"Tireless Worker is this person. Youngster is this person," squirted Precise Talker at Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion. "Baby is resting in next room. Grabbers of Baby are still budding, so Baby talk-not yet."
☼Do Baby and Youngster have names?☼ asked Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion.
"Names given after third Homebringing, when new-Baby is brought home at Homebringing. Old-Baby becomes new-Youngster. Old-Youngster leaves nursery and is apprenticed to another Home. Old-Youngster is given name by Mother of new-Home."
Precise Talker sent out a gatherfish to squirt at one of the tethered gatherfish of Youngster. "Meet new-friend Loud-Hot-Red."
The eyefish and gatherfish of Youngster had been looking and tasting Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion during the discussion.
"Stinks!" said Youngster, its gatherfish withdrawing to avoid the strong ammonia odor which Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion emitted.
A gatherfish darted from the mouth of Tireless Worker and zoomed to the dorsal fin of Youngster, where its stingers gave the young wereshark an electrical shock that even Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion could feel. There was a chirp of pain from the main body of Youngster as all of her appendages pulled back rapidly into their sockets in the head and mouth.
"Youngster say greeting properly and politely!" warned Tireless Worker with a squirt at Youngster from another gatherfish.
Youngster opened its mouth and a gatherfish exited slowly, dragging an umbilical behind it.
"Release grabber ..." warned Tireless Worker.
The gatherfish reluctantly released the umbilical and swam up to Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion, where it released a small jet of taste, then darted quickly back inside Youngster's mouth.
"Welcome to Green Home, new-friend Loud-Hot-Red," said the taste cloud.
Both Precise Talker and Tireless Worker sent out gatherfish to squirt some glucose of praise at Youngster.
Just then, the nursery door slid open, and Careful Harvester came in, her gatherfish herding two small filter-fish in front of her. The smallest filter-fish was herded into the small room. Baby awoke, immediately gobbled the fish up in one bite, then closed its eyes again.
"Baby seems to spend lot of time with its eyes shut and doing nothing!" said Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion. "Just like humans!"
"Baby has growing and changing to do," explained Precise Talker. "Baby must grow grabbers in mouth so it can talk, and Baby must change insides so it can lay eggs."
Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion had been specifically warned by Cinnamon and Reiki not to ask any questions about the sex life of the weresharks, so he didn't comment on Precise Talkers last statement. He knew, however, that the humans would be very interested to know that Baby was changing sexes. During their language lessons, the flouwen had learned that all the weresharks were females, and that all of them expected, in time, to participate in the swarming that occurred during the extreme midnight tide, in the hopes of bringing home a baby in their mouths. The humans had guessed that the lake-fish were not only the babies, but the males of the species, and this statement now showed that they were probably right, but the males changed into females as they grew older.
Back in the other room, Careful Harvester was feeding the other filter-fish to Youngster. Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion could taste her conversation with the young wereshark.
"Play-not with fishfruit!"
"Fishfruit gone," said Youngster a short while later. "More?"
"More-fishfruit I get you," said Careful Harvester, to Youngster, then sent another gatherfish over to squirt a comment to Tireless Worker. The amount of scent used in the phrase was small, but the flavors were so strong that Precise Talker and Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion had no problem tasting it. "More-ventplants I must set out. Demontrees, Swiftmovers, and Slimedevils steal most of ripe-fishfruit."
The scents for "Demontrees", "Swiftmovers", "Slimedevils" and "stealing", with their odious overtones, dominated the taste of the phrase that Careful Harvester had squirted, and the unpleasant scent hung in the room. Careful Harvester knew that she shouldn't have used such words within tasting of Loud-Hot-Red, but although the others in the Swimming had managed to do so, she had never forgiven the red-colored alien Slimedevil for killing her fellow vent-field worker, Steadfast Defender.
"You set out ventplants on purpose?!?" exclaimed Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion. "I did not know! Jollys did not know! Humans did not know! We thought they grew by themselves and were free for anyone to take! We did not know they were yours!"
It was hard for Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion to bring himself to apologize, but when he did, he did it thoroughly, carefully making sure that he emitted the same odious tastenames that Careful Harvester had used.
"I apologize for the terrible behavior of myself and my fellow Slimedevils in stealing your fishfruit. I apologize also for the stealing of your fishfruit by my friends the Demontrees and the Swiftmovers. When I return, I will inform them all that the fishfruit are yours, and are not for anyone to take. It will not happen again." Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion knew that the flouwen and the humans would keep that promise, but he had doubts about the Jollys.
Precise Talker then took Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion to the next room. It was a large one in the center of Green Home. On one long side of the rectangular room was a high table. At each end of the table was an ornate openwork cage made of carved stone, and in each cage were some fat worms, their bodies glowing dimly in the blue-green. At one end of the table were a number of small stone jars with lids, each jar a different size and a different color. From what he had learned about the wereshark culture during the language lessons, Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion knew this was the Home Altar, and these were the Telling Jars that held the prime number of pebbles for the various levels of honor chants to the Home ancestors. Along the back of the altar were a number of statues of mature weresharks. Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion was intrigued that the statues were designed to be seen with sound as well as looked at with light, since there were density differences inside that added an internal dimension to the surface features. Most of the statues were merely heads, but one was of a Demonfish with three lake-fish inside its mouth. Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion wondered what sort of story went with that one.
