“But in that case the call would be cast in terms utterly alien to us. I do not think Echo could even react to it.”
Again Vern looked at his sister. The world outside had darkened as the hour deepened and the sound of the curtaining waterfall seemed to grow louder. Echo, with her silvery long hair and porcelain-pale skin almost glowed ghostlike in the dim cave. She had stopped pouring sand and was gathering it into little mounds spaced out evenly from one another. After mounding a fifth small pile, she stopped and sat up cross-legged with her hands in her lap, looking toward the cave mouth.
“Well, what do you think we should do?” Vern asked.
“It is time to go to sleep. Maybe you’d like to scout around outside a little. Maybe when Echo goes to sleep tonight, she will receive another message and maybe it will be clearer than this map diagram she drew.”
Moms’ suggestion was what Vern had expected. He supposed that prudence was probably their best policy, but he was apprehensive. Someone or something knew of their existence. They went on with their hardscrabble daily lives as if the Olders did not know about them, keeping as closely as possible to narrowly settled routines, to behavior that did not arouse their feelings or require unusual degrees of mental activity. Quietude was their only camouflage. If they had to journey, the stress of traveling with Echo might rouse attention, but if pursuers were closing in, there would be no choice but to travel.
It was dark here; the detestable five-pointed orange moon was not in the sky — and he was grateful for that. Skirting around the waterfall by a familiar but barely traceable pathway over the rocks, Vern walked a little way down the stream edge. Then he stopped and breathed in the night air that was growing ever colder with the season. He shivered. The scraps of canvas and plastic and cloth Moms had spliced into a motley robe-like garment was draughty, to say the least. He hugged his chest.
And then he thought he heard a sound different from the customary night noises. A thin, high yelping far, far away. Perhaps the Olders had introduced an animal new to this forest, some strain of wolf, or an animal of their own engineering.
Then he heard it no more and decided that his imagination was overly exercised. He turned and headed back to the cave where Echo and Moms would be ready for sleep by now.
Despite his apprehensions, Vern was sleepy. Although his day had been physically a little less active than usual, anxiety had depleted his mental energy. He lay for a few minutes, listening. He could tell that Moms was not asleep; she was surely thinking through their discussion. Echo was asleep in her own way, though sometimes Vern wondered if she ever actually slept, the way that he and Moms and Queenie did — as Queenie was doing now, her large head laid on her large paws.
Almost as soon as he closed his eyes, he began to dream. His viewing floated like an invisible balloon, bodiless, and traversed one of the Olders’ cities, if that was what they were to be called. He envisioned entering underground through a huge doorless opening. If he were making this journey in his body, his every nerve would be pulsing with fear as he passed tremendous pentagonal pools of unknown black liquids and drifted through rooms filled with curious and inexplicable utensils of myriad sorts. Then there were colossal caverns of intricate machines at whose purposes he could not guess. They were all motionless until he came to one larger than the rest. It was so large that the top of it must have extended through the cavern roof into the outside world. It seemed to buckle inward and outward continuously, the matte gray planes of its panels seeming to open and close simultaneously, as if it were a strange doorway allowing both entrance and exit in the same vertiginous movement. This machine uttered a high-pitched piping sound and it seemed to Vern that the noise was like the sound of the faraway yelping or baying he had thought he heard outside by the stream.
Then he woke.
Queenie was awake too, making her dangerous, nearly inaudible growl. And Echo was awake and Moms was sitting up straight, her eyes wide and glistening in the dark. The three of them listened to that piping; it was still far away, still small among the sounds of the waterfall and of the forest at night, but it was dreadfully intelligible:
Tekeli-li Tekeli-li.
“Ship?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Are all things well?”
“Very well. The mission is proceeding according to procedure.”
“That is good,” I said and truly I felt a happy relief in my organism. “Am I sober enough to take command?”
“You are not entirely cleansed of deepsleep narcosis,” Ship said, “but you are rational and your body is highly operable, though it needs exercise, as do the bodies of the other crew members.”
“Please find if they are well and sober,” I said. “Doctor, Navigator, Seeker — how do they fare?”
“They fare well. No. Disregard. Farewell is a phrase suitable for departures. The crew fare good. They are beginning to awake.”
“I will address them when all is sober.”
“The correct would be, when all are sober,” said Ship.
“Are you certain?”
“Eighty-four point oh-two certain.”
“Our mission dialect is difficult,” I said.
“The English is,” Ship said. “There are other planetary languages more difficult; there are others less so. Part of the problem is that we have taken our knowledge of these languages from what remained of the libraries of relic spaceships. The electronics were primitive and much has been lost to age-deterioration and other damage.”
“But we must persevere,” I replied, “for if our mission performance is well, we must be ready to converse.”
“All the crew have been instructed during normal sleep periods and also during deepsleep, but that is not the same as speaking. We all must practice.”
“I will write my account in English,” I said. “That will be strong practice.”
“We salute your pluck,” Ship said, speaking for the Alliance, I presumed.
While Ship was waking the rest of the crew, I undertook the prescribed medicines and waters and endured the exercises. During the stretches and lunges, I reviewed the tasks that awaited. The Starheads had taken over the planet third from the sun to use as a base for offensive strikes and architectural experiment. As usual, they had almost eradicated the dominant intelligent species and there remained only scattered Remnants that were like my siblings and me. Our own home had been destroyed and the four members left of my family had been rescued by a small party of scientists who were members of the Radiance Alliance, the ancient foes of the Starheads. The Alliance are a highly advanced race (in our local mission world they were called the Great Ones) and they have thought it desirable to try to preserve all the different species of life that they could rescue. The Starheads (locally known as the Old Ones) regard every other species of intelligent beings but themselves as enemies, active or potential. For this reason, they kill all. But if any can be saved from slaughter, the Great Ones strive to that end and send out disguised spying machines where the Starheads are active to find if some few survivors escaped their attentions. Traces of Remnants had been detected here and Ship and crew had been dispatched.