“As you are my sponsor, I cannot oppose you,” says Broadtail, and the two of them head for the dining room.
When the humans slept, Tizhos spent hours looking over the video of the incident, going over the images of the native beings in complete fascination. She envied the humans. They could work here, doing all kinds of fascinating research on Ilmatar and its creatures. She considered herself Shalina’s foremost expert on Ilmatar, and had never even visited the world before.
Sholen robot explorers had discovered Ilmatar, and tunneled through the ice layer to the subsurface ocean. Sholen probes had returned images of life in Ilmatar’s waters before humans ever ventured beyond the atmosphere of their homeworld. But the study of Ilmatar by Sholen ended there.
For probably the ten-thousandth time Tizhos cursed her people. They had ventured forth from a ruined planet, rediscovered how to enter Otherspace and explore the Universe, made contact with Terrans and others—and then decided they preferred to spend all their time blowing glass and planting gardens in little woodland villages. Without the conve nient menace of the humans to stoke fears of conquerors from space, Shalina probably wouldn’t have any spaceships at all.
In a way, it seemed almost cruel for her to see all this information and know that no more would ever come from Ilmatar. This mission would ensure that. She remembered the outrage from Irona’s faction when the account of the humans’ unauthorized contact reached Shalina. It seemed impossible that the Consensus would launch such a huge and expensive mission to Ilmatar only to confirm the existing arrangement. Soon all spacefarers would leave Ilmatar forever.
Dr. Sen approved Alicia’s proposal quickly enough, and that turned out to be a problem for Rob. He was an expert with recording systems, he was spending a lot of time with the aliens, and he didn’t have much else to do, so Rob Freeman was the natural choice to watch the watchers and take video of everything they did and said. Which meant that all his free time suddenly vanished.
It was a chore, but Rob actually found it kind of fun. It was just like filming wildlife—forget all the externals, concentrate on getting the video. The best cameras at Hitode were all built for underwater use, but Rob managed to scrounge up a few spare keychain cameras and rig them up with suction mounts so that he could record both the aliens and their interview subjects at the same time.
The social part of it was utterly baffling. Tizhos and Gishora didn’t seem to mind a bit that Rob was monitoring them. Sholen weren’t big on privacy, and the two of them probably understood the reason for his presence. But Rob’s fellow humans seemed almost insulted that Dr. Sen wanted him to record their interviews with the aliens. Even when he explained why, they still griped.
“Do not worry about me,” said Simeon when the Sholen came to talk with him about the archaeology program. “I know when to keep my mouth shut.”
“This is just a precaution,” said Rob. “To make sure there’s no disagreement over what somebody said.”
“Or a way to assign blame if someone does make a mistake. Have you thought of that?”
Rob couldn’t think of an answer, so he shut up and stuck to his recording. Simeon’s interview went relatively well; despite his prickly temper, Dr. Fouchard had a good grasp of public relations, and had done plenty of media in the past. With the Sholen he was frank but polite. “I think it is an absurdity that you come here presuming to judge us. But I will answer all your questions honestly. Let us begin.”
Watching the aliens grill his colleagues gave Rob some interesting insights about them. Where Fouchard was surprisingly diplomatic, Dr. Sen was a lot more acerbic than he would have expected—although Sen did it so subtly the aliens may not have noticed. When Tizhos asked him, “Tell me what is your opinion of Dr. Kerlerec’s death,” Sen’s response was classic: “Right now I am beginning to understand how he must have felt.”
And on one occasion Rob was afraid he might have to intervene to prevent a fight from breaking out. Gishora and Tizhos were talking with Dickie Graves, and it was like watching a couple of belligerent drunks on a street corner. The Sholen, especially Gishora, were asking questions that could almost have been designed to piss him off. Meanwhile Graves himself was making no secret of his dislike for the aliens.
“Explain what you study here,” said Gishora.
“I’m trying to learn about the language of the Ilmatarans. Not very easy to do when one can’t even speak with them.”
“Tell us what you hope to gain.”
“Gain? Why, I want to get one of those huge salaries routinely paid to linguists, of course. Some of them even make enough to purchase food, or so I’m told.”
“We want to know if your studies could be continued by other means,” said Gishora.
“Sure! You could build a probe to not listen to Ilmatarans the same way I do. Better yet, don’t build it. Much cheaper.”
“Tell us what observations of the native beings you have made,” said Tizhos.
“I’ve planted a net of hydrophones to pick up their communications. It would be easier if I could put the ’phones near their permanent settlements, but someone objected to that, so instead I put them out away from the vents, along routes they often travel. In the two years I’ve been here I’ve managed to accumulate about thirty-six hours of usable data. The other ninety-nine point five percent of my recordings are either silence or animal sounds.”
“Tell us how you analyze them.”
“With great difficulty. Normally, linguists have the advantage of being able to ask their subjects what things mean. Since that’s not allowed, I have to proceed by induction, comparing what’s said with what’s going on. Now as it happens, I have been able to make some significant progress, but I expect it would have taken me about two weeks rather than two years without you lot interfering.”
“Explain what you have learned,” said Gishora.
“As I said, rather a lot. We know their language is based on what I’ve named eidophones, or sounds mimicking the sonar echoes of particular objects. By comparing eidophones with actual echoes I’ve built up a little Ilmataran vocabulary, and—” Tizhos interrupted. “Tell me what value you find in this.”
“Is this the old ‘why are we doing this’ question? I thought we laid that particular specter when we met you people. All right, I’ll play: there are lots of things we can learn from the Ilmatarans. It appears they have a very long history; they may have developed social structures and philosophies we haven’t considered. The biology people have already learned a great deal which may be applicable in medicine or biotech back home. The place is a gold mine—” Graves stopped.
“Continue describing the benefits you can gain here,” said Tizhos.
“Oh, no. I see your game. Your people have been trying to paint us as wicked old colonialists ever since Castaverde first set foot on Ilmatar. If we benefit from being here, it makes us look like so many conquistadors out for loot. But if I say there’s nothing here of value to anyone, you can pass that along to UNICA with a word about closing down this useless project. Well, I decline.” He turned to face directly into one of Rob’s cameras. “Hear that? I refuse to answer any more questions because these two are trying to twist my words and manipulate my responses.”
“Richard Graves, I ask you to make yourself calm,” said Gishora. “We only seek to learn the truth.”
“The truth? The truth is that poor old Henri got fed up with your stupid contact rules and went out to have a good look at the locals, but he cocked it up and got killed. Maybe if you Sholen weren’t trying to tell us what we can and can’t do here, he’d have been properly prepared and it wouldn’t have ended so badly. Have you thought of that?”