“Couldn’t your real Bones have met this one earlier and taught him-her-the language?’ “And to recognize me on sight? I last saw the real one only a day or so ago, and he’d been with us all the time for months before that. If there’s been a smaller one around watching us and taking language lessons, neither Kahvi nor I saw it. No, this has to be the real Bones. He’s shrunk. I found him just a little while ago in this city. The Hillers who captured me admitted they were keeping another of Bones’ people for experiments, though they dodged that exact word. That’s certainly what they were doing. They claimed that Bones’ people came from another world, and had destroyed Earth’s air; they want to change the air back, and think they have to kill the natives first so they won’t interfere. They’re using the ones they capture to find out how they can kill them. I don’t know what they did to Bones, but it was certainly something which explains why people decided science was evil.”
“Is evil!” snapped Genda. Earrin paid no attention.
“I’m sorry if I insulted this Genda person by saying she was involved in science, but she called me a liar, and someone here in this city of yours certainly is. When I told Genda I’d never seen this native before, I believed it. I’m willing to admit she’s not the hypocrite, but don’t try to tell me there aren’t some around!”
“It’s those Hemenway devils!” exclaimed Genda. “I might have known it! They’re not just talking evil — denying the truth and the law — they’re practising it as well. They re using science — they’re experimenting!” Even in her rage, she had trouble uttering the forbidden words, and flushed in embarrassment as she did so. “They’ll make the world even harder to live in unless they’re stopped — we won’t even have cities! I’m sorry I thought you were a liar, Earrin; I didn’t want to believe it. You can see how I’d make the mistake. It’s still hard to believe that — that those young ones — civilized people — even could — could — ” She couldn’t make herself use the words again.
Fyn accepted the apology, though he was really unable to care very much what this woman thought.
The information about the social changes going on in Great Blue Hill was more interesting, and quite disturbing; if one could no longer be sure what these people were going to do, and especially if one could no longer be sure of close connection between what they promised and what they would do, he and Kahvi would have to reconsider very carefully their own future relations with the city and its people. If one could not regard the people as a unit, the planning would have to be much more complex. This was as new a problem to Fyn as it was to Bones.
It must have been the Hemenway group whose members had wanted the glass and copper, and he had no right to be using the air and food of the main city — or did that belong to all the inhabitants? And if some of them wanted the cargo and others didn’t, who paid him from common property? It was too much for Earrin, and for the first time he became really worried about whether he and Kahvi would receive any return for their efforts. They could live without it of course; fundamentally they were completely independent of other people. But man is a social animal.
He brought his attention back to the present; Zhamia was saying something.
“When Genda told us you were talking to Bones, it occurred to us we might get information which would force the delinquents to change their preaching,” she said. “We might even get them to see their errors. No one knows how long the — pardon the term — animals have been around, but perhaps they have some idea of what really happened to the world’s air. Most of us, of course, believe that sinners experimenting with pseudolife made the change — they wanted nitrates to make food with, though I can’t see what way that would work, and produced an organism which could take nitrogen from the air and release nitrates into the ground. It needed oxygen from the air, too, and worked too well. The Hemenway youngsters insist that the animals, which they call Invaders, did the same thing to get rid of the so they could live here. I don’t know how they’re explaining to themselves why Bones doesn’t seem to be bothered by the oxygen here in city, but I’m sure they have an answer. I wonder if Bones knows whatreally happened, though; have you ever asked?”
“No. Neither of us ever thought of it,” Earrin admitted.
“Will you?”
“Sure. I’ve never really believed there was enough oxygen loose in the air to make it breath able, but it would be nice to find out.” He ignored Genda’s gasp of outrage and turned to the Observer.
The children listened and watched in fascination. Since the man’s gestures served mainly to supplement his words, helping Bones distinguish phonemes which Observer auditory and nervous systems could not distinguish, some of the more observant youngsters began to catch on to the system very quickly. The return signals, however, were another matter; they were made not only with the two main handling tentacles but with the dozen much finer tendrils which formed a fore-and-aft fringe across the top of the head on each side of the great mouth. Since the translation came at intervals rather than continuously, none of the children made any progress with this aspect of the system.
The translation itself was not always clear; neither Fyn nor the human listeners had an adequate information background. Human beings in general still knew some physics and astronomy, since many books still existed. They knew much more chemistry, since the technology which kept the remnants of humanity alive was based on biochemical products of earlier times.
Mankind was in more or less the position of a motorcycle gang whose members could not have built their machines from metal ores or refined their own fuel, but were kept supplied with spare parts and gasoline. The continuation of the supplies was due to the fact that the resources of the biochemical culture were self-renewing, pseudoliving organisms and tissues. No person now living could have produced the pseudolife from raw chemicals, but many of them could still manipulate it with the aid of such agents as the Evolution plant’s enzymes.
With this sort of limitation on human knowledge, it was impossible for all of Bones’ account to be completely clear even to the adults. Fyn’s translation of Bones’ pronouns was also very foggy. The Observer had no conception whatever of the difference between “he” and “she,” as Earrin already knew.
What affected the present attempt at communication was the fact that the native also lacked any real grasp of the difference between “I” and “we,” and understood “You” only because of long association with the raft family. Earrin’s translation was therefore much more of a paraphrase than a direct quote.
It was clear that Bones had arrived on Earth after the air change, and was not responsible for it — He/they had travelled frozen in a body which an astronomer of earlier times would unhesitatingly have called a comet nucleus. These, traveling slowly between the stars, were constantly carrying vast numbers of Bones’ species through the Galaxy in obedience to their basic psychological drive — the need to know.
Automatic controls would place the comet into an appropriately close orbit and awaken the crew when and only when sensing apparatus identified an atmosphere as being primarily nitrogen, with enough traces of oxides of that element to indicate the presence of nitro-life. Bones’ vehicle was the comet which now rode sixty degrees behind the moon in the latter’s orbit; his/their landing craft was on the sea bottom thousands of kilometers from the Boston area.
The fact that all this came as though it were a personal memory confused Fyn, and did not get through his translation very well. The other human beings were therefore even less clear about the matter.