“So, who was to host?” Yorick shrugged. “The land was just lying there, perfectly good; nobody was using it. All we had to do was kick out a few dinosaurs and move in.”
“You never thought we folk over here on Gramarye might have something to say about it, huh?”
“Why? I mean, you were over here, and we were over there, and there was all this ocean between us. You weren’t even supposed to know we were there!”
“Lord Warlock,” Tuan interrupted, “this news is of great interest, but somewhat confusing.”
“Yes, it is getting a little complicated,” Rod agreed. He turned back to Yorick. “What do you say we begin at the beginning?”
“Fine.” Yorick shrugged. “Where’s that?”
“Let’s take it from your own personal point of view. Where does your story begin?‘’
“Well, this lady picked me up by the feet, whacked me on the fanny, and said, ‘It’s a boy!’ And this man who was standing near…”
“No, no!” Rod took a deep breath. “That’s a little too far back. How about we start with your learning English. How’d you manage that?”
Yorick shrugged. “Somebody taught me. How else?”
“Dazzling insight,” Rod growled. “Why didn’t I think of that? Could we be a little more specific about your teacher? For one thing, the way you talk tells me he wasn’t from a medieval culture.”
Yorick frowned. “How’d you guess? I mean, I know they didn’t exactly send me to prep school, but…”
“Oh, really! I would’ve thought they’d have enrolled you in Groton first thing!”
Yorick shook his head firmly. “Couldn’t pass the entrance exam. We Neanderthals don’t handle symbols too well. No prefrontal lobes, you know.”
Rod stared.
Yorick frowned back at him, puzzled. Then his face cleared into a sickly grin. “Oh. I know. I’ll bet you’re wondering, if I can’t handle symbols, how come I can talk. Right?”
“Something of the sort did cross my mind. Of course, I do notice that your mates have something of a language of their own.”
“Their very own; you won’t find any other Neanderthal tribe that uses it.”
“I wasn’t really planning to look.”
Yorick ignored the interruption. “These refugees come from so many different nations that we had to work out a lingua franca. It’s richer than any of the parent languages, of course—but it’s still got a very limited vocabulary. No Neanderthal language gets very far past ‘Me hungry. That food—go kill.’ ”
“This, I can believe. So how were you able to learn English?”
“Same way a parrot does,” Yorick explained. “I memorize all the cues and the responses that follow them. For example, if you say, ‘Hello,’ that’s my cue to say ‘Hello’ back; and if you say, ‘How are you?’ that’s my cue to say, ‘Fine. How’re you?’ without even thinking about it.”
“That’s not exactly exclusive to Neanderthals,” Rod pointed out. “But the talking you’ve been doing here is a little more complicated.”
“Yeah, well, that comes from mental cues.” Yorick tapped his own skull. “The concept nudges me from inside, see, and that’s like a cue, and the words to express that concept jump out of memory in response to that cue.”
“But that’s pretty much what happens when we talk, too.”
“Yeah, but you know what the words mean when you say ‘em. Me, I’m just reciting. I don’t really understand what I’m saying.”
“Well, I know a lot of people who…”
“But they could, if they’d stop and think about it.”
“You don’t know these people,” Rod said with an astringent smile. “But I get your point. Believing it is another matter. You’re trying to tell me that you don’t understand the words you’re saying to me right now—even if you stop to think about each word separately.”
Yorick nodded. “Now you’re beginning to understand. Most of them are just noises. I have to take it on faith that it means what I want it to mean.”
“Sounds pretty risky.”
“Oh, not too much—I can understand the gist of it. But most of it’s just stimulus-response, like a seeing-eye parrot saying ‘Walk’ when he sees a green light.”
“This is a pretty complicated explanation you’ve just been feeding me,” Rod pointed out.
“Yeah, but it’s all memorized, like playing back a recording.” Yorick spread his hands. “I don’t really follow it myself.”
“But your native language…”
“Is a few thousand sound effects. Not even very musical, though—musical scales are basically prefrontal, too. Manipulating pitches is like manipulating numbers. I love-hearing music, though. To me, even ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ is a miracle.”
Tuan butted in, frowning. “Doth he say that he is a blinking idiot?”
“Hey, no, now!” Yorick held up a hand, shaking his head indignantly. “Don’t sell us short. We’re smart, you know—same size brain as you’ve got. We just can’t talk about it, that’s all—or add and subtract it either, for that matter. We can only communicate concrete things—you know—food, water, stone, fire, sex—things you can see and touch. It’s just abstractions that we can’t talk about; they require symbols. But the intelligence is there. We’re the ones who learned how to use fire—and how to chip flint into weapons. Not very good tools, maybe—but we made the big breakthrough.”
Rod nodded. “Yeah, Tuan, don’t underestimate that. We think we’re smart because we invented the nuclea—uh…” Rod remembered that he wasn’t supposed to let the Gramaryans know about advanced technology. It might disrupt their entire culture. He opted for their version of the weapon that endangered civilization. “The crossbow. But taming fire was just as hard to figure out.”
“Good man.” Yorick nodded approvingly. “You sapiens have been able to build such a complicated civilization because you had a good foundation under you before you even existed; you inherited it when you evolved. But we’re the ones who built the basement.”
“Neanderthals had the intelligence,” Rod explained. “They just couldn’t manipulate symbols—and there’s just so far you can go without ‘em.”
Yorick nodded. “Analytical reasoning just isn’t our strong suit. We’re great on hunches, though—and we’ve got great memories.”
“You’d have to, to remember all these standard responses that you don’t understand.”
Yorick nodded. “I can remember damn near anything that ever happened to me.”
“How about who taught you English?”
“Oh, sure! That’s…” Then Yorick gelled, staring. After a minute, he tried the sickly grin again. “I, uh, didn’t want to get to that, uh, quite so soon.”
“Yes, but we did.” Rod smiled sweetly. “Who did teach you?”
“Same guy who gave me my name,” Yorick said hopefully.
“So he had a little education—and definitely wasn’t from a medieval culture.”
Yorick frowned. “How’d you make so much out of just one fact?”
“I manipulated a symbol. What’s his name?”
“The Eagle,” Yorick sighed. “We call him that ‘cause he looks like one.”
“What? He’s got feathers?” Rod had a sudden vision of an avian alien, directing a secondhand conquest of a Terran planet.
“No, no! He’s human, all right. He might deny it—but he is. Just got a nose like a beak, always looks a little angry, doesn’t have much hair—you know. He taught us how to farm.”
“Yeah.” Rod frowned. “Neanderthals never got beyond a hunting-and-gathering culture, did you?”
“Not on our own, no. But this particular bunch of Neanderthals never would’ve gotten together on their own anyway. The Eagle gathered us up, one at a time, from all over Europe and Asia.”
Rod frowned. “Odd way to do it. Why didn’t he just take a tribe that was already together?”