My opposing captain was at the plate. Two full ranks my junior, Alex really was a captain, as well as our pilot for the landing two years before, company meteorologist, and a d.a.m.n fine cajun cook.

"Seven innings?" she shouted, swinging the bat with pleasure. She didn't usually lead off the order, but rank hath its privileges.

I looked at the angle of the reddish sun. Plenty of afternoon left. We were taking off an extra half-day in honor of our new bat, and to celebrate our latest pipeline milestone, which we'd reached ahead of schedule. Probably a longer game would tire everyone out for a good night's sleep. Morale needed a boost, I figured.

"Let's go for nine," I called.

Alex gave me a questioning look.

I nodded. "That's right. Cancel the late shift. It's a beer night."

"You got it, Colonel." She stepped into the batter's box. "Doctor?"

Dr. Chirac completed a sweep with her tablet, with which she'd been snapping pictures of our alien audience, and nodded curtly. "Play ball."

I took a deep breath, slapping our best baseball into the worn pocket of my glove. The ritual begun, I cracked my neck on both sides with a dip of each shoulder, squinted at Yoshi on first and McGill at third, tugged aside my filter mask and spat, then licked my lips once from right to left.

Wound up.

And threw. A bit low and to the left.

"Ball one!" Dr. Chirac shouted in her familiar way, loud enough to carry to the alien observers. The xenos weren't quite sure of the Taus' hearing range yet, but Chirac called the game at high volume, introducing minimal variation in baseball's signs and signifiers. The more consistent she was, the easier it would be for the Tau to learn the patterns of the game. She stepped back, folding her arms to gaze at the audience as she did between each pitch.

Hunter returned the ball to me. I cracked my neck again, checked the bases, and licked my lips. He gave me two fingers down, to which I nodded. Alex couldn't stand up to my fastball.

I wound up, pitched it in hard. Swing and a crack, straight up or just about. I ran a few steps forward, but Hunter sprang up and waved me off, taking the catch.

The humans in the field raised a ragged cheer, echoed by the high-pitched hooting of the Taus.

"How'd she feel?" I yelled to Alex as she trudged back from halfway to first base.

She laughed. "What, are baseball bats feminine now?"

"That one is."

Alex picked it up from where it had flown from her grasp and ran her fingers down its length. "Maybe you're right. She's pretty sweet."

"Don't ask, don't tell, Captain." I smiled, mentally moving myself to the top of my team's order, and returned to the mound.

The game went long, and our shadows lengthened, then doubled as Antipodes rose, full as it was every weekend. Like most small-town baseball games, ours was a dramatic affair, the score padded by overthrows, dropped catches, and stolen bases. By the bottom of the ninth, the teams were tied at twelve runs apiece.

"Come on guys, extra innings," Alex shouted as her team took the field.

"No way. Let's wrap this up," I exhorted my own troops.

The Taus seemed to have caught the growing tension. They'd been agitated since the end of the seventh. I wondered if they'd noticed we were playing a couple of more innings than usual.

No one knew how smart the Taus were. They were definitely tool-users well into the agricultural revolution, planting their ferny staple plants with stick hoes and fending off large predators collectively, using spears and slings and a lot of hooting. According to some of our Earthbound theorists, their social rituals were about as advanced as humans at the beginning of language development, although Dr. Chirac always warned me about making comparisons. Their repertoire of vocal noises sounded awfully sophisticated to me, and fully half of it was too high for human hearing.

My job had little to do with contact, of course. Our mission priority was getting the pipeline up, never mind the local environment and culture, intelligent or not. With a global population of about a hundred thousand Taus, we weren't exactly crowding them. And they had no use for the oil we were stealing, anyway. Maybe twenty thousand years from now they'd miss it. But I figured we were doing them a favor. We'd leave them enough accessible oil for a short run at internal combustion, but not enough to f.u.c.k their planet as thoroughly as we had ours.

In the meantime, Earth's billions needed oil for plastics, our ancestors having apparently forgotten that petroleum is useful for things other than burning. And of course the U.S. needed another few decades of cheap gas and big cars to complete our conversion.

Hunter went in and hit a single, and got a big cheer from the Taus. I wondered for a moment if our alien audience knew the score was tied.

"The natives are restless," a voice behind me observed.

"I didn't know you were watching, Ashley. Thought you didn't approve."

