Thanks to a recent rejection by a US magazine (no names, no pack-drill), I'm able to post this story here. It's a tale of human first-contact with an alien species, of humourless authority figures, large, squishy slug-things and patchwork patterns. Enjoy!

I've noticed that lots of people are arriving here in search of the meaning of "GSOH" (yes, we know what you're all up to - you can't keep anything secret!) It's a common abbreviation used in personal ads, where you pay by the word, for example - "Pretty, slim blonde, 40, WLTM (would like to meet) tall, dark, handsome man, 20-30, GSOH (good sense of humour)"

GSOH

by Jilly Paddock

Yemitzov was a pretty primrose yellow sun in the back end of beyond, so far away from Earth that it took the cruiser Jojorin two weeks to reach it, even using the quantum fast-lane of hypaspace as a short-cut. The system's fifth planet had resembled Earth even before terraforming, with salty oceans, temperate weather and a lush green flora completely at home with chlorophyll-based photosynthesis. Calvados the first colonists had dubbed it, and it lived up to that name, as sweet, golden and mellow a world as you could ever wish to see.
If I'd had any thoughts that this was a dangerous mission, they were swiftly dispelled, because the first thing we did on arrival was split up. Major Jonathan Burgoyne, our commander, took most of his team to meet the Vadosian authorities at their capital, an ugly, sprawling township with the pretentious name of Nouveau Paris, while I was sent into the field with Dr Moya Kent, mission psychologist. We were given a vehicle of a type that abounds on young colony worlds, a khaki-and-rust Land Rover with a noisy combustion engine that ran on methane, a fuel with the fetching local name of 'chicken-gas'. Our driver was the final member of our team, an enigmatic young man called Mooney. I'd yet to discover his function in our hierarchy, but he smiled as he helped me into the back seat and had no trouble controlling the eccentric Land Rover. It was an uncomfortable journey, spent in silence, bouncing over the badly-made tracks that passed for roads on this rural world.
At last I grew tired of the uneasy quiet. Most of the trip had been like this - I was the outsider, not really part of the team and I'd been politely ignored. Well, Zuzi-love, you've spent most of your life talking at things without backbones, so I'm sure you can strike up a conversation with the haughty Dr Kent and this strange multi-talented young man. "Where are we going again?"
"To a farm down on the coast, owned by a man called Seb Nantucket," Mooney said, glancing at me in the rear-view mirror, his eyes twinkling as he smiled. "It's about twenty minutes from the capital. We should be there soon."
"And why are we going there?"
"Really, Dr Aaron-Jones!" Moya Kent laughed scornfully. "Anyone would imagine that you weren't adequately briefed on this mission."
"I wasn't." That was true. I'd only been told the bare bones of it, only given access to the biological data-banks. "And it isn't necessary to call me Aaron-Jones - just Dr Jones will do, or Zuzana, if you prefer."
"We're going to talk to Seb's twelve year-old daughter, Boadicea," Mooney said. "She has the dubious honour of being the only Vadosian to have encountered and communicated with her world's sentient native life."
"Allegedly sentient," Moya corrected. "We only have the child's word for it. None of the local experts have heard the squilts talk."
Squilts I knew about - I'd read everything on file about those fascinating beasties. The survey-team had dubbed them sea-quilts, mats of greyish tissue that undulated through the shallow coastal waters, some as large as two metres square, sans eyes, ears, legs and teeth, in fact sans most of the things considered as basic essentials to life. All of the data was based on a single specimen - bad science, I know, but not an uncommon practise in the mad rush of an initial biological survey. A dead squilt had been recovered from the shore, deemed to be fresh enough for study and thoroughly dissected. When the scientists found a distinct lack of brain, only a rudimentary nervous system, sensory organelles that would look primitive on a flatworm and no sexual organs, the creatures had been written off as dumb marine oddities, nothing more. As they were an unknown genus, a Latin name had been coined for them - by tradition it should have included the surname of the man who'd captured the first specimen, but it was recorded that he'd refused that honour (in a simple two-worded response, the second of which was 'off!') so the sea-quilts were entered on the log as Megaloculcita maculata , the literal translation of which was 'big spotted cushions.' Dull and harmless native fauna, no threat to humankind.
Mooney steered our chicken-shit bus off the road and down a rocky track. We came to a halt in front of a low white farmhouse with a breath-taking view of the sea behind it. Sheep dotted the uneven pastures all the way down to the rocky coast, a small black and white horned variety, an old breed - Jacobs, I think. I climbed out of the Land Rover, tasting salt on the breeze. A pair of Border collies appeared from nowhere, barking furiously and baring their teeth. They were quickly called to heel by a red-headed man in his late thirties, as he came round the house to meet us. I let Dr Kent make all the introductions, while I made my peace with the dogs, patting their heads and rubbing behind their ears.
"So you've come all the way from Earth to talk to Boodie?" Seb Nantucket sounded pretty unimpressed. "Hell of a journey. Still, it's important stuff, this question of sentience. We need to nail down the truth, so we can stay on planet."
"Be assured that we'll only recommend removing your colony as a last resort," Moya said. "It would be a shame to uproot such a thriving community."
"More than a shame, after all the work we've put in here," there was a grimness in his eyes. "Calvados may seem a kind world, but we've lost people in claiming it for our own. My wife was one - she's buried behind the house."
"So it's just the two of you, you and your daughter?"
"Just Boodie and me," he agreed. "Wasn't it something, though, the squilts saving her from drowning like that? Your boffins labelled them just dumb bags of salty gloop, and there they were, smart-beasts all along."
"Have you heard them speak, Mr Nantucket?" Moya asked.
