“Oh. I get it. Malacostracans. It’s your name — what you call yourselves. It’s the strangest name I ever heard, I must say, but I’ll blame that on the translation unit.” Friday tapped his chest with one gloved hand. “I’m Friday Indigo. I’m going to call you Indigoans , for our records. The name of our whole species is humans . My own personal name is Friday Indigo. What’s yours?”
Apparently that was too much, either for the Malacostracan or the translator. Friday heard only a sullen hum.
“All right, let’s leave it for later.” He sat up and swung his legs over onto the floor. That produced violent pins and needles from his hips to his toes. He had to sit quiet for a while, cursing horribly and wondering if that too was being translated. He felt for his backpack of supplies, and was relieved to find it there and untouched. If he didn’t feel better in a minute he’d take a painkiller. No point in suffering any more.
“ We you go.” The Malacostracan waved a vicious-looking pincer in Friday’s face. “We you see one big one we.”
“I think I get that. You’re just gofers of some kind, so now I’m awake you’ll take me to your leader, right? Fine with me. That’s the way it should be, because I’m the leader for the humans and I don’t want to talk to underlings. Uh-oh. Wait a minute. If you’re going out that way, I may need to close my suit.”
The creature had turned away and was scuttling down the incline toward deeper water. When it realized that Friday was not following it paused. The eyestalks reared up over the carapace to stare back at him as he closed the visor of his helmet.
The translation unit said, “Take shell off, put shell on? Not we.”
“You’re dealing with humans now, my friend. There’s lots of things that we can do and others can’t.”
That was the way to do it, give the aliens an idea of human superiority right at the beginning. But the Indigoan merely waited until Friday was finished, then led the way into deeper water. When it came to a point where the bottom of its carapace was level with the surface, the creature ducked forward and submerged. That confirmed Friday’s idea that the Indigoans were equally at home on land or in the sea. But where had they evolved? The bubble men hadn’t mentioned them.
There would be plenty of time for answers to questions like that. First, the translation unit must finish its learning process.
Friday followed the Indigoan into a narrow tunnel with a semicircular arched ceiling. It was a tight squeeze, but by crouching slightly he could keep his head in the two-foot gap between the surface of the water and the low roof. The lights were all in the main chamber, and he plowed on through increasing gloom. The tunnel was so narrow that there was no possibility of mistaking the way.
He heard a sound ahead, a faint moaning cry that grew steadily louder. The unit at his waist made no attempt at translation. At the same time the water level went down. He walked a rising incline that led up into deeper darkness. Friday raised his arm above his head, and found that he could no longer touch the ceiling. Also — he spread his arms wide — he could not reach the sides of the corridor. The wailing had become louder and more unearthly. A strong, gusty wind pushed against his chest.
Confused and unable to see, he paused with water up to his knees. After a few seconds, a light appeared ahead of him. The creature that led the way was holding an oblong lantern high in one of its fore-pincers, while the stalked eyes stared back to make sure that Friday was still there.
“It’s all right.” He waved at it. “I’m with you. You can keep going.”
“ We go. You follow.”
Friday wondered if the translation unit couldn’t work while the Indigoan was under water. A moment later he had other things on his mind. He had a sudden suspicion that they were not inside a room any more, but moving out onto exposed land surface. That wailing sound was from the same wind that pushed at his suited figure. As they came completely out of the water he could feel it swirling about his body. It was the tail end of the storm, raking the night surface of Limbo. From somewhere behind he heard another sound, the distant roar of surf on the shoreline.
He wondered how far they had carried him. How long had he been unconscious? How long until dawn? And had the Mood Indigo survived its battering by wind and water?
Well, for every question he had, they must have one about him. The trick was to make sure you got more information than you gave.
He was still walking, and now there seemed rather more light than the lamp provided. He stopped, leaned back his head, and stared straight up.
The heavy overcast of the storm had gone, to leave a cloudless night. He opened his visor for the clearest possible view, aware that he would be the first human ever to observe the night sky of Limbo.
The pre-mission briefings he had received before leaving the solar system had been sketchy, but they had told him pretty much what to expect. The Geyser Swirl was a compact mass of dust and gas in which stars lay strewn at random. The thick dust would scatter starlight, producing a sky in which an overall glow like an aurora was broken by the veils and dark bands of denser absorbing dust.
Well, so much for what he had been told. He might have guessed it, the briefers were like all briefers: screwed up. The sky here was no gauzy, aurora-like veil. The heavens were filled with glowing globes, many of them so faint that you had to look slightly away to see them at all. They were of different sizes, from faint sky-pearls to swollen balls seemingly close enough to reach out and touch. Even the brighter ones were too dim to possess definite colors, but he imagined that he saw a hint of green in one to the left, a touch of pink in the globe next to it. The sky was full , more globes than dark regions between them.
Friday heard the clicking of claws and brought his gaze back to ground level. The Indigoan was moving on ahead, up a rocky incline that threw back points of glitter in the light of the lamp. The creature was finding it hard going, scrabbling its way forward and up. Friday bent low and saw a surface so smooth and bare that it seemed to have been scraped clean. What was it Rombelle had said? That there was no life on the surface of the planet. Well, the idiot had been wrong about animal life, but he seemed to be right about the plants. There was no sign of them. What did the Indigoans eat? From the look of them they were more at home in water than on land. Maybe they found their nourishment in the sea. Apparently they thought he was like them, amphibious, if that “we you same, live air, live water” had been translated correctly by the unit.
The lamp lit a circle only four or five meters across, and the star-globe light was too faint to provide illumination. Everything on the ground beyond the lamp’s circle apparently didn’t exist. Friday had no choice but to trudge on after the Indigoan and hope the other knew where it was going. The pain of returning circulation was less in his legs, but they felt wobbly and with the continuing uphill walk his lungs were aching.
“How much farther?” he said at last. “I’ve got to stop and take a rest if it’s going to be much farther. It’s easy for you, you’re not the one who got shot and knocked unconscious and just woke up.”
That used up what little breath he had left. He paused and panted. He couldn’t tell if the Indigoan had understood what came out of the translator, but it too halted and turned. In the lamplight, the creature with its cruel pincers, stalk eyes, and multiple mouth slots seemed like a gigantic and deformed crab.
The eyestalks waved. “Soon top, top flat like water flat, place you we end.”
That wasn’t exactly a model of clarity. “You mean, when we get to the top of this rise, we come to a place that’s flat in the same way that the surface of water is flat? And when we get to it, we’ll be where we want to be?”