She curled up on her side, and wriggled around. Very comfortable indeed. Suddenly something sharp poked her side. She sat up, and felt around with her fingers until she found the cause—a stone about the size of a chicken egg, with sharp angles. That didn’t belong in a nest, and how had the pregnant one missed it? She held it up, scowling at them.
Their left toes drummed; she knew now that meant approval. The pregnant one snatched the stone from her and held it aloft; the drumming deepened, including fingertips on torsos, and finally the pregnant one’s throat sac.
Obviously, they had planted the stone in the nest for her to find, but why? It was just an ordinary stone. One of them held out a hand to her, and helped her out of the nest. The pregnant one clasped her wrists and bent her head; she felt the dry, ticklish touch of a tongue on her hands. The pregnant one released her, and the others did the same, even Bluecloak. Her hands tingled from the touch of so many tongues.
Her stomach recoiled, knotted in fear. She was in over her head; she was committed now to something she did not understand. What if she made a mistake? What if she did something that hurt the baby? She looked around for Bluecloak. If she could read their expressions at all, Bluecloak looked satisfied, even smug. The others looked relaxed; the pregnant one stretched out in a patch of sun on the floor and one of the others squatted beside her, running its fingers lightly along her back.
Then Bluecloak urged Ofelia out of the house; the others left the pregnant one and her—birth attendant? best friend? husband? Ofelia didn’t know—alone in the house. Two of the creatures settled outside the house, squatting in the lane, and pulled out their long knives. The rest went back to the center, Ofelia with them. Behind her, she could hear the ring and rasp of sharpening; it made her shiver. She was hungry for lunch, but she was even hungrier for knowledge. She still didn’t know whether to expect eggs or a wiggly baby. She didn’t know why those knives were being sharpened . . . to guard the pregnant one and the baby from predators, or to carve up a clumsy, ignorant aunt if she made mistakes?
She was just opening her mouth to ask Bluecloak, when an alarm went off in the control room. Ofelia jumped, then led the way there, heart pounding. It was the wrong season for sea-storms, and that morning she had seen nothing in the gauges to indicate any problem.
The gauges were still steady, still in the safe range for all functions. The flashing red light was on the weathersat board. Which meant someone had queried the weathersat, which meant another ship had arrived.
She had known it would happen someday. Eventually someone would come to investigate the attack on that second colony, and the creatures who had made it. That was why she’d set the alarm as she had, so that she would know when to hide. She had even explained that to Bluecloak, as best she could; she wasn’t at all sure that the creatures understood space flight, or how far away things were. She had hoped she wouldn’t be alive when the other humans came, but she was.
And far worse, the pregnant one was nesting. Ofelia had no idea how long it would be before she gave birth or laid her eggs or whatever, but she knew it was a bad time for the other humans to come.
She conveyed this to Bluecloak: others like herself were coming, were in a boat—they had agreed on the term—far up in the sky. They would come down—she was sure of that—and they would most likely come down here, at the shuttle strip. She had no idea how long it would be. They might sit up there for days looking at things through orbital scanners, making sure they would be safe. They might already have been there for days, in which case it was no use trying to get the creatures to conceal themselves in the houses because they had already been seen. Besides, if they could strip the records from the weathersat, they would find plenty of evidence that Ofelia and the creatures were both living here.
And what if they decided the creatures here knew too much, and killed them? Ofelia felt a cold sweat break out all over her. She could not let that happen. She would not. She did not know what she could do, but she would not let that happen.
First, could she find out something about the ship that had arrived? She queried the weathersat herself, but got no answer. Apparently the people on the arriving ship had pre-empted all local requests. That might mean they didn’t yet know she was here, that she used the weathersat, or it might mean they didn’t care.
She turned to Bluecloak again, and tried to ask how long it would be before the pregnant one—she stumbled over Gurgle-click-cough—delivered. Bluecloak’s answering gestures were not reassuring. It might be today, or tomorrow, or the day after. It was Gurgle-click-cough’s first birth, and its timing was more uncertain than for a subsequent one. Ofelia understood that well enough; it was the same with humans. She conveyed that to Bluecloak fairly easily.
More difficult was the concept that the arriving humans presented a special danger to Gurgle-click-cough and her young. Bluecloak cocked its head to one side; its right toes tapped the floor. She had tried to explain before that the humans killed far to the north were not the same as those who had lived here, and the ones who lived here went somewhere else, very far away. Now she tried to say that the ones coming were more like those who had been killed, not like her.
“Nesst click-kaw-keerrr,” Bluecloak said, as if that would end the discussion. “Aant.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Ofelia said. “They won’t care.” She tried to think how to say that in gestures, but when she looked at Bluecloak it was standing rigid, its throat-sac swollen and pulsing, its eyelids partly shut. Then it blinked.
“Nesst click-kaw-keerrr nnot kkaerrr?” A pause. “Kkilll?”
“Not kill,” Ofelia said, hoping it was so. “But they won’t care about me. I’m not one of them. Not their . . .” what was the word Bluecloak had used about its people? She opted instead for gestures that included her, Bluecloak, others who lived here, as opposed to others who lived someplace else.
“Uhoo,” Bluecloak said, pointing to make it clear. “Click-kaw-keerrr.”
She was the click-kaw-keerrr; whatever click-kaw-keerrrs had to do, she had to do. She was uncomfortably certain that this meant she was supposed to protect Gurgle-click-cough and her young from the other humans . . . or die trying.
She chose to interpret the hollow feeling in her belly as hunger, and went back to her house to cook something.
They had seen the white streaks of the shuttle’s flight; they had heard the brief transmissions between the shuttle and the orbiting ship. Ofelia wondered how much the creatures understood of this. She herself couldn’t follow much of the talk; the accent was strange, and the utterances perhaps intentionally cryptic. She thought of trying to use the colony transmitter, even keyed it once, but the signal had to go through the weathersat, and she couldn’t get it locked open. Apparently, they were still using the weathersat themselves. She felt a guilty relief. In her inmost heart, she still hoped they would simply go away.
Meanwhile, Gurgle-click-cough had settled into the house next to the center—not in the nest itself yet—and the others brought her food and sat with her. She seemed larger to Ofelia, her lean form now bulging under her kilt. She rarely left the house, and had no interest in the news. Every time Ofelia visited, Gurgle-click-cough leaned against her and licked her hands. Ofelia felt helpless and protective all at once.