John Maddox Roberts - Spacer: Window of Mind (21 page)

"Why rogue . . . want war?" She translated.

"This isn't going to be easy," Torwald said. "It seemed utterly crazy to us; imagine how they'll take it." They conferred and came up with the simplest possible explanation.

"Vengeance, greed, insanity." Apparently Kantli was familiar with all three concepts.

"How rogue . . . vengeance on Dzuna . . . never . . . human before ..."

"Not Dzuna!" Unconsciously Kiril made a hand gesture she had never performed before. "Rogue want vengeance on our

leader. Want for long, long time. Want to make her outcast by blaming war on her. Humans not want war with Dzuna."

"Why rogue . . . want . . . vengeance . . .?"

"This is going to be difficult," Michelle warned, "but if you can get it across right, it could help us look good."

"Long ago," Kiril said, "rogue kill many, many humans. Our leader denounce. Could not prove."

"Why rogue . . . kill humans?"

"Greed. Insanity." Couldn't get much simpler than that, she thought.

Kantli stood and looked down at Kiril. "Send . . . teacher. You . . . learn (incomprehensible). We . . . look . . . ship." He turned and left. The medic took up the platter and followed him. Kiril translated his last speech.

"He wants me to learn, well, he used a word that isn't exactly 'language.' It means that and a lot more."

"Not surprising," Torwald said. "I'm wondering, though, why they refer to our negotiations as a 'peace talk,' as if we were settling a war, or avoiding one."

"Maybe because we showed up with a warship," Nancy said.

"Or maybe," Torwald said, "these people are so warlike that the first thing they settle when they meet somebody is that there is or isn't going to be a war. Let's hope not."

"I may not have translated it quite right," Kiril said, "but that was the meaning I got."

"Did that last statement mean he's instituting a search for the
AngelT'
Nancy asked.

"I'm pretty sure," Kiril said.

"For whatever that's worth," Torwald said. "He may just be the CO of this little outpost. If I was an officer like that, and I had a whole planet to search for a single ship, I'd have my work cut out for me. By the way, every time we talk about one of these guys, we say 'he.' Actually, we've no way of knowing what gender they are, or even if they have such. We've run across plenty of life forms that don't have our setup."

"How about that, Kiril?" Michelle said. "Did you pick up on anything like that?"

Kiril shook her head. "I said 'she' when I mentioned the skipper, but I don't know what he heard."

"Until we know better," Torwald said, "I guess 'he' will

have to remain our pronoun of choice, it' makes them seem like nonintelligent creatures, and I hate to think of burly, tough-looking characters who have guns on me as 'she.' Irrational, I admit."

Kiril was feeling burned out. She was stumbling from one appalling responsibility to another. Everything, not only their immediate future but maybe even the future of humanity, might hinge upon her ability to communicate with the Dzuna.

10

The instructor arrived the next morning. There had been comings and goings during the night. Dzuna on foot had arrived, presumably patrols reporting in. Small craft that hovered on some kind of suspensor field had moved about at night, showing no lights. All of it showed evidence of wartime conditions and discipline.

"I hope this means contact is being kept with the main settlement," Torwald said. "We're sunk unless we can get in touch with their highest authorities."

"How do we know there
are
any higher authorities?" Michelle had asked. "We don't know how devastating Izquierda's attack was. These may be all that's left."

Torwald had mused on that awhile. "Izquierda would have left them some way of getting off-world. This is an outpost. No sense simply blasting them and stranding them here with no way to tell the homeworld who they're supposed to be at war with."

"What's to keep us from taking advantage of that?" Kiril had asked.

"How so?" Torwaid queried.

"I mean, not us, but humans in general. Nagamitsu said that they'd left no way for the aliens to find out where Earth or any of the human colonies were, right? What's to keep the TFCS and the Supernova from skinning out of this system? Why not treat this whole business as a fiasco and just leave? There's lots of galaxy left. Humans could just avoid this sector, and we might not run into the Dzuna for another hundred years."

"That's what I'd do if I was Nagamitsu," said Torwald, "but I'll bet Izquierda thought of that, too. Remember the fuss he made when we landed the first day, how he asked Nagamitsu if he was sure that
Angel'
s records were secure? He was going on record that time. He's found some way to get the coordinates to the Dzuna and blame it on the skipper."

"He engineered the
Angel's
landing in the first place," Nancy said. "We could have come down on the shuttle like everybody else. But he wanted everybody, human and alien, to get a good look at the
Angel,
close up. That way when his ringer came in, everybody would know just what to think."

Now they were taking in the morning sunlight streaming through the doorway. They had just choked down a breakfast of cold vegetation. The medics had not brought back any of the items they had rejected the day before, and had brought some others. They had yet to try anything really palatable, but so far they were suffering no unpleasant effects. Kiril had tried to engage their guards in conversation, but they had all reacted with a negative gesture, holding the hand with fingers down, flicking towards her with the back of the fingertips. This, she figured, was the equivalent of shaking their heads. Apparently they were now under orders not to try to communicate with the humans.

The instructor arrived alone, passing through with only a word or two to the guard on duty. He looked like the others, except for differing paraphernalia attached to his harness. He wore none of the presumed weapons that the soldiers had strapped to their forearms. He looked around at them and began speaking.

"I guess the boss couldn't describe which of us is the sensitive," Torwald said. "That makes us even, I can't tell them apart either." He pointed to Kiril, using the back of his hand.

"I am Teacher Aktla," he said. Kiril was amazed at how clearly this came across. "1 will teach you . . . our (language). Must learn . . . quick. There is little time."

She translated for the others. "He's a lot easier to understand than the others."

