This file is a part of Elf Sternberg's Collected Works on ASSTR.  The
complete archive of Elf's work can be found on his website at:

http://www.drizzle.com/~elf

The author can be contacted at:

mailto:elf@drizzle.com

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                              First Contact

Journal Entry 164 / 01314

Erwer, Cerim 17, 01314

Maykir/Cot leaned back in her comfortably padded office chair, her eyes
closed. She had finally finished grading the last of two dozen papers,
most of them well-written, and had entered the grades into the computer on
her desk. Outside her window one of the great windstorms that came every
autumn blew fiercely. She caught herself thinking that if she had to walk
home those winds would tear out her feathers and make flutes of her bones.

She scowled. "I'm not that old yet," she said to the empty office space.
In truth at fifty-two years she was not that old. Somehow, though,
she could not shake the sensation of aging.

"Maybe it's the papers," she said, glancing down at the pile of documents
on her desk, some colorfully bound. The great bulk of them read just
the same as last year, and those had read much as the year before. She
knew many of the students were earnest in their quest for knowledge,
but many had also learned that a Respected Degree required one to be
able to spew a great deal of guano at a moment's notice. That guano had
to sound official to those who lived in the upper leaves of university
life and yet seem incomprehensible to the average citizen. Many of these
papers demonstrated mastery of that skill.

Seven years ago she had been selected to be one of a handful of university
scientists to go on the Maepetus 5 mission, the largest mission thus
far of its kind. After a little more than a year in transit she, her
fellow academics, and a sampling of students had set out to explore the
gas giant close-up and in real time. It had been a fascinating time
for all of them, even those students who had complained of boredom,
and yet events on the expedition had turned completely enthralling
when two of her students had located a highly polished object on the
fourth moon of Maepetus. Although she had not felt truly qualified (she
held two RD's and had been selected for her specialty in using remote
sensing techniques in archeology, but in truth both archeology and her
other degree, sayropology, were considered arts rather than sciences,
after all) she and a fellow professor had gone down to the surface with
four students and there they had found Albedo One. The Hard One.

Maybe that was it, she thought. Almost all of the papers here mentioned
Albedo One in one way or another despite the fact that her nominal class
topic was Sayrin archeology. She felt saddened to see that at least two
students had fallen into the trap of analyzing images from cultures long
dead, even cave scribblings, looking for evidence of Albedo One's species.
A few of the analyses had given her pause and made plausible reaches
in that direction. But the papers fell into abject speculation without
evidence and without doing much to convince her.

She turned off the desklamp and rose, walking out into the hallway,
locking the door behind her. She hadn't placed any marks on the papers
and the grades were in the computers, but still some enterprising young
student might want to make copies of them all to sell to next year's
guanodroppers.

She glanced at her watch and suddenly realized that the sun had set hours
ago. Normally, she would be deep in sleep by now this late at night but
she had no classes to teach tomorrow, indeed nothing to do but research
for the next two months. She sometimes joked that she had turned the
ancient, deep-rooted instinct for migration by which the still-winged
species survived into a desire to migrate back in time and see things
as they had been. With the fall of snow the students would return,
the distraction ended and the desire to learn all the stronger for it.

But now the university campus was completely desolate and at this late
hour she would be lucky to find another living soul anywhere. Except
maybe the security guards. Even of that she was in great doubt.

An impulse took her and she decided to follow it. She made her way
downstairs to the underground walkway complex that linked the ring of
buildings in this corner of the university campus. After reaching the
main building in the complex she ascended to the ground floor, then
walked over to the archeology department's modest museum. She swiped
her identity card, examined the readout on its surface, and typed in a
seven-digit ID code. The door unlocked.

"Hello, old friend," she said. She felt immense personal satisfaction
that the statue had ended up here at the University, but she also felt a
sadness that the initial reaction to the statue had been so negative, that
no major museum had wanted to make it part of their permanent collection.

Still, only two hours away from the world capitol they had plenty of
guests visiting for a look. Several television crews had come by this
year and some had even managed to show full pictures of Albedo One
without pixellating out the source of his popular nickname.

The lights were off. She flicked a switch and turned on an overhead
spotlight to illuminate the center of the room. He still lay there, arms
crossed behind his head, still smiling. A 'rock' of painted foam had been
fashioned to replace the stone that had been his pillow on Maepetus V's
largest moon. His legs were still crossed at the ankles and his penis
was still a magnificent erection pointing towards the ceiling. He looked
immensely pleased with himself, as if the knowledge that he had created so
much confusion with his erection was a source of satisfaction all its own.

She walked up to the red rope barrier that surrounded the low platform on
which he was displayed, lifting a hook off one of the posts and stepping
into the display area. She reached out and touched him. He felt cool
to the touch, as metal would. As far as anyone was able to tell, he was
just that, just a stainless steel statue.

A magnificent work of art in its own right, too. Art critics had raved at
the attention to detail, the marvelous proportions in which the statue
fit, even the technical skill of the sculptor. A seam found between
the two legs where they crossed, and between the head and the hands,
revealed that each was an individual item, not actually joined as some
sculptor would create from a block of marble. Arguments had raged over
how the artist had accomplished that particular detail.

