And there were the creatures she knew, nearly all of them. Bluecloak, formally cloaked. Gurgle-click-cough. Her three babies, hedged about with the bodies of four creatures, who had stretched out to form a living playpen within which the babies tumbled and sprawled. They squeaked when they saw Ofelia, and staggered over to someone’s legs, where they bounced up and down on feet that seemed bigger every day.
As Bluecloak greeted Ofelia, she saw two of the creatures slip away, back toward the village. Long knives gleamed in their hands. Had they planned a massacre—? She would have gone, but Bluecloak had her hands.
“Nnnott killll,” it said, as if it had read her thoughts. Her expression, most likely; human faces were so mobile, so flexible. “Nnot killll utter uhoo. Yahtch.” Not kill, but watch. Keep them away from this meeting, which the creatures had carefully held far from the scanners and recorders that had been planted all over the village by the industrious Bilong.
Ofelia realized that the one who had talked to her in the sheep meadow must have been waiting for that chance. She wanted to know how long—surely they had been in the village the day before—but that was not the most important question.
Bluecloak’s throat-sac swelled abruptly, and it began thrumming. Soon they all were, fingers and toes and bodies, in a complex of rhythms that had the babies lurching from one side of their enclosure to another, their little feet twitching first in one rhythm then another. Finally it all steadied; Ofelia could feel it all through her body, could feel her own toes tapping, her own heart slowing to match the left-hand drumming that meant concord.
Then silence, abrupt, into which the babies’ squeaks sounded loud. Ofelia put out her hand to them, and they ran to her, licking her wrist, grabbing with their little fingers, so much weaker still than their toes, though apt for manipulating everything they got hold of. The talons felt like tiny pins.
When Bluecloak spoke, Ofelia could hardly believe it. He sounded exactly like Vasil Likisi, down to the accent and the pomposity. “I have been empowered by the government . . .” He stopped, and rattled off a long string in his own language. Ofelia stared.
“But you—”
Now in the voice she knew, the one which changed some sounds of human tongue. “It izh kud cahpih, ss?”
Better than a good copy; better than some recordings Ofelia had heard. “You can . . . can you do that all the time?”
“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 tuh 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-kaw-keerrr. 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-to-strangers: 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.