Pursuit

Part 2 - Trappist - 1

It had been almost a week since the aliens arrived. We waited for the first round of communication with them. The area was sealed and a quarantine room was built around the asteroid... I mean the alien ship. After two days of their arrival, one of the aliens 'woke up' and stepped out of their ship. He (no idea about the gender though) seemed to be doing fine in the earth's atmosphere.

He was tall, over six feet, closer to seven actually. The surprising thing was the form, he looked somewhat like a human. Two legs on which he stood and two arms. The arms ended in single leaf-like shapes with one thumb-like structure beside each leaf. We could see the veins in the leaf-like palms as light diffused through them. Blood vessels? He didn't have toes, just feet that were much smaller in size than a human's. Even the feet had leaf-like structures. His body was covered with dark brown hair that looked rather sharp, like a porcupine's, but smaller. I should say, he looked more like a wild animal than an alien from another planet. His head was not much different from a human's either. The face was also covered with those sharp hair, except near the two sides of the forehead. There were four parallel horizontal black lines on either side of his forehead. Eyes maybe? There was no nose but another set of parallel lines, this time three of them, smaller and vertical, above the chin. Looked like a mouth to me. The top of the head had the same small and sharp hair, as a man with short hair. He would mostly walk on two limbs, but sometimes he would walk on all four.

We visited him almost every day since he woke up. Some scientists tried to speak in English which was obviously useless. Some tried to show models of his ship and hand gestures to try to communicate. Again useless. I didn't try doing any such drama. I would just go and look at him curiously like he did every time someone would visit him. But one day something surprising happened.

There were five people visiting him at that time. Vikranth and I from ISRO, and Neil, Joseph, and Janine from NASA. We had visited the alien over 15 times by then. We discussed ways to communicate in front of him.

"I don't think they communicate by sound, what are other possibilities?", Janine made a point.

"Makes sense, we never heard any sound from him", Vikranth agreed.

"What about light?", I asked, "Can he see li-"

"Aaa-raa-v"

He spoke! The alien spoke!! We turned to him and saw him pointing his leaf-like palm at me. We remained silent. Then he pointed to Janine.

"Ja-neeen"

His voice was surprisingly like a human's, just a slightly higher pitch.

"Nee-eeel, Joo-sae-ff, Vee-karaa-nth", he said pointing at Neil, Joseph and Vikranth. Every time he spoke, the three vertical lines above his chin would expand and contract at different rates. I was right, it was in fact his mouth. He produced different tones by passing air through those gaps and changing their size. It's like how you can blow through the slit in a paper to make a whistling noise and varying the size of the slit produces different frequencies.

After that day the alien started talking to almost every scientist. He could only remember nouns but his memory was excellent. Later, NASA sent linguistic experts to teach him other words. He learned pronouns and verbs although the latter was slightly difficult. He was an excellent learner, grasping anything almost in the first attempt. Eventually, he could speak basic sentences and start communicating with the scientists in English. He told us his name was something like 'Elzakulstakisat' which we could never pronounce properly. We just called him El and he seemed to be fine with it. Now let's get to what he told us. The obvious first question by the scientists was where he was from. Although it took some time and explanation to point out the location of his home, he could eventually explain it pretty well.