K.D. WENTWORTH

  THE EMBIANS

  AFTER SETTING THE AUDIO recorder for the night, Shayna wraps her fingers through

  the wires of the treetop blind and stares into the heavy darkness, straining to

  catch the next mating display the instant it flares. Just beyond the ragged edge

  of the rain forest, the unseen ocean hisses against the shore and salt hangs in

  the sultry air. Somewhere out in the sweltering sea of black, a small animal

  squalls and dies in the jaws of some nameless predator.

  Flash of electric-green with orange diagonals. Melds into the yellow of fresh

  lemons. Softens...fades....

  Darkness.

  Cerulean blue. Swirls of carmine that suffuse with purple, brightening as though

  they will explode.

  Darkness...darkness.

  Shayna sighs. "They're so incredibly complex, so varied. If I could just sort

  the nuances into a key, I know I could make my thesis work."

  Her expedition partner, Mae, dutifully records the mating displays on the

  night-cam in every wave-length from ultra-violet to infra-red for later

  analysis. She is eight years older than Shayna, working on her doctoral

  dissertation, rather than a mere master's thesis. Her movements are careful and

  methodical, everything always labeled, thought out, planned. Shayna understands

  herself to be more intuitive, knowing when an answer is ready, it will surface

  from the depths of her mind like an offering. Until then, she must wait, absorb

  data, allow her subconscious to analyze and correlate.

  Mae shifts on the camp stool, so close in the narrow blind, Shayna can feel the

  heat of her skin, while out in the hot, tangled night of a world that has never

  known a moon, or tide, or the chill embrace of snow, the serpentlike embians

  slip through soft-fleshed trees and serenade each other with light. In the

  daylight, they appear vaguely humanoid, with similar number and placement of

  limbs, but their flesh is so dense, their bones are only cartilage, and they are

  as sinuous as eels. Their skin is a mottled gray-green and they rarely attain

  five feet in height. They produce no intelligible sounds.

  "You might as well pick a different thesis and be done with it. Those displays

  are no more a language than wolves back on Earth howling at the moon. They're

  just mating lures." Mae jerks. "Over there!"

  Acid-red. Sharpens to actinic violet that hurts the eyes. Flash...flash. White

  afterimage.

  Darkness.

  Shayna lifts sweat-soaked hair off her neck, impatient for the next display. "I

  think they're arguing. He's ready for her, has been for hours, but she's playing

  coy."

  "How do you know it's mixed pair?" Mae asks, calmly sensible as always. "Other

  teams have documented male to male pairings, as well as female to female." From

  the first moment they met at the university funding this study, Mae reminded

  Shayna of a redwood that has stood for a thousand years and is no longer capable

  of surprise or wonder. "They're acting on instinct," Mae says. "When the time is

  right, they'll come together."

  Come together. Such a pale expression for the incandescent union of embian or

  human. Shayna's fingers tighten until the blind's wires cut into her skin.

  Impossible blue-black hovering on the edge of ultra-violet. Shot through with

  sparkles of green. Expands...expands. Flash of red.

  Darkness...darkness...darkness.

  Shayna's pulse leaps, settles into the alien rhythm of the lights. She turns to

  Mae. "He's dying for her, and she's laughing, climbing just out of reach."

  "Quit projecting." Mae's voice is curt, impatient. She leans away from the damp,

  sweaty touch of Shayna's thigh.

  Muted green. Swirls of magenta.

  Pale rose. Pool of lavender.

  Darkness.

  Compromise, thought Shayna. One relents, so the other bides his time. In the

  end, they will find a way to understand each other.

  Olive.

  Lime.

  Darkness.

  Red, Shayna thinks, fountains of orange-gold. White so hot it would burn you to

  ashes.

  Glimmering pure green.

  Darkness... darkness...darkness.

  The minutes pass, stretch into tens. Night hangs over the rain forest like a

  suffocating black shroud. After an hour, Mae exhales and clicks off the

  night-cam. "I think that's it for now. We might as well pack it in."

  "Wait!" Shayna feels on the edge of understanding something vast and complex.

  She senses unseen colors lurking out there, waiting to be discovered,

  interpreted, felt. There are worlds within those colors, epiphanies too large

  for the conscious mind to enfold. Her hands knot together. "There might be a few

  more."

  "Look, the only pair within range found each other." Mae's voice is exasperated.

  "What more do you want?"