Along the wall opposite the altar was a long stone rack holding a large number of scrolls. On top of the scroll-rack was another cage of glowgrubs and a number of other statues. Unlike the ones on the altar, which were representations of deceased weresharks, these had freeform or geometrical shapes. Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion was intrigued with one that consisted of all the regular solids, a dense tetrahedron, inside a less dense square ... all the way up to a low-density twenty-sided icosahedron.
Precise Talker sent a gatherfish to each of the light-cages and soon all the glowgrubs were giving off a bright bluish light. Since the wereshark obviously wanted to have him look at something, and not just see it, Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion quickly formed an eye-lens. Precise Talker then proudly displayed her collection of carved stone Telling Jars and the prime number of colored pebbles in each one, holding each pebble up in front of the light-cage to show its color and flawlessness and commenting on how well the colors of the pebbles matched.
Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion was politely complimentary about each pebble collection, although his cells itched to ask the obvious. If the wereshark masons were so capable of cutting, grinding, carving, and etching stone, then why did Precise Talker take so much pride in the fact that the not-quite-similar stones in each jar were formed naturally, when it would have been very simple for the masons to make identical pebbles for each Telling Jar. Reiki, having heard from the flouwen that the weresharks had household altars, had warned the flouwen that to ask questions about religion was even worse than asking questions about sex, so Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion kept his questions to himself.
Now that the light in the room was brighter, Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion could look with his eye and confirm what the chirps from his body had been seeing about one of the statues on the altar. Unlike t
he others, that showed a normal wereshark head with its mobile appendages in their sockets, this one showed the open-mouthed head of a wereshark with no eyefish and no gatherfish. The gills on the head were also spread painfully wide, as if the wereshark was in panic or agony.
"Who is that?" asked Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion, using a pseudopod to point.
"Statue is reminder of Steadfast Defender," said Precise Talker. The chemicals she squirted were low in intensity and did not have any overtones of anger. "Steadfast Defender was only person in recent-memory of Swimming to die defending her home ..." There was a long pause, and then another gatherfish appeared from inside Precise Talkers mouth. "... from you."
Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion resolved right there to collect his own Telling Jar of colored pebbles. When he had done so, he would bring them here to this altar and Tell his own apology to the memory of Steadfast Defender. The only question in his mind was whether to make the number 59 or 101.
Precise Talker led the way out of the Altar Room into the next one. The walls of the room were lined from floor to ceiling with stone racks containing rolled up scrolls. In the center of the room was a younger wereshark hovering over a simple machine that held two scrolls side-by-side. The mouth of the apprentice was open, and two of its gatherfish were outside the mouth on umbilical connections, hovering over the flattened open portion of the two scrolls.
"Copy Room is this place," she said. "Apprentice Faithful Transcriber is this person."
Faithful Transcriber sent out a freely swimming gatherfish which squirted them both a greeting. Meanwhile, its two captive gatherfish continued with their tasks. One of the gatherfish was moving along one scroll, tasting the surface with its inner set of sucking tentacles, while the other gatherfish matched its motion along the surface of the other scroll. This gatherfish, however, was using its outer stinger tentacles to squirt complex tastes into the finely woven, linenlike scroll material.
"What is Faithful Transcriber doing?" asked Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion.
"Copying old-scroll to new-scroll," replied Precise Talker through a gatherfish. "Tastes fade with time, so scrolls must be recopied."
"You waste much time doing that!" objected Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion. "You need a method of making permanent records."
"Permanent-records we can make," said Precise Talker. "Ancients used strong chemicals emitted by their grabbers to etch pictographs and numbers on stone tablets. Etching symbols takes much time. Pictographs suitable-not for complex ideas. Writing tastes on scrolls much faster and better. Stone tablets now used by masons for permanent drawings only. Masons use-not anymore pictograph symbols. Masons use-now only number symbols for dimensions in drawings."
They swam out of the Copy Room. As they were leaving, Precise Talker added a comment, keeping the amount squirted low, so Faithful Transcriber wouldn't be able to taste what she said.
"Copying of scrolls is good method of impressing knowledge of ancients on unwilling brains of apprentices."
"What is in this room?" asked Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion, curious, as they passed by a sliding door with an unusual yet somehow familiar-looking peaked top. Most of the sliding doors is Green Home were rectangles. This door had a square bottom but a triangular top.
"Air Room is this place," said Precise Talker, swimming on.
"Can I see inside?" said Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion, curious.
"Important to you is request, then yes," said Precise Talker, the rapid motions of her gatherfish and eyefish showing her annoyance.
Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion slid open the door to reveal the smallest room in the home. The room was long and narrow, with a triangular peaked ceiling which tapered down and inward toward the back. It would just fit the body of a wereshark if the wereshark backed into the room. On the floor, at the rear of the room, was a carved receptacle shaped something like a bowl, with a hole in the bottom of it that went into the floor. The back wall of the Air Room had the same odd shape as the door, a rectangular bottom portion and a triangular top portion. In the middle of the wall was a lever.
"What is Air Room for?" asked Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion. There was a long silence as gatherfish after gatherfish appeared between the lips of Precise Talker, then withdrew back into her mouth without speaking.
"What does this lever do?" asked Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion, pushing down on it. Immediately there was a hissing sound, and through the back wall could be heard bubble after bubble of air making its way upwards, as if moving through a narrow channel. Water started to flow out through the hole in the bottom of the basin. Curious, Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion formed a red pseudo-pod and stuck it into the basin, allowing it to be dragged down into the hole by the rapidly flowing water. At this point, Precise Talker closed all six eyes and left with her mouth tightly shut, unable to speak. Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion let his pseudopod be dragged through the piping until it finally came to an exit. He issued a sonar chirp from the end of the pseudopod and looked around. His pseudopod had exited up at the top of the large pile of rocks under which Green Home lay. The exit point was high above the vent fields, where the prevailing ocean currents provided a constant flow of fresh water.
In the process of pulling back his pseudopod, Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion figured out how the mechanism in the Air Room worked. Below the room was a chamber full of air—no doubt kept full by some apprentice to Precise Talker. The air was released into the venting shaft by the lever that Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion had pushed. The air lifted the water in the shaft, pulling the water in from the basin, along with anything that had been deposited in the water.
Suddenly Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion realized why the door to the Air Room had looked so familiar when he first saw it. The Air Room was shaped like the diagram on the tablet. The mysterious tablet that had been tossed up on the shore was nothing more than a mason's working drawing for what Richard would call a shit house!
Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion caught up with Precise Talker as she entered the next room. Reiki had also warned the flouwen that after religion and sex, excretion was the next worst topic to bring up in polite conversation between alien species, so although Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion had questions about the operation of the Air Room, he kept them to himself.
The next room had a large floor with a large number of short grooves in the floor. In each groove were two large pebbles, one rough and one polished smooth. These pebbles were perfectly round, unlike the subtly oval pebbles that the weresharks preferred for their Telling Jars. Moving over the grooves was an apprentice, gatherfish out in front of her, pushing stones back and forth in the grooves. Precise Talker waited until the apprentice came to the end of her task. All the grooves now had their rough pebbles set at one end of the groove, while the smooth pebbles were either in the middle or at the other end of the groove. Once the apprentice marked the results in a scroll, Precise Talker introduced her.
"Accurate Calculator, this is, Loud-Hot-Red."
"Tasted, I have, that you know some mathematics," squirted Accurate Calculator.
"I know lots of mathematics!" bragged Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion, returning to his boasting manner now that he was in more familiar territory. "That must be a calculating machine. What are you calculating?"
"Factoring, I am, a number Precise Talker gave me. If factor I find-not, then Precise Talker a new prime number has found. Return to my task I must." With that, Accurate Calculator swam back to the end of the grooves and started moving pebbles again. Precise Talker and Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion left the room so that Accurate Calculator would not be disturbed.
"Is finding new prime numbers important to you?" asked Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion.
"Yes," replied Precise Talker. "Finding of new-primes is one way a person can leave wretched state of bodily desires and reach exalted state of spiritual purity."
With both sex and religion now suddenly topics of conversation, Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion moved quickly back to the safer subject of mathematics.
"Fortunately,
there are many prime numbers to be found."
"Concern we have, that primes come to end," said Precise Talker.
"Primes not come to end," replied Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion, with surety. "I prove to you. Take set of prime numbers. Any set. Even set you think contains all prime numbers. Multiply all primes in set together. Add one to get new number. Primes in set now cannot be factors of new number. New number either prime or not. If prime, it bigger than all primes in set, so it new prime. If new number not a prime, then it has prime factors. Prime factors not members of set you think contains all primes. Prime factors are then new primes. Either way, you get a new prime. Add new prime to set and repeat. You will repeat forever. Primes not come to end," he concluded.
Precise Talker was glad to hear that. She would be sure to include Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion's proof as her contribution to the news-scroll that circulated from Home to Home in the Swimming.
"Exists there method which will always generate a prime?"
"Yes."
"Tell me!"
"You not understand method."
"Teach me!"
"I teach you how to surf instead. Easier. More fun, too."
Roaring☼Hot☼Vermillion changed shape and headed out the exit door of Green Home, heading for the surface of the ocean and leaving behind a large pungent cloud. "LETS SURF!!!"
LAVA
RICHARD, at the lead of the work crew, paused at the top of the low ridge that separated Meander Valley from the narrower river valley that contained the Jolly village. A flood during the past rainy season had damaged the meeting dock at Wide Pond, and the humans were coming to reseat some pilings and replace a few missing planks. He glanced up at the red ball of Barnard as it began to slip slowly behind the planet Gargantua.
Rescued From Paradise Page 25
