Chapter 26

But nothing happened—nothing untoward, nothing threatening, nothing radically different. Not that night, not the next day or night, not the next nor the one after that. Nothing to confirm Igwanda's lingering suspicions or to provide even the slightest hint of substantiation. He was the guard at the gate that no enemy sought to storm.

The natives continued to come and go with the greater freedom they had claimed at the conclusion of the pavilion's construction. Some of the original pairings remained intact; the initial quartet of Joe and Gus with Meiersdottir and Lee were a fixture, with others of both species joining and leaving ad hoc, and Akakha continued to shadow Igwanda's footsteps. But other relationships altered; Heisinger, originally matched with Oglura, found a more compatible companion in another native introduced as Agula who had apparently a better biological background, while Oglura gravitated more toward Komosaki and Toshimura, whose initial interaction with Gagnora continued but without exclusivity. As the other scientists emerged from the lander—often the entire contingent was outside simultaneously—they spoke with and moved freely among the natives.

What was remarkable was that, although the primary language lessons continued to be conducted between Lee and Gus with Meiersdottir and Joe commonly (though not always) participating, the natives' fluency in Standard seemed to progress evenly within the entire group. It appeared that Gus was conducting private sessions with its fellows during the evenings and, with their seemingly eidetic memories, they absorbed its teaching unerringly; nothing else could explain how a word, a phrase, a concept painstakingly clarified by Lee one day would be in common usage among all the natives the following morning.

But the learning process appeared to be substantially a one-way street; even after more than a week of intensive effort, neither Lee nor any of the other humans had achieved more than the most rudimentary and fragmentary ability to communicate with the natives in their own language. "I keep listening and trying," said Lee in frustration one evening, "but the most I can get is this word or that word without any sense of how they're put together. Even when they speak to each other when I'm around, they seem to speak in sentence fragments—a word or two but which don't clearly relate to one