  What she wants, with a fierceness that frightens her, is something of her own,

  something not observed and written down in neat piles of notebooks, or

  catalogued on a computer screen, or stored as a visual record. She wants Mae's

  hand tracing the contours of her bare shoulder, craves Mae's perspiring body

  sleeked against her side in the loneliness of the night while outside the rain

  patters down and, inside, recycled air whirs. From the beginning, though, Mae

  has made it quite clear she does not waste her time on petty matters of the

  flesh with anyone, man or woman. Mae is all business, inviolate to everything

  but concerns of the mind, and her first rejection of Shayna's overtures was so

  painful, Shayna cannot bear to risk a second.

  Her face hot, Shayna switches the lantern on, and then; by its pristine white

  glow, pulls up the trap door and climbs down to the dark tangle of the forest

  floor alone.

  SHAYNA SLEEPS restlessly in the confines of her own bunk until noon, Aelta's

  noon, that is. The days are longer here, like the steamy, languid nights, and

  few creatures of any real mass stir under the blazing cauldron of the

  yellow-white sun. Inside the small research bungalow on the forest floor,

  though, the conditioned air is blissfully cool, allowing sleep or activity,

  whatever the hour.

  Mae wakens even later and emerges from her room, rumpled and blinking. Her short

  ash-gold hair is plastered to her forehead. She is all muscles and planes, sense

  and organization. She stretches and smiles wanly. "We got some good footage last

  night."

  Sitting at the metal kitchenette counter, Shayna nods over unsweetened coffee.

  "I want to go to the cliffs and film the burrows again," Mae says. "My last

  tapes were too dark."

  Shayna finds herself reluctant to return there, although it is safe to walk the

  jungle in the daylight. Embians are nocturnal and the local insect population

  disdains the alien taste of human skin and blood, but the sight of the sleepers

  curled into tight fetal balls, the light-generating organs on their chests pale

  and lifeless, disturbs her. When she looks at them so vulnerable, she feels

  guilty for spying on their love-making night after night.

  "I have some transcriptions to make." Her hands tremble as she picks up her cup.

  "I'll meet you in the blind later."

  The displays begin early, while the air still is suffused with light the shade

  of dark honey and the embians are barely visible.

  Plum. Starburst of amber. Ochre.

  Darkness.

  Watching the embians is the only time she feels real anymore. Shayna rakes her

  fingers back through sweat-sheened hair. If only they could install fans or

  air-conditioning in the blind, she would stay here all night, every night, but

  the embians have preternaturally sharp hearing. Conversation does not bother

  them, but the least mechanical sound drives them to perform their dazzling

  mating rituals elsewhere in the rain forest's steamy privacy. The night-cam and

  audio recorder, small as they are, have to be heavily shielded. Shielding the

  entire blind would be inordinately expensive, and the university that funded

  them subscribes to the long tradition that fieldwork should be difficult and

  uncomfortable.

  She clicks on the sound recorder and sets it on the floor between her booted

  feet. The other camp stool remains empty. She envisions her partner with a

  broken leg, or perhaps a concussion, lying helpless and in pain among the trees'

  exposed, pulsating roots so that Shayna would be forced to trace her by the

  signal of her personal transponder. She sighs. Mae wouldn't be so distant, so

  self-sufficient then. The wire screen creaks as she leans back and wonders what

  it would be like if pe ople spent half as much time learning about each other as

  they do trying to understand the embians.

  Aquamarine.

  Darkness.

  A trill pierces the silence, full of loss and longing. What do they seek from

  each other, she wonders. A lifetime of commitment, or only a moment of ecstatic

  union? Do they raise their young together, or abandon them to survive on their

  own? Why do the males seek each other out at times, and then court females at

  others? So little is known of them except these dazzling displays of light.

  Flash of peach. Intensifies to orange. Shot through with yellow lines that bleed

  into each other.

  Darkness...darkness.

  Mae pulls herself up the ladder, closes the trap door and drops, panting, onto

  her stool. "Sorry I'm late." She clicks off the lantern. She smells faintly of

  sweat, overlaid by a heavy floral soap, jasmine. "I was so filthy that I

  showered when I got back, but now I'm wringing wet again." She laughs ruefully.

  Indigo. Mottled with gray. Fades....

  Darkness.

  Shayna stares hard out into the liquid blackness, feeling the heat radiating

  from the woman at her side. Her own skin burns with its nearness. "I was getting

  worried."

  "Look, I said I was sorry!" Mae's tone is stiff. She scrapes the camp stool

  toward the far corner.

  Cinnamon. Saturated with blood-red.

  Darkness.

  Blue-violet. Brightens....

  Darkness...Darkness.

  "Never mind." Shayna remembers touching the damp curve of Mae's cheek, and how

  Mae recoiled that one, terrible time she dared that minor intimacy.

