"Wish I had a batter's helmet, just in case the pitcher pulls out her sling."

I looked back at the Taus. They were throwing the ball to each other, warming up like humans taking the field. They had adapted their sling technique to a throw, like an underarm pitch tilted forty-five degrees.

"You'll be okay." I patted Jenny's shoulder and jogged over to join Yoshi by one of the cameras.

"They're throwing pretty good."

He nodded, following the ball with the camera headsup, a zoomed-in view on a translucent layer over his face.

"I've seen the kids toss rocks like this," he said. "My guess is that it's the original behavior that the sling was adapted to augment."

"They used to hunt barehanded?"

"They're built for it." Yoshi sent me a headsup. He had some software running that interpolated Tau skeletal structure. (Conveniently, the Tau practiced ritual exposure after death. Given that carrion-eaters usually dragged away the corpse, we figured an autopsy or two wouldn't stretch the bounds of cultural sensitivity.) As the Tau with the ball wound up, I watched the compound socket that allowed her arm smooth 360-degree rotation. She was far more fluid than a human throwing underarm. Faster, too.

I wondered if Jenny was really safe. These guys were built to throw.

The Tau team had managed a pretty fair imitation of our field placings, and when the alien on the mound raised a hand, another slung the ball to her.

Jenny hefted the bat and walked up to the plate, and my jaw dropped.

"Did you see that, Yoshi?"

"Well, I guess they can tell us apart," he said quietly.

The outfielders had moved in, covering the ground where Jenny's Texas-leaguers tended to land.

"The question is," Yoshi said, "do they really understand Jenny's. .h.i.tting style, or are they just imitating our strategy?"

"Good point. Remember, she got a hit by going deep last game."

"Barely," Yoshi muttered. Then I remembered that he'd been the one in center field for Jenny's last at-bat.

She knocked the dust from her shoes and stood at the ready, glancing at the Tau playing catcher. It was the closest any of us had actually gotten to the dominant life form before today. Just behind the catcher, Dr. Chirac looked ecstatic.

"Play ball!" she shouted.

The Tau started to jitter on the mound, some sort of pre-pitch dance. She finished with jerk of the head accompanied by a little coughing noise. I heard a giggle from my team, which spread throughout the humans.

"Well, Colonel," said Yoshi, "she's got you cold."

I blinked, then saw it: the little dance had been an imitation of my wind-up ritual. She'd bobbed her shoulders one by one, checked the bases, then spat on the ground. No doubt she would have licked her lips if she'd had a tongue.

Of course, as far as the Tau knew, it was in the rules that you had to spit before you pitched. All four humans who regularly spent time on the mound had a tendency to do so. As observers, the Tau had the cla.s.sic problem of a small sample size: They couldn't distinguish between the explicit laws of the game, its long-held traditions, and the personal habits of the few players they'd seen.

Jenny readied herself, and the first pitch came at her. It was low and outside, but she stepped back nervously. The pitch had looked tentative to me, slower than they'd been throwing in the outfield. Hopefully, that meant the Tau were trying not to hurt us.

The catcher scooped it in effortlessly and tossed it back with a high, arcing throw, an imitation of Hunter's returns.

"Ball one!" Chirac called, focused on her tablet as the pitcher warmed up again. The humans around me t.i.ttered again as the alien performed its little pantomime of me.

"Can't wait to get a sample of that fresh saliva," Yoshi said.

"Well, at least I've made one contribution to science," I said.

The second pitch got a little closer to the plate; I reckoned it was between knees and chest, but still outside. Chirac called another ball.

Jenny looked more confident now. The outside pitches seemed cautious to a fault, and when the third came almost within reach, she leaned forward across home plate and took a swing at it.

The ball smacked off down the first-base line. Jenny started to run, but checked herself as it drifted foul. The Tau playing first base managed to get in front of the ball, but didn't get her hands low enough. It bounced off the hard abdominal carapace and rolled toward Yoshi and me.

I scooped it up.

"Is she okay?" I said softly.

"Sure," Yoshi said. "They're tough. As long as we don't hit one in the head."

I tossed the ball softly to the first baseman, then looked down at my hand. I'd touched a ball that had been touched by an alien. Not since my boots had first planted themselves on Tau soil had I felt such an otherworldly thrill.

"Strike one!" called Chirac, nodding approvingly.

From then on, Jenny gamely tried to get a hit, managing to strike out chasing the errant pitches. The Tau on the mound was getting better, but she still was about as accurate as a drunk little-leaguer. At least she was throwing faster, apparently confident that she wouldn't kill anyone.

"Sorry, Coach," Jenny said, "but I didn't want to get walked, you know?"

"That was fine, Sergeant. We're all playing it by ear."

