Rediscovery (17 page)

Ysaye shivered, and wondered fleetingly if her concussion had been worse than

she thought. Was she even now lying in that shelter, and hallucinating all this? But no—

she had none of the other symptoms of a severe head injury…It was one thing to watch David and Elizabeth demonstrate telepathy in the lab, but quite another for
her
to hear and understand a total stranger from another world.

And why do I understand him now? I never heard anything so coherent when I

was working with David and Elizabeth. Could it have been that I just wasn’t listening?

She decided to keep her new-found understanding to herself. Bad enough that she could hear this stranger, but worse to find herself the focus of pitying gazes as Elizabeth was.

Elizabeth clearly still did not realize that there was something wrong; she was

confused, but not alarmed. Instead, she asked, “Do you all really not understand what he is saying?”

“I can’t imagine that you really do,” MacAran replied. “It still seems gibberish to me. Maybe you’ve finally hit on words from one of the languages you sing, and you’re picking up what he means that way. What did he say?”

“He told me who he is, and asked who we are, where we are from, and why we

have come here. He gave his name as Kermiac of Aldaran,” Elizabeth replied. At the sound of his name Kermiac nodded and smiled.

MacAran raised an eyebrow, but only said, “You seem to be our
de facto

interpreter. Speak with him, then. You might start by introducing us; that’s usually the appropriate way to begin.”

“Even if we have botched our First Contact completely by now,” Britton muttered

under his breath. Ysaye sympathized with him; nothing had gone according to Procedure and Regulation from the moment they had entered this world’s gravity-well. And

someone would have a great deal to say to him and MacAran about that, once they

contacted the ship.

A First Contact forced by natives coming to rescue us; culture contamination, and
amateurs handling the initial overture to the local authority figure. No, the Powers That
Be are not going to like this.

Elizabeth nodded, and raised her chin. “Kermiac of Aldaran,” she said formally, “I should like to present to you Commander Ralph MacAran, the leader of our party.”

“Rafe MacAran?” said Kermiac in surprise. He considered the Commander, while

MacAran did a noble job of not squirming under that direct gaze. Kermiac continued to speak to Elizabeth as the only one who could understand him, although he nodded to MacAran as he did so and had no hesitation about keeping eye contact with the

Commander. “Yes, he does have the look of the family, a bit. It is a shame that he appears to be head-blind. Has he none of the
donas
of his family, then?”

“His family?” Elizabeth blinked, then the real meaning of what Kermiac had said

dawned on her. “Uh, Commander MacAran, sir, did you have any ancestors on any of the Lost Ships?”

“I don’t know off the top of my head,” Commander MacAran said patiently.

“That was at least a thousand years ago, after all. Is it really relevant at the moment?”

She shook her head. “Well, he seems to think he knows your family. It might be

important. They might place a heavy emphasis on family and anything the local

MacArans have been up to, you might be held accountable for—”

“Elizabeth,” Ysaye put in quietly, “he also seems to understand every word you

say, and perhaps every word you hear.” She directed a questioning look at Kermiac, who grinned at her, then turned his attention back to Elizabeth.

“True enough,
mestra.
”
Ysaye was not mistaken; that was meant as much for her as for Elizabeth. So Kermiac knew that she understood him, even if Britton and

MacAran hadn’t figured it out yet. “What are Lost Ships?” Kermiac continued. “There is no ocean near to here.”

“Mestra?”
David jumped on the term. “I wonder if that’s a variant on the old Italian word maestro?” He turned to Elizabeth excitedly. “Are you sure that what the musicians were using was Gaelic?”

“Yes!” Elizabeth replied distractedly. She was clearly completely confused by the conflicting demands on her, and the contradictory things people were asking of her. “I am absolutely positive!”

“Compare linguistic notes later,” MacAran said severely. ‘You are being rude to

our host. More than that, Elizabeth, you are our translator. Was he asking you a question, just now, and did you understand him that time, too?”