Ashley Newkirk shrugged. "A base imitation of the mother game, without subtlety or grace."

"Aye, but at least it doesnae take five days." Iain Claymore was another abstainer from baseball, and physical activity in general, but was happy to take any side against Ashley. The two Brits were on the xeno team, like all of the non-Americans in the colony, but were strictly horticulturists. They had little to do with the dominant species, too busy observing how our invader species were affecting the local flora.

"One day you must tell me the rules again," I said, praying he would ignore the offer. Ashley had once tried to reveal the mysteries of cricket to me, but his explanation turned to apoplexy every time I made an a.n.a.logy to baseball. In his mind, any query that compared the two was like asking of Rembrandt's painting: "Interior or exterior?"

Jenny Flagg was up next. She had once been a reliable single, specializing in Texas-leaguers that landed just behind the shortstop. The problem was, after two years everybody knew her one trick. The outfield moved in.

The first pitch flew past her wild swing. She was looking to hit it hard, trying to force the fielders deep. They didn't buy it.

"Strike one!" Dr. Chirac declaimed. If nothing else, the Taus would probably learn to count to three.

"Jenny!" I made a calming gesture with my hands. With the score tied, all we needed was her usual single.

She nodded, took a less aggressive stance.

But she slashed again at the next pitch, a drive that flew high over second base, clearing the center fielder's outstretched glove by centimeters. Jenny ran a leisurely double while Hunter pounded home.

"That's the ball game!" Dr. Chirac shouted. The Taus cheered.

The field jogged desultorily in. Our team gathered around Hunter and Jenny, providing the Taus a textbook example of a human victory celebration.

"The beer's on me," I announced, then turned to Jenny. "But I should have you up on insubordination charges, Sergeant Flagg."

She shrugged as we headed back toward camp. "I thought you and I were engaged in a subtle deception, Colonel."

I laughed. "At least now you'll get a little respect for your long ball-"

"Colonel!"

I turned at the shout. Dr. Chirac still stood at home plate, transfixed and staring into the outfield.

A small party of Taus was approaching.

I signaled for everyone to stop where they were and walked with quick, even steps to Chirac's side.

"Sweet Jesus," I said. They were armed, as always, slings at the ready around their necks. Over the last two years, we'd cleared the field of rocks pretty thoroughly, but the Tau could be deadly with improvised projectiles. I was more awed than worried, though. This was the first time they'd entered the human colony.

"They look friendly, I guess."

"Don't you see it?" Chirac was breathing hard, her tablet making the small reminder beep that indicated high-memory motion capture.

"See what?"

"There are nine of them."

They didn't want gloves.

That made sense, at least. Their big hands were already baseball glove-sized. It had crossed my mind to wonder once or twice if that's why they watched the game. We must have looked a bit more Tau-like with brown leather webbing our fingers.

As Dr. Chirac quickly briefed me, I realized that she was in command for the next couple of hours. At long last, we were in a contact situation.

"Keep the winning team playing, in the same positions for consistency. Play nine innings, no matter how dark it gets. Go along with any call I make, however strange."

"Thinking of cheating, Doc?"

"Absolutely not, but I may have to adapt the rules a bit. With their body structure, it's going to be a small strike zone. Go easy on them, but play to win. And for G.o.d's sake don't hurt one. Any questions?"

"Just one."

"What?"

"Are we the visitors or the home team?"

She nodded. "Interesting. It's our field, but their planet. Still, they won't be aware of the distinction, given that we haven't had any visiting teams lately. Let them bat first."

I was glad Dr. Chirac had chosen who would play. Everyone wanted to be in the first interspecies baseball game.

Contact had been one of our mission parameters from the beginning, but after the excitement of finding Tau inhabited, two years of being snubbed by the natives had left those of us in the military and construction side feeling left out of the explorers' club. But the old excitement came back quickly. The news spread through handcom calls, and before the game had started the entire human population of Tau was in attendance. Yoshi and the rest of the xeno team frantically mounted fixed cameras to record the game.

"Play ball!" Dr. Chirac shouted as I took the mound.

I faced the Tau at bat, preparing myself to throw the first interspecies pitch in baseball history.

She (a ninety-percent chance with Taus) was gripping the Slugger with her two sling hands, shifting her weight on the other four like a restive batter. The two mid-hands popped up occasionally to scratch her thorax and stroke the bat.

