The following is a continuation of Deer Throwing by Lauren Brown. Read it first, it’s under a thousand words and otherwise this won’t make any sense.
But moments later, the creatures stirred. First a twitch, then two more. Three pulses. A gasp. Exhale. Two more pulses.
“What?”
In Carla’s morphine haze, nothing made sense. Nothing about the trio of pulses, nor the sudden awareness of what those pulses meant, the subtle modulations in their tenor that she had never seen before seemed real.
“What … happened?”
Two more pulses, yet each contained a thousand tiny cues, a symphony of dancing lights somehow contained inside the pupils of the S’kethri. Two blinks that seemed like a half crazed run-on sentence, compressed into a fraction of a second: “you’re alive you’re alive you’re alive how are you alive thank goodness why did i go flying where did the launcher go what happened. What … happened?”
The two sat up, Carla with a grunt of pain, the S’kethri with a motion that defied the anatomy of earthly amphibians, a fuzzy reforming of the bent and broken shape into a restored silvery form. They stared at each other, wide eyed, neither daring to utter another word. Silent under the riftlit sky.
Three more slow blinks: “What was that human thinking, throwing me, casting me from its hand without reason, without care? What fool? Did he not know that he could hurt me? That he would hurt you? That my people would see what he would do? That he would be brought before the tribunal? That he would have no chance to defend himself without the knowledge of our customs, the knowledge that he so clearly lacked? What was it thinking?”
Carla gasped.
Aloud she said, “I can understand you!”
Privately, she thanked the doctors for giving her the good drugs, but wished they would have warned her about the side effects before giving her hallucinogens.
Another two blinks, and information crashed into Carla’s brain, not words exactly, but pure meaning, deposited in the instants of between eyelid flutters: “that is the typical side effect of the bioelectric field. When I was surprised my sudden evacuation from the ground into your abdomen, I released a shock.”
“But how am I alive?” Carla asked, “I should have been killed by the bioelectric field.”
Three blinks of the eyes which were pools of compassion: “I couldn’t silence a heartbeat of another soul, not on purpose, and not on accident if I could help it. I limited the bioelectric field’s intensity; not by enough to stop it entirely, not by enough to prevent the arrhythmia and the ensuing shock, but enough to keep you alive.”
“But what. But why? How can I understand you?”
Two more blinks: “that tends to happen when your kind survives exposure to the field. Not every S’kethri has sufficient control, and even when everything seems right, things can go badly, so we tend to use translators. The cerebral pattern synchronization isn’t fully understood, even by us, but we think it has something to do with the rift.”
As Carla and the S’kethri continued to look into the darkness, the departed alien recovery ship flashed back through the rift, and as the scent of singed grass mingled with the echoing doppler of the Xiros-5 Diplomatic Response Force sirens, a brilliant beam wrapped itself around the S’kethri, and Carla knew that soon her busted knee would be the least complicated thing in her life.