“Yes, and yes,” Elizabeth said, subdued, and looking a little unnerved, as Ysaye sighed in relief, realizing that MacAran had not noticed that the question had been directed to her and not Elizabeth. “He was asking what the Lost Ships were,” Elizabeth concluded. “I don’t know what to tell him!”

MacAran directed a rather less than thrilled look at Elizabeth, who had been the one to bring up the subject, then glanced at Aurora. “Dr. Lakshman, can you understand him?”

Aurora shook her head helplessly. “No, sir, I’m sorry. Not a bit. I’m inclined to think now that a background in ancient folk songs might be a good thing for a

xenopsych to have.”

MacAran sighed. “Just great. The only member of our party with xenopsych

training can’t understand them, and our xenoanthropologist drops one of the most alien concepts we could fling at them into practically the first sentence she utters!”

He looked at Kermiac, who was regarding them with an inquisitive patience, and

straightened a little. “Talk to him for me, Elizabeth, but carefully, please. The cat’s out of the bag, but we can try not to botch things any further.”

Ysaye bit her lip, wanting to say something, and not daring to. She did not want MacAran convinced that she was under delusions—and he had obviously completely

ignored the fact that the sentence that had “let the cat out of the bag” had not been in this stranger’s babble of Gaelic, but in good Terran Standard. In fact, he was ignoring the fact that Elizabeth was speaking to Kermiac in Terran Standard, and Kermiac

understood that as well.

Elizabeth flushed and hung her head at the implied rebuke.

“Try to explain briefly who we really are, and who we think they might be—”

MacAran continued, “—since if they are a Lost Colony, they seem to have forgotten the fact. When we get more people down here—if we can land here at all, if these hellish mountains don’t completely defeat us—then the Captain can look up this Gaelic-speaking ship of yours and give them—and us—the facts.”

Elizabeth bit her lip, and said carefully to Kermiac, “My name is Elizabeth

Mackintosh.”

She hesitated briefly, wondering what she ought to call him, and then

compromised on a simple “sir.” “Sir, this is Commander Britton, and this is my friend and companion Ysaye—”

“I have never seen anyone like them,” Kermiac stated baldly, staring at Ysaye out of the corner of his eye, as if she were some kind of exhibit. “Are they not human, then?

Or do they coat their skin with dark brown paint?”

Shocked, Ysaye realized that the very concept of different human races was

unknown to him. Elizabeth bit her lip in consternation, then went gamely on. “Ysaye and Commander Britton are so by birth.”

“By birth?” Kermiac shook his head. “There are those who are swarthy of skin in

the lower parts of Thendara, but none have ever been born of such a color—”

Elizabeth stared at him. “You have never seen anyone like them? Are there truly

no black peoples known to you?”

“Black? People with black skin?” Kermiac seemed unsure as to whether he was

confused or Elizabeth was. “Her skin is brown, is it not—or do you call that color black?” He looked from Ysaye to Commander Britton to Aurora, whose skin was a sort of olive-brown. “I thought if anyone was not of our kind they would be nonhumans,”

said Kermiac, after a moment of consideration. “But if they are your friends they are welcome as yourself and as the head-blind young MacAran yonder.” He shook his head, pityingly. “I have great sympathy for his misfortune, in being so without any gift.”

Again the word he used for gift was
donas,
and Ysaye could hear David muttering something about the Latin word
donum,
also meaning gift. “I think we’re getting a Romance language here,” he said to himself, and Ysaye could feel his impatience at being trapped so far from his computers and recording instruments.

Meanwhile Elizabeth completed the rest of the introductions, paused, and added

bravely, “We came here from the violet moon which now stands in your sky.”

Ysaye waited for the sky to fall, Kermiac to declare them some kind of madmen,

heretics, or demons and have them carted away, or MacAran to have a fit of apoplexy.

None of the three happened.

“Wait,” said Aldaran firmly. “I will call no man or woman liar who speaks to me

mind-to-mind, and I know that you believe what you say, but even I know that the moons are lifeless and airless worlds circling our own. No man can live there. Are you telling me, then, that I am mistaken about the nature of the moons?”