The other human batters followed Jenny's lead, swinging at whatever the Tau pitcher could get to them. But she was too fast and wild. For the next few innings, strike-out followed strike-out for both teams.

"I wonder if we're teaching them bad baseball," Yoshi said. "I mean, shouldn't we take a walk at some point?"

I shrugged. "All in good time. Maybe she'll throw some strikes one of these days."

In the fourth inning, with two down, Hunter got a hit. He connected off a low, straight fastball that popped into short left field. A human probably would have caught it, but the Tau aren't very fast on their feet. The alien fielder collected it on one bounce and slung it toward first base, where Hunter was already camped out.

After the frustrations of the early innings, we cheered him loudly, joined by the Taus in the audience, who apparently weren't taking sides.

"Very cricket of them," Ashley Newkirk said approvingly.

"We'll have to teach them the Bronx cheer," I said.

The pitcher had found her range, and the next two humans managed what looked like genuine little-league at-bats: not great pitching, and some over-enthusiastic swings to be sure, but both made it onto base. The Taus were not good fielders. Their six-legged body design didn't allow for much backward or sideways motion. They had to turn their whole body around to chase b.a.l.l.s that flew long.

Still, Yoshi was one happy xenozoologist. He'd captured more unique movements in four innings than in two years of field work.

With the bases loaded, I was up again.

As I approached the plate, I glanced at Dr. Chirac, remembering what she'd said. Play to win.

The first pitch came in high, and I pulled back.

"Ball one!"

The second looked good, and I took a shot at it. But I hadn't expected a good pitch, and my swing was late.

"Strike one!"

The third pitch was low, and I let it go. The fourth was inside, and I left that, too. I snuck a look at Chirac, who nodded subtly.

The next pitch was way outside.

"Ball four-take your base."

I jogged to first, and Hunter walked in to score. The Tau audience squealed with appreciation. A few of my teammates remembered to high-five Hunter, but they looked embarra.s.sed. We'd scored on a walk, against a pitcher who'd never held a baseball before today.

The rest of the game went scoreless. Hunter got another hit, a couple of us managed tepid grounders and were thrown out at first. As my arm started to go, a couple of Taus got walked as well. But when nine innings were over, the first interplanetary baseball game had been won by humanity, one to zero.

The last Tau batter trotted over to his teammates, and they all touched his head softly with their big hands. A cheer rose up from them, echoing the squeals of the Taus out beyond the fence, and the visiting team made its way across the field and out of sight.

"Shouldn't we have let them win?" McGill asked. McGill looked like what he was: an aging rig worker, his skin leathery from summers off the Louisiana and California coasts, black half-moons of crude apparently tattooed under his fingernails. He was also the Halihunt rep here on Tau and head of the construction team. Halihunt were our corporate sponsors, who had put up some of the funding and all of the political bribes necessary to make the mission happen, and would reap the lion's share of benefits. His eyes had the bright sheen they'd shown a year before when we'd had our one fatality, Peter Hernandez lost to a drilling cave-in. Bad PR scared the h.e.l.l out of McGill.

Dr. Chirac shrugged. "We don't even know if they understand that they lost the game. They knew it was over, because we'd played nine innings and the score was uneven. But do they know actually what winning means?"

We all looked at each other, clueless.

While the rest of the colony celebrated a new bat, the end of a day off, and a new era in human interplanetary contact, the xeno staff and the military had taken our homebrews into the command tent. We had to get our story straight before our various reports went back to Earth via the tube.

"I just feel bad about the way we won," Alex said.

I took a deep breath. "I know, Alex, taking that walk seemed like a lame way to score, but the game's the game."

Dr. Chirac jumped in. "I think the colonel is correct. We want to test their understanding in as many ways as possible. How much of what they are doing is sheer imitation? How much is pattern recognition? And how much is creative thinking-real strategy? Are they actually trying to win?"

"They've seen us react when we win and lose," Jenny said. "They must know we like winning better."

"They have no way of understanding human body language, sergeant," Dr. Chirac said. "Our cheers may sound like moans of pain to them. And perhaps they have no concept of mock conquest, which is what winning a game is. The desirability of winning might be a difficult concept for them to come to."

"I'm no linguist," Ashley Newkirk said, puffing at his empty pipe. "But lots of animals play-fight and engage in submission rituals."

Dr. Chirac nodded her head slowly. "But only one animal organizes play-fighting into complex contests of skill. The conflict in sport, the victory and vanquishment, is carefully hidden under dozens of rules and accommodations. We cannot a.s.sume the Tau understand that this is a fight. It doesn't look like one on the surface. We must discover if they know what it is to win. How far they'll go to avoid losing. If they'd ever cheat."

"Cheating?" Ashley Newkirk protested. "I think we should a.s.sume they're trying to play fair."

