He blinked up at the ceiling, the holographically projected double star of Oidar’s homeworld hazily visible through the thick curtain of air, and waited.
Oidar swam toward him, waving once as he moved just below the surface. He swam like a terrestrial frog, his hands and arms swept back against his body while strong kicks from his legs carried him forward. Rice had heard several of the Kowloon’s crew refer privately to the Sarpan as frogs and, while he hated the epithet, reflected that it was more uncomfortably accurate than he would have liked to admit.
“Temple!” Oidar swam into the shallows at the water’s edge and sat up on the bottom of the pond. He glided his webbed hands around him as he sat, waist-deep, and the water moved around him in gentle little waves. “This one is pleased to have your visit!” He seemed genuinely happy to have Rice there, and reminded him of a small child eager to show off his room when company called.
“Hello, Oidar.” Sweat had begun dripping through his hair, and Rice drew the sleeve of his free arm across his forehead. There was a low plastic bench a few meters to his left and Rice approached it, setting the helmet next to him as he sat. Oidar splashed through the shallow water to sit nearer him, and again rested on the bottom and swirled his arms to create the little waves.
Rice realized suddenly that, while Oidar was indeed stirring the water with his hands, most of the splashing around him was not of his making. Rice leaned closer, squinting in the hazy light, and saw that the alien was surrounded by several tiny fishlike animals. They swam freely over and through the alien’s legs, occasionally wandering slightly away before hurriedly wriggling back to join the others. Oidar positively beamed.
“There are eleven males, Temple, that have survived. Eleven! Come see.” He motioned excitedly for Rice to come into the water for a closer look, and when Rice hesitated, added, “It is all right, Temple. It is shallow and the bottom is firm.” He waved his arm again.
Leaving the helmet on the bench, he waded tentatively into the murky water and was relieved to find that, although his booted feet sank several centimeters into the muddy bottom, the footing was firmer than he would have thought. He waded forward then stopped, knee-deep, in front of Oidar and looked nervously around. “Oidar, are you sure this is all right? I don’t want to violate any…” Any what? What was he frightened of? He thought for a moment that his nervousness might be caused by the political implications of being this close to a Sarpan in his spawning area, but quickly discarded the thought. What was really bothering him, he realized, was his own discomfort at being unexpectedly thrust this far into an alien culture. He had come here, after all, only to talk to Oidar privately about the directive that Academician Bomeer had just—
“This space is mine,” Oidar countered, interrupting his thoughts. He lifted his hand from the water and swept an arm around him at their surroundings. Drops of water flew from his fingertips at the motion, and the little creatures swam playfully after the tiny splashes the drops made wherever they touched the surface of the pond. “And I alone decide who visits my spawn and who does not.” He tilted his head as if trying to come to a decision about something, then reached out and took Rice by the hand, pulling at the E-suit’s glove. “Please to remove them, Temple?” he asked.
Rice unsealed each glove from its sleeve and pulled them off, clumsily stuffing them into one of several roomy pouches sewn into the waistband of the suit.
“Like this,” Oidar said, cupping his own hands.
Rice copied his actions and held his hands out before him, watching as Oidar carefully reached into the water and scooped up one of the little swimmers. It made no effort to swim away. He extended his webbed hands and poured the water and the swimmer into Rice’s.
His heart raced as he looked down at the form in his hands. Against the lighter color of his palms the swimmer was much easier to see than in the murky water where Oidar sat. The swimmer had a wide, flat tail and no rear legs yet, but otherwise was an exact duplicate of the broadly grinning Oidar himself. With water leaking through his fingers, Rice felt the slight pressure of the diminutive alien’s tiny hands as it pushed itself up in his palms and regarded him carefully, tilting its little head in a mannerism he had grown used to seeing during the time he’d spent with the aliens. The little one rubbed several times against his palm, then, as the last of the water ran out of his cupped hands, wriggled back into the pond and swam to rejoin his water group. They greeted him by swimming and bumping against him and each other, friskily bumping one another and playing a game at which Rice could only guess. He felt he should say something to Oidar, but could think of nothing.
“They learn from me here,” Oidar said. “You understand that.” Rice nodded. “Much knowledge is passed through the blood, but much more is passed through touching. So. They learn much while I carry them, but they learn still more here.” He swirled his hands through the water, brushing against them as he did. “Each new touch carries a thought, an idea.”
“Thank you for sharing this with me,” Rice said softly, his words almost drowned out by the buzz of a dragonfly-like insect that darted between them before disappearing in the growths to his left.
“No. It is this one who give thanks.” Oidar smiled again, his gill slits puffing out in a manner Rice had come to associate with a display of pride, and he noticed for the first time since entering the room that a single silver bob had been clipped to the skin at the edge of one of his gill slits. “You have touched one of my spawn, and have given him a bit of your knowledge, a bit of yourself. He, in turn”—he indicated the swimmers frolicking and splashing in the shallow water—“has touched the others. They all share that knowledge now and are better for it, I’m certain. Thank you, Temple.”
Templeton Rice stood transfixed by the importance of what the alien had just said and forgot, for a moment, the urgent business that had drawn him to the Sarpan ship in the first place.
He is concerned for the condition of his water, and is correct to be so, Oidar reflected after Rice had left. He sat on the muddy bottom at the edge of the pond and held his free hand before him just under the water’s surface, his children swimming freely through his fingers and against the skin of his hand. In his other hand he held the data stick that Rice had left with him. Oidar did not entirely comprehend the human trait “worry,” and although he knew that “concern for the condition of one’s water” was not quite the proper analogy, it was the closest he could come.
He had not touched Temple while he related what the human Bomeer had instructed him to do, and so had not picked up a better sense of what coursed through his friend’s mind. As his visit lengthened, Rice had sat with him in the water and had, on several occasions, dipped his hands into the pond as he talked. One of his children, the one the human Temple had held previously, had been braver than the others of his group and had touched with him several times while he spoke. That one had quickly passed what he had learned to his brothers, but they kept to themselves the thoughts they shared and did not pass them to Oidar when he touched them; he could only guess what feelings they had acquired from his human friend.