"No, not me. They only talk to Boodie."
"Can we meet her?"
"Sure. She'll be down on the shore, keeping an eye on the sheep grazing the seaweed, and talking to her pet squilts, no doubt. Spends most of her time down there," Seb shrugged. "I'd show you, but I've ewes to milk Follow the path down through the orchard - you can't miss the way."
We went where he pointed, around the house and between the lines of stunted but healthy apple trees. Mooney took the lead without any prompting and I followed Moya, studying him. Tall and well muscled, though not freakishly so, he moved with the grace of a dancer, or a man trained for unarmed combat. His hair was too long for military taste, tied back into an unruly ponytail, mid-brown with a hint of copper, and he wore a stud in his nose, a bead of green jade. This was a man easy to like, yet difficult to know. I couldn't get past the fact that in two weeks of close contact on the cruiser, in the company of a whole pack of people obsessed with titles and status within the team, neither he nor anyone else had told me what he did or why he was here.
We came down to a rocky shore, here opening out into a low sandy bay, but rising into cliffs to the north. I thought of Cornwall or Brittany, and envied the Nantucket family their life here. Sheep were grazing along the tide-line, munching on washed-up kelp and bladderwrack. Their names came rushing back to me, a litany learned long ago - Laminaria digitata, Fucus vesiculosus, Ascophyllum nodosum. The Jacob ewes and their lambs skipped over the rocks with never a care, little knowing that one false move would mean a broken leg and a one-way ticket to the stewpot. Perched on a smooth boulder at the far end of the bay was our target, a child in frayed and patched denim dungarees and cobalt-blue gingham shirt. Her mane of flame-coloured hair left no doubt that this was indeed the infamous Boadicea Nantucket. She watched our approach through a pair of dark-mirror sunglasses.
"Hi there," she said, grinning. "You must be the experts from Earth, huh?"
"Hello, Miss Nantucket," Mooney said, gravely. "Yes, we're part of the Terran study team. This is Dr Moya Kent and, bringing up the rear because she's too busy sight-seeing, is Dr Zuzana Jones. And me, I'm Mooney, at your service."
Boodie giggled and peered over her glasses at us. Her eyes were bluer than the sea. "Dad says you've come halfway across the galaxy to talk to me. What do you want to know?"
Moya slipped into her best professional tone, the kind that costs two hundred euro-dollars an hour. "We want you to tell us all about the squilts."
"They don't like being called that," the girl said. "They say it sounds rude. They don't like 'sea-carpets', 'swim-sacks', 'grey-blankets' or 'bags of gloop' either."
"So what do we call them?" Mooney sat down on the next rock.
"Sea-quilt is okay, I suppose."
"Tell us all about them, in your own words," Moya arranged her face into her slick put-them-at-their-ease smile. "We're really interested in hearing your story."
Boodie wrinkled her nose at the psychologist, wise to the fact she was being patronised but too polite to pass comment. "I went out in the boat, past the point," she waved towards the northern cliffs. "Got some pots laid out there, so we can catch crabs or maybe lobster. I was checking them when a squall blew up Turned the boat over before I could do anything, then I was in the water. Must have hit my head, 'cos I didn't know which way to swim and I kept breathing in sea... thought I was gonna drown, really I did. Then suddenly, the sea-quilts were there, three of them, big ones, floating in the water all around me. Picked me up, they did, and carried me back to the shore. It was like riding on an eiderdown or a sea-horse's back."
She stopped talking and gazed into the sea, a little secret smile on her lips. There was nothing I could see in the blue-crystal water, nothing on the stony bottom.
"So they rescued you?" Moya prompted. "We have legends like that on Earth, of dolphins saving people from drowning."
"Sea-quilts are smarter than dolphins, ma 'am. Dolphins don't talk to you, not in words you can understand, words you can only hear inside your head."
"Telepathy?" Mooney glanced at me. "You're our expert on invertebrates, Dr Jones. Ever come across any telepaths?"
"All the slugs I ever worked with didn't have enough mind for tricks like that," Not even the human ones, I added, to myself.
"Do they only talk on the inside of your head?" Moya had scented madness and was hot on its trail.
"They talk to me both ways now, speaking with tongues or without," Boodie frowned. "They say they can't get inside everyone's heads, not straight away. It was different with me 'cos I was scared and half-drowned. They sang to me all the way back to this cove."
"What did they say?"
"They told me not to be frightened and that I was safe," she pulled the glasses down to the tip of her nose. Huge cornflower-blue eyes stared at us, wide and serious. "They told me we were going to be friends. They said we had very important things to talk about. And we did, when they came back the next day."
"They came here?" Mooney stood up, scanning the waters just as I had.
Boodie grinned. "They're here now."
Three sea-quilts surfaced, appearing almost under our feet. Moya cried out, Mooney swore under his breath and I was transfixed by my first sight of these marvellous creatures. They were about two metres square and twenty centimetres thick, with no visible features. They weren't really grey though; their dorsal sides were spotted - the maculata of their Latin name was no lie - in a complex pattern of colours that had allowed them to remain camouflaged against the sea bed, invisible in plain sight. As I watched their colours altered, possibly using the same mechanisms as octopi and squid back on Earth.
"Are these the same three who rescued you?" I asked, wondering just how the hell you could tell these things apart.
"Yes, they are. I wasn't sure at first, but their voices taste the same inside my head," Boodie slid down from her boulder.
"Are they speaking to you now?" Moya asked.
The girl ignored her. "These are the people from Earth," she said, and I knew she wasn't talking to us. "Moya Kent, Zuzana Jones and Mooney. Is it okay to tell them your names?"
