Chapter 1

As the lander touched down near what appeared to be a village, an air of palpable excitement emanated from the privileged few of the starship's complement who had been chosen for the mission. It was, after all, First Contact—the first time humans had ever encountered an apparently intelligent alien species.

Excitement had pervaded the ship almost from the moment the scanners had spied the planet. Its appearance, even at a vast distance—a cloud-littered atmosphere peering through to deep blue reflection of vast bodies of water that occupied fully three quarters of its surface, vari-colored dry land ranging from tan to verdant green—was remarkably Earth-like. "The shapes are different, but it's home," one of the crew had murmured as the ship drew nearer and scanned images were broadcast over its monitors.

Atomic and molecular studies agreed. The atmospheric analysis showed air close enough to Earth's to be all but indistinguishable: mostly nitrogen, 20% or so oxygen, even trace elements not entirely dissimilar, and surface atmospheric pressure 97% of Earth sea-level norm. Surface examination showed the same; the oceans were salinated water (less sodium, but close enough to approximate the mouths of Earth's rivers), the inland seas and flowing water mostly pure H2O with only occasional and minor contaminants, the life carbon-based.

For life there was, in abundance. Distant views showed first a profusion of flora in varied forms—grasses, shrubs, forests (or the RM-96375-05 version thereof); in fact, the crew quickly dubbed it "Eden" for its seeming gardenial fecundity. But as the ship drew nearer, and finally took up a close orbit, the magnifying imagers soon discovered animal life as well. Great herds of creatures roamed the savannas and prairies, natural aviators sailed the low skies, even the shallow waters (as deep as the imagers could penetrate) seemed to harbor their share of motive life. At full magnification no-one could confuse these creatures with those of Earth, but they appeared to be adapted to similar evolutionary niches. For the most part they were even quadrupedal, as on Earth, though a few hexapods were intermingled.

But the culminating shock was not discovered until after several days of orbital passes. Off in the corner of one image, in an area previously unsurveyed, it was unmistakably there: a starkly rectangular shape at the edge of an open field that was itself remarkably regular in contour. It was a technician who first spotted the sharp-edged outline and oh so hesitantly—for no-one wants to be the boy who cried wolf—pointed it out to the ship's captain. Immediately change in the ship's previously randomized orbit was ordered so it could pass directly over the site for a closer look at full magnification.

No possible question could exist; this was an artifact created by rational design. A building, in fact, with walls and a roof and an evident doorway. As the image record expanded, it was even possible to see those presumably responsible for the design as they passed in and out of that doorway—bipedal as humans are, unlike all other previously observed life on Eden, with upper limbs used to grasp objects that were carried in a fairly regular parade to and from a neighboring field that by all appearance they had cultivated.

This was not merely life on a scale never before observed on any planet other than Earth—it was intelligent life, capable of manipulating and controlling its environment. Perhaps humanly intelligent life.

Almost surely humanly intelligent, subsequent scans revealed. The bipeds appeared to be wearing some type of clothing—almost uniform in nature, it seemed, but with enough individual differences to be distinguishable as artificial attire. Their behavior in the field was clearly some form of agronomy. A rough opening in the roof of the building was discovered when smoke emanated from it—a cookfire? heating? both? or serving yet some other indeterminable purpose? The universal conclusion aboard the ship: this was a society of intelligent beings in what appeared to be an early agrarian stage of civilized development, perhaps akin to what hypothetical alien observers might themselves have seen on Earth about 10,000 or so years B.C.E.

It was at this point that shipboard opinion split into two polarized camps. One, led by the captain, was for landing immediately to make initial contact with (as he oratorically put it) "our brothers and sisters in intelligence." Starships themselves could not venture into planetary atmospheres, but each was equipped with a matched set of landing craft (the second a safety backup); in prior explorations such vessels been used to collect samples of the primitive life-forms which had been all that other mapped worlds had to offer. This time, in the captain's opinion, one should take human adventurers down to greet another intelligent species.

His second-in-command was of a more conservative view. Better to wait, in her opinion, to gather more information and to consult with those having greater expertise in this discipline. ("Greater expertise?" snorted the captain. "How can anyone have any expertise at all in something that's never been done?") There was no rush, she argued; let's don't charge in like the proverbial bull in a china shop, let's merely observe and report our findings back.

