Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show by Edmund R. Schubert

be sure the Aurorans would not react with xenophobic violence, so she had decided to send only two people: Singh, because of his xenobiological expertise, and Tinochika Murerwa, because prior to becoming an astrophysicist he had seen combat while serving in the UN Special Forces.
    My arguments in favor of freedom of the press did not persuade her, but I made enough of a fuss that her superiors on Earth had ordered her to include me. I don’t know why they overrode her; I suspect the real reason had nothing to do with freedom of the press and everything to do with the fact that the United States shouldered 40 percent of the cost of this mission, and U.S. politicians wanted an American involved in the biggest news to come out of it. It didn’t matter why—I was in.
    Singh, Murerwa, and I gathered our equipment and entered the airlock. As the pressure equalized, I said, “Good luck, Singh,” because he was the one in command of our little party.
    “Thanks.”
    We climbed down the ladder and started preparing for our hosts to arrive and greet their unexpected visitors.
    Murerwa looked over his shoulder at the videocam I was setting up on a tripod. He let out a deep bass laugh. “Planning to get a picture of yourself shaking hands with a real alien?”
    “Yes.” Somehow I felt that getting a real picture would be my compensation for all the grief I’d taken over the fake one.
    After a very long five minutes, something came over a small ridge east of us. As it got closer, I began to make out details of its physiology. It looked like a scaly brown headless camel with four tentacles instead of a neck. As it got closer, I could see a wide opening between the top and bottom pairs of tentacles that I presumed to be its mouth.
    It stopped about ten meters away from us. It wasn’t very large; although it certainly weighed more than me, the hump on its back only came up to about the middle of my chest. As if responding to that thought, the hump rose a few inches on a thick stalk, and the creature seemed to stare at us out of two glossy blue-black openings on the front of the hump.
    Singh said something in Hindi that I didn’t understand.
    “Is it one of the Aurorans or just an animal?” I asked.
    “I think it’s sentient. It’s wearing something like a tool belt around one of its forelegs.”
    Now that he pointed it out, I saw the belt, which appeared to be made of a thick woven fabric. And one of the tools was undoubtedly a hammer, even if I wasn’t sure what the rest were.
    We stared at him while he stared at us. Now we knew what an Auroran looked like.
    Or rather, we thought we did until more creatures began coming over the hill. Some came on four legs, some on two. I was fairly sure I saw one with eight. Some had tentacles; others had jointed arms with hand-like appendages. All had scaly skins, but some had patches of fur that appeared to be part of their bodies, not clothing, and all had heads similar to the hump on the first one, though it didn’t seem to be in the same place on the different anatomies. Some were bilaterally symmetrical, but some were not—I spotted one that had anemone-like tendrils on one side and a crab-like pincer on the other. And of the fifty or more arrivals, there didn’t appear to be more than a handful that looked like they belonged to the same species.
    As the crowd grew, they began singing to each other. At least that’s what it sounded like to me—wordless tunes that harmonized rather than creating a cacophony.
    Then one of them said some words, and the others silenced almost immediately.
    “Did you catch what he said?” asked Singh.
    “Sounded like ‘Alla Beeth’ to me,” I answered.
    A voice in the crowd repeated it, and suddenly all of them were chanting, “Alla Beeth.”
    They didn’t stop chanting until the soldiers showed up. Their civilization might be very different from ours, but a sword still looks like a sword, even if it is strapped to the waist of a tentacled