“If he ever is.” It was as if someone else sat down at a control console in Flandry’s brain and made him say, “Why did he bring in barbarians?”
“He must’ve gone elsewhere himself and needed them to guard Virgil.” She looked aside. “I asked a couple of your men who’d watched on viewscreens, what that ship was like. ’Twas Darthan, from their descriptions. Not truly hostile folk.”
“As long as they aren’t given the chance to be! We’d offered Pax, and nevertheless they fired.”
“They … well, Darthans often act like that. Their culture makes it hard for them to believe a call for truce is honest. Hugh had to take what he could get in a hurry. After everything that’d happened, what reason had he to tell them someone might come for parley? He’s mortal! He can’t think of everything!”
Flandry slumped. “I suppose not, my lady.”
A fluting went through the forest. Kathryn waited a minute before she said gently, “You know, you haven’t yet spoken my right name.”
He replied in his emptiness: “How can I? Men are gone because of what I did.”
“Oh, Dominic!” The tears broke forth out of her. He fought to hold back his own.
They found themselves kneeling together, his face hidden against her breasts, his arms around her waist and her left around his neck, her right hand smoothing his hair while he shuddered.
“Dominic, Dominic,” she whispered to him. “I know. How well I know. My man’s a captain too. More ships, more lives than you could count. How often I’ve seen him readin’ casualty reports! I’ll tell you, he’s come to me and closed the door so he could weep. He’s made his errors that killed men. What commander hasn’t? But somebody’s got to command. It’s your duty. You weigh the facts best’s you’re able, and decide, and act, and long’s you did do your best, you never look back. You needn’t. You mustn’t.
“Dominic, we didn’t make this carnivore universe. We only live here, and have to try and cope.
“Who said you were in error? Your estimate was completely reasonable. I don’t believe any board of inquiry ’ud blame you. If Hugh couldn’t foresee you’d come with me, how could you foresee — ? Dominic, look up, be glad again.”
A moment’s hell-colored light struck through the eastern leaves. Seconds after, the air roared and a queasy vibration moved the ground.
Men stumbled to their feet. Flandry and Kathryn bounded apart. “What’s that?” cried Saavedra.
“That,” Flandry yelled into the wind that had arisen, “was the second barbarian ship making sure of our boat.”
A minute later they heard the ongoing thunderclap of a large body traveling at supersonic speed. It faded into a terrible whistle and was gone. The gust died out and startled flying creatures circled noisily back toward their trees.
“High-yield warhead,” Flandry judged. “They meant to kill within several kilometers’ radius.” He held a wet finger to the normal dawn breeze. “The fallout’s bound east; we needn’t worry. I’m stonkerish glad we hiked this far yesterday!”
Kathryn took both his hands. “Your doin’ alone, Dominic,” she said. “Will that stop your grief?”
It didn’t really. But she had given him the courage to think: Very well. Nothing’s accomplished by these idealistic broodings. Dead’s dead. My job is to salvage the living … and afterward, if there is an afterward, use whatever tricks I can to prevent my superiors from blaming me too severely.
No doubt my conscience will. But maybe I can learn how to jettison it. An officer of the Empire is much more efficient without one.
“At ease, men,” he said. “Well spend the next rotation period here, recuperating, before we push on.”
IX
The forest opened abruptly on cleared land. Stepping out, Flandry saw ordered rows of bushes. On three sides the farm was hemmed in by jungle, on the fourth it dropped into a valley full of vapors. The trend of his six Didonian days of travel had been upward.
He didn’t notice the agriculture at once. “Hold!” he barked. The blaster jumped into his grasp. A rhinoceros herd?
No … not really … of course not. Lord Advisor Mulele’s African preserve lay 200 light-years remote. The half-dozen animals before him had the size and general build of rhinos, though their nearly hairless slate-blue skins were smooth rather than wrinkled and tails were lacking. But the shoulders of each protruded sidewise to make a virtual platform. The ears were big and fanlike. The skull bulged high above a pair of beady eyes, supported a horn on the nose, then tapered to a muzzle whose mouth was oddly soft and flexible. The horn offset that effect by being a great ebony blade with a saw-toothed ridge behind it.