Memories came back of the days after his discovery, of the analysis of
the organic material found on the penis, of the pictures beamed around
the world of the fingerprints of the first alien ever to be encountered,
if only through her artwork. She recalled the countless interviews, the
debate over taking it onto the ship, the debate over cleaning it after
all the analysis, the awkwardness with which her students discussed
polishing the impressive knob. She couldn't remember who had actually
performed the task.

"You gave me my career back," she said, placing a hand on his thigh as she
sat down onto the marble platform. "Well, not so much back as you gave
me another flap after I had started to feel tired." She sighed. "I'm
starting to feel tired again. All anyone ever talks about anymore is
you. Maybe that's all they talk about around me. It's as if we were
lovers and you were somehow the celebrity and I the dutiful wife."

She looked along the length of the body. Here, in his own little puddle
of warm lights, the rest of the room darkened to black invisibility, he
looked as impressive and yet as familiar as the day she had found him. "I
guess I am not the most dutiful wife in the world," she said with a laugh.
She leaned over and with a delicate touch kissed his unmoving smile. "We
have never consummated this mating after all."

She sat up, wondering what was happening to her. "Maybe I am just
exhausted. Flappy." She looked the statue in the face. "What would
you think?"

No answer came. She was tired. But also, she realized, there were
no cameras in this room, no security guard watching. There were no
other students or faculty to interrupt her private visit. And, despite
everything else, until that moment she had never actually touched The
Hard One in anything but the most cursory fashion.

With a trembling hand, she reached out to grasp his penis. She closed
her hand around the shaft, amazed as it seemed to fit into the palm so
perfectly the two had melded together. She let her fingertips play over
the gleaming metallic surface, astounded at the depth of detail she was
discovering here for the first time.

Her ex-mate had once told her that "You can't really tell anything about
someone's sex until you've felt it on your tongue." He was talking about
a female's, of course, but she imagined that the same must hold true
for a male's penis. She leaned over and extended her tongue to lick the
metallic surface of his shaft, sliding up over the head until she was
poised to take it into her mouth. She let her head be pulled down by
gravity and the cock went into her mouth.

An odd thrill rose through her body; it seemed to emanate from her chest,
her back between her shoulders, and radiate outwards to her sex, her
throat, her mouth. She wanted much more than to taste The Hard One.

She stood up. For a brief moment she considered the insanity of what
she was going to do, then banished the thought with an angry scowl. She
had had a longer relationship with him than even his creator. If she had
been the dutiful mate for so long, then by all the gods there were she
deserved a little attention of her own. She reached up to her shoulder
and unclipped the two clasps on her blue floor-length robe, working her
way down the side until it fell to the floor. She threw aside her scanties
and straddled him, much as she imagined his maker had many years ago. His
erection hovered between her thighs and she pressed herself against it.
It's solid mass pressed against her feathered belly. It was large,
certainly larger than her ex-mate. He had been her only lover in her
life and she had nothing but him to which to compare this.

But she ran her hands over it, trying to use friction to warm it up. The
sensation of coldness that permeated through her feathers to her thighs
and buttocks where it pressed against the metal started to fade as it
reached a common temperature with her skin. She waited until she felt
it was warm enough, then slowly raised herself over it.

The touch of the knobby head was a surprise; it was certainly more
solid than anything else she had ever experience before. She realized
that she could hurt herself on it and resolved to be more careful. It
penetrated her sex and she felt her insides move to take it, parting to
give it better entry. She groaned quietly as she felt her buttocks again
press against the metal. The blunt tip was so far inside her that if she
pressed down even a tiny bit more pain shot up from inside her belly to
her throat.

She eased herself off a little and began to give herself what she had
come for, the attention of her old friend. He smiled at her and she smiled
back, taken over by the wild, taboo sensations that shot through her. Even
if he wasn't real, she was taking her pleasure from an alien creature--
the thought itself felt indescribably delicious. Her fingers sought out
her sex, stimulating what the shaft itself wasn't reaching. She drove
herself into a height of pleasure she couldn't remember ever reaching
before, but she knew when she climaxed that it was worth it more than
any other experience she had ever felt.

Gasping and drained, she stood up, feeling post-coital sadness at being
empty again of her friend's penis. She glanced down at him. He still
smiled, and this time the smile had more in it. She realized that the
emotions came from her, not this motionless statue, but still, she
couldn't shake the feeling.

She recovered her underclothes and her outfit, dressing slowly. With the
hem of her robe she cleaned off the statue as well as she could. She
walked forward to his face and kissed the extended, mammalian muzzle
there. "Goodnight, old friend. And thank you." And with that, she wiped
off her kiss as well, leaving him spotless. She turned off the lights
and headed home.

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Original document is available from:
http://www.drizzle.com/~elf/journals

The Journal Entries of Kennet R'yal Shardik, et. al., and Related Tales
are Copyright (c) 1989-2000 Elf Mathieu Sternberg. Distribution limited
to electronic media not-for-profit use only. All other rights are reserved
to the author.