"They have names?" Mooney demanded in amazement.
"Not really - they don't need any. They agreed to take the ones I gave them though, so I could identify them," Boodie crouched down at the water's edge and placed her hand palm-down on each of the sea-quilts in turn. Where she touched them bright geometric patterns appeared in their grey-green tegument, vivid, primary colours, like pieces of calico. "This one's Prairie Stars and this one's Crown of Thorns. The biggest one of all is Drunkard's Path."
I laughed in recognition. "You named them after patchwork patterns?"
She grinned at me over her shoulder, through a billow of fire-bright hair. "Pretty neat, huh? They didn't mind - they thought it was clever."
"Will they talk to us?" Moya asked, trying to conceal her eagerness. This would be a real coup for her, to resolve the problem on our first day here - and Moya Kent was a very ambitious woman.
Boodie stood up slowly, wiping her hands on her dungarees. She had an anxious, introspective look - the look of a girl listening to inner voices or haunted by the whispering demons of madness? "They say they won't talk to you."
"Can they hear us?" I wondered. "Without ears?"
"Yes, they hear you," she turned her back on the sea-quilts and, as if it was a signal, the three creatures undulated slowly away from the shore.
"Where are they going?" Mooney demanded.
"Out into the deep waters to think - they do that quite a. lot. For such nice guys, they sure can be awkward," Boodie shrugged. "Want to come back to the house for a drink or something? We've got coffee."
"Guys?" Moya wrinkled her nose. "I thought that squilts were asexual?"
The girl frowned, sticking her hands deep into her pockets. "I never thought of those three as anything other than male, boy-scouts who rescued me when I was in trouble. I've met a couple of females since then - of course, they don't look any different on the outside, but they do sound like girls."

The farmhouse had the expected huge and cool kitchen, with a flagstone floor and green-enamelled range. Much to my companions' distaste, I sampled a glass of sheep's-milk and declared it to my liking. They settled for coffee and Boodie went to find her father, leaving us alone.
"First impressions?" Moya combed her blonde hair back from her forehead. "An adolescent girl on an isolated farm, lonely and desperate for attention. I have to admire her imagination, imbuing such ugly creatures with such saintly intelligence.
Mooney didn't say anything, watching me, watching Dr Kent and very probably laying odds on which of us would deck the other first.
"You don't believe that the sea-quilts talk to her, do you?" I scarcely needed to ask.
"I believe that she believes it. I don't," she switched her professional scrutiny onto me. "You?"
"Dr Kent, I'm having a great day here!" I wanted to shout at her, shake her until her molars rattled, somehow communicate to her some of the excitement that boiled in my veins. "You're looking at a marine-biologist in shock! I've just encountered a new species - one of the most exciting examples of invertebrate life I've ever seen. If ever there were intelligent slugs, these could be the ones. That's my first impression, my gut reaction, but I need to study them some more before I make up my mind."
"Fine," Moya put her mug down. "Then you can stay down here, Dr Aaron-Jones, and watch your precious slugs. Perhaps you should pitch a tent down on the shore to be close to them - I'll have some equipment sent out from Nouveau Paris."
"That's a little extreme, isn't it?" Mooney demanded. "I'm sure that Zuzana could stay here in the farmhouse..."
"We shouldn't impose on the hospitality of these good people any further," she stood up. "Let's get back to town."
Mooney didn't follow her out, waiting for my reaction. I tried to hide my anger. "Can she order me about like that?"
"I'm afraid she can Dr Kent is right up there in the chain of command, second only to the Major," he shrugged. "I'll be back in an hour or so with the gear."

Seb Nantucket accepted the news with an identical shrug. "We could put you up at the house, but if you want to camp on the beach, that's okay. You won't need a tent - there's no rain forecast on the radar for two days. This time of year you can sleep out under the stars with just a blanket. Trina and me used to do that - watch the sun fall into the sea, build a fire, look into it and dream, then watch for shooting stars until we fell asleep. It was kind of romantic."
"I'll be on my own."
"You'll be safe, Dr Jones, couldn't be safer in a fortress. There's no-one but us for miles and no animals but the sheep and my dogs."
"And the sea-quilts."
He grinned at me. "Perhaps they'll come and sing you to sleep."
"Do you think they're intelligent?"
"Boodie says they are," that was good enough for him. "Do you know what I really think about the squilts?"
"Please tell me."
"We've shared Calvados with them for thirty years - we don't trouble them, they don't trouble us. I don't see why that state of affairs shouldn't continue, do you?"

I took a late lunch down to the cove - bread, ewes'-milk cheese and an apple - and ate it on the hoof, meandering down the shoreline to the south. Around the central crescent of sand was a tidal labyrinth of rock-pools filled with an abundance of marine life. Most of the plants and animals I was familiar with, Earth species seeded when the colonists arrived, some deliberately to form a food chain for the imported fish stocks, a few by mistake. There was a sprinkling of native Vadosian life; tiny colonies of algae like dainty lace fans, chrome-yellow and blue, beds of vast purple anemones, like chrysanthemums with curled petals, their tentacles bristling with giant nematocysts - fat stinging cells I could see with the naked eye - which looked toxic enough to lay low a human, and a fierce brown wedge-shelled crab with ten legs. Knowing how easily I could lose myself in a leisurely study of the pools, I took off my sandals and stuffed them in my pockets, then rolled my trousers up to the knee and headed for the surf. The grey sand was warm and squidgy between my toes. I laughed aloud at the silly joy of it, at Zuzi Jones, mission specialist, alone and in her element, playing like a big kid on an alien beach. When I trod on something that definitely wasn't sand, something that moved like muscle contracting under my foot, my heart nearly stopped.
