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“I would like to ask a question,” said Scott presently. “Could you, Miss Bierce, translate one so-called word of that prayer? Because I’m very curious about this lizard-god. What’s he called? O Great and Scaly One?”
Meoraq’s eyes opened.
“Do you know what I think?” Scott pressed, oblivious to the narrow, red stare now boring into him. “I think you’re making it up. I don’t think you have the first clue what that thing is saying. I think you’re just too stubborn to admit it’s not saying anything at all.”
“Dude,” murmured Dag, watching Meoraq’s head slowly tip to one side. “You might want to drop this.”
“No, I think it’s long past time we had this out.” Scott came briskly back to the fireside and stood over Meoraq with his arms folded in his most commanding posture. “Say something,” he ordered. “Say anything. Talk. Pray. Heck, sing some dirty limericks. Come on, Meoraq. Let’s hear it.”
Heads turned all around the camp as people waited for Meoraq to speak.
Meoraq kept his narrow stare on Scott and did not say one word.
People began to whisper.
Scott threw up both hands in a gesture that was at once victory and surrender. “Miss Bierce, you justified the tremendous danger of bringing that thing into my camp by insisting that it could act as our guide once we had achieved some form of communication. Now I think I’ve been more than patient with you—”
“Bullshit you have!” Amber sputtered.
“—but all I’ve gotten out of the endeavor so far is a lot of argument and profanity,” Scott concluded. He didn’t shout. It was actually worse that way. If he’d shouted, she could have jumped up and shouted back, but as it was, he just talked, sounding disappointed but so damned reasonable. “All you had to do was teach that thing enough English to tell us, oh, anything! What his people are called! What planet this is! Yes, no, anything!”
“I tried!”
“She tried!” Nicci came out of the crowd of Manifestors, past a suddenly-flustered Scott, to stand at Amber’s side. “She tried every single day. For hours. No one can make someone else speak English.”
“Yeah, come on.” And that was Maria, miraculously enough. Lawsuit Lady herself, ignoring Eric’s whispers to stand up and take a challenging step forward. “What was she supposed to do? Hold hot irons to his feet?”
Meoraq’s head tipped back. He looked at Amber.
“He can talk,” Maria declared. “Even I can understand him a little, and so could you if you weren’t too busy campaigning to listen.”
Scott gazed at her for a moment or two while Eric raked his hands through his hair. “And what was he saying, Miss Alverez?”
Maria hesitated, looking at Meoraq, who kept his eyes on Amber. “I couldn’t quite…He was talking pretty fast.”
“In other words, you don’t know.”
“I—”
“And yet you’re convinced it was a prayer. How do his prayers usually go?”
Maria sat down again and put her hand on Eric’s knee almost defensively. Eric wouldn’t look at her.
“So, in point of fact,” Scott continued, “you didn’t understand any of it.”
Maria opened her mouth. Eric murmured something. She glared at him, but pressed her lips together, silent.
“I can appreciate that you’re trying to help, Miss Alverez,” said Scott, dismissing her with a wave, “but Miss Bierce needs to answer for her own failures.”
“My failures?” Amber echoed. “It’s complicated, goddammit!”
“And if you have something to say, Miss Bierce, find a way to say it without turning it into a personal attack.”
Meoraq glanced at him and snorted. It was nice to know that someone else saw the irony in that, since it seemed that most of the people watching them did not.
“It’s complicated,” Amber said again, struggling to keep her voice down and sound as reasonable as he did. To her own ears, she sounded weak and sullen—a child making excuses for skipped homework. “Everything he says can change just by how he says it! Like…ga
“Guns?” All of a sudden, Scott was interested again. “Those things have guns?”
“If you’re going to interrupt, pay attention,” she snapped. “Ga
Meoraq glanced over at her.
“Which I think is the name of this world. And ga
“Well, I still don’t hear words in there at all,” Scott a
“Oh for Christ’s sake, how stupid are you?” Amber exploded. “Look at him! He’s wearing clothes!”
“Yeah, and my Aunt Harriet used to put hats on her terriers all the time, but that didn’t make them people.”
“He’s wearing boots and pants and everything but a fucking top hat and a pair of spats, not to mention all the knives! I mean, what are you really suggesting here? That someone dressed him up and turned him loose? Can Aunt Harriet’s terriers put up a tent? Start a fire? Whose food are you eating right now, you fucking moron?”