"Maybe you're improving," Torwald said, "but communicating is probably this guy's specialty."

"Open mouth," Aktla said. Puzzled, she obeyed. He examined the inside of her mouth. The medics had done this as well. "Your . . . structure is different. Never use . . . sound part of (language) properly. Maybe adequately. Start with . . . vocabulary."

He squatted before her and she sat cross-legged facing him. He undipped a wide, flat instrument from his belt. It was roughly oval and looked like it was made from some organic substance, like most of the artifacts these people had. Along one side was a series of depressions. He placed it on the ground, then grasped the wrist of Kiril's unwounded arm. He placed her palm flat on the instrument and his long fingers danced over the depressions. "Start with nouns," he said.

Shockingly, a vivid image of an alien ship appeared within Kiril's mind, along with an alien word that meant "ship." She jerked her hand back as if it had been burned.

"What is it?" Michelle said. "Are you all right?"

"I'm okay," Kiril said, "just startled. These people have something that makes books and screens and holos look like scratchings in the dirt."

She placed her hand back on the plate. Aktla's cheekbones were working up and down alternately. This she knew to be an expression of amusement. "Not frightened," she said, "just surprised." His fingers moved across the depressions again, and a series of images and sounds came to Kiril. She repeated the sounds as best she could. Many of the sounds were almost impossible for her to enunciate. Nothing was ever repeated, and there was no need to. She found that once a word and object had been flashed into her mind, she could not forget it.

After an hour she took a break and her friends all gave the teaching machine a try. None of them could get more than a vague, fuzzy picture, not even clear enough to get a real idea of what was intended.

The learning session continued rigorously all day. After a basic vocabulary of several hundred nouns came verbs. Most of these were illustrated by Dzuna performing various actions or of objects going through assorted functions. In a few cases she could not understand what the action was, or else the object illustrated was so alien that she could not understand the concept. She told Aktla when this happened, and he tried again with an alternate illustration. Sometimes the question was cleared up, but there were a few that seemed to be impossible to translate.

The sun was almost down when the teacher brought the lesson to a close. "Your (progress?) is good. Tomorrow we try more difficult parts of (speech?) and . . . concepts. By the day after, you must be proficient." He left. Kiril leaned back against the wall of the hut, exhausted. Her brain ached with the new information, and alien words buzzed in her mind. It was too much in too brief a time.

"How's it coming?" Torwald asked.

"I think I'm doing all right," Kiril said, "but the rest of it won't be as easy as today's lesson. Nouns and verbs were easy, both languages have them. But he says there are other things, I guess you'd translate the word he used as 'abstracts,' and I think they're almost purely mental, not spoken. There's other things, too. I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to use their language perfectly, or even well. Maybe I'll be able to get by enough to get us out of this jam, though."

"That's all we ask," Torwald said fervently. "Now, you've been taking in a lot of information. What've you learned about the Dzuna from that instrument?"

"A lot. For instance, you were right when you figured they have a warlike history. I never thought there could be so many words for 'fight.' There's a basic word," she made a gobbling sound, "that just means 'fight.' The image they used was two Dzuna fighting barehanded. Then there was one with two of them fighting with hand weapons, I guess some kind of duel. There were gang fights, then real battles. By the way, those things tied to their arm are weapons, all right. They just make you disappear."

"Disappear?" Michelle said.

"Yes. They point 'em at something and bend their hand down out of the way. No sound and no light, but whatever they point it at just fades away."

"A disintegrator!" Torwald said. "Nobody's ever been able to make one small enough for a man to carry. We've never even developed them as practical weapons. Too much power drain for too little result."

"Let's keep on the good side ofthe.se people," Kiril advised. "They're awfully good with those things."

"What about their technology?" Nancy asked. "Did you see any metal, or does it look like they do everything with synthetics?"

Kiril leaned back and closed her eyes. She was as tired as she had ever been. "Not synthetics; organics. They grow everything. They grow their guns and that teaching tool. Their words for 'grow' and 'manufacture' are the same. It all comes out as some kind of agriculture. You want to hear something that's really hard to take? They grow their ships, too." There was a flabbergasted silence.

"That's just not possible," Torwald said.

"Tell them," she advised. "I don't think they'd be very impressed at how we build things. Their way is easy on labor and everything's self-repairing."

"You mean the ships and other objects are still alive after they've reached their final form?" Nancy asked.

"That's the impression I got. Most of them, anyway. The gadget showed a ship-refueling operation in space. It looked like it was happening on a moon or something. The ship just put out roots, like the ones at the bottom of this hut only thicker. They sunk right into the ground and started soaking up chemicals. They use some kind of chemical process to maneuver in-system. I don't know what their interstellar drive is."

"They're not likely to tell us, either," Torwald said. "Not until we can prove we aren't hostile. We probably won't learn how they brake their ships from a free fall to a dead stop, either. It has to be some kind of contragravity force we've never heard of before. Did you figure out—" But Kiril was sound asleep.

The medic arrived early. This time he had brought some cooked items, including what looked like cubes of dark meat and several shellfish. They had shells, at any rate, and they smelled good. It was far more satisfying than what they had been eating, and they said so. When they had finished eating, the medic reached into a pouch and withdrew something that was flat, hairy, and alive. It pulsed slightly in his hand, then he placed it carefully on the ground.

"Let me . . . see injured arm," he said. Since her lesson the day before, Kiril was having a much easier time understanding him. Hesitantly, she extended her splinted arm. The medic took her arm delicately and extruded a triangular thumbnail perhaps an inch long from his free hand. He ran the nail along the plastic splint, slitting it cleanly. The splint fell away, exposing Kiril's forearm, pale and deeply marked by the ribs of the splint.