The sea-quilt lifted itself out of the soft sand, lumping its mass into a shape rather like a child crawling around under a rug, and scurried for the sea. Scurried was the only word I could use to describe its motion - it seemed as if myriads of tiny feet around its edge were propelling it over the sand.
"Sorry!" I called after it. "Didn't mean to tread on you - didn't know you were there."
The squilt stopped. Such instant response to an external stimulus, it gladdened my biologist's heart! How did it do that without brain, ears or eyes? Whatever the experts said about this beast, I had the damndest feeling it was looking at me.
"Uh, hello," I waved and smiled like some dumb idiot; that's what it says in the bible of first contact - thou shalt smile and wave a lot, and try not to get eaten. "Have we met before?"
The squilt ruffled its edges in what I chose to interpret as an amiable fashion, then made a salvo of rude farting noises by pressing itself against the sand. I couldn't help giggling and, as if in response, it produced another salvo. It sat there and again I had the feeling it was watching me, waiting for me to do something, so I knelt down in front of it and tried to replicate the sounds with the flat of my hand. My efforts were pathetic. As if I'd failed to give the correct reply to its password, it curled its edges underneath it and scuttled off into the sea.
"Shit!" I slapped the wet sand, splashing water over my shirt. So close to communication, so very close...
I stood up and followed the squilt, wading out into the shallows. It was some way from shore now, swimming lazily, rippling along just under the surface. The tide was on the turn, beginning to go out and Yemitzov was sinking towards its pale sunset. I turned to leave the water and froze.
The land was slipping down to the sea, as all the squilts that had been basking unseen, half-submerged in the grey sand, undulated back into their element, twenty, maybe thirty of them. All of them rippled towards me, as if I was a magnet that drew them on, as if they would drag me down and crawl over me. There was no sense of danger, no malice, and at the last moment, they swirled aside. I didn't dare to move as they flowed past me in a living river, paralysed not by fear but by awe.
I'm not sure how long it lasted, that uncanny, silent migration, only minutes probably, but it felt like a lifetime, The final pair of squilts scuttled close to each other, as if they'd been sewn together along one of their long edges, and played chicken with me. It wasn't a fair game - I had nowhere to run. These two jokers skimmed through the surf until their leading edges met my shins, then they split and oozed languidly past me, their touch gentle against my skin. Gentle and little else, this fleeting contact with the unknown. I turned back to watch the... what word would you use for a group of sea-quilts? - an ottoman? a dormitory? a summer exhibition? - swim out into the deep water.
"You are intelligent, aren't you?" I shouted after them. "I'll prove it, you bastards, see if I don't!"

On my way back to the farmhouse I found Mooney setting up camp on the last piece of pasture nearest the shore.
"Hey, just-Dr-Jones, what have you been doing?" he sat back on his heels, squinting up at me. "Mud-wrestling?"
"Studying squilts, as per Dr Kent's orders," I told him about my close encounter, just the bald facts, none of the feelings.
Mooney listened, stacking gear under a plastic sheet; a tent, a small cooking stove, pots and pans, and military-issue sleeping-bags, two of those, I noticed. My hand-luggage was piled next to a heap of blankets and a rucksack. He'd also built a ring of stones to take a fire and collected a store of driftwood, just like a good scout. "Weren't you afraid, when that wall of alien flesh rolled towards you?"
"They don't project much threat, sea-quilts. No teeth."
"Ever the hard-headed scientist, eh?" he finished securing the sheet with stones. "As promised, the camping gear. Seb reckoned we wouldn't need the tent tonight."
"We?"
"Did you really think I'd leave you out here alone?" he unleashed the impish grin. "Be no different if it had been Luke or Jean-Marc - hell, I wouldn't even do it to Moya Kent!"
"Mooney, I don't need a minder."
"You don't get a choice Mission specialists aren't dumped in the wilderness and left to fend for themselves - that's orders," he tossed me a blanket. "Don't you like companionship, or is it just me?"
I gave him a smile, no strings attached. "Truthfully, I'd be glad of the company."
"Good," he looked over my shoulder and whistled. "Did you ever see a sky like that?"
Yemitzov was sinking into the sea through a froth of cloud, like a bright penny falling through sherbet, pale pink and lemon yellow. As its disc touched the sea the water turned to molten gold and I heard distant voices, slow and eerie, as deep and unfathomable as whale song, the voices of the true owners of this world singing their star down into darkness.
Mooney clutched my arm. "Can you hear that?"
"Of course," there was enough light left in the sky for me to pick my way down to the water's edge and not fall over any rocks on the way. Mooney followed.
They were about half a mile out, black shapes in the sea like burnt confetti on a golden mirror, a group of sea-quilts in a precise arrowhead formation.
"Dear God!" Mooney squeezed my shoulder. "What are they doing?"
"Same as we are, watching the sunset," the song was faint yet I felt it through the soles of my feet. It lifted the hair across my scalp. I couldn't find a word for the emotion it contained, not sadness, not joy. Perhaps we didn't have a name for something so inhuman.
"Can you hear them?" Boodie asked. She was standing behind us and must have crept like a ghost over the beach; even Mooney jumped at the sound of her voice. "Kind of like a hymn or something, isn't it?"
"Do they do this often?" Mooney asked.
The song was ebbing away, growing softer and deeper as the sea turned to bronze. It ceased at the moment Yemitzov dipped below the horizon.
"Only on clear days when the sea's calm, or sometimes when one of the moons is full. Most people can't hear them - I'm glad they let you," Boodie said. "I came to call you up to the house. Supper's ready."

