Engine City by Ken MacLeod

heads. But the bones always turned out to be of seabats, and the momentary excitement of finding in a grassy bank a huge warren of burrows was dimmed somewhat by the discovery, which at any other time would have made their day, that they were the work of a peculiar flightless bird which they provisionally dubbed the “mole penguin.”
    “I’m amazed the whalers didn’t hunt them to extinction,” said Elizabeth.
    “Probably taste disgusting.”
    She looked at him sidelong. “And your point would be?”
    They laughed and took themselves aloft.
    The volcanic badlands were, not to their surprise, an even less thriving habitat for land animals. They chipped some interesting mats of yellow, stinking extremophile bacteria and netted a few specimens of a small spider that skittered across the algae-clogged pools, but that was it. They returned to the whaling station as the short day ended. The wind had dropped, and the sea was calm, smooth on the surface of its ceaseless swells. Elizabeth and Gregor stowed their less fragile specimens, marked and tagged for later collection, in the whaling station. In the long twilight they built a fire from the whitened timbers of a ruined boat and cooked over it their first hot meal of the day. They lingered, huddling closer together against the cold, as the embers faded with the light and the stars came down to the horizon. The southern hemisphere constellations were so unfamiliar they didn’t have names. Repairing this omission and identifying the two stars, among the many visible, that they’d visited themselves, was keeping them idly occupied when they heard heavy footsteps crunching up the beach.
    “Behind the fire,” Gregor said quietly.
    They scrambled to their feet and backed off, one to each side, and peered toward the shoreline. The footsteps became quieter as they moved from the shingle to the sand, then stopped. Elizabeth could dimly make out a selkie silhouetted against the starlit sea. He spread his hands wide and stepped forward into the dim circle of light from the fire. One arm was raised, shielding his eyes from the glow as he peered over his thick forearm at them. It was the bold one they’d met before.
    He began to speak, his deep voice loud above the surf but quiet in itself. There was something in it of frustration, perhaps sorrow, but nothing of anger or fear. He spoke for about two minutes, then trailed off and ended with a gurgling laugh. Then he hunkered down, spread his hands, and looked at them across the fire, his eyes having apparently adapted to the light. Elizabeth stepped over beside Gregor, put a hand on his shoulder, and he joined her in squatting down. She faced the selkie, spread her hands, and leaned forward earnestly.
    “What you are saying,” she said, her voice speaking to the selkie but her words for Gregor’s benefit, “is that you are speaking, and therefore you are a rational being, and that you want us to recognize you as such, and that you find our lack of a common language as frustrating as we do. Well, I understand and agree with that. In fact, I think that for all your nakedness and living in the wild, you are not a savage, a hunter-gatherer, although that may be how you live now. I think you’re basically as civilized as we are, and as aware of the nature of the universe. You can draw, you’ve seen a skiff before, you’ve met aliens. Am I right?”
    Gregor nodded. The selkie responded with another minute or so of speech, looking down a little, as though in abstraction. When he’d finished, he looked up, and his teeth flashed in the embers’ glow. He reached for a stick from the fire, motioned to them and began to draw in the sand. They joined him and watched as he slashed in the sand the glyphs of skiff and spidery alien—ten lines, little more. He pointed at himself, waved a hand out to sea, and then raised a hand, palm forward: Wait. He rose and tramped into the dark, beckoning them after him. When they were all out of the circle of light, a few tens