“No. We came here from a world like your own, from another sun, with air like

this one,” Elizabeth said, and groped for a simple explanation. “We stopped on the moon and set up a dome there to observe the weather before we landed. But I suppose we did not observe it well enough,” she concluded forlornly, “since the wind in these mountains led to the crashing of our vehicle.”

“Interesting,” Kermiac said, though Ysaye could not tell whether he meant that

they
were interesting, or what Elizabeth had told him was interesting. “These mountains are not called the Hellers for nothing, you know; their winds are known to be dangerous.

I suppose in this tale of yours, your vehicle is something like a glider, but more complicated.” He smiled a little. “As a boy I flew a glider in these hills, and wished someone could manage to invent a heavier-than-air vehicle, as they had in the old days. I assume the tale is that you have done so—where you come from.”

“We have indeed,” said Elizabeth eagerly. “But you said that you had such things in the old days! That would be years ago, when your ancestors first landed upon this world—”

“Wait,” he said. “There is someone else who should hear this, if you do not

mind.” He looked up and beckoned, and a tall young man with strange, steel-gray eyes came toward them. As he neared them, Ysaye realized that he was not just very tall, but unusually so. He towered above everyone else by a full head, at least. He had a narrow sharp face, unbearded as a boy’s, a guarded expression, and an untidy shock of dark hair.

“My good friend and paxman,” Kermiac said, “Raymon Kadarin. He knows more

about these hills, perhaps, than any other man living. I think he will understand what you have told me and where your vehicle was supposed to have crashed. Now, what

were you saying about my forefathers?”

“We believe,” Elizabeth began, “that your ancestors, many, many generations ago, did not originate on this world. From the language I heard in your songs, which is now an extinct language to our people, we presume they were on one of our ships. They were sent out to explore, and somehow they ended here, perhaps crashed, but at any rate lost to us. That is what I meant by a Lost Ship; and it means that we are the same kind of people, with a common background.”

“I am sure that you must believe what you say,” Kermiac answered, very

carefully. “I am at least enough of a telepath to know when I am being lied to. You believe what you are saying; whether I can credit it or not is something else again. Your tale of coming from the stars is a difficult one for me to believe; this other, that my forefathers did likewise, is far more difficult. I do not think this is something to be discussed while we stand about at mealtime,
mestra,
and,” he paused, looking very uncomfortable, “to tell the truth, I am not accustomed to discussing serious business with women. Perhaps your superior officer…” He shook his head. “But no, your

superior here is that head-blind young man who spoke before.”

Kermiac pursed his lips, as if he was confronting a difficult and delicate problem.

“I should of course be unable to do any business with him, since I have no way of communicating with him.”

“Don’t you ever do business through translators?” Elizabeth asked, her face and

voice reflecting the dismay she felt when Kermiac called what she had told him “tales.”

Kermiac shrugged. “Not more than once or twice in my lifetime,” he replied

dryly. “In any case, you are my guests. Refresh yourselves, overcome the fatigue of a journey which at least must have been very long, even if you did not come from one of the stars in the sky. Perhaps in a few days we can speak rationally of these things.”

It seemed to Ysaye that she heard what he did not say, that it would a great pity if so pleasant-spoken a young lady should prove to be mentally disordered. There were other things, too, but so jumbled she couldn’t make any sense of them. He bowed to them and went to get a mug of beer from the sideboard and take a seat at the end of the hall. At his gesture the musicians resumed their performance.

So he does not really believe us,
Ysaye thought with well-concealed dismay.
But
how can we blame him? I wonder what sort of origin myths they have. Whatever they
are, I doubt they match with people claiming to come from the stars.
Another disquieting thing occurred to her.
And he is not accustomed to doing business with women; a pre-equality society. Fascinating, I’m sure, but not very rewarding for us women.

“There is whiskey over there, too, besides the beer and the herbal stuff, if anyone wants it,” said Evans, gesturing with the mug he was holding. “Trust the descendants of Scots, if they really are, to make whiskey wherever in the Galaxy they find themselves.