They had been watching us closely. One of the Tau's sling hands let go of the bat for a moment to touch its brow, as if adjusting an invisible cap.

I dipped my shoulders one by one, getting a pair of good cracks from my neck, hoping my arm would stay in the game for nine more innings. Checked first and third, spat, and licked my lips.

The creature in front of me didn't look ready for a fastball. For a first-time batter, she didn't seem utterly clueless, but she held the bat a bit too far back, as if stuck in the wind-up of a swing.

I threw at a nice, easy speed.

Like many first b.a.l.l.s of new seasons, it was not a great pitch, dipping low enough that Hunter had to scoop it up from the dirt. But the Tau gamely swung, missing by a country mile. (Or, as Chirac's tablet recorded, a good forty centimeters.) I saw Dr. Chirac hesitate before she called, "Strike one!" Her eyes narrowed a bit above her filter mask, as if thinking I'd thrown an unhittable ball on purpose.

I shrugged as it flew back to me.

My second pitch tightened up and went in right at thorax level, where the Tau's first swing had pa.s.sed over the plate. She swung and missed again, low this time, but closer.

"Strike two!"

The ball came back from Hunter, who yelled his usual, "You got her now, Colonel!"

I smiled at Hunter's att.i.tude. It wasn't like the Tau were going to walk in here and win a game off us. We had to a.s.sume this was as much about contact for them as it was for us. They might as well get a real baseball experience.

Hunter flashed me two fingers down, and I nodded.

After nine innings, my fastball isn't exactly scorching, but it ain't bad for an old man's. I laid the ball straight into Hunter's glove, and the Tau batter swung late by a solid second.

"Strike three!" Chirac called, and c.o.c.ked her thumb for the Tau to go.

There was dead silence for a moment. Did she know she was out? Had my fastball const.i.tuted humanity's first interstellar diplomatic blunder?

The batter hung its head, rested the Slugger on its abdomen, and trudged back toward the other Taus cl.u.s.tered to the right of home plate.

Hunter started the cheer. "Way to go, Colonel!" He clapped and whistled. The remaining humans and the Taus around the field joined in. When the batter got back to her teammates, they put up their sling hands to pat her head softly, almost like a team high-fiving each other.

I looked at Dr. Chirac, who was recording the display. They apparently knew the rules, at least the basics. Over a year or so of watching the game, the Tau had learned some baseball.

It occurred to me that of everything we had accomplished here-prospecting for oil, building a solar array to power the tube, planting the farm, drinking and fighting with (and s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g) each other-this game was our only real collective ritual.

Our colony had no common religion. The small group that had once held Ma.s.s had dwindled due to a schism: Some wanted to observe every seven Tau days, some every lunar week, others to match Earth Sundays. As a result, any prayers nowadays were pretty much done in private. After a few weeks on-planet, I'd let the military protocol loosen. There were only seven of us who were U.S. Army, so I saw little point in raising the flag every morning. Even our work schedules were erratic. Everyone adapted differently to the eighteen-hour day, and McGill and I let our people change their shifts when Tau-lag left them sleepless in the planet's long twilit night.

To the Tau, we must have seemed an unruly lot, chaotic and unpredictable. But in baseball we had found ritual and ceremony, a focus that brought us-the twenty Americans, four j.a.panese, two Cubans, and our French umpire, at least-together.

So perhaps it didn't matter if the Tau never got a hit.

It's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.

Three up, three down.

The top of the Tau order only got the bat on the ball once, producing a foul tip that went over Hunter's head. For a moment, I wondered if the batter would mistakenly run, but she knew it had gone foul and just eased onto her back four, waiting as Hunter chased it down. Then she struck out swinging on the next pitch.

We were up.

"Jenny," I called as we came off the field. "You go in first."

"And do what, Colonel?"

I shrugged. "Chirac says play to win. But no dangerous line drives. And don't argue with the doctor's calls."

"Can they even pitch?"

"I guess we'll find out. They're pretty good with those slings, though."

I could see Jenny's lips purse even through her filter mask. "Deadly, actually." We'd seen them take down the local predators at a hundred meters with a fusillade of rocks the size of human fists.

"Relax, Jenny. So far they seem to know the rules. I don't think they're suddenly going to throw beanb.a.l.l.s at us."