Dairine stifled her laughter. Roshaun, who had come out of his pup tent shortly after Dairine, caught her eye. You said you were planning to improvise? he said. You are going to have to move much faster in the future.
Dairine turned her attention to the Yaldiv handmaiden. She came around the back of the mochteroofs and paused to look at the members of the group one after another, taking them in: a tree with glowing berries, a tall humanoid with flowing blond hair, a tall dark humanoid, a smaller one, and another smaller still; a little machine, a strange creature that wagged at one end and panted at the other. The Yaldiv’s scenting palps moved uncertainly.
Somebody really ought to say hello to her, Dairine said. But then the question came up: what did you say to a creature that might never have heard of errantry, or might think it was evil? Yet, buried somewhere inside this creature was the hope of a tremendous power for good. You had to let that power know it was safe to express itself.
Dairine opened her mouth. But the Yaldiv beat her to it, raising her foreclaws in the deferential gesture they’d seen used out on the path the afternoon before. Then the Yaldiv let them fall, as if she couldn’t use the normal ceremonial response, and thus the gesture was invalid as well.
“This one saw these,” the Yaldiv said. Those weird pronouns again, Dairine thought. “When they walked in the tunnel, near Grubbery Fourteen. Though they were not Yaldiv, they had a Yaldiv seeming. They wore it strangely, like a shell during molt, but not-like, as if the shell could be seen through. Their shapes were strange. Their shapes were these shapes—” She pointed one claw at each of them in turn.
Then she glanced up again and met Dairine’s eyes, and once again Dairine felt the shock of looking out, looking in, mirrors reflecting in mirrors. “But this one saw that one before,” she said to Dairine. “And not within the Commorancy.”
Dairine became aware that the “older-and-wiser types” were watching her and expecting her to produce some useful result. She took a breath. “Yes,” Dairine said. “And this one, also, has seen that one before.”
“When?”
“Not long ago,” Dairine said. “And not from within the Commorancy, either. From within that one.”
The Yaldiv stood there shifting uncertainly from leg to leg, a rocking motion. “Yes,” she said. “There was a glimpse of strangeness. Other eyes, a world in strange shapes, strange colors. Why are these here?”
Dairine glanced at the others. Anyone have any suggestions?
You’re the only one of us she knows firsthand, Kit said. You’d better run with it.
She turned back to the Yaldiv. “To see this one,” Dairine said.
“Why?”
I really need a few moments to think about this! “To tell the story may take a while,” Dairine said, “as the story told before the King does.”
Dairine saw the shiver that went through the Yaldiv—a shudder that literally shook her on her legs. It was strange, considering the fervent way all the Yaldiv in the hive had seemed to willingly worship that bloated shape on the dais. Maybe—
No, don’t get ahead of yourself. “That one should be at ease,” Dairine said, “and this one will be, too, while the story is told.” She sat down cross-legged on the cavern floor.
Spot came spidering over to Dairine and crouched down beside her. Look, Dairine said silently, keep an eye on her bodily functions while I’m talking. If I get near some dangerous topic, I want some warning.
All right, Spot said.
Very slowly the Yaldiv lowered herself to the floor, folding her legs underneath her and resting the huge claws on the floor at what passed for their elbow joints. As she did this, the others slowly sat down, too—those who could. Filif stayed as he was, and while the Yaldiv was watching them do that, each after his fashion, Dairine saw Spot put up a transparent display above his closed lid. It can’t be seen from the other side, he said. Here are indicators for brain activity, general neural firing, and the rates for all three hearts. But as for what the readings will mean …
She was going to have to take her chances with that. “Tell these of this one’s life,” Dairine said, hoping she was getting the pronouns in the right order.
“This one is a Yaldah,” the Yaldiv said. It was apparently the female form of the species noun. “The Yaldat are the mothers of our people. We are the engenderers of our City’s defense. To be a Yaldah is our destiny, and our glory.”
This sounds too familiar, Dairine thought. The language was much like some of the stuff she’d read in the mid-twentieth-century unit of last year’s history class. “Destiny.” Half the time the word’s just code for “what someone else wants you to do without asking any inconvenient questions.” “What does this one do in the City?” Dairine said.
“What most Yaldat do,” said their guest, and then she did the first casual thing Dairine had seen any Yaldiv do: she lifted one claw to comb back the scent palps on one side, like someone absently brushing the hair out of her eyes. “Feeding meat to the newly hatched grubs who are past their first food. Cleaning away their leavings and molted-off skins until their shells grow. Yaldat tend the hatchlings until they are large and strong enough to be taken away and trained in their work, or the way of warriors… or vessels.”
Vessels was a different word in the Yaldiv language than the simple female form. And the it pronoun simply meant that the creature using it was just a thing, of no value except as it contributed to the glory of the Great One.
Dairine opened her mouth to ask another question, but she didn’t get the chance. “Now these must tell this one of themselves,” the Yaldiv said. “These have come to the City wearing shapes that are not their own. And to mimic a City person’s smell—that has been done in the past by invaders from outside, the Others.”
“These simply did not wish those in the City to be frightened,” Dairine said. “The strangeness of these could make a Yaldiv fear.”
“The strangeness does not frighten this one,” the Yaldiv said. “It is also—” She stopped.
“Also what?” Dairine said.
The Yaldiv was gazing at the cavern floor with those dark eyes. “Also not the same…”
Dairine glanced at the readouts that Spot was privately showing her. The hearts’ rate had increased nearly threefold in the past few minutes. She looked up into those dark eyes again, met them, and held them. “There’s no reason to fear,” Dairine said.
The pause was so long that Dairine broke out in a sweat, wondering if she’d misstepped. But the Yaldiv looked down at her with eyes that somehow managed to show more than fear. There was anger there, too.
“There’s every reason,” the Yaldiv said. “For when one says the wrong word, the dangerous word, in the wrong hearing—little time passes between the last breath and the first bite of another’s jaws on the meat that was one’s body.”
“Whatever else these may do,” Dairine said, also angry now, “these are not going to eat that one.” And then a little exasperation crept into her own anger. “And these can’t just keep calling that one ‘that,’” Dairine said.
The Yaldiv looked at her in complete noncomprehension. “What else would this be called?”
“There is something,” Ronan said suddenly, “called a name.”
The Yaldiv looked from him back to Dairine. “A name?”
“A name,” said the one inside Ronan, “is the word by which one calls a creature that is different from all other creatures. A creature that is its own unique self.”