Bruce nodded, his warm brown eyes glowing with understanding.

Dinner was drawing to a close when Captain Edison and Dr. Bremen rose and walked to the podium at the front of the mess hall. The crowd grew silent.

“Dr. Saari, would you please come up here?” Bremen asked.

Juna rose and walked to the podium. She felt the weight of the Survey crew’s gaze on her, and was suddenly glad that she had chosen to wear her dress greens.

“In recognition of your great service to the Survey, and in honor of the difficulties you have endured, the Survey has decided to promote you to the rank of Research Director,” Bremen announced. “Congratulations, Dr. Saari.”

Juna turned magenta in astonishment. They had jumped her two full rankings. If she had not been marooned, she might have been promoted to Associate Researcher in another year or two, but this promotion made her one of the youngest Research Directors in the Survey.

Captain Edison handed her a small flat case. Inside were the insignia of her new rank.

“I wasn’t expecting this,” Juna said. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

“May I help pin them on?” the captain asked.

Juna nodded, and Captain Edison took the little gold galaxies out of the box and pinned them to her collar and chest.

“I’m going to recommend to the Survey that they make this promotion retroactive to the time your flyer went down,” the captain told her in an undertone. “It would make quite a difference in your back pay.” She smoothed Juna’s collar down and stepped back. “Congratulations, Research Director Saari.”

“That’s very kind of you, Captain Edison.”

“The Survey owes it to you for all you’ve accomplished,” the captain told her.

Juna shook Dr. Bremen’s hand, then stepped up to the podium. She stood for a moment, looking out over the assembled crew. Alison was standing at the galley door with a towel over one shoulder.

“It’s good to be out of quarantine,” Juna said. “It’s good to be back—” She paused, considering her words. “I would like to thank Dr. Bremen, Captain Edison, Ensign Laurie Kipp, Dr. Paul Wu, Dr. Robert Baker, Dr. Patricia Tanguay, Chef Alison Vladimir, and Technician Bruce Bowles for their trust, support, and friendship.” She glanced over at her friends’ table and smiled at them. “And thanks to everyone else for coming back to get me.”

The crowd laughed in response to her last remark. Juna smiled, waved, and stepped back from the podium. Everyone in the room rose to applaud as she walked back to her table. She was crying so hard by the time she got there that she could hardly see. Patricia handed her a napkin, and helped her sit down. Laurie patted her on the shoulder. She finally felt that she was truly back among her own people.

Then Bruce, who was sitting next to her, reached down to take her hand. Juna slid her hand eagerly into his. It would be the first time that they had ever really touched. She saw him flinch as he felt the moist, alien texture of her skin. She drew her hand back into her lap, fighting to keep a sudden sense of shame from darkening her skin as she realized that despite everything, there was still a deep, uncrossable gulf between her and the rest of her people.

Juna walked into the^ Resource Utilization seminar. It was her fifth seminar this week, and she felt tired and drained. Dr. Nazarieff, the director of the Resource Utilization department, greeted her politely, escorting her to the head of the table.

This trip must be frustrating for her, Juna thought. Contact protocols forbid exploitation of a sentient species’ planetary resources. It was, she thought with an ironic smile, rather a turnaround. Usually it was the Resource people who were busy and the Contact people who had to sit on their hands. She wondered what they wanted from her.

“Thank you for coming, Dr. Saari,” Nazarieff said when they were all assembled. “I know your time is very valuable. I’ll get right to the point. This is Gerald Nyimbe, one of my graduate students. Gerald was studying your list of Tendu trade goods, and he thinks that he may have a potential solution to your trade problems. Gerald?”

A tall, slender young African with three rows of tribal cicatrices across his cheeks, rose. “Yes, Dr. Saari,” he began in musically accented Standard. “One of the trade goods mentioned in the daily notes of the negotiations was guano, which the Tendu transport from outer islands to use as a fertilizer. In going over the first expedition’s reports, I noticed many large seabird colonies located on islands in the subpolar regions. I did some satellite surveys and visited several different sites.” He pressed a button on his computer, and a map of the northern subpolar region appeared on the wall. “These three sites have the richest, most accessible guano deposits,” he said, indicating three islands in the middle of the northern ocean. “We could harvest them with relatively little disturbance to the local wildlife.”

Juna sat up, her weariness forgotten. It looked like an excellent solution to her problems. “What about the Contact Protocols on mining? Won’t we be in violation of them?”

