Shipstar by Larry Niven, Gregory Benford

their mourning with festival. The humans stood aside as the lithe forms began to move, sway, sing. All around them spontaneous movement broke out. The warm sun and lancing jet stung their skins and they danced until a kind of glow spread on their skins. “Maybe the exercise changes their surface circulation?” Irma wondered as the pumping music swelled, bodies glided and kicked, and the golden richness of Sil skins seemed to give off its own moist radiance.
    Quert led them to a low building, its walls slanted sheets of ivory rock. Beneath their feet was blond gravel that as they entered a small room turned green, each pebble wrapped in a translucent skin of slime. Quert bent and carefully unhinged from some sculpted seats small blobs that seemed to be slugs that had adhered. They sat and the seats adjusted to their bodies with a slithery grace.
    There was a long wait, but as protocol required, the alien spoke first. “We need know goal Astronomers.”
    “They want to catch us,” Terry said. “Or kill us.”
    “Whichever is easier,” Aybe added.
    “Capture best for them. Folk want know what you know.” Quert said this flatly.
    “About what?” Irma asked.
    “Ship you ride, plants you carry, bodies you have, songs. Possible is.” The swift slippery slide of Quert’s words belied a calm the feline alien wore like a mantle. Plainly Quert was a leader.
    The talk went on, speculating on why the Folk had fired into a Sil crowd. Yes, humans were among them, but why did that matter? Cliff watched the alien and reflected on what could come next. In his experience people centered their lives around money or status or community or service to some cause, but the Sil seemed to live learning-centered lives. Here little bits of practical knowledge were the daily currency—Howard had given them a Möbius strip to amuse the children—and their main vocation was to be preoccupied with some exciting little project or maybe a dozen. As one Sil had told him, it was quicker to list the jobs he didn’t hold than the ones he did.
    There were teams completing a pit to turn manure into electricity, plans to build a micro-hydroelectric generator in a local stream. They devised and built their own lathes and saws, tough enough to carve into the hard wood of the big trees that ringed their sprawling village. The Sil seemed shaped by what Cliff saw as a frontierlike culture. Here they drilled into trees to make body lotion or designed cement hives for swarming insects, as if to foil a creature that sounded to Cliff like honey badgers. They’re isolated, Cliff thought, no other Sil for great distances, or other intelligent species … out here in the bush, lost in their experiments.
    His attention had wandered. Aybe had been peppering Quert with questions, and nobody understood its answers. Then the alien leaned back, yawned to show big teeth, and held up its hands. “Not right thing, you speak for. Folk want all Adopted to obey. I-we, you—” A liquid pointing gesture. “—not made in Bowl. Danger badness comes from us, say Folk.”
    This came out as hard, clipped words, not the sliding sibilants Quert usually used. It was tricky inferring emotions from alien facial signatures, Cliff’s judgment warned him, but the narrowing eyes and tensed lips made a constricted face that oozed resentment. Cliff said, “You came before us.”
    A quick blinking, which seemed to convey agreement among the Sil. “Not Adopted over long time. We move, live, work. Folk give us things. We do their commands.”
    Irma said, “You said earlier that you move often?”
    Quert looked puzzled, as it always did by the human habit of conveying a question by a rising note at the end of a sentence. “Our kind rove.”
    “But you have buildings.”
    “Young must learn by doing. This I-we know. Costs to know. Must pay. No such thing as free education. And buildings, cities used to talk.”
    “Talk?”
    “Adopted can see our work from everywhere in the Bowl.