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

Zalcberg’s observations of our newfound friends, that is essentially what the Aurorans can do: manipulate their own bodies by absorbing an animal and using its genetic code to recreate some aspect of that animal’s body. The wide variety of body shapes and parts among the Aurorans comes from deliberate change, not from their inherited genes.
    Within a few days, the Aurorans remedied our failure to bring a linguistics expert by providing one of their own. His name was a short trill that most of us could not reproduce, so someone called him Mozart. I pointed out that, given “Beeth” was one of the two words he knew, Beethoven might have been more appropriate, but by then the name had already stuck.
    Biologically speaking, Mozart was neither a he nor a she, but none of us really felt comfortable calling it “it.” Since the real Mozart had been a he, we defaulted to that usage for the most part.
    Through trial and error, we determined that the Auroran vocal apparatus simply was incapable of making most of the sounds of human languages. Fortunately, Mozart had brought rough sheets of a paper-like substance, inks of various colors, and a collection of clay stamps that could be used to imprint various symbols on the paper. While a few of the simpler symbols bore a resemblance to letters in various Earth alphabets—X, O, I, T,—there did not appear to be any connection between them and their Earthly sounds, so Rachel’s aleph-bet explanation for “Alla Beeth” was a dead end.
    Since Mozart understood the concept of written symbols representing ideas, once he got over his astonishment at the interaction between a computer keyboard and monitor, we were able to teach him to use his tentacles to type. We would communicate back by typing and saying words at the same time, so he could learn to associate the text of a word with its sound.
    Whoever had decided to send Mozart to communicate with us had made a good choice. After only four days, he had learned enough English to carry on simple conversations, so during my shift for teaching him, I asked him the question that had been bothering me. “Why did your leader bow to me?”
    
    “One of your people with swords. The most important one.”
    
    “Yes.”
    
    I demonstrated a bow.
    
    The nearest town, which someone had imaginatively dubbed Neartown, was not the place Mozart was from. That was new information, and I felt a little pleased with myself for discovering it. Still, I pressed on to find out more about what was bothering me. “Why did the leader of the close people bow to me?”
     He stopped typing and said, “Alla Beeth.”
    I typed it out for him.
    
    “You do not think I am Alla Beeth?”
    
    “Who is Alla Beeth?”
    Mozart whistled a staccato tune.
    I thought fast. If Alla Beeth was some sort of deity and I denied knowledge of it, I wasn’t sure what sort of complications that would cause. “Our language is so different from yours that our name for Alla Beeth may be different, too.” I hoped that wasn’t some sort of heresy.
    
    I felt the tremble in my stomach that I get when I realize I’m on the verge of a major story. “When did Alla Beeth visit your people?”
    
    Fifty years. Their planet’s year was more than two Earth years long, so he was claiming a human had visited Aurora over a hundred years ago, back before we’d even walked on Mars.
    “Wait a minute.” Even though this was being recorded, I wanted someone else with me before I proceeded any further. I commed Commander Gutierrez and asked her to come join us.
    After reading the transcript of our conversation to that point, she asked, “Is this a joke?”
    “If it is,