There's a lot you can fit into a 851-gram teleport.

Lean beef is about two-thirds water, so more than two-and-a-half kilos of ground chuck can be reconstituted from a transport that size. Enough for twenty-nine decent hamburgers, one for every human being on the planet. For fixings we had lettuce and plenty of soybread, and our tomatoes were bigger than golf balls that second year on Tau.

Alternatively, each member of the colony could have received a seven-page letter. Not text or camfeeds, but actual pieces of paper touched by our loved ones, marked with tactile incisions of the pen. (And try spraying perfume on a textfile.)

With 851 grams of hops pellets, we could have produced about 2,000 liters of homebrew. We had our own sugar and malt, but they'd never given us seed crop for hops, to make sure we couldn't drink more beer than Houston decreed.

Or, for a truly exotic experience, three medium-sized oranges would have massed about the same. Not dehydrated, pre-juiced, or even peeled. Just the real things smelling of an earthly summer's hard sunlight. We had a tiny anti-scurvy orchard, of course. But our starship had brought only fast-growing limes, our oldest trees four feet tall and delivering a small, bitter fruit.

None of these items were in the transport, however. We had voted. With one annoyed abstention, the choice had been made.

The tube glowed, scattering its weird light through the shed. The familiar room turned eerie around us, bent like the colors of an Oklahoma landscape just before a tornado folds into shape overhead. Seven light-years away in the packed suburbs of Houston, lights dimmed and air-conditioning faltered as a grid serving fourteen million was poached. This torrent of power crowded its way into some unthinkably long and narrow channel of the quantum that led to us, 851 grams of matter riding the wave.

When the tube light faded, we all stood blinking.

I popped the clean-seal, which hissed at me as vacuum equalized, but waited a moment before opening it. My instincts insisted that the transport would still be hot to the touch inside, however ridiculous that notion was. And worse, if the squirt had blown, we'd all wasted weeks of mass allowance on a pile of splinters.

But the transport had come in clean. I lifted it up for Alex and Yoshi to admire.

"Beautiful," Yoshi said.

"Much better than my old one." Alex was right. The thirty-ounce Louisville Slugger felt much sweeter than our broken bat. The long, wide grain of the wood showed the considerable age of the ash tree from which it had been hewn. The finish lent it an emerald gleam in the antiseptic lights of the clean shed, and it hefted like a feather in my hand.

Of course, our pals back on Earth wouldn't have sent us anything but the best. The price of a solid-gold bat wouldn't approach the energy costs of a 851-gram transport.

Still, this Slugger was a beauty.

Yoshi took it gingerly from my hands, a look of relief on his face. It had been his wild swing that had cracked the first one two weeks before, reducing it to the two most expensive pieces of firewood in human history, leaving us without the game.

Alex patted him on the shoulder, all forgiven now. The old bat, nine gloves, and six baseballs had comprised her entire personal mass allowance on the starship out, and had proven the most popular contribution to the public good. (With the possible exception of Iain Claymore's micro-still.)

Alex took the bat from Yoshi, stepped back, and took a practice swing. She grinned like a kid on her birthday.

"Let's play some ball."

Our baseball field was a medium-age impact crater full of sheetgrass, basically flat if you ignored the low, concentric ripples emanating from the natural pitcher's mound in its exact center. The home-run "fence" was a ring of chalky two-meter cliffs at the crater's edge, reachable even by amateurs like us thanks to Tau's nine-five gravity. The sheetgrass surface was impeccable, tractable, soft in a fall, quick-drying after the heavy Coriolis rains which swept across us every afternoon: the best of astroturf and earthly grass combined.

Of course, sheetgrass wasn't grass in any botanical sense, but a genetically identical colony of cilia that acted as water filtration system for the composite organism that filled the crater. In a way, we owed our presence here on Tau to the rain-catch organisms. They accounted for most of the biomass of the planet, and thus most of the rich oil field below our feet had once been sheetgrass or some ancient relative.

It had been two weeks (six Tau-day microlunar months, actually, a bit over a hundred hours each) since Yoshi's swing had snapped our old bat and brought baseball on the planet to a halt. It hadn't taken much arm-twisting to get two enthusiastic teams of nine onto the field. We even had a few human spectators in addition to the usual audience of Taus.

"Looks like pretty good attendance today, Doctor."

"I count sixty-seven." Dr. Helene Chirac lifted her tablet and peered at the screen. "That beats the previous record by five."

"Think they missed it, Doc?"

"It seems likely they noticed our absence on the field."

