Chapter Forty-Four
I wish I could take credit for the close of the first game, how the pairs of players shook hands and traded words of good will. But I can’t, Mavis and Coach Wills, I came to learn, were taking a few moments during the player cycling to tell each of the newcomers among my people a little more about how humans viewed sportsmanship.
And a little more about how to show you wanted to do that again.
So the gaggle of players formed two lines and began to file past one another, shaking hands and congratulating each other on their performances. They were sweaty, grimy, and to be kind about it, filthy messes. Humans sported bruises, and Captain Bonny had earned herself an eye that now needed a patch at least temporarily, and she was less sore than most. The bruised up humans definitely stank to the stars. Humans smell absolutely rancid when they sweat.
It was enough to make me wonder if this was an evolutionary defense against predation? Something to look into later. ‘I don’t think the no biting rule needs to exist, no dlamisa in their right mind would take a bite out of a sweaty human.’ I shuddered even to think about it.
Stench aside, it was a resounding success, and the spark of competitive spirit was lit in the very best of ways.
Lisa, in a moment of what I can only call pure inspiration, approached the bins where the balls and frisbees were sitting, waiting to be loaded back up and taken to the Walker house, and began to hold them up one by one. “Souvenirs for our friends from beyond the stars!” She shouted, and began tossing them over to the sailors, who immediately locked their limbs and chased after them one by one.
Lisa, if I did not make this clear, was of the sort of humans that were considered nearly universally to be ‘beautiful’ and she was in the flower of her youth. She clearly knew it, and played to it when the cameras were on her, chucking one after another toward a select dlamisan officer or sailor and getting them to run one last time.
It was pure spectacle, but nobody cared, except perhaps the one to catch whatever was thrown.
Unsurprisingly, Captain Bonny, when her turn came, did as she did during the game and blended the all fours running with something close to human gymnastics, rising from four legs to two for the final leap and snatching a frisbee out of the air in her jaws with a gracefulness that a human ballerina would have envied.
She landed with a pirouette and held the disc in the air like a prize before sauntering back to the others, she kept the ‘head tilt’ look on her face, it struck me as manipulative to do that. She learned somewhere, probably from movies, that humans liked that expression on our race for some reason. I suppose I have no right to complain, whether you manipulate someone for a minute or an hour, or do with one person or nine billion, manipulation is manipulation.
And I was confident she meant no harm, she was just trying to win them over. The truth was, looking back, I was no different. I did believe in the work we were doing, the study I was performing. But my motivation? I was driven by my own desires, my own wants.
I just didn’t want to leave my humans, and the only thing that wasn’t secondary to that was my academic integrity, but even that? I look back at that now as a half formed joke. It wasn’t motivated by some lofty ideals, but by the realization that I would put my humans in danger if shoddy work studying their species ultimately led to a breakdown in relations that were only just barely beginning at the time.
After each of the bins were emptied, she had one tennis ball left, and held it up, most of the dlamisans held their prizes in their mouths, but the fact that they got theirs didn’t stop them from eyeing the one in Lisa’s hand.
“And hey,” she shouted, “One for the waterboy that made all this happen!” She then threw the ball in my direction and I didn’t even hesitate. I jumped ‘mostly’ straight up, caught it in my mouth and…
I did say ‘mostly’ straight up.
That ‘mostly’ took me over the middle of the table where gravity worked its mischief, and I came crashing down, landing on my back and sending the table toppling to the ground with cups going every which way. My fur was drenched, but I didn’t care.
I’d caught the ball, after all.
When I got back up and brushed myself off, I found myself face to face with a skinny young man who I can only describe as being in ‘cosplay’. I say this because despite the fact that we were living in the modern era, he was dressed as if he were from the humans mid-twentieth century, complete with suspenders, a funny hat called a fedora, and pad and pen in his front pocket.
I had questions.
Lots of questions.
But he beat me to the punch, “How soon till the Ballyball leagues get started? Will you book the stadium for future games or build special ones for different types of team play? How much of a role did football play in coming up with this? Do you have sponsorship yet?”
He peppered me with questions in a nasal voice that felt rushed and overeager, and from my point of view he was standing just a little too close.
“What, sponsorship? No. No, we don’t. I mean, the equipment was paid for by the education department of my University…” I was flustered, thrown off by the rushing of his questions and from my hard landing, but he seemed not to notice that, and maybe he didn’t? Our faces are hard for humans to read.
“So interschool competition, and you’re still available to sponsor. Well you certainly captured people’s imaginations today with this one.” He said without pause, but I had to jump in.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“What are you talking about?” I asked and rubbed my head where I’d bumped it after landing on the table.
His voice changed and he pulled the microphone back, suddenly sounding a lot less like an old timey reporter he whispered, “Dude, you’re trending!” He held out his mobile device and thumbed through things, “Play it up,” he whispered, “this could be my big break!”
‘All those devices…’ It hit me all at once. Nobody had ever seen this game before, and humans talked a lot. Some told some more who told some more, the ones who showed all had devices that streamed whatever they pointed them at to audiences everywhere. Louisville was an intercultural amalgam of a city, the University of Louisville was a hub of education for numerous different humans from around the world. All of them had their social followers and channels where they put out whatever…
And then… ‘Just what did Fauve suggest that Teresa do? What were these ‘work assignments’ recently?’
