“Not really,” she said. “We had much to learn, and little time.” It had not seemed like little time, all those nights in class or studying, when the children were small and she could have been mending or cleaning or simply resting. But in terms of absolute hours, they had had too much practical material to fit in to allow of much theoretical digression.
Ori leaned back, satisfied with her answer; she did not explain further. “Now — the first time you saw the creatures, what did you do? What did you think? Did you recognize them right away?”
The first time… she had to start with the sea-storm, with her attempt to ready the village. That bored him, though he didn’t say so; his eyes drifted away, seeing something else entirely, something beyond her head. When Bilong crossed her own view, a minute or two later, she knew what it had been. She told of that first storm-bound afternoon and night, the first few days. At first he let her talk on without interruption, only urging her to continue when she stopped. But then he wanted to ask questions. How had she first noticed that they were intelligent? How did she know who was in charge? What had she learned of their social structure? How territorial were they?
“I don’t know,” she kept saying. “They don’t do it like that—” Whatever it had been, from dividing up food to making decisions to marking rank. The more he asked, the more she felt she knew nothing about the creatures at all. It had never occurred to her to wonder if both sexes had extensible throat-sacs; she tried not to think about their sexes at all. When she said that, shyly, he gave her the smile of an adult to a backward child.
“Its all right,” he said. “Anthropologists look at these things differently.” The right way, he meant. That he was too polite to say it didn’t really take the sting out of it. He asked more, and she told what she knew… except about the babies, about being Click-kaw-keerrr. She was afraid someone would harm the babies; she hated herself for the knowledge that humans would certainly kill those babies if they thought it prudent. This man himself, with his gentle voice, she might have trusted, except that his eyes slid too often to the young woman… and his rival was the tall man, the cold-eyed team leader that Ofelia did not trust at all.
After that one long interview, Ori did not come back. She saw him following the creatures around, sitting where he could watch them with a sketchpad on his knee. He had told her that the act of drawing sometimes taught him more than the best video clips. He had showed her a few of his first sketches, and she had admired the graceful lines, drawn surely and quickly, that did seem to capture the essence of the creatures’ forms and movements. She would like to have seen his sketches of the babies, the alert way they carried their snouted heads on those flexible necks, the brisk swipes of their striped tails. The team leader ignored her completely, barely nodding as he strode up and down the streets, in and out of most buildings. He talked endlessly into a recorder that hung from his belt. He seemed to be making an inventory of every item of human origin in the village, even to the number of tomato plants. He avoided the one where Gurgle-click-cough nested; Ori had insisted that humans not intrude when the creatures made it clear they were unwelcome.
The tall woman took short trips into the forest, collecting samples of plant life from the intermediate zone as well as areas of pure native growth. She set out fishing lines in the river, put out traps for small animals. The creatures watched her, with expressions that Ofelia interpreted as a mixture of avid curiosity and mild disgust. Ofelia did not know how to ask what she herself wanted to know: did they mind another hunter in their territory, and one that did not even eat the catch?
The young woman, Bilong, seemed to spend most of her time wandering from man to man; she had a recorder, and she had placed pickups in the center — Ofelia saw that, and assumed she had put them other places as well — to gather language samples. What Ofelia knew, and Bilong did not, was that the creatures knew exactly where the pickups were, and amused themselves by standing under them reciting… reciting what Ofelia suspected were merely lists, possibly even nonsense words. Certainly their speech then had none of the rhythm and feel that it had most of the time.
Ofelia went back to her old life, as much as she could, slipping across to play with the babies — the rapidly growing and very active babies — when the humans were not in evidence. Quite often they were not in evidence. She suspected the creatures of having something to do with that, of intervening to be sure that the Click-kaw-keerrr had ample time with the babies.
The babies changed faster than human babies, in those first days. In this they were more like young calves or lambs, quickly alert and active. Ofelia had always assumed that the slow early development of human babies went with their higher intelligence — that anything which was born able to run around was also born limited, close to its adult potential of wit. She remembered parenting classes, early-childhood development classes, in which she was taught precisely this. Children took a long time to grow, because they had a long way to go; the human brain had to organize itself, teach itself how to learn. Other baby animals could be born with more behaviors wired in, because they didn’t have to be able to learn much later.
These babies… already their high squeaks sounded speechlike. Already their busy four-fingered hands manipulated the stalks of grass and sprigs of herb in their nest. Handed empty gourds by an adult, they put in pebbles, and poured them out. They squabbled with each other, shoving and nipping, using their tails to hold one another down… but these squabbles quickly shifted into cooperative play, if someone offered a toy. At ten days, twenty days of age, they were more like children of three years. Ofelia could not merely observe; she found herself being used as a plaything, a living obstacle course. The other creatures handed her the items they thought the babies should have: gourds, beads, pebbles, bits of string. She was the one who hissed disapproval when one of them wound string around its throat. It froze, eyes wide. Ofelia mimed strangulation, producing a guttural squawk. The baby blinked; the others, sitting up on legs and tail, squeaked softly. To her surprise, none of them tried that again. If they were like human toddlers, then… she wondered if they could learn letters and numbers. If the other humans hadn’t been there, she would have taken them to the center, would have shown them the books and the teaching computers. She couldn’t do that now. Her conscience nagged her; she shouldn’t want to do that. She should protect human technology from them, and them from human technology. Water rushed into the sink, startling her out of that reverie. One of them stood on the long faucet of the deep sink, its talons hooked around the cold-water tap, pulling; the other two, braced against the wall, had pushed at the same tap with their feet. Now, as she watched, they reversed their force: the ones who had been pushing hooked their talons over and tried to pull. The one on the faucet tried to push… and lost its footing, to splash into the sink. Ofelia heaved herself up, and put her arm into the water. The talons dug in, as the baby climbed her arm, squeaking furiously.
So much for protection, either way. They would have to learn how to use the technology safely; there was no way to keep them from using it.
Although the daily sessions with the babies delighted her, Ofelia felt a steady weight of apprehension. Someday — some one of these hardly numbered days — the team leader would think they had done enough, seen enough, and would order Ofelia to the shuttle. She would have to leave, or die. She had not thought of any way to escape this time, not with her inability to eat the local food, not with the determination of these people to find her and bring her back. She would have to leave, and leave her creatures — her responsibility, the babies — to these others, whom she did not trust.