The meal was surprising in that it had nothing to do with sheep. Seb produced roast chicken, baked potato and a dish of sweetcorn laced with native spices, followed by an excellent apple tart baked by Boodie herself. We drank rather too much cider and our hosts chatted away freely, entertaining us with tales of their life here; of the lamb that tumbled into the well and had to be rescued by Boodie, aged six, lowered down on a rope, of the fearsome high-tide of 'fifty-one, when the waters came up as far as the doorstep, and of the many reports over the years concerning the strange behaviour of squilts.
"People have always said odd things about the beasts," Seb admitted. "Fishermen mostly, and other lonely souls who live down by the coast, telling stories of livestock saved from drowning and brought ashore, of boats guided home through storm or fog, and of lost valuables recovered as if by magic, lockets and wedding rings."
"Did nobody ever believe them?"
Seb shook his head. "Called them mad."
"Just as she thinks I'm mad, the other doctor who came here today," Boodie added.
"Dr Kent likes to find madness wherever she can - it keeps her in a job!" Mooney said, making the girl giggle. "Don't forget that she's not the only member of this team. Most of us are much more reasonable."
"You believe Boodie, don't you, Dr Jones?" Seb asked.
"Yes, I do. Once you've seen a sea-quilt, it's hard not to."
"What will happen once Earth admits they're smart?" Boodie frowned. "They say at school that we'll all have to leave Calvados."
"Once the sea-quilts are granted the status and rights of intelligent life-forms within Terran law, a process which can take quite some time, negotiations will be started to determine the fate of the planet," Mooney navigated his way through all that as if he were sober. "Could take years. Ultimately, it all comes down to whether the sea-quilts are prepared to accept your colony's presence on their world."
"What do they want?" I wondered. "Have they talked to you about that?"
Boodie propped her chin on her hands, considering my question. "It isn't like that, talking to them. Sometimes they use words I haven't taught them yet and it seems like they understand, but they don't. Other times they put pictures in my head, pictures and feelings. Mostly I know what they mean, but sometimes they're just so weird... They aren't like us, they don't think like us - sometimes I don't think they can. You asked me what they want, Dr Jones, and I don't really know. They don't want - they are, and that just seems to be enough for them."
I thought about those words later, as we sat by our driftwood fire. Twelve years old and as wise as anything in this universe - had Boodie been like that before or had the sea-quilts changed her?
"You tired enough to sleep yet?" Mooney asked.
"Nope. I'm too full of good food and cider," I wrapped my blanket tighter around my shoulders to keep out the breeze. "I just want to listen to the sea and look at the stars."
"Great sky," he agreed. "Not a single constellation I recognise, of course, but they do have a nice take on the Milky Way. Five moons is a neat touch, don't you think?"
"Five is good - six would be sheer extravagance!" I liked to make him laugh. "I'm not sure a mission like this should be such fun."
"What did you expect? If you wanted serious and solemn, I'm sorry - I don't do them very well."
"What exactly do you do?" I'd been itching to ask.
"Me?" he shrugged. "I'm a specialist in not being specialised. I do everything that you experts can't be bothered with - I drive things, fly things, fetch and carry things, supply three square meals a day, hot baths, private rooms, soft beds..."
"Soft beds? I want a refund!" I threw a pinch of sand across the fire at him. It fell into the flames, tinting them purple and crackling like popcorn. "No, tell me really, what do you do?"
"I'm a troubleshooter. I fix things for Earth."
"Very mysterious! You sound just like James Bond!"
"Would that be the man who wrote books about birds or the fictional spy?"
"The ornithologist, obviously!"
He grinned. "Can't tell you much about birds, except how to catch 'em and roast 'em! That reminds me - how about that perfect partner to any campfire, toasted marshmallows?"
"You haven't got marshmallows!" I laughed, but he had, this man who could do anything and who knew more than most scholars I'd met. So we toasted them, singeing our fingers and giggling as melting sugar trickled down our chins. By the time we were through Mooney was no longer safely on the other side of the fire.
"Now, just-Dr-Jones, it's your turn to share with me," he said, leaning close to my shoulder to pass over our single handkerchief. "How does anyone get to be an expert in the habits of sea-slugs?"
I scrubbed my face clean and returned the cloth so he could do the same. "My grandfather and both of my parents were marine-biologists, so I sort of slid into this career by default. It seemed like a good life when I was a child, always playing around on beaches. And they pay me for it yet - heaven!"
"Never understood the attraction of beasts without backbones myself. Give me something with fur, teeth and claws, like a wolf or a tiger - I can appreciate the savage beauty of nature in creatures like that," thoughts of such wildness put a predator's glitter in his own eyes and I shivered to see it there. "Sea-quilts though, they're pretty impressive animals. You like them, don't you?"
"Guilty, as charged," I admitted. "If we can't prove they re sentient, it'll break my heart."
"We don't have to prove anything. If squilts are sentient and they want us to know it, they'll give us all the proof we need."
I shook my head. "We can't assume that, Mooney. We can't assume anything about sea-quilts - all our assumptions will be based on human logic and therefore meaningless when applied to them."
He shrugged. "Then our problem is no different to theirs, Dr Jones. All their assumptions about us are based on sea-quilt logic and therefore probably false."
"Yet Boodie has established a dialogue with them, a mutual understanding..."
"So she claims."
"Do you doubt her?" I looked into his face.
Mooney sighed. "I wish I could. If the girl is wrong and the squilts are just stupid lumps of meat, then all our problems go away - and part of me wants that very much."
"And the other part?"
"That wants to know the truth. Anyhow, both parts are too tired to think clearly now. I'm for some sleep - how about you?"