“Wait, Dominic!” Kathryn sped to join him. “Don’t shoot. Those’re nogas.”
“Hm?” He lowered the gun.
“Our word. Humans can’t pronounce any Didonian language.”
“You mean they are the—” Flandry had encountered curious forms of sophont, but none without some equivalent of hands. What value would an intelligence have that could not actively reshape its environment?
Peering closer, he saw that the beasts were not at graze. Two knelt in a corner of the field, grubbing stumps, while a third rolled a trimmed log toward a building whose roof was visible over a hillcrest. The fourth dragged a crude wooden plow across the newly acquired ground. The fifth came behind, its harness enabling it to steer. A pair of smaller animals rode on its shoulders. That area was some distance off, details hard to make out through the hazy air. The sixth, nearer to Flandry, was not feeding so much as removing weeds from among the bushes.
“C’mon!” Kathryn dashed ahead, lightfoot under her pack.
The trip had been day-and-night trudgery. In camp, he and she had been too occupied — the only ones with wilderness experience — for any meaningful talk before they must sleep. But they were rewarded; unable to mourn, they began to mend. Now eagerness made her suddenly so vivid that Flandry lost consciousness of his surroundings. She became everything he could know, like a nearby sun.
“Halloo!” She stopped and waved her arms.
The nogas halted too and squinted nearsightedly. Their ears and noses twitched, straining into the rank dank heat. Flandry was jolted back to the world. They could attack her. “Deploy,” he rapped at those of his men who carried weapons. “Half circle behind me. The rest of you stand at the trailhead.” He ran to Kathryn’s side.
Wings beat. A creature that had been hovering, barely visible amidst low clouds, dropped straight toward the sixth noga. “A krippo.” Kathryn seized Flandry’s hand. “I wish I could’ve told you in advance. But watch. ’Tis wonderful.”
The nogas were presumably more or less mammalian, also in their reproductive pattern: the sexes were obvious, the females had udders. The krippo resembled a bird … did it? The body was comparable to that of a large goose, with feathers gray-brown above, pale gray below, tipped with blue around the throat, on the pinions, at the end of a long triangular tail. The claws were strong, meant to grab and hang on. The neck was fairly long itself, supporting a head that swelled grotesquely backward. The face seemed to consist mainly of two great topaz eyes. And there was no beak, only a red cartilaginous tube.
The krippo landed on the noga’s right shoulder. It thrust a ropy tongue (?) from the tube. Flandry noticed a knot on either side of the noga, just below the platform. The right one uncoiled, revealing itself to be a member suggestive of a tentacle, more than two meters in length if fully outstretched. The krippo’s extended equivalent, the “tongue,” plunged into a sphincter at the end of this. Linked, the two organisms trotted toward the humans.
“We’re still lackin’ a ruka,” Kathryn said. “No, wait.” The noga behind the plow had bellowed. “That entity’s callin’ for one. Heesh’s own ruka has to unharness heesh ’fore heesh can come to us.”
“But the rest—” Flandry pointed. Four nogas merely stood where they were.
“Sure,” Kathryn said. “Without partners, they’re dumb brutes. They
won’t act, ’cept for the kind of rote job they were doin’, till they get a signal from a complete entity … Ah. Here we go.”
A new animal dropped from a tree and scampered over the furrows. It was less analogous to an ape than the noga was to a rhinoceros or the krippo to a bird. However, a Terran was bound to think of it in such terms. About a meter tall if it stood erect, it must use its short, bowed legs arboreally by choice, for it ran on all fours and either foot terminated in three well-developed grasping digits. The tail was prehensile. The chest, shoulders, and arms were enormous in proportion, greater than a man’s; and besides three fingers, each hand possessed a true thumb. The head was similarly massive, round, with bowl-shaped ears and luminous brown eyes. Like the krippo, this creature had no nose or mouth, simply a nostrilled tube. Black hair covered it, except where ears, extremities, and a throat pouch showed blue skin. It — he — was male. He wore a belt supporting a purse and an iron dagger.
“Is that a Didonian?” Flandry asked. “A ruka,” Kathryn said. “One-third of a Dodonian.” The animal reached the noga closest to the humans. He bounded onto the left shoulder, settled down by the krippo, and thrust out a “tongue” of his own to join the remaining “tentacle.”