“I’m not going to tell you again to stop with the profanities. And all I’m suggesting is that the things you like to call proof of intelligence look to me like nothing more than proof that some as-yet unknown master race has trained a considerably lesser one to perform certain menial tasks. Look at it logically,” he said, turning back to the Manifestors. “As Miss Bierce herself acknowledges, he’s starting our fires, providing our food, patrolling around our camp…tasks he took on literally the moment he met us!”
Meoraq’s head tipped a little further. The fading yellow stripes on his throat grew a little brighter. He said nothing, did not move.
“But has he tried to learn our language? No. In fact, does he make any effort to speak with anyone who doesn’t speak to him first? No. Does he show the slightest curiosity about where we come from? No!” Scott began to pace back and forth in front of the murmuring crowd, gesturing now and then to punctuate his points. His color was high; his step, light. He was a man in his element and, ragged uniform and scruffy beard-stubble aside, he looked good when he was there. “When native tribes are first discovered by a civilized society, they react, ladies and gentlemen. They show awe. Curiosity. Excitement. They’re people who recognize foreign people for the first time and it’s an amazing, fantastic moment for them! But has this…Meoraq ever showed even a smidgeon of interest in…in our clothes, for example? Has he ever tried to touch someone’s hair? Indicated that he even noticed we have more fingers? Different features? Different bodies? No! Obviously, there is some higher life on this planet somewhere,” Scott concluded. “But after observing this particular specimen, I am more convinced than ever that we haven’t found it yet. What we have here is…”
He paused dramatically to think, and in that pause, Amber suddenly realized that she had been struck speechless for the first time in her life. It was a terrifying thought; maybe it had been outrage that silenced her, but she’d been just as silent all the same. Mesmerized. Not just letting him say it, but letting him say it in front of Meoraq.
She opened her mouth.
Meoraq put his hand on her shoulder without looking at her and squeezed hard.
She closed her mouth, fuming.
“Okay,” said Scott, holding up both hands as if to quiet all the people who weren’t talking anyway. “What we appear to be dealing with is a kind of dog. And before you all get offended on its behalf—”
No one appeared to be offended. Amber opened her mouth again and this time got a squeeze and a silencing point. He still didn’t look at her.
“—dogs can be highly specialized animals,” Scott concluded. “We have bomb dogs, don’t we? Drug dogs. Seeing eyes and hearing ears. And of course, attack dogs. My point is, no matter how well-trained the dog is, no one would ever confuse it for a sentient life form, would they? And why not? Because even when the dog can do what it does better than anyone else around it, it still can’t think.”
“Just because he can’t speak English doesn’t mean he can’t think!” Amber insisted, shrugging off Meoraq’s hand. “He—He drew pictures, for crying out loud! He gestures! He—”
“So do monkeys,” said Scott.
“But if he’s so intelligent,” said Dag, and immediately backed off when Meoraq looked his way, “and I’m not saying you aren’t, man. But if he is, how come he can manage twenty different ways to say ga
Everyone looked at Meoraq, Amber among them. Meoraq eyed them all and then just looked at Amber. His spines were flat again.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “Maybe we’re thinking of it too…one-dimensionally. Like sound is all there is. But for him, the way you say it matters as much as the sounds it makes. I don’t know.”
“That’s such a ludicrous answer,” muttered Scott, and made a point of walking away a few steps just so he could shake his head and come back. “Just admit it, you’re as clueless as the rest of us.”
“I did admit it,” she said tightly. “That’s what I don’t know means.”
“And for those people who are trying to learn a non-inflected language like English when their own is more tonal,” interrupted Yao, “it can be very difficult. There are five different ways to say ma in Mandarin. It can mean anything from mother to horse. Language is not a science, Mr. Scott. It is far more abstract than most people realize, and to this I would add that the physical structure of our speech may be impossible for him to emulate.”
“Yeah, that’s another thing,” said Amber. “His mouth. He doesn’t have lips, you know? And his tongue is all weird.”
Crandall made a loud, derisively suggestive sound that earned him all of Meoraq’s attention.
“You’re a dick,” Amber snapped. And to everyone else, said, “I mean it’s different from a normal tongue. A human tongue,” she amended, catching a narrow glance from the lizard. “I don’t think it moves much. He pretty much only uses it to chew, so however he’s making the sounds he makes, he’s not doing it the way we do.”
“As usual,” Scott sighed, “you don’t know what you’re talking about.”