It was a decision that necessarily had to be made shipboard. As in the long-ago days of transoceanic exploration on Earth, the technology of transportation had outstripped that of communications. The worm drive allowed ships to essentially bore their own wormholes to penetrate the space-time fabric, permitting them to cross parsecs of space in an objective instant (though the starfarers themselves experienced several days or even weeks of subjective time during the passage) with no Einsteinian time distortion. But no way had yet been found to create similar wormholes for electromagnetic waves. The effect was that each starship was incommunicado during its voyage. Moreover, because it took real-time weeks to build up the relativistic velocity the worm drive required, and weeks more for deceleration on the other end, a return home for instructions was impractical. Realistically, the vessel had only its own resources on which to rely.

It was in the end the captain's view that prevailed by fiat of command. A landing would be made. And not even a carefully sequestered landing in an area far from this habitation, as the first mate argued weakly (once she'd lost the primary dispute, she knew a true First Contact landing was inevitable), but one in an untended clearing as close to the ... village? ... as possible. The only concession made to the No. 1's concerns was that the landing party would be armed—not with true weapons, for the ship carried none, but with powerful laser cutters designed primarily for penetrating dense objects at close range but whose focused beams could wreak havoc over distance as well.

"Not for defense," the captain declared. It was to him inconceivable that any intelligent species might react violently to the landing. "For protection, though. Some of the creatures we've seen down there are pretty big and might be dangerous if we spook them."

And thus the lander, piloted by the captain himself and an assemblage of the best scientifically educated members of his elite crew, made its descent and gentle landfall.

Starship landers were of course not equipped with stealth technology; and their gravitronic engines, though producing much less than the deafening roar and visible flames of old-time rockets, were loud enough to reverberate for some distance. The captain had expected the landing to draw notice from the entire village and his expectations were fully rewarded; within moments the first few individuals were visible in the forest-like surroundings of the chosen landing field, and soon the ... woods? ... was filled with native faces.

As had been already seen from orbit, the natives were roughly humanoid in configuration. They averaged about the size of a prepubescent human child, though their elongated lower legs—comparable to those of an Earthly deer or dog—detracted somewhat from their height. Their upper grasping limbs seemed almost boneless, perhaps somewhat akin to an elephant's trunk or octopus' tentacle. The visages they presented were entirely alien, roughly combining those of an Earthly preying mantis and lemur: a quasi-muzzle with mouth inset in the slope of what passed for a jawline, no visible nostrils and two wide-set eyes above in what by Earth standards would be disproportionate dimensions. What could be seen of their ... skins? hides? ... was tan in color, but most was concealed with some artificial covering of uniform black in various stages of wear. Colorful adornment, as with the planet itself—the green/tan/blue hues of land and water were the only colors in any significant measure that the orbital scans had revealed on Eden—was evidently not in these beings' societal lexicon.

As the lander sat quietly, engine stilled, a few of the aliens ventured closer, leaving the protection of the surrounding ... woodland? ... for the open clearing. The more curious and courageous ones, the captain thought as he and his shipmates began to prepare for their departure from the lander—the very ones, his thought continued, that we most want to meet; they are the ones for First Contact.

Preparation was a fairly simple process, consisting mainly of each crew member donning a transparent respiratory filter that covered mouth and nose tightly. "The air is perfectly breathable, maybe even more than our own," the ship's doctor had advised, "but we have no idea what sort of spores and bacteria are about, or what they might do to humans." The filters had been individually fitted, and an impenetrable seal was made with a compound that adhered to both the plastic of the mask and the facial skin and was removable only with a solvent or the loss of a great deal of that skin.

Clothing had been chosen with equal care—not for warmth (the ambient temperature was a comfortable 20°C) but as protection against potential toxins in the plantlife on which they would be treading. Little skin was exposed, and that only from the neck up. All clothing, from shoes to jumpsuits to gloves, was biologically and chemically impervious, as had been proved before in other starships' landings on worlds where more lethal compounds had abounded.

Chapter 2 »