“You see,” Kathryn said hurriedly, “we had to name them somehow. In most Didonian languages, the species are called things answerin’ roughly to ‘feet,’ ‘wings,’ and ‘hands.’ But that’d get confusin’ in Anglic. So, long’s Aenean dialects contain some Russko anyhow, we settled on ‘noga,’ ‘krippo,’ ‘ruka.’ ” The tripartite being stopped a few meters off. “Rest your gun. Heesh won’t hurt us.” She went to meet it. Flandry followed, a bit dazed. Symbiotic relationships were not unknown to him. The most spectacular case he’d met hitherto was among the Togru-Kon-Tanakh of Vanrijn. A gorilloid supplied hands and strength; a small, carapaced partner had brains and keen eyes; the detachable organs that linked them contained cells for joining the two nervous systems into one. Apparently evolution on Dido had gone the same way.
But off the deep end! Flandry thought. To the point where the two little types no longer even eat, but draw blood off the big one. Lord, how horrible. Never to revel in a tournedos or a pêche flambée—
He and Kathryn stopped before the autochthon. A horsey aroma, not unpleasant, wafted down a light, barely cooling breeze. Flandry wondered which pair of eyes to meet.
The noga grunted. The krippo trilled through its nostrils, which must have some kind of strings and resonating chamber. The ruka inflated his throat pouch and produced a surprising variety of sounds.
Kathryn listened intently. “I’m no expert in this language,” she said, “but they do speak a related one ’round Port Frederiksen, so I can follow ’long fairly well. Heesh’s name is Master Of Songs, though ‘name’ has the wrong connotations … ” She uttered vocables. Flandry caught a few Anglic words, but couldn’t really understand her.
I suppose all Didonians are too alien to learn a human tongue, he thought. The xenologists must have worked out different pidgins for the different linguistic families: noises that a Terran epiglottis can wrap itself around, on a semantic pattern that a Didonian can comprehend. He regarded Kathryn with renewed marveling. What brains that must have taken!
Three voices answered her. The impossibility of a human talking a Didonian language can’t just be a matter of larynx and mouth, Flandry realized. A vocalizer would deal with that. No, the structure’s doubtless contrapuntal.
“Heesh doesn’t know pidgin,” Kathryn told him. “But Cave Discoverer does. They’ll assemble heesh for us.”
“Heesh?”
She chuckled. “What pronoun’s right, in a situation like this? A few cultures insist on some particular sex distribution in the units of an entity. But for most, sex isn’t what matters, ’tis the species and individual capabilities of the units, and they form entities in whatever combinations seem best at a given time. So we call a partnership, whether complete or two-way, ’heesh.” And we don’t fool ’round inflectin’ the word.”
The krippo took off in a racket of wings. The ruka stayed aboard the noga. But it was as if a light had dimmed. The two stared at the humans a while, then the ruka scratched himself and the noga began cropping weeds.
“You need all three for full intelligence,” Flandry deduced.
Kathryn nodded. “M-hm. The rukas have the most forebrain. Alone, one of them is ’bout equal to a chimpanzee. Is that right, the smartest Terran subhuman? And the noga alone is pretty stupid. A three-way, though, can think as well as you or I. Maybe better, if comparison’s possible. We’re still tryin’ to find tests and measurements that make sense.” She frowned. “Do have the boys put away their guns. We’re ’mong good people.”
Flandry acceded, but left his followers posted where they were. If anything went agley, he wanted that trail held. The hurt men lay there on their stretchers.
The other partnership finished disengaging itself — no, heeshself — from the plow. The earth thudded to the gallop of heesh’s noga; krippo and ruka must be hanging on tight! Kathryn addressed this Didonian when heesh arrived, also without result though she did get a response. This she translated as: “Meet Skilled With Soil, who knows of our race even if none of heesh’s units have learned pidgin.”
Flandry rubbed his chin. His last application of anti-beard enzyme was still keeping it smooth, but he lamented the scraggly walrus effect that his mustache was sprouting. “I take it,” he said, “that invidi — uh, units swap around to form, uh, entities whose natural endowment is optimum for whatever is to be done?”
