"I am Cloudy. My friends here are Shower and Moment." The first Griffin indicated the two nearest him. Others began to call out their names, and Keff decided to count on IT remembering them all for him.
"What do you call this beautiful world, Cloudy?" he asked.
"This is Thelerie, at the Center of all things, but you must know that, human sir."
Keff made the namaste, and saw it repeated by every griffin.
"I must assure you I do not know all that. I am pleased to be here. Cloudy, I am here for a most important reason."
The wide smile flashed again. "Ah, so I know. What commodities do you bring to us?"
"Uh, no commodities. I'm just visiting."
Carialle's voice was a siren in his ear canal. "I knew it, piracy! They trade in contraband!"
"Hush, Carialle!" Keff schooled his expression and waited, smiling.
The griffins looked puzzled, and some of the ones further back exchanged glances. "You are not of the Melange?"
"No," Keff said, firmly. "Who are they?"
"You are teasing us," Shower said, shaking its great head.
"How do you know humans?" Keff said, pressing. "How do you all speak Standard so well?"
They looked knowingly at him.
"You are teasing us," Cloudy said, his upper lip spreading again. "We did not know of humans to be so merry."
"They are friendly?" asked Tall Eyebrow, rolling out of the open airlock around Keff's feet, with Small Spot and Big Eyes immediately behind. The griffins looked down at the small globes. Tall Eyebrow looked up at them, wearing his best human-type smile. The curious, striped eyes widened.
"Slllaaayiiim!" the aliens shrieked. The large ones grabbed the small ones, and they backpedaled hastily away in the billowing tube. In moments, the long corridor was empty, and bobbing softly. Keff, thrown off his feet by the jouncing, listened to the shrieks outside on the surface as he climbed up again, using the airlock for a handhold, but his gauntlets scrabbled on smooth enamel. As soon as the corridor had broken open to atmosphere, Carialle had slammed the airlock shut.
"Well, that hasn't changed," Carialle said, into the silence. "Your ancestors must have fought hard, TE."
"This isn't the way to start a detente," Keff said severely, looking down at the Ozranian. His back and elbows hurt where he'd slipped against the side of the ship. "I wish you'd waited inside as I asked you. Now they'll probably call out the militia."
"We will protect you," Big Eyes said firmly, showing her fingerstalls.
Keff swallowed his exasperation. "Please wait here. Please." He held up a hand to forbid any of the Cridi to follow him, and threshed clumsily down the tube toward daylight. Two of the globes levitated and started after him, but he held up a warning hand. The plastic balls subsided to the cloth floor. The Cridi inside them sat down crosslegged in the water at the bottom.
"We wait," Tall Eyebrow said, disappointedly.
Lying flat on his belly Keff poked his head out of the end of the corridor. The landing field was deserted. He squinted up into the bright sky, quickly enough to see hundreds of winged shadows fleeing off in all directions.
"Damn," he said.
"At least they aren't calling out the guards," Carialle said in his ear. "No transmissions from this site, and no warm bodies headed in your direction. My, that's a long way down."
Keff glanced at the ground below him. In their haste, the griffins had shoved the gurney away from the ship. The only way down to the pavement was a drop of almost ten meters.
"Do you want me to open my ramp?" Carialle asked.
"No." Keff pulled himself back into the tube and waded back toward the globe-frogs. "I guess you four win, after all. I need an elevator ride to the ground floor."
To his credit, Tall Eyebrow tried not to look triumphant.
"We come with you?"
"Yes, but under conditions," Keff said. "One, you do what I tell you. Two, you stay out of sight until I think it's all right. Three-well, I'll decide on three if I have to. Agreed?"
The Cridi all nodded vigorously.
"This visiting of a new world is fun," Big Eyes said, her dark eyes shining.
"It is," Keff agreed, as they floated out into the sunshine on a wave of Core power. "The worst thing is that we're not the first humans to land here, Cari. After all this, somebody else gets the credit."
"Cheer up, Sir Keff," Carialle said. "We're in this one for another purpose this time."
"I just wish all our witnesses hadn't run away," Keff said. He forced himself to stare straight ahead and not look down as the four Cridi carried him toward the mountain city where most of the natives had fled.
Chapter Fourteen
"Four heat traces inside that one," Carialle said, as Keff obligingly swept his sensors toward the nearest house on the edge of town.
The habitations of the griffins were a peculiar hodgepodge of modern and primitive architecture strewn throughout the ridges of the high mountain reaches. No one seemed to like to live in the valleys. All of the buildings were of stone; unsurprising in a landscape with few trees. Each house had been constructed with considerable physical labor, using handhewn blocks, and yet, on top of this building and the ones visible nearby were delicate metal antennae, the communications transmitters Carialle had detected from space. The houses were roofed and decorated with the local clay, colored blue and green with trace minerals Carialle identified as copper extractives.
"One thing you can say about them, they do landscape nicely," Carialle commented, focusing on various details in the large yard. "Although the preponderance of rock gardens would get old fairly quickly."
"Pee-yew!" Keff said, as the globe frogs floated him over a pit. It was carefully bermed to prevent its strong stench from wafting toward the small blue house, so the only place for the stink to go was straight up, toward him. He gestured with frantic hands.
"Put me down! Now!" He dipped dangerously towards the cesspit, and waved for attention. "No, not in here, over there." He rose through the air once more. Following his signals, the Cridi set him down in the long grass several meters away from the humped construction. Once on the ground, he could see that it was fitted with wide stone steps leading to the lip, and surrounded by handsome gardens that no doubt benefited from the natural fertilizer.
"I see you've found 'the necessary,'" Carialle commented drily.
"You can laugh," Keff said crossly, triggering the stud that controlled air recirculation. "You didn't smell it. It was so bad that it passed the filters in my suit." Grateful to be back on his own feet, he patted the nearest Cridi's globe. Small Spot glanced up at him with large, scared eyes.
"These beasts are not secretly making an attack?" he asked.
"I don't think so," Keff replied. "It does not appear as if we have much to fear from them. They're afraid of you."
"Us? They are so many, and we are so few, and yet they do not attack?"
"It would seem not," Keff said. He squeezed his eyes halfway closed to trigger magnification on the house. "Those wires are very new," Keff said. "The contacts have yet to oxidize in spite of the chlorinated atmosphere."
"I am finding it very difficult to believe they continue to live in a semi-primitive state like this after having developed space travel," Carialle said.
"Focused application of technology?" Keff wondered out loud. "Perhaps they have a cultural prohibition against wholesale changes in the environment."
"Yes, but Keff, even sustainable technology could take care of that midden heap in a more aesthetic and less odiferous fashion. Side by side with electric light and telecommunications is that complicated system of water-wheels for ventilation."