"Ah, I see," Big Voice said, leaning back with his long, spidery hands propped proudly on his chest. "Naturally not. I must wait until I may see them face-to-face-which I hope will not be long."
"No," Keff said. "It'll be as soon as we can make it."
Big Voice left, looking very satisfied.
"Well handled," Narrow Leg signed to them, with very small motions obscured from the rest of the room.
Carialle's hand signs were equally discreet. "We have our bores, too."
A soft sound woke Keff in his cabin. He opened his eyes to the darkness.
"Yes? Who's there?"
"Keff?" Carialle's voice came very softly from his aural implant. "Come on forward. I'm getting clearer transmissions from Planet Four. I think you want to hear these."
Keff pulled on a pair of exercise pants and padded out into the cabin. A soft hum, the sound of the frogs breathing, came from behind the closed room across the corridor. Carialle illuminated a faint line of blue along the wall to guide him. He slid into his chair.
"We just came into range where I could pick up those faint radio signals intact. I think it's telephone conversations, words and pictures."
"Really?" Keff asked, interested enough to wake up almost all the way. "And are they the griffins?"
"See for yourself."
"Paydirt!" Keff exclaimed in an excited hiss. He glanced over his shoulder to see if the Cridi had heard him. He turned back for another good look.
In the tank in front of him, a long, narrow image took shape. The being pictured was indeed a griffin. It was younger and slighter than any of the brutes the team had left behind in the Cridi system. It put the tips of its wing-claws together under its chin in a sort of namaste, then let the wings flip around to its back.
"Freihur," it said, the slit upper lip opening and closing breathily. "Solahiaforn. Zsihivonachaella." A burst of static broke up the picture, and it reformed around the speaker saying, "… Volpachur."
"You're right," Keff said. "It does sound like half a telephone conversation. I'm surprised you haven't picked up any mass communication channels."
"Maybe they don't have any," Carialle said. "But isn't this better?"
"A thousand times," Keff said, feeling for the keypad to activate IT. The server controlling the translation program beeped softly to tell him it was operating. "I might be able to separate out some appropriate phrases between now and our arrival. Starting with 'hello,' if that's what that first word meant. 'Freihur,'" he said, trying it out with a trill of his tongue. "How close are we?"
"About five days," Carialle said. "… Keff, I feel uneasy."
He felt a twinge of anxiety for her, and gazed at her pillar as if it might give him some clue how to help her. "I know how much of a strain this is on you, personally. You know I'm for you, all the way. I simply don't know how much I can help, if we run into-into anybody."
Carialle sighed. "I don't know how I'll react. But thank you for your support. This is the best way to lay my personal demons."
"You're right," Keff said, settling himself more comfortably in front of the screen. "And with this I now stand a better chance of cooperation. This is what I was wishing for after the Cridi froze those griffins. How bad is the gain? Can you get me some more?"
"Cued up and waiting for you, Sir Knight," Carialle said, feeling better in the face of Keff's enthusiasm.
At the beginning of day shift, Carialle watched the Cridi on the other ship reacting with surprise to seeing Keff already up before them. Narrow Leg immediately intuited that something important was afoot.
"What is new?" he asked, in Standard, making his way to the screen nearest the console.
"Good morning, captain," Keff said, still staring at the griffin on the screen, a delicate, sable-furred one with a chip on its front left fang. He swiveled toward the screen. "Language lessons."
"The beasts!" Narrow Leg exclaimed, his hands flying.
"We're close enough to pick up their low-power transmissions," Carialle said, forwarding receiver data to the Cridi technical operator. "I think it's a tower-based, amplitude-modulated system."
"Indeed? The monsters have come far," the Cridi captain said. "No electronics were reported many years past."
"How long?" Keff asked. "My own species went from wood stoves to satellite technology in the same generation."
The Cridi opened his large mouth wide, then closed it. "I have forgotten that progress moves tenfold, and tenfold again. It is long since my people discovered non-motor engines."
"Mine, too," Keff said. "It looks like these people made their leap much more recently."
"Have done so without morals," the Cridi said, almost dismissively. "We shall have much to say to them on that subject."
Keff held up his hands. "Slow down a little, Narrow Leg. I've barely learned how to say 'Greetings,' in their language. It is going to take time."
"We shall help you," Narrow Leg said, resolutely. "It is better to work on a project that will advance our understanding than spend time playing puzzles." He shot an impatient glance at his crew, who were now involved in an interactive game with the brainship.
"I'll take care of that," Carialle said cheerfully. She reached into her peripherals for her game function and clicked it off. Screens all over the Cridi ship went blank, and she heard outraged peeps. Disappointed crew members, suddenly noticing that their captain's eye was upon them, immediately tried to look busy.
"I'll tight-beam them all the linguistic data we have so far," she said.
"Think of it as a new kind of game," Keff said, more lightly than he felt. "We're stalking the wild syntax in its lair."
"No. It is rather another weapon in our hand," the Cridi captain said. "This is the confirmation we have sought, after alclass="underline" that the marauders are here. That is where retribution begins."
"No!" Carialle interrupted him, with a touch of alarm. "Captain, we are investigating this system to gather information, not start an interstellar war. We're not armed."
"No, you are not, but we are."
"With respect, Captain, we must-and will-stand between you and the griffins if you start a conflict."
"Even though yours have also died at their hands." The old male made it a statement instead of a question.
Keff gulped, the memory of the dead on the asteroid clear in his mind. "That only makes what we have to do that much harder, Narrow Leg. That is the unhappy part of diplomacy."
"In the end such an outcome can only be a tragedy," Narrow Leg said, with a sudden expression of sympathy. "I shall not be the one to sacrifice our friendship. We will help you."
The radio transmissions from the griffin homeworld were primitive and infrequent, but as the two ships neared it, Carialle had no trouble capturing and translating the broadcasts into pictures and sound.
The files they'd gotten from the pirate base computer were put to one side. To Keff and IT those had been no help at all. The overlay of narration in musical horn-call on the astrogation file was unreliable as a point of comparison between the two languages. Where Central Worlds had long commentary on a particular system, there might be a single phrase or two of description in griffin. On a star-chart dismissed by the CW astrogators in four sentences as unimportant, Keff listened to a three-minute horn solo that sounded beautiful, but meant nothing to IT. He couldn't separate the language into words. Here and there, a word in the griffin speech sounded like the CW name for a system: "Farkash," for "Barkus," and so on. The difference was due to the griffin facial physiognomy. Keff wondered what had happened to the human computer operator who had told them how to use the system and pronounced some of the names for them.
In the live transmissions from the planet, Keff saw the creatures speaking in colloquial dialect. After several hours of listening to tape after tape, he was delighted to begin to discern patterns. Each of the messages began with the same word or words of greeting: "Freihur." Keff had his "hello."