Summertide

If Darya did not cry out, it was only because her throat refused to function.

The creature standing in front of her lifted two of its dark-brown legs off the ground and reared up to tower over her. She saw a dark-red, segmented underside, and a short neck surrounded by bands of bright scarlet-and-white ruffles. That was topped by a white, eyeless head, twice the size of her own. There was no mouth, but a thin proboscis grew from the middle of the face and curled down to tuck into a pouch on the bottom of the pleated chin.

Darya heard a high-pitched series of chittering squeaks. Yellow open horns in the middle of the broad head turned to scan her body. Above them a pair of light-brown ante

She screamed and jumped backward, stumbling over the grassy tussock that she had been sitting on. As she did so a second figure came in a long, gliding leap to crouch down before the carapace of the first. It was another arthropod, almost as tall but with a sticklike body no thicker than Darya’s arm. The creature’s thin head was dominated by lemon-colored compound eyes, without eyelids. They swiveled on short eyestalks to examine her.

Darya became aware of a musky smell, complex and unfamiliar but not unpleasant, and a moment later the second being’s small mouth opened. “Atvar H’sial gives greetings,” a soft voice said in distorted but recognizable human speech.

The other creature said nothing. As the first shock faded Darya was able to think rationally again.

She had seen pictures. Nothing in them had suggested such a size and menacing presence, but the first arrival was a Cecropian, a member of the dominant species of the eight-hundred-world Cecropia Federation. The second animal must be an interpreter, the lower species that every Cecropian was said to need for interaction with humankind.

“I am Darya Lang,” she said slowly. The other two were so alien that her facial expressions probably had little meaning to them. She smiled anyway.

There was a pause, and again she was aware of the unfamiliar odor. The Cecropian’s twin yellow horns turned toward her. She could see that their insides were a delicate array of slender spiral tubes.

“Atvar H’sial offers apologies through the other.” One of the jointed arms of the silent Cecropian waved down to indicate the smaller beast by its feet. “We think perhaps we startled you.”

Which had to be the understatement of the year. It was disconcerting to hear words that had originated in the mind of one being issuing from the mouth of another. But Darya knew that the seed world for the Cecropian clade, their mother planet as Earth had been the mother-planet for all humans, was a cloudy globe circling the glimmer of a red dwarf star. In that stygian environment the Cecropians had never developed sight. Instead they “saw” through echolocation, using high-frequency sonic pulses emitted from the pleated resonator in the chin. The return signal was sensed by the yellow open horns. As one side benefit, a Cecropian knew not only the size, shape, and distance of each object in the field of view, it could also use Doppler shift of the sonic return to tell the speed with which targets were moving.

But there were disadvantages. With hearing usurped for vision, communication between Cecropians had to be performed in some other way. They did it chemically, “speaking” to each other via the transmission of pheromones, chemical messengers whose varying composition permitted them a full and rich language. A Cecropian not only knew what her fellows were saying; the pheromones also allowed her to feel it, to know their emotions directly. The unfurled ante

And to a Cecropian, any being that did not give off the right pheromones did not exist as a communicating being. They could “see” them all right, but they did not feel them. Those nonentities included all humans. Darya knew that early contacts between Cecropians and humans had been totally unproductive until the Cecropians had produced from within their federation a species with both the capability for speech and the power to produce and sense pheromones.

She pointed to the other creature, which had disconcertingly swiveled its yellow eyes so that one was looking at her and one at the Cecropian, Atvar H’sial. “And who are you?”

There was a long, puzzling silence. Finally the small mouth with its long whiskers of sensing ante

“The name of the interpreter is J’merlia. He is of low intelligence and plays no part in this meeting. Please ignore his presence. It is Atvar H’sial who wishes to speak with you, Darya Lang. I seek discussion concerning the planet of Quake.”

Apparently Atvar H’sial used the other in the same way as the richer worlds of the Alliance employed service robots. But it would require a very complex robot to perform the translation trick that J’merlia was doing — more sophisticated than any robot that Darya had heard of, except for those on Earth itself.

“What about Quake?”

The Cecropian crouched lower, placing its two forelegs on the ground so that the blind head was no more than four feet from Darya. Thank God it doesn’t have fangs or mandibles, Darya thought, or I couldn’t take this.

“Atvar H’sial is a specialist in two fields,” J’merlia said. “In life-forms adapting to live with extreme environmental stress, and also in the Artificers — the vanished race whom humans choose to call the Builders. We arrived on Opal only a few short time units ago. Long since we sent request for permission to visit Quake near to Summertide. That permission had not yet been granted, but at Opal Spaceport we spoke to a human person who told that you plan to go to Quake also. Is this true?”

“Well, it’s not quite true. I want to go to Quake.” Darya hesitated. “And I want to be there close to Summertide. But how did you find me?”

“It was simple. We followed the emergency locator on your car.”

Not that, Darya thought. I mean, how did you know that I even existed?

But the Cecropian was continuing. “Tell us, Darya Lang. Can you arrange permission for Atvar H’sial’s visit to Quake also?”

Was Darya’s meaning being lost in translation? “You don’t understand. I certainly want to visit Quake. But I don’t have any control of the permits to go there. That’s in the hands of two men who are on Quake at the moment, assessing conditions.”

There was a brief glint of Mandel through the cloud layers. Atvar H’sial reflexively spread wide her black wing cases, revealing four delicate vestigial wings marked by red and white elongated eyespots. It was those markings, the ruffled neck, and the phenomenal sensitivity to airborne chemicals that had led the zoologist examining the first specimens to dub them fancifully “Cecropians” — though they had no more in common with Earth’s cecropia moth than with any other Terran species. Darya knew that they were not even insects, though they did share with them an external skeleton, an arthropod structure, and a metamorphosis from early to adult life-stage.

The dark wings vibrated slowly. Atvar H’sial seemed lost in the sensual pleasure of warmth. There were a few seconds of silence, until the cloud gap closed and J’merlia said, “But men are males. You control them, do you not?”

“I do not control them. Not at all.”

Darya wondered again about the accuracy with which she and Atvar H’sial were receiving each other’s messages. The conversion process sounded as though it could never work, moving from sounds to chemical messengers and back through an alien intermediary who probably lacked a common cultural data base with either party. And she and Atvar H’sial also lacked common cultural reference points. Atvar H’sial was a female, she knew that, but what in Cecropian culture was the role played by males? Drones? Slaves?