So many questions.
But all I could do was go with the moment and cope with this pseudo-costumed reporter and answer him as best I could.
He probably would have talked all eight of my ears off, but before he could manage to make even one fall free of my skull, I was saved. Lisa’s hand on his shoulder got his attention, he looked over and saw her pretty bright eyes and a smile I knew he had to find charming, she tilted her head and said, “I’m afraid we need to borrow him for a bit.”
“But-” He stammered and Lisa’s slender hand drifted down to his lower back.
“Let me just say, he has people who need him at the moment.” She added and with what I can only suppose was a light pressure, got him to move aside to make way for me.
I, however, was still somewhat flustered. In the back of my mind I was mentally tallying the recorded data, occasions of rendered aid and the rapidity of shifting bonds on the field as pairs gelled together. That was the easy part. But between the shouts and the noise, and the constant hum of drones, the rest was a bit more than I expected.
Lisa had not been making things up just to get me some space, she jerked her thumb over her shoulder to where the Walkers were standing just inside the tunnel. I’d been so drowned out with the smells… and the stench, that I somehow missed theirs.
Fauve had a grin on her face that no dlamisan idiom could ever describe, to borrow a human one, she looked like the cat who swallowed the canary, which is to say smug or cocky self satisfaction.
She rushed ahead of her parents, though she did her best not to run, and looking up at me she asked, “So, what’d you think?”
I had to ask, “About what?”
She crossed her arms, snorted and looked away, “Yeah, like all those drones just showed up out of nowhere. I was explaining everything to Teresa and told her what you were doing, what this was supposed to accomplish, and she said…”
Fauve did her best to imitate Teresa’s imperious and peremptory voice, “You can’t come to me with a story like that and expect to do nothing with it. Half of media relations is being ahead of everybody else. The other half is controlling what everybody sees when they finally catch up to you.”
She cleared her throat and resumed her normal speaking voice, “So anywho, she made a few calls to some popular D-bloggers, you know, the drone bloggers like the ones who showed up at the house before…” my tail stiffened and ceased its wagging motion.
“No, no, it’s fine, they just chase stories, and the first interplanetary sporting event? Who wouldn’t want to be the first to stream that? It got picked up by local news and from there it got picked up by more and…” Fauve uncrossed her arms and pulled her datapad out of her pocket, “Remember what Mr. Barnum said about perception?”
“Yes…” I said, and while I said it, Fauve was opening up an autogenerated site that included pictures of some of the players along with names and bios, their photos were mostly captured in motion, and unsurprisingly Fauve went straight to the Captain.
Her photo was in mid leap, pushing off somebody’s back with the grace of a gymnast.
I glanced at the data, already there were some other photos and a fan site link, her photo from the landing of her ship, and a short biography gathered from a short few minutes conversation in between her rounds on the field. I read it out loud. “Advance force recon with six confirmed Zenti ships destroyed, merchant captain with three hundred systems visited over a thirty year period…” Fauve made her own impressed whistle for me.
“So cooooool!” She practically squealed, balling up her hands at chest height and almost dancing with excitement. I raised my eyes from the datapad and looked at her in lengthy silence.
Fauve coughed into her hand and tried very hard to become a ‘professional young lady’ again, then said, “Anyway, they’re being turned into celebrities, a couple of other sports teams showed some interest in crossplay and Teresa contacted some shoe companies and equipment manufacturers about sponsorship. The New Kyoto plaza even put the game on the big screen, see?” She asked and tapped on the screen to show a video of someone videoing the crowd and the giant screen on the tower.
“Teresa says that everybody is a pacifist when peace is profitable.” Fauve relayed the words of her mentor and… I couldn’t really argue. “So anyway I helped out as much as I could…” She lowered her eyes a little, “Sorry I didn’t tell you… I thought if I did, you might tell me not to.”
“Better to ask forgiveness than permission?” I asked, and she gave me a little nod, her eyes welled up.
“I know you think your experiment, your study is enough. But… but I couldn’t do nothing.” She bit her lower lip to stop it from quivering, “I figured if everybody on my world wanted you to stay as much as I did, we did… maybe it would make it easier to convince your University not to make you go away…”
I wondered how long it would take me to get used to the volatile emotional states of human children. But the truth was, she might have expected me to be upset, or angry, or flustered.
But I couldn’t be. A couple of humans, with a handful of volunteers, ignited a firestorm of interest in a sport, just to keep one alien Earthbound? It was unthinkable.
“Unthinkable. Wonderful. And to be honest… a little bit scary. But most of all… wonderful.” I hadn’t said it loud enough for her to hear me over the still fading tumult. So I answered her another way. It wasn’t my first time giving a hug of course, and doing so was a little clunky for me still, but I did my best.
Sometimes for all my love of writing things down, data, and well reasoned explanations, even I had to admit, one big hug said more than ten thousand hours of lectures.
I had a lot to do still, I knew that.
But the day was looking up.