I can’t tell the Folk apart. They look a little like Siberian elkhounds, if you don’t mind the head. The head is big. The eyes are below the jawline, and face forward. There’s a nostril on top that closes tight or opens like a trumpet. They weigh about a hundred pounds. Their fingers are above the callus, and they curl up out of the way. Their fur is black, sleek, with white markings in curly lines. We can’t say their word for themselves; their voices are too high and too soft. We call them the Folk because their translators do.
I said, “They stood up and pulled themselves onto ottomans. I went to take their orders. They were talking in nearly supersonic squeaks, with their translators turned off. You had to strain to hear anything. One turned on his translator and ordered five glasses of milk, and a drink for myself if I would join them.”
“Any idea why?”
“I was the closest thing to a meat eater?”
“Maybe. And maybe the local alpha-male thought they should get to know something about humans as opposed to grad students. Or—” McPhee grinned. “Had you eaten recently?”
“Yeah. Someone finally built a sushi place near the spaceport. I can’t do my own cooking, I’d go nuts if I had to run an alien restaurant too—”
“Raw flesh. They smelled it on your breath.”
Oh. “I poured their milk and a double Scotch and soda. I don’t usually drink on the premises, but I figured Sireen or Gail could handle anything that came up.
“It was the usual,” I said. “What’s it like to be human. What’s it like to be Folk. Trade items, what are they missing that could improve their life-styles. Eating habits. The big one did most of the talking. I remember saying that we have an ancestor who’s supposed to have fed itself by running alongside an antelope while beating it on the head with a club till it fell over. And he told me that his ancestors traveled in clusters—he didn’t say packs—and followed herds of plant-eaters to pull down the slow and the sick. Early biological engineering, he said.”
McPhee looked worried. “Do the Folk expect you to outrun an antelope?”
“Oboy!” That was a terrible thought. “No, we talked about that too, how brains and civilization cost you other abilities. Smell, for humans. I got a feeling…he wanted to think we’re carnivores unless we run out of live meat. I tried not to disillusion him, but I had to tell him about cooking, that we like the taste, that it kills parasites and softens vegetables and meat—”
“Why?”
“He asked. Jesus, B-beam, you don’t lie to aliens, do you?”
He grinned. “I never have. I’m never sure what they want to hear.”
“Well, I never lie to customers. —And he talked about the hunts, how little they test the Folk’s animal abilities, how the whole species is getting soft…I guess he saw how curious I was. He invited me on a hunt. Five days from now.”
“You’ve got a problem anyone in this building would kill for.”
“Ri-ight. But what the hell do they expect of me?”
“Where does it take place? The Folk have an embassy not fifty miles from here.”
“Yeah, and it’s a hunting ground too, and I’ll be out there next Wednesday, getting my own meal. I may have been a little drunk. I did have the wit to ask if I could bring a companion.”
“And?” B-beam looked like he was about to spring across the desk into my lap.
“He said yes.”
“That’s my Nobel Prize calling,” said B-beam. “Rick Schumann, will you accept me as your, ah, second?”
“Sure.” I didn’t have to think hard. Not only did he have the knowledge; he looked like he could strangle a grizzly bear; which might be what they expected of us.
The Folk had arrived aboard a chirpsithra liner, five years after the first chirp landing.
They’d leased a stretch of the Mojave. They’d rearranged the local weather and terrain, over strenuous objections from the Sierra Club, and seeded it with a hundred varieties of plants and a score of animals. Meanwhile they toured the world’s national parks in a 727 with a redesigned interior. The media had been fascinated by the sleek black killing machines. They’d have given them even more coverage if the Folk had been more loquacious.
Three years of that, and then the public was barred from the Folk hunting ground. IntraWorld Cable sued, citing the public’s right-to-know. They lost. Certain guest species would leave Earth, and others would kill, to protect their privacy.
IntraWorld Cable would have killed to air this film.
The sunset colors were fading from the sky…still a Mojave desert sky, though the land was an alien meadow with patches of forest around it. Grass stood three feet tall in places, dark green verging on black. Alien trees grew bent, as if before a ferocious wind; but they bent in different directions.
Four creatures grazed near a stream. None of the Folk were in view.
“The Folk don’t give a damn about privacy,” B-beam said. “It’s pack thinking, maybe. They don’t mind our taking pictures. I don’t think they’d mind our broadcasting everything we’ve got, worldwide. It was all the noisy news helicopters that bothered them. Once we realized that, we negotiated. Now there’s one Xenobiology Department lifter and some cameras around the fences.”
The creatures might have been a gazelle with ambitions to be a giraffe, but the mouth and eyes and horns gave them away.
Alien. The horns were big and gaudy, intricately curved and intertwined, quite lovely and quite useless, for the tips pointed inward. The neck was long and slender. The mouth was like a shovel. The eyes, like Folk eyes, were below the jaw hinges; though they faced outward, as with most grazing
