Grail - Elizabeth Bear [34]
Danilaw cleared his throat. Around the table, conversation quieted, and his cabinet directed their attention to him. Trying not to feel like he was pronouncing words he’d be hearing repeated back on news programs and documentaries for the rest of his life, he said, “We’re receiving a radio transmission.”
Somewhere out there, archaic technology was spinning out of dormancy. Technicians or Gain’s recruited hobbyists were hovering over fragile antennae and instrumentation, breaths held, hands instinctively—protectively—outstretched as if cupping the air around a toddler taking her first steps.
Jesse lifted his head. “Answer them.”
Captain Amanda glanced at him with a scientist’s patience. “We can’t, not immediately. Lightspeed lag, remember? Can we see it, Premier?”
Danilaw keyed his infothing to display. An image flickered into view. It showed two—people; Danilaw corrected himself before he could think of them as creatures. They were something like people, anyway—upright, bipedal, with eyes and nose and mouth in the familiar biologically convenient arrangement, two ears on either side of a primate head with a flat muzzle and a domed skull. They wore clothes, and they had hair, and—
—that was where the resemblance ended.
Danilaw suspected, from the size dimorphism, that he was looking at a male and a female. They were so thin, so attenuated, that it was hard to be sure.
And they were blue.
The smaller of the two—possibly the female, as seemed near universal in placental mammals where males were, organically speaking, more expendable—stood in the front, although Danilaw was not sure whether her action was in defense of the larger one or a display of dominance. And perhaps it was overhasty to call her blue, exactly, because her hair was brown and straight, and the irises of her deep-set eyes were a perfectly pretty shade of hazel. Her thinness could have been explained as the result of short rations for a long time, though she seemed superficially healthy. It was hard to be certain, however, because her skin—which would have been strikingly pale even if the blood-tint showing through its lightly pigmented translucence was a familiar, comfortable pink—had a distinctly cyanotic hue. Her lips were blue-lavender, the tongue with which she wet them—nervously or in anticipation—liver purple, the corners of her eyes a faint aqua. Her chest was remarkably deep; the rib cage belonged on a biped two and a half times her size.
The larger one, at her shoulder like a lieutenant or a bodyguard, was equally thin. Bones projected over his sunken cheeks, the flesh spare and parchment-thin and flushed with aquamarine. Danilaw could see blue veins spidering across his neck and collarbones below the open collar of a white shirt of seamless construction. The alien’s hair, long and loose, glowed white with the light behind it. His eyes glowed too, through the irises, cobalt as a young star.
Danilaw could have stared much longer, but the smaller spoke, and her voice was indeed a woman’s. The words were familiar, the sounds and rhythms echoing lyrics in hundreds of songs that Danilaw knew intimately. English, and not too much changed from its twentieth-century cadences. She had a light, strong voice, more confident than Danilaw would have expected given her apparent age, and she spoke as one accustomed to wielding authority.
She said, “Greetings, if you can hear me. I am Captain Perceval Conn of the Jacob’s Ladder. My First Mate, Tristen Conn, stands beside me. We have come far in a damaged world, and I say these things not knowing if you will understand me or if you will even have the technology to hear. If you cannot mark my words, I harbor hopes that my tone and unmartial appearance will convince you that