“There’s an exemption for small amounts of internal trade. We would need permission from the Tendu to proceed with the mining, and there are very strict regulations about environmental degradation that we would have to follow, but we’re talking about very small scale, temporary mining here. My most liberal estimates indicate that we can meet our obligations to the village of Lyanan with about 1.5 metric tons of guano. With the equipment we have on hand, we could probably dig up and process that much material in one day.”

Juna scrolled through the report on her computer screen, fighting back rising excitement. “This looks very good, Mr. Nyimbe. It may prove to be the solution that we need. I’ll talk to the Alien Contact people about it tonight.”

It was indeed [[ihe]] solution to the trade problem. Everything fell together with amazing rapidity when Juna introduced the proposal. Once Dr. Wu had confirmed that it wouldn’t significantly affect Tendu trading patterns, he gave his approval. After some face-saving hesitations, Lalito also accepted it. By now it was clear that the humans were not going to yield any further on her demands for their technology. Lyanan would receive enough guano to meet its needs for the next two years, cover all the outstanding obligations that the village had incurred in replanting the forest, and still have a small surplus to trade with.

Juna took Anitonen, Ukatonen, Lalito, and Moki up to see the proposed mining site. They stopped briefly at the shuttle base for refueling. Moki made a beeline for the space shuttles as soon as he climbed out of the flyer, and remained there, peppering the amused techs with questions while Juna showed the other Tendu around the shuttle facility. She smiled as she retrieved her errant bami from the bowels of the shuttle.

Moki was fascinated by aircraft of any kind. The bigger it was, the faster it flew, and the farther it went, the more interesting it was to him. Juna’s nephew, Danan, was similarly fascinated by planes and shuttles. He was eleven now, she realized with a sudden pang of sadness; she had missed most of his childhood, marooned here with the Tendu. Closing her eyes, she tilted her head back. The sun glowed redly through her eyelids. She wanted to go home.

When she opened her eyes, Moki was looking at her questioningly.

“Let’s go,” she said.

They walked back to the dock and climbed into the flyer. The Tendu looked out the window intently, ears spread wide in wonder, all the way to the island. The island rose from the dark blue sea like a lost piece of some gigantic jigsaw puzzle. They had chosen this site because of its remoteness. The only creatures that lived there year-round were a few species of flightless birds and some crustaceans. But in the summer, the rocky island was home to millions of nesting seabirds.

Clouds of birds exploded upward as the flyer passed overhead. The pilot set the plane down in a cove on the lee side of the island. While he assembled the landing craft, Juna bundled the Tendu into warmsuits to prevent them from getting hypothermia.

When the boat was ready, Juna opened the door of the flyer. A blast of icy gale-force wind nearly pulled it out of her hand. The Tendu flinched from the cold, their mittened hands fumbling at the hoods of their unfamiliar clothing. She helped them pull up their hoods and tighten them around their faces, then assisted them into the boat as it bucked and heaved on the choppy swell. They huddled in the boat, their faces turned away from the bitter wind. Juna had never seen the Tendu look so miserable before. The pilot beached the boat and Juna hopped out to pull it up out of the swell. She helped the Tendu off between waves. A tumble into this icy water would be disastrous for them.

Juna led the Tendu up a sloping rise to the top of the cliffs, threading their way between colonies of nesting birds, their chicks nearly grown. The birds honked and hissed at her, clacking their beaks together, wings spread, the feathers on their necks and backs raised threateningly. Crushed and mummified corpses of baby birds crunched underfoot. The stench of bird shit and death was overwhelming. Juna fought back a wave of nausea. The Tendu held their mittened hands over their noses.

Already the incredible numbers of birds were thinning. When Juna had visited the island the week before, she had had to wade through a solid tide of black, white, and grey, hissing and fighting furiously at the disruption of their territory. Waves of squabbling birds had spread in their wake, some bloodied from fighting. The noise was deafening. Now you could actually see the ground between the nesting birds, and it was possible to walk between the nests.

They reached the top of the cliff and paused. Spread out before them was a wide plain of packed brown soil, covered with nesting birds. The island had once been a live volcano. Now the crater was entirely filled with guano, which one of the geologists had estimated was over three hundred meters deep. Ukatonen pushed up his sleeves, exposing his spurs, and grabbed a struggling, hissing bird. It threw up on him, its vomit bright pink from the crustaceans it had eaten. He sank a spur into it, and the bird went limp. The other enkar followed suit, picking up birds, and sticking them with their spurs.

“What are they doing?” asked the pilot, as Ukatonen released his captured bird.

“Sampling the cells of these birds. They do that when they see a new or interesting plant or animal. Now they’ll have enough information to build a whole new bird if they wanted to.”