As always, Dr. Chirac was our umpire. (With seventeen PhDs and three MDs between us, that title was usually ignored, but something about the gray-haired, imperiously formal Dr. Chirac made it unavoidable.) As head of the xeno team, she had attended every game since the Taus had started watching, hoping that her elusive linguistic breakthrough might be found here on the field.

Other than becoming baseball fans, the Taus didn't have much to do with us. No Tau had ever set foot on the land we'd developed, steering well clear of the camp, solar array, drill site, and farmland. Whether it was out of respect for our claims or fear of contagion, we didn't know. Like good spectators, they stayed at the edge of the baseball field. And when the odd home run came their way, they always scattered to let one of us retrieve the ball.

The rest of the xeno team were biologists and could work with other life-forms or long-distance observations. But Dr. Chirac, a linguist, needed face-to-face contact with the dominant species. Umping baseball was as close as she got.

Our Tau fans were definitely learning the game. They knew when to cheer now. They showed no favoritism, making their characteristic stuck-pig squeals on tough catches as well as long drives, and a few were clapping as my team took the field for the top of the first inning. They were finally starting to get some sound out of those big, soft hands. I waved to them as I took the mound.

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 damn 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.

"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 fuck 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 analogy 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 signalled 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."

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 god'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 balls 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 passed 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 attitude. It wasn't like the Tau were going to walk in here and win a game off us. We had to assume 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 cocked her thumb for the Tau to go.

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

The batter hung its head, rested the Slugger on its abdomen, and trudged back toward the other Taus clustered 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 screwing) each other—this game was our only real collective ritual.

Our colony had no common religion. The small group that had once held Mass 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 Japanese, 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.

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 beanballs at us."

"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 hitting 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 a 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 classic 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 tittered 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 balls 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 embarrassed. 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.

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 assume 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 assume they're trying to play fair."

"A noble assumption, 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 space, 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 analyze 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 assumed 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 assure 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, "Bloody 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?"

"Just one," Ashley said, a smile visible behind his pipe. "What if today they decided they don't like baseball and never show up again?"

Yoshi laughed aloud. "Don't worry about that, Newkirk. Everyone likes baseball."

Our request couldn't have come at a better time. The current powers in Washington were not those who had originally funded the mission, and the space agency, as always, was looking for ways to improve its image. Within the U.S., the idea of exporting the national pastime to Tau was a natural. The Halihunt public relations wing immediately annexed half our discretionary data bandwidth, demanding video of aliens at play. The mission had been a Halihunt loss leader for a decade now, tough to swallow for corporate execs used to thinking about the next quarter, not eight-year space journeys. But here was good PR with its own revenue stream. They wanted to license images and find sponsors for equipment teleports. There were even plans to send us uniforms through the tube. With snazzy corporate logos, of course.

On the international front, a breakthrough in the mission's scientific side was a godsend. Outside the reach of the U.S. media, the Tau expedition was pretty much seen for what it was: an attempt to restore the U.S. to unquestioned superpower status. Seventy years of unilateralism on global warming, oil dependence, and off-and-on military occupation of the Middle East had pissed off pretty much the whole world. Despite the fact that every other economic bloc had converted to renewable, Earth's fossil fuel supply was finally drying up. America's decision to open up whole new worlds to drilling was going down like day-old fried eggs.

After two years of hard work, I'd started to get nervous, wondering if the economics of our primary mission would prove viable. Our oil wells were useless unless the hundred-square-kilometer solar array could keep transport cheap: The energy costs went down geometrically when power was available at both ends of the tube. And the longer you kept a single tube open, the cheaper and more stable it became. Thus, the London-New York-Beijing tube was very efficient, and long-haul aircraft a thing of the past, but you still had to drive to the local store. The math said that a perpetual tube carrying a thousand barrels a minute of crude from Tau to Earth was profitable in the extreme and would give the U.S. economy another hundred years to switch over. But the technology had never been tested in industrial quantities on an interplanetary scale.

If Tau's frequent Coriolis rains interrupted input to the solar array, if the planet's petroleum reserves varied unusably in composition, if the transport math didn't hold up over interstellar distances … I had lived daily with the possibility that all our work here might be pointless.

Until now.

As of that first game, we had done something no other human beings had ever done. After two years of being snubbed by the locals, as if they knew what we were up to and didn't approve, we had finally made contact with them. They had walked into our camp, held our tools in their big hands, tried to communicate on our terms.

They even wanted to play with us.

That night after the first game, having drunk six beers and sent off my report, I went to bed happy, feeling as if my little colony finally belonged here on Tau.