Miniature eyestalks waved up at him, and the topmost mouth opened. The translator said, “Who but I? No one else is here.”
“I don’t get it. I understand you, but the one who brought me here hardly made sense at all. I know that the translator improves as it hears more of a language, but it shouldn’t be this fast.”
A pincer claw pointed to the unit at Friday’s waist. “I s that the ‘translator’?”
“Sure. Do you also have such things?”
“We have … other ways. Better ways for translation, ways that do not allow mistakes. I think that we communicate, but I am not sure. As for understanding the one who brought you here, it cannot be expected.”
“Does it speak a different language?”
“It speaks no language, no true language. It is not a leader. It is a lower, a Level Three.”
“You mean, a sort of moron?”
“It is Level Three. A patroller, a guard, a worker.”
“I get it. I had the same sort of problem on my ship, workers who couldn’t grasp the big picture. I’m a leader, too.” He had missed with his earlier tries at first contact, but this looked like the right time for it. “Let me explain who I am, and why I am here. My name is Friday Indigo, and I have come to this world from another star system. I am the captain of a starship, the Mood Indigo , which is stranded near the shore not far from here. I am also the representative of all humans, and of all other intelligent species who are members of the Stellar Group. I would welcome the chance to compare your civilization with ours, and if possible to exchange elements of our technology.”
Even as he spoke, Friday wondered if he was being a trifle optimistic. The translator was working now — of course it hadn’t worked when he was talking to a half-wit minion, how could it? — but he was throwing at it some pretty high-level concepts.
For a few seconds he was afraid that he was right, and his speech had been too much for the translator. The little Indigoan in front of him — funny, when you saw a pint-sized one it looked like a cross between an Earth crab and a lobster — was waving its eyestalks in an excited way and whistling loudly. The translator whistled in sympathy, and finally said, “I question what was said to me. Repeat who you are, and what you are.”
“Sure. Let me try to keep it really simple. My name is Friday Indigo. I have come here from another star. I want to learn your technology, in exchange for giving you some of ours.”
It was hard to say it clearer than that, but the Indigoan leader seemed as agitated as ever.
“You are not from this world? You are not the dominant life-form and intelligence of this world?”
“I’m dominant and intelligent, sure I am. But you got it right, I’m not from this world. I came here from a world that orbits another star.” The oddity of the question finally got through to Friday. Why would somebody who was part of the dominant intelligent form of Limbo ask Friday if he was of the dominant form here? “Are you telling me that you’re not the leading life-form here, yourself?”
“Not from here, you are not from here. Where, if not from here?” The Indigoan was standing up, lifting itself from the table. It seemed awfully excited. “You will say all or die, as those died. You will say all, or you will join them.”
One pincer was now holding a small version of the familiar black cane, but that was not what gave Friday the chills. The cane was not pointing at him. It was directed toward the big wall panels that stood on each side of the room.
He wondered why he had not noticed them as he came in, then realized that once the lights came on he had been totally focused on the Indigoan leader. If he had observed on entry what he saw now, he would have run back outside and taken his chances with the line of guards.
On the easels hung four objects. They seemed oddly two-dimensional, but that was because they had been dried, carefully opened and dissected, and pinned flat.
Friday was staring at the desiccated remains of four bubble people.
21: REUNION
Bony had been very young when the quarantine was imposed, and in his childhood he had absorbed the widespread human bias against other members of the Stellar Group. Pipe-Rillas were hopeless cowards. Tinkers were unstable. Angels were enormously intelligent, but they were also obstinate, complaining, and inscrutable. It was an outrage that such flawed and inferior beings should control access to the stars, while denying it by quarantine to superior humans.
Perhaps; but when you were stranded on the seabed of an alien world with a major storm raging overhead, a limited air supply, and no idea what to do next, you became aware of other alien qualities.
Vow-of-Silence was crouching in the silt-filled water with the Angel cradled in two of her fore-limbs and an amorphous mass of Tinkers heaped by her side. As Bony and Liddy came up to her, the Pipe-Rilla bobbed her head toward the humans and said, “There is a slight difficulty. Although the Finder is no more than two or three kilometers away, the storm has so filled the water around us with suspended sediments that earlier sea-markers are invisible. Also, night approaches. We do not know in which direction we should proceed to reach our ship. Do you?”
For a coward the Pipe-Rilla sounded remarkably calm — much calmer than Bony felt. He looked at Liddy. She shrugged, and said to Vow-of-Silence, “I’m afraid we don’t.”
Bony felt like an idiot — setting a beacon for your return path should be second nature to anyone who claimed technical competence. The Angel said, “ ‘Full fathom five, thy Finder lies,’ ” which didn’t seem to help at all.
Vow-of-Silence said, “Very good. Eager Seeker, I’m sorry to trouble you. If you wouldn’t mind?”
Eager Seeker offered no reply, but the whole heap of the Tinker Composite disassembled, rose, and circled briefly like an underwater tornado. Then the components streaked away in all directions.
Bony said, “What?” but Liddy’s nudge saved him from making a bigger fool of himself. After a couple of minutes the Angel added, “ ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’ ” Five minutes later the Tinker components came streaming back. They merged to make a tall column, held there for maybe ten seconds, then reformed to create a horizontal line that snaked away into the murk.
“Thank you, Eager Seeker.” Vow-of-Silence gestured to Bony and Liddy with one of her fore-limbs. “After you.”
“How could the Tinker understand that?” Liddy asked Bony, as they followed the strung-out line of components. “I thought they had no intelligence unless they were formed into a Composite.”
She spoke softly, but Vow-of-Silence heard her. “Indeed they do not.” The Pipe-Rilla with her Angel burden was close behind. As she moved to Bony’s side, the individual components in the line of Tinkers behind her coalesced into a rough sphere.
“My reply was formal politeness,” Vow-of-Silence went on, “and no more than that. I will repeat our expression of gratitude when we reach the ship, and Eager Seeker is once more fully assembled into a higher consciousness.”
The Angel said nothing. The blue-green fronds were furled about the upper body, and to Bony’s eye the resemblance to a large vegetable became complete.
The little party trudged on across the seafloor as twilight edged toward night. Flickers of lightning, faint and far-off, picked out the guiding column of Tinkers. It seemed far more than three kilometers when the rococo outline of the toppled Finder at last appeared.
Bony was too tired to do more than struggle aboard, remove his suit, and find a place to lie down on a cluttered floor that was actually a wall. After a few seconds Liddy came to curl up beside him. She snuggled close but said not a word. Bony was left to reflect that this was an adolescent’s dream. He was spending the night with a woman who had been trained in the Leah Rainbow Academy for the Daughters of Gentlefolk, a woman who had been trained to please men in a hundred different ways. A woman, moreover, who seemed to like him and had told him that he was attractive.