“Nnno. Cahpih foyss, eehess, hut he ssay. Ssay die thoughtss, aaakss utter ssondss.” Ofelia did not understand. If he could copy Likisi’s voice so exactly, even to the accent and tone, why couldn’t he say the words right when he said his own thoughts? For the first time, she had something to ask Bilong — assuming Bilong would listen, and then understand the question — but she didn’t have Bilong handy.
Bluecloak didn’t wait for her to understand. It went on, now uttering a phrase in Kira Stavi’s voice, and another in the flat monotone the military advisors murmured into their suit mics. Finally it repeated the song Ofelia had sung to the babies, in a voice she realized must be hers, though it sounded breathier, more like an old woman’s voice than she heard it inside. She had never heard her voice recorded. Maybe she did sound like that, and Bluecloak had been accurate with the others.
“Do you understand all that?” Ofelia asked. “Or just -
“Eehess,” Bluecloak said. “Know peeninks.” The meanings, he meant, but how? How could he understand so much, when she had learned so little of their language? She had known they were smart, but this — Bilong had made such a fuss about how hard it was to learn other languages, even human language families.
“All of you?” Ofelia asked.
“Alll know. Nnnott all tsay.”
If they understood it all — they couldn’t really, but if they did, if they thought they did — then what they had heard, in these last decems, must have given them a very… strange… idea of humans. Ofelia sat on the pillow one of them produced from behind the log. Her mind ran from one corner of her brain to another like the babies now playing chase in their playpen. How long had they understood? How much? And why this meeting now? What were they planning? What would they expect her to do? One of the babies squeaked, trying to climb adult legs to get to her. Gurgle-click-cough picked it up, licked its neck, and handed it to Ofelia. She cradled it, letting it lick the insides of both wrists, and then curl into a ball on her lap.
“Ahee,” said Bluecloak, pointing to itself. “Thry aaakss clearrr tub uhoo hut he hoo-ahnt.” Ofelia found she understood this much easily; she was reshaping the words almost without thought to the sounds she knew. They wanted to make clear to her what they wanted? That was what she most wanted to know, right now… and then she could find out more.
Only occasionally in the next few hours, did she have to ask Bluecloak to repeat or clarify what it said; the combination of near-human language and gestures conveyed more complicated meanings than she had thought possible. Much as she disliked the team members, she kept thinking that they should be here instead of her — or with her. They had the education, the training, to understand what she struggled to grasp. She was being given the knowledge they had come so far to obtain, knowledge the creatures still withheld (they made that clear) from the team.
“You should tell them,” she argued, early in the session. “They’re… official.” How could she explain official? How could she explain that no one would listen to her, that she was nothing in that social order? But Bluecloak interrupted firmly. They would tell her, and she must pay attention, She could do nothing else, Ori would be intrigued by the creatures’ social structure, she thought, the combination of nomadic hunting and herding for most adults with permanent, safe child-rearing locations in which the young, protected from predators and the rigors of migration, could be tutored as well as protected by the wisest of the adults. The special positions within the troops: singer-to-strangers, war leader, wayfinder, and click-kawkeerrr. Then the loose confederacy of most troops, the constant testing of opinion with right and left-hand drumming. They had no concept of disobedience; dissent could always leave, with any who drummed the same rhythm, and the world itself defined error and right.
Now Bluecloak explained more about her special position and his. Click-kaw-keerrr: more than aunt, a combination midwife, infant nurse, preschool and elementary teacher… and protector. Singer-tostrangers: those who made contact with other troops, and negotiated the sharing of lands and duties, bringing the drumming into the left hand if possible.
Kira and Ori both would have wanted to hear about the creatures’ understanding of their world’s living beings… how they classified the plants and animals, how they had learned to use them, how they bred their grass-eating herd animals, how they replanted the ruined nestmass. Ofelia realized that she was dividing what Bluecloak said into what this one and that would like to know — but Bluecloak wasn’t thinking that way. To Bluecloak, all “mind-hunting” was the same, each scent-trail leading to a different prey, but all the same in the joy of the hunt. She remembered how even the first of them had seemed so eager to learn, like young children before they are taught that most curiosity is idle, useless.
She pulled her mind back to what Bluecloak was saying. For a people like this, there could be no single government; nothing they did, in fact, resembled anything she knew about governments. Bluecloak sang for some large fraction of the People (she heard the capital of that now, and accepted it) who roamed the plains, but singing for them did not mean ruling them. And while Bluecloak had sung to (different from singing for) some of the People who lived on the stone coast, this did not mean that agreement had come. Ofelia had to hear more about the people on the stone coast; the humans, when asked, had cut her off. Bluecloak explained, and in the process Ofelia understood why the idea of water and electricity in pipes had come easily to them. Their People ran water, other liquids, and particulates like sand in pipes of wood and hollow reeds, and brewed things in gourds made of clay or burnt sand. They had no electricity — yet — and their water pumps ran on water or foot power… but the idea of pumped water was not strange to them, even to the nomads.
But the core of what Bluecloak wanted to say had to do with the colony that had destroyed their nestmass, and which they had killed in shocked revenge… and these new humans, who had come because of that, who now wanted to make their rules for the People, what they could learn and what they could not. Nestmass — which meant, Ofelia thought, the nestlings and nest-guards as well as the nests themselves — were untouchable in the People’s own culture.
Bluecloak understood — they all understood — that perhaps the strange monsters from the sky hadn’t known what they destroyed. But that was an excuse no click-kaw-keerrr would accept from a nestling. To see the end of a deed in its beginning was the prime virtue — to lay a trap where only prey, not allies, walked, was the first lesson of the stalker. In all the lessons of hunting that continued: go hungry rather than kill and eat the last mother of the prey. Go thirsty rather than take water of the those who will be eaten. Leave sweet fruits on the tree for the climbers you hunt.
Ofelia understood that, but not the lengths to which the People took it. She had no training in logic; she had been taught only enough math to use the necessary manuals and work the necessary machines. She remembered seeing Bluecloak hunched over the old math textbooks; now it held one out, pointing to a long proof. That, it explained to her, was easy; its People thought in longer and more winding trails than that.
“But you…” There was no way to say tactfully that for such smart people, they hadn’t got very far. No real cities — well, she hadn’t seen the ones of the stone coast yet. But no vehicles, no big machines — she remembered something from the doomed colony tape about a catapult that threw something explosive. No big metal machines, no mechbots. No computers.
“Papiess,” Bluecloak said. If she understood him, if he understood what had happened, they considered themselves a young People, almost babies. They had once been other, only ten or twenty generations back. With the math book, with stones laid out in rows, Bluecloak conveyed that their recent ancestors could think along only few-step chains, whereas they could think along many-step chains. Something had happened; they didn’t know what. Someday they would figure it out, but in the meantime, they had other things to deal with.