  Red-violet.

  Lilac.

  Darkness.

  Purple, strong and true, piercing the night like a beacon.

  Darkness...darkness...darkness ....

  "I'd rather be here than anywhere else in the universe." Shayna stretches

  languidly. "It's like being on the edge of a wonderful secret, something no one

  else shares."

  Mae exhales. "Your first assignment is usually like that, but then the newness

  wears off. And sometimes it can be just bloody miserable. On my last trip out,

  there was this asshole, William, who wouldn't take no for an answer. He was

  always after me, you know, rubbing up against me, touching me, and I hate to be

  pawed like that. It was so damn humiliating."

  Shayna's gaze is drawn to a different quadrant of the rain forest as another

  display begins.

  Sapphire.

  Darkness.

  She leans her head back, half-closes her eyes. "If -- you were an embian, what

  color would you be?"

  "Hmmm...." She can almost hear the slow smile spreading across Mae's face.

  "Silver, I think, like moonlight on the ocean. What about you?"

  No moon rides these Stygian skies, one of the things Shayna misses most. Arms

  braced behind her head, she stares up at the ice-bright stars. "The hottest

  shade of vermilion I could find."

  Jade.

  Darkness.

  "So, what do you think -- two males, two females, or a mixed pair?" Mae asks. "I

  can check the infra-red tomorrow when I review the tape and see who's right."

  Burst of cobalt. Explosion of red-violet. Fades....

  Darkness.

  Glimmering pool of pine-green. Expands. Shower of cadmium-orange.

  Darkness.

  "Two females," Shayna says.

  Mae leans toward her, redolent with jasmine. "Why?"

  "Because they're coming together so fast, no games at all, just inquiry and

  prompt resolution."

  Aqua.

  Sea-blue.

  Darkness.

  There is a momentary flash as Mae checks her watch to mark the time. "Okay, I'll

  let you know tomorrow."

  Azure so intense the eye must look away.

  Darkness...darkness...darkness.

  Shayna tries to sleep, but colors flow like rivers behind her eyelids,

  unadulterated greens melting into raging, violent blues, oranges that erupt into

  an energetic sea of yellow-white. What is it the embians say out there in the

  darkness? What do they promise each other with each new pattern?

  She tosses, presses her hands over hot dry eyes, tries to blank her mind,

  compose herself for the balm of sleep, but the colors intensify until she can

  taste them on the back of her tongue, hear them ringing in her ears. They mean

  something. She slips out of her bunk and sits on the edge, pushing her

  fingertips against her temples. Red throbs along her optic nerves, seeps deep

  into her brain. Amber melds with her unconscious. Violet sings.

  Finally, she turns on the light and searches the stores. Somewhere in the

  station she has seen sets of colored bulbs for the lanterns, used as lures in

  the earliest studies when others besides herself had postulated the lighting

  displays possessed meaning. The embians never responded to static decoys,

  though, and, after dozens of unsuccessful trials, the bulbs had been abandoned

  in favor of the more traditional forms of observation.

  Two hours before dawn, she finds a set of four: red, yellow, blue, and green, a

  severely truncated vocabulary, but perhaps enough to begin. She takes four extra

  lanterns and eases outside into the sticky, hot night air, leaving Mae soundly

  asleep. Sweat immediately trickles down her temples and pools between her

  breasts as she follows the well marked path to the blind, but then hikes beyond

  it into the virgin forest to hunch at the bottom of a great, fleshy tree oozing

  vinegar-scented sap.

  The air has the consistency of heated sludge, down where the night breeze cannot

  reach. Her lungs labor to inhale, exhale. She kneels between protruding roots as

  knobby as knees, and, by the bland light of the white bulb, changes out the

  other four. She turns on the green and waits. Mating displays usually start just

  after dusk and intensify until midnight, tapering off after that, but a few

  embians roam until dawn, searching for something -- she wishes she knew what.

  The sodden heat of the night coils inside her, like a snake about to strike. She

  swings the lantern over her head, then turns it off, trying to approximate their

  initializing rhythm. Green, she thinks hard at the embians.

  Whir of insects. Creak of trees shifting in the breeze. Rustle of mouse-small

  feet.

  Ochre.

  Darkness.

  Her heart thumps. They never make the same response twice in a row. Her hands

  shake as she selects red this time, holds the lantern aloft for ten counted

  seconds before turning it off.

  Darkness.

  The night presses in as she tries to be patient. Out of sight, the ocean

  whispers against the sand. Her back itches and she tastes salt on her lips. She

  wishes for a moon, something, anything to lessen the unbroken power of the

 

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