"A n.o.ble a.s.sumption, and a proper one so far," Dr. Chirac said. "I merely point out that we should let them push the parameters of the game as far as they can. We have been handed the tool we need to make real contact."

Chirac's words were measured and intense, the look in her eyes one of a lifelong dream coming true before her. When the xeno contact team had been equipped ten years ago, we'd had only the vaguest idea there was intelligent life on Tau. Evidence of cultivation had been glimpsed from s.p.a.ce, but the locals had stayed clear of the ground probes. On landing, we had discovered the Tau's reticence. To make things still harder, their speech and hearing stretched into much higher frequencies than human, higher even than we could a.n.a.lyze with the dolphin gear we'd brought in through the tube. Without specialized devices, of the sort that only a larger xeno team and bigger industrial base could supply, we didn't have the technical capacity to learn their language. Except for a few spy cams, we could hardly even study their physical culture.

But now they were playing baseball with us.

Chirac continued. "This game is clearly our best hope for communication. In baseball, everything happens within a relatively simple framework, visible to the naked human eye. A framework which we understand, and hopefully they have come to learn. We shouldn't be caught up with notions of chivalry, Mr. Newkirk. We should try to win these games-that's the best way to test their understanding of rules and strategy."

"Personally," I said, "I doubt they can tell rules from habits. Like when they imitated my warm-up ritual. Do they think you have to spit before you pitch?"

"Ach, from watching you lot, I had a.s.sumed it was a rule myself," Iain Claymore said.

"And sliding into home plate," Alex said. "Do they know you do it to avoid being tagged, or do they think it's just a decorative flourish?"

"That's what we'll be finding out over the next few weeks," Dr. Chirac said.

"Maybe, maybe not," Jenny Flagg said. "Our big problem right now is their physical limitation. I mean, can the Taus slide? At the moment, they can't even get a hit. Maybe they'll never be able to. It'll be hard to explore their strategic thinking if their skills aren't up to it."

We all looked at Yoshi. An evolutionary biologist who doubled as one of our MDs, he had the best understanding of Tau physical abilities.

"Look, they've got plenty of physical skills. They're deadly with those slings. Literally. And they have a number of sling-related behaviors that look game-like. Adolescents throw rocks to each other; adults stage mock sling attacks. Some of those behaviors might, in fact, be rule-governed sports rather than unstructured play."

"Wait a second," I interrupted. "We're the ones with the spy cams and the PhDs. How come they learned how to play baseball before we figured out how any of their games work?"

He shrugged. "Because there's more of them than us. We've only got three people working full-time on dominant species behavior. Dozens of Taus have been watching baseball for over a year. But I'll be prioritizing gameplay from now on, I a.s.sure you."

"But can they hit a ball?" Jenny asked.

Yoshi nodded. "There's no mechanical reason they can't. They use spears to fend off projectiles in pre-hunt play. They have superhuman vision and great hand-to-eye. They may not run very fast, but neither did Babe Ruth."

Ashley Newkirk looked quizzical at the name, but no one bothered to explain.

"I think their pitching will come along first. Like I said, it's already in the culture. Probably the only reason they've thrown poorly so far is that we've been playing adults, who generally use slings. As far as fielding goes, they're not used to the dynamics of a perfect sphere, but they should pick that up easy enough. Tau adolescent play includes catching rocks on the fly, but not on the bounce."

"So they'll have more trouble with grounders."

"Probably. But once the ball's in hand, the throw to first base should be fast and accurate. As for batting . . . " He shrugged. "It's anyone's guess. But it's a difficult skill even for humans to learn. They're pretty good with spears. Let's give them a chance to develop before we start intentionally walking them."

"Intentional walking?" Ashley said. "What does that mean?"

"When you throw wide on purpose, letting someone get on base without a hit," Alex explained. "For tactical reasons."

Ashley raised his eyebrows and muttered, "b.l.o.o.d.y odd game."

I cleared my throat. "Okay, for the moment we play regular ball, the same as we would against a bunch of kids. Take it easy, but play real baseball. Show them the ropes. At least, that's what we'll suggest to NASA."

"You think you'll get permission?" Iain Claymore asked. "Playing games with wee beasties may take valuable time away from stealing their oil. We've got a whole planet to exploit here."

McGill spoke up, ignoring the Scotsman's tone. "Contact is our second mission priority. In my report, I'll point out that we're ahead of schedule on the pipeline. I'm sure Halihunt won't have any objections to pursuing scientific aims here."

I nodded. "And we won't have any trouble finding volunteers to play, even if they have to use free time. But at some point we may not be so far ahead of schedule, and we'll need support to keep playing. When xeno writes its report, you've got to sell this project. Make it big: baseball as Rosetta stone."

Dr. Chirac offered us a rare chuckle. "I may steal that line."

"Please do. Any questions?"