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Wace leaned forward and forced his tongue around the grunting syllables of Tyrlanian: “We are friends. Do you understand me?”
A string of totally foreign words snapped at him. He shrugged, ruefully, and spread his hands. The Diomedean moved across the hull — bipedal, body slanted forward to balance wings and tail — and found the stud to which the humans’ lashings were anchored. Quickly, he knotted his own rope to the same place.
“A square knot,” said Van Rijn, almost quietly. “It makes me homesick.”
At the other end of the line, they began to haul the canoe closer. The Diomedean turned to Wace and pointed at his vessel. Wace nodded, realized that the gesture was probably meaningless here, and took a precarious step in that direction. The Diomedean caught another rope flung to him. He pointed at it, and at the humans, and made gestures.
“I understand,” said Van Rijn. “Nearer than this they dare not come. Too easy their boat gets smashed against us. We get this cord tied around our bodies, and they haul us across. Good St. Christopher, what a thing to do to a poor creaky-boned old man!”
“There’s our food, though,” said Wace.
The sky cruiser jerked and settled deeper. The Diomedean jittered nervously.
“No, no!” shouted Van Rijn. He seemed under the impression that if he only bellowed loudly enough, he could penetrate the linguistic barrier. His arms windmilled. “No! Never! Do you not understand, you oatmeal brains? Better to guggle down in your pest-begotten ocean than try eating your food. We die! Bellyache! Suicide!” He pointed at his mouth, slapped his abdomen, and waved at the rations.
Wace reflected grimly that evolution was too flexible. Here you had a planet with oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon, sulfur… a protein biochemistry forming genes, chromosomes, cells, tissues… protoplasm by any reasonable definition… and the human who tried to eat a fruit or steak from Diomedes would be dead ten minutes later of about fifty lethal allergic reactions. These just weren’t the right proteins. In fact, only immunization shots prevented men from getting chronic hay fever, asthma, and hives, merely from the air they breathed of the water they drank.
He had spent many cold hours today piling the cruiser’s food supplies out here, for transference to the raft. This luxury atmospheric vessel had been carried in Van Rijn’s spaceship, ready-stocked for extended picnic orgies when the mood struck him. There was enough rye bread, sweet butter, Edam cheese, lox, smoked turkey, dill pickles, fruit preserves, chocolate, plum pudding, beer, wine, and God knew what else, to keep three people going for a few months.
The Diomedean spread his wings, flapping them to maintain his footing. In the wan stormy light, the thumbs-turned-claws on their leading edge seemed to whicker past Van Rijn’s beaky face like a mowing machine operated by some modernistic Death. The merchant waited stolidly, now and then aiming a finger at the stacked cases. Finally the Diomedean got the idea, or simply gave in. There was scant time left. He whistled across to the canoe. A swarm of his fellows came over, undid the lashings and began transporting boxes. Wace helped Sandra fasten the rope about her. “I’m afraid it will be a wet haul, my lady,” he tried to smile.
She sneezed. “So” this is the brave pioneering between the stars! I will have a word or two for my court poets when I get home… if I do.”
When she was across, and the rope had been flown back, Van Rijn waved Wace ahead. He himself was arguing with the Diomedean chief. How it was done without a word of real language between them, Wace did not know, but they had reached the stage of screaming indignation at each other. Just as Wace set his teeth and went overboard, Van Rijn sat mutinously down.
And when the younger man made his drowned-rat arrival on board the canoe, the merchant had evidently won his point. A Diomedean could air-lift about fifty kilos for short distances. Three of them improvised a rope sling and carried Van Rijn over, above the water.
He had not yet reached the canoe when the skycruiser sank.
IV
The dugout held some hundred natives, all armed, some wearing helmets and breastplates of hard laminated leather. A catapult, just visible through the dark, was mounted at the bows; the stern held a cabin, made from sapling trunks chinked with sea weed, that towered up almost like the rear end of a medieval caravel. On its roof, two helmsmen strained at the long tiller.
“Plain to see, we have found a navy ship,” grunted Van Rijn. “Not so good, that. With a trader, I can talk. With some pest-and-pox officer with gold braids on his brain, him I can only shout.” He raised small, close-set gray eyes to a night heaven where lightning ramped. “I am a poor old si
After a while the humans were prodded between lithe devil-bodies, toward the cabin. The dugout had begun to run before the gale, on two reef points and a jib. The roll and pitch, clamor of waves and wind and thunder, had receded into the back of Wace’s consciousness. He wanted only to find some place that was dry, take off his clothes and crawl into bed and sleep for a hundred years.
The cabin was small. Three humans and two Diomedeans left barely room to sit down. But it was warm, and a stone lamp hung from the ceiling threw a dim light full of grotesquely moving shadows.
The native who had first met them was present. His volcanic-glass dagger lay unsheathed in one hand, and he held a wary lion-crouch; but half his attention seemed aimed at the other one, who was leaner and older, with flecks of gray in the fur, and who was tied to a corner post by a rawhide leash.
Sandra’s eyes narrowed. The blaster which Van Rijn had lent her slid quietly to her lap as she sat down. The Diomedean with the knife flicked his gaze across it, and Van Rijn swore. “You little all-thumbs brain, do you let him see what is a weapon?”
The first autochthone said something to the leashed one. The latter made a reply with a growl in it; then turned to the humans. When he spoke, it did not sound like the same language.
“So! An interpreter!” said Van Rijn. “You speakee Angly, ha? Haw, haw, haw!” He slapped his thigh.
“No, wait. It’s worth trying.” Wace dropped into Tyrlanian: “Do you understand me? This is the only speech we could possibly have in common.”
The captive raised his head-crest and sat up on hands and haunches. What he answered was almost familiar. “Speak slowly, if you will,” said Wace, and felt sleepiness drain out of him.
Meaning came through, thickly: “You do not use a version (?) of the Carnoi that I have heard before.”
“Carnoi—” Wait, yes, one of the Tyrlanians had mentioned a confederation of tribes far to the south, bearing some such name. “I am using the tongue of the folk of Tyrlan.”
“I know not that race (?). They do not winter in our grounds. Nor do any Carnoi as a regular (?) thing, but now and then when all are in the tropics (?) one of them happens by, so—” It faded into unintelligibility.
The Diomedean with the knife said something, impatiently, and got a curt answer. The interpreter said to Wace:
“I am Tolk, a mochra of the La
“A what of the what?” said Wace.
It is not easy even for two humans to converse, when it must be in different patois of a language foreign to both. The dense accents imposed by human vocal cords and Diomedean ears — they heard farther into the subsonic, but did not go quite so high in pitch, and the curve of maximum response was different — made it a slow and painful process indeed. Wace took an hour to get a few sentences’ worth of information.
Tolk was a linguistic specialist of the Great Flock of La