Dirge - Alan Dean Foster [10]
Neither Pitarian gender manifested visible discomfort, though a certain understandable nervousness was reflected in their initial comments. After all, despite the reaction of the greeting team, they were participating in initial representations with a newly contacted space-traveling species, physical similarities notwithstanding. The warmth of the greeting that followed as soon as the dumfounded diplomats and their associates recovered their senses soon put the visitors at ease.
Their skin was a homogenous, unvarying bronze hue, made all the more striking by the extreme variance in hair and eye color that the Chagos’s scientists assured the members of the receiving team was natural. Blue hair and violet eyes were not uncommon. There were combinations of white and yellow, green and red, lavender and pink that would have seemed shocking on a human but which on the entirely perfect Pitar appeared utterly natural. Their voices, hastily trained in basic Terranglo during the space-plus journey from Argus, were uniformly resonant and mellifluous. They moved with the easy, pantherish grace of natural athletes and politely tolerated the wide-eyed stares of media and diplomatic personnel alike. Only occasional indications of nervousness betrayed what otherwise would have been a confrontation between two species completely at ease with one another.
As the shock wore off, the visitors were escorted into the receiving area. While stunned personnel took over and began processing the Pitarian representatives, Pranchavit and the senior members of his team were quickly drawn aside and hurried into a small conference room whose atmosphere was filled with disbelief mixed wildly with speculation. Kept outside, the desire of certain media reps to gain admittance bordered on the hysterical. Through it all the chief of the Chagos’s scientific complement maintained a calm, though clearly amused, composure.
“What kind of a joke is this?” As an assistant general secretary specializing in human-alien protocol, Dosei Anchpura carried more weight than her slight frame suggested. Presently she had parked her diplomatic skills just inside the door. Immediately behind her, on the other side of the soundproof barrier, media representatives fought to aim their pickup lenses over the shoulders of immovable security personnel.
“Joke?” Smiling absently, Pranchavit considered her question rhetorically. “What joke?” Next to him Werther Baumgartner, a sober xenologist pushing an active seventy, smirked and nudged his companion. “There is no joke.”
“This is impossible!” Anchpura looked to her colleagues for support. “These Pitar—those people out there being guided through the processing lines—aren’t aliens. They’re human. Where’d you pick them up? From a live show on one of the orbiting stations before you came down? Without clearance, I might add, and here instead of across the strait at Lombok, where you belong. Although now that I see the joke, I understand your reasons, if not your motivation.”
“Aye,” Colin Brookstone put in. “What’s come over you? It’s a fine joke, I admit, but you’ll soon have to call a halt to it.”
“Siringh is telling you the truth.” Smirk gone, Baumgartner was all serious now, and all scientist. “Believe me, the first time we set eyes on them our reaction was, if anything, more disbelieving than yours.”
Ambassador-at-large al-Namqiz, who until now had been silent, sputtered a response. “But how can this be? They are as human as you or I, as anyone in this room.” His attention shifted to the tightly packed horde of frantic media representatives who were still fighting to gain entrance to the meeting room. “More human.”
Lionel Harris-Ferrolk, Baumgartner’s companion in subdued mirth, was the possessor of a reputation that exceeded even that of his two nominal superiors. “Remarkable how after all these years of contact with sapient extraterrestrials we are still hostage to the superficiality of appearance.” His reconstructed eyes, small but penetrating, swept over the