“Yes. In most cultures we’ve studied. Skilled With Soil is evidently just what the phrase implies, a gifted farmer. In other combinations, heesh’s units might be part of an outstandin’ hunter or artisan or musician or whatever. That’s why there’s no requirement for a large population in order to have a variety of specialists within a communion.”
“Did you say ‘communion’?”
“Seems more accurate than ‘community,’ true?”
“But why doesn’t everybody know what anybody does?”
“Well, leamin’ does seem to go easier’n for our race, but ’tis not instantaneous. Memory traces have to be reinforced if they’re not to fade out; skills have to be developed through practice. And, naturly, a brain holds the kind of memories and skills ’tis equipped to hold. For instance, nogas keep the botanical knowledge, ’cause they do the eatin’; rukas, havin’ hands, remember the manual trades; krippos store meteorological and geographical data. Tis not quite that simple, really. All species store some information of every sort — we think — ’speci’ly language. But you get the idea, I’m sure.”
“Nonetheless—”
“Let me continue, Dominic.” Enthusiasm sparkled from Kathryn as Flandry had never seen it from a woman before. “Question of culture. Didonian societies vary as much as ever Terran ones did. Certain cultures let entities form promiscuously. The result is, units learn less from others than they might, for lack of concentrated attention; emotional and intellectual life is shallow; the group stays at a low level of savagery. Certain other cultures are ’stremely restrictive ’bout relationships. For ’sample, the units of an entity are often s’posed to belong to each other ’sclusively till death do them part, ’cept for a grugin’ temporary linkage with immature ones as a necessity of education. Those societies tend to be further along technologically, but nowhere beyond the stone age and everywhere esthetically impoverished. In neither case are the Didonians realizin’ their full potential.”
“I see,” Flandry drawled. “Playboys versus puritans.”
She blinked, then grinned. “As you will. Anyhow, most cultures — like this one, clearly — do it right. Every unit belongs to a few stable entities, dividin’ time roughly equally ’mong them. That way, these entities develop true personalities, broadly backgrounded but each with a maximum talent in heesh’s specialty. In addition, less developed partnerships are assembled temporarily at need.”<
br />
She glanced skyward. “I think Cave Discoverer’s ’bout to be created for us,” she said.
Two krippos circled down. One presumably belonged to Master Of Songs, the other to Cave Discoverer, though Flandry couldn’t tell them apart. Master Of Songs and Cave Discoverer apparently had a noga and ruka in
common.
The bird shape in the lead took stance on the platform. The companion flew off to find a noga for itself. More krippos were appearing over the trees, more rukas scampering from the woods or the house. We’ll have a regular town meeting here in a minute, Flandry anticipated.
He directed his awareness back to Kathryn and Cave Discoverer. A dialogue had commenced between them. It went haltingly at first, neither party having encountered pidgin for some years and the language of this neighborhood not being precisely identical with that which was spoken around Port Frederiksen. After a while, discourse gained momentum.
The rest of the communion arrived to watch, listen, and have the talk interpreted for them — aside from those who were out hunting or gathering, as Flandry learned later. An entity moved close to him. The ruka sprang off and approached, trailing the noga’s thick “umbilicus” across a shoulder. Blue fingers plucked at Flandry’s clothes and tried to unsheath his blaster for examination. The man didn’t want to allow that, even if he put the weapon on safety, but Kathryn might disapprove of outright refusal. Removing his homemade packsack, he spread its contents on the ground. That served to keep the rukas of several curious entities occupied. After he saw they were not stealing or damaging, Flandry sat down and let his mind wander until it got to Kathryn. There it stayed.
An hour or so had passed, the brief day was drawing to a close, when she summoned him with a wave. “They’re glad to meet us, willin’ to offer hospitality,” she said, “but dubious ’bout helpin’ us across the mountains. The dwellers yonder are dangerous. Also, this is a busy season in the forest as well as the plowland. At the same time, the communion ’ud surely like the payment I promise, things like firearms and proper steel tools. They’ll create one they call Many Thoughts and let heesh ponder the question. Meanwhile we’re invited to stay.”
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