"In a little while," I watched the stars for a time while Mooney curled himself into a nest of blankets. Only when I was certain he was asleep did I make up my own bed.

It was almost light when I woke, beneath a sky of mother-of-pearl kissed with salmon pink. I was buried under a heap of blanket and sleeping bag, my joints stiff and my extremities a touch chilly, but the rest of me was warm enough where it came into contact with another human body Mooney's arm was draped over me and I felt his breath on the back of my neck.
"Hey!" I jabbed an elbow backwards and earned a very satisfying grunt. "What in hell do you think you're doing?"
"Sorry," he edged away from me, but only a little. "Don't hit me again, huh? You woke me up in the middle of the night, muttering and moaning as if you were having a nightmare or something. I couldn't wake you and you felt like ice, so I pooled all the bedding and snuggled up to you..."
"Just to keep me warm, eh?" I wormed my way around to face him, nose to nose-stud. His eyes were as sap-green as a cat's, flecked with gold.
"You scared me, just-Dr-Jones," that was true - I saw the memory of it under his smile. "Didn't want you dying on me. That kind of thing looks so bad on a resume."
"You'd better call me Zuzi. It's so rude to insist on formality once you've slept with a man, don't you think?"
"Don't get so prickly, woman! I didn't touch you! I'm a civilised man not an animal - I can cook and clean... hell, I'm even house-trained! And I notice that we're both seasoned campers, since neither of us was dumb enough to shed any clothes - in fact, I think you're wearing more than you were last night."
"Yep - extra jumper," This time I did let out the smile. "So, Mooney, have you got a first name?"
"No," he propped himself up on one elbow, squinting out across the beach. All of the levity drained from his face and I felt the sudden tension in his body as he snapped into readiness to fight. "Zuzi, you'd better take a look at this. No sudden moves - sit up with me, very slowly."
I'd been aware of a sound coming up from the shore, a crunching, tearing, cropping sound. I'd assumed it was the sheep grazing along the tide-line, just as they had been yesterday. What I saw was a group of sea-quilts, six or seven of them, munching their way through a breakfast of seaweed.
"No teeth, huh?" Mooney murmured, his lips beside my ear.
"The records say nothing in the way of a gut at all - no mouths, stomachs or anything," I couldn't see how the trick was managed, it all happened on the squilts' undersides, but they were cutting eight-inch swathes through the plant-life, leaving only bare rock. "Nobody could ever figure out how they ate - most of the experts went for the sifting plankton out of sea-water theory."
"Zuzi... " Mooney squeezed my shoulder, drawing my gaze back from the beach.
A piece of grass and pebbles at our feet lifted itself up and transformed into a large sea-quilt. There had been no indication of its presence before it appeared right in front of us. A tiny voice of panic inside my head whispered that we might be surrounded by the creatures, while another part of my brain was noticing the line of milky-blue spots along its margin and guessing that they might be eyes.
"I can't see any more of them," Mooney said, very quietly. "Then again, we didn't see that one before it let us."
"What should we do?" He hadn't helped my panic - it was getting louder. "Perhaps we should talk to it?"
"Can't hurt."
"Hello... " I tried to sound calm. That's it, Zuzi-love, pretend you're in control. Fear is a thousand miles away and you aren't within grabbing distance of a thing that can grow teeth hard enough to pulverise kelp at will. "I mean, good morning. Isn't it a lovely day?"
The sea-quilt rippled its edges encouragingly.
"Did we meet before?" I asked. "Yesterday, here in the cove - were you one of the three Boodie talked to?"
The rippling stopped. If I had to guess what the beastie was doing I'd have said it was staring at us and trying to make a decision. It didn't take too long to make up its non-mind. A multi-coloured pattern formed in the centre of the side facing us, a square of purples and greens. I placed the name by remembering those colours. "Drunkard's Path."
Zuzana Jones
It was as if the squilt had spoken my name - I heard it inside my head, a male voice, deep, warm and full of amusement, yet it was also a swirl of colours, gold, emerald and violet, and it tasted of clover honey, sweet white wine and nutmeg.
Mooney clutched at my shoulder so hard I thought my collar-bone would pop. "Fuck!"
Is that an instruction? asked Drunkard's Path.
"No..!" we both said that together.
An expletive. An involuntary exclamation indicating great surprise. Boodie.. here it used the sound of the girl's name wrapped up in an abstract impression of flame-red hair, an image of bright blue eyes, a snatch of her laughter and the smell of lavender ...is not aware that we know the F-word, just as her parent is not aware that she knows it. Humans, huh? Go figure.
"Is it talking to us?" Mooney demanded. "Or am I just going insane?"
We are not qualified to determine the state of plus-or-minus sanity in humans, Drunkard's Path admitted. As for talking to you, that was our intention. Our attempt to do so has been successful, yes?
"Yes, of course."
There is no 'of course', Zuzana Jones. Some humans will not hear us whatever we do. The technique of massaging the back of the cranium with a rock to attract their attention has been recommended to us, but we doubt that it would be effective without causing blunt trauma, so we are loath to try it.
"Don't - you might kill someone!" I warned, wondering if the squilt had any concept of humour. If not, who the hell had taught it to talk like that? Surely not Boodie?
Humans die often enough without our help. We do not kill and we will not walk the waters to that point on the horizon until all other ways are blocked by high land.
"You keep saying 'we'," Mooney pointed out. "Which of you are we talking with?"
All of us, said Drunkard's Path.
Every sea-quilt on the shore stopped eating, lifted up its top right-hand corner and waved at us. The gesture was so surreal and cartoon-like that both of us laughed.
The sun is rising, the calico pattern vanished from Drunkard's Path's back. We shall return to the sea and swim. Join us.
Without waiting for a reply it undulated towards the water and the rest of the group followed suit.
"Come on! " Mooney hauled his sweater up over his ears with one hand and unbuckled his belt with the other.
"I didn't pack a swimming costume," that was a lie. I had, but it was in the rest of my luggage.
"Then get your underwear wet, girl!" he wrestled his socks off. "Hell, go in naked if you want to - I don't care. All I know is we won't get a second invitation like this in our lifetimes!"
Mooney stripped down to his pants and so did I. His were green tartan boxer-shorts, mine sensible black cotton briefs faded to grey. We limped over the rocks and he reached the sea first, swearing soundly as he waded out into the shallows.
"Is it cold?" I called after him.
"On a scale of one to ten, with Antarctica in a blizzard at ten, it's around six... " he reached that point of no return, when the water creeps past the top of your thighs and an unfriendly wave takes it up to your waist, when the coldness makes you gasp for breath and you have to duck your shoulders under and swim. "Shit! Make that nearer eight!"
I grimaced as I paddled after, but it wasn't that bad, not when you were in. Mooney trod water and waited for me to catch up. "Are you okay? Hey, that's not fair - you aren't even shivering!"
"That's the female advantage - our layer of subcutaneous fat."
He grinned lazily. "And may I say that yours is arranged in a very attractive fashion?"
"No, you may not - if you want to keep your front teeth, that is!"
The sea-quilts were waiting for us a little further out in the deeper water of the cove, bobbing silently on the swell. I've swum with dolphins before, which is tremendous fun, and even once with a pod of whales, which was awesome, but swimming with sea-quilts is in a league of its own. The first shock was how warm they were compared with the chill of the sea, and the second surprise was the satiny smoothness of their thick grey-brown hide. Drunkard's Path was the first to touch me, scooping me out of the water and rolling me across a back that was suddenly a mosaic of its green and purple namesake squares. I was caught by Prairie Stars, patterned in orange, yellow and brown, who flipped me out of the water and up into the air. As I fell back into the water, Boodie's third friend, Crown of Thorns, dressed in sombre indigo and crimson against cream, wrapped itself around me and gently pushed me back to the surface. Mooney let out a whoop of delight as they repeated the neatly-choreographed manoeuvre with him.
I'm not sure how long we played with the sea-quilts - I quite lost track of time. It was like riding a living roller-coaster that would suddenly turn into a slide and splash you into the water, or just as abruptly hurl you ten or fifteen feet into the air, only to catch you and bounce you around on a muscular trampoline. Between the intense bursts of boisterous action there were gentler games, when the sea-quilts danced about us in lazy spirals, trailing their rippling margins across our skin, sometimes tickling us until we giggled, sometimes just touching our hair and minimal clothing in amiable curiosity. They were very careful not to hurt us; each time I coughed on a mouthful of sea-water through laughing too much I was lifted above the surface until I'd regained my breath, and I noticed that Mooney was treated as gently. At last the pace of the game slowed and I found myself sitting on Drunkard's Path's gaudy back.
Enough? The squilt's deep voice rang inside my head, tasting of cream and raspberries, scented with cloves.
"Enough," I agreed. "And thank you - that was fun."
It carried me back to the shore, bearing me all the way through the shallows until I could step off onto dry land. I felt a little like Venus on the half-shell. Crown of Thorns followed with Mooney riding on its back. When they'd returned us to our own element, they simply swam away.
"You will come back and talk to us again, won't you?" I called after them, suddenly afraid that this unexpected gift might be snatched away.
Later, came back the silent reply.
I turned to Mooney, who was standing there in dripping boxer-shorts, hair plastered flat to his scalp, grinning like an idiot. "I don't suppose you brought any towels along?"
But he had, of course. We stumbled back to our camp and he dug them out of our gear, huge, fluffy white ones, a pair each. "Did I imagine any of that, Zuzi? Did we really just play tag with a tribe of telepathic aliens?"
"Yes we did!" I was still dizzy from being thrown in the air like a baby, still dazed by the fact we'd made contact. "And they talked to us, and they're smart! Oh yes, Mooney, it was real."
"Wasn't it?" his grin was still in place, as wide as ever. "How do you feel?"
"Wonderful! And you?"
"Kind of weird, like I was drunk or something," he turned his head, wrinkling his nose. "That's odd. Wait a minute, Zuzi, before you dry yourself."
"Wait for what?" I asked, but he'd already turned me around and was sniffing at the nape of my neck. "What in hell are you doing, you pervert?"
"There's something on your skin, girl," he peeled my towel away. "You wearing perfume?"
"No perfume, just me. Hey, that tickles!"
He was sniffing me again, working his way across my shoulders, then down to the small of my back. The feel of his breath on my skin made my toes curl. "Sweet smelling, strongest along the length of your spine. Turn around - I want to find out where it's localised on your front..."
"In your dreams, Mooney!"
"This is serious, Dr Jones!" he rubbed a fingertip under the hair at the base of my skull and held it out to me. "Am I imagining that weird scent?"
I sniffed cautiously. "Yes, there is something there. Very faint, sweet and not unpleasant, a little like jasmine with a touch of musk and a hint of spice, something exotic like cardamom or fenugreek."
"Good nose," he observed, moving to face me. "See if you can map out where it is on me."
I felt stupid snuffling around him like a bitch on heat and prayed that no-one was watching us from the farmhouse, but he was right, damn him! "It's only on your back, Mooney, and nowhere else. A distinct line of it, straight as a die along your spine." "What do you think it is?"
"Look at me," he touched my cheek, lifting my chin. "Your pupils are dilated, too wide for this light. Mine?"
"I can't remember the last time a man asked me to gaze into his eyes," they were deep, dark pools. "I'd say those were dilated."
"The bastards drugged us, Zuzi!"
I really felt that idea ought to worry me, yet any negative emotion seemed beyond my grasp, slipping through my fingers. "Not necessarily. It's an oily substance - has to be, or it would have washed off in seawater. Perhaps it's some kind of scent-marking."
"And just how does that evolve in a species that doesn't possess a nose?"
"They see without eyes, hear without ears and do one hell of a good impression of intelligence and telepathy without a brain - smelling without a nose seems a snip besides that," I tried for a reasonable working theory. "Perhaps they didn't mean to get it on us and it's just a natural secretion, like sweat or saliva..."
"Sea-quilt sweat?" Mooney grimaced. "Yeugh, gross! You biologists can be so disgusting at times!"
I wound myself back into my towel and began to scrub myself dry. "I don't feel drugged. Happy, yes, and excited, yes, but amazingly calm for someone who's just made contact with an alien race. Just wait until we tell this to the rest of the team!"
Mooney froze. "Uh, Zuzi, we can't tell them."
"Why not? Mooney, we've made a real breakthrough here.."
"I know that - but Major Jon and the rest of those clever folks, what do we tell them? That the squilts spoke inside our heads, with words that were colours and flavours and smells, then invited us into the sea for a game? Think about it for a moment - what proof do we have that anything happened to us?"
"No more proof than Boodie ever had!" I groaned. "You're absolutely right - we talk about this and Moya Kent will have us doing psych-tests for the next three days solid!"
"One wrong answer and we strike out - she'll label us insane and write us a ticket home," he smiled, sadly. "And we won't get to play with our friends again."
That was a threat too horrible to consider. I chewed on my lower lip. "Then we have to keep silence on this. Are you sure we dare?"
"I don't think that Drunkard's Path is going to tell on us, do you?"
"I have absolutely no idea what that unpredictable beastie is going to do next, which should scare me," I found some fresh clothes in my hand-luggage. "Why don't they scare us, Mooney? They're big, they can sprout teeth and probably talons as well, and they can reach inside our skulls and do weird things to our brains... we ought to be terrified of them."
He frowned. "But we aren't, because they seem slow and stupid, because they have an aura of being harmless, just like a big, dumb dog. When you look at them all you see is how absurd they are, and not how dangerous."
"Perhaps they won't let us be afraid of them."
"Emotion control?" he shook his head. "No. We'd be aware of that, I'm sure."
We'd almost finished dressing when the dogs came bounding down across the pasture, barking and wagging their tails. Boodie followed them, whistling commands that were largely ignored, as the dogs skipped around us, licking our hands.
"You've been swimming," the girl grinned at us knowingly. "With them?"
"With the sea-quilts, yes," Mooney agreed.
"Then they've talked to you?" her smile grew so broad that she positively glowed with delight. "You believe me now, don't you?"
"We believe," I answered for Mooney and he didn't argue. "How did you guess what had happened to us?"
"Didn't guess - I read the clues," she said, proudly. "The dogs are slobbering all over you - they like the taste of that stuff the squilts leave on your skin. And Path told me their new policy was talk then swim. The other way round is just too scary - it drives people insane."
"You've experienced that sweet-smelling chemical?" Mooney asked. "What is it?"
"Makes you feel a bit strange for a while, doesn't it? A bit spaced-out or tipsy, yes? Crown told me it was a mark, like the dye-blots we put on the sheep."
I wasn't sure I liked the notion of being branded. "What would they mark us for?"
"Protection," her blue eyes were suddenly serious. "In case you meet another group of squilts who don't know you. Dad didn't tell you all of the stories last night - he left out the nasty ones. Some fisher-folk say that sometimes, far out to sea, during thunderstorms, squilts go mad. They swarm over boats, drag people into the ocean and leave them there to drown. A few crazies will even tell you that squilts eat humans Dad reckons that kind of stuff is nonsense - kid's tales, but who knows?"
"Have you ever been afraid of the squilts?"
The question surprised her. "What for? They wouldn't hurt me. Are you going up to the farmhouse now? Dad and I have already had breakfast, but there's eggs and cold meats if you want to make something for yourselves."
"Where are you headed?" Mooney inquired.
"To walk the dogs down along the bay. I'll be gone a couple of hours - Dad likes me to check for stray lambs along by the cliffs," she whistled the sheepdogs to heel, leaving us with a cheery wave.
"Want breakfast?" Mooney wondered.
I grinned at him and took him by the arm. "Well, you did say you could cook..?"
He could too, whisking up a ham and mushroom omelette that wouldn't have disgraced a five-star restaurant. By the time we'd demolished that and several rounds of toast, washed down with cloudy apple-juice and strong coffee, the effects of the scent-marker had worn off.
"So what'll we do today?" Mooney asked.
"I'm meant to be studying squilts."
"Seems to me it's the other way round. We haven't initiated any of these encounters, have we? It's always been them calling the shots."
I couldn't disagree. "So what shall we do? Hang around on the beach and pretend we're busy..?"
The noise reached me then, the erratic pot-bubbling sounds of two chicken-gas engines, the squeaking of worn brakes and the crunching of tyres on the rocky yard at the front of the farmhouse. Doors banged and voices shouted - I picked out Seb Nantucket's call of greeting.
"Sounds like the whole damn circus just came to town," Mooney sighed. "Come on, Zuzi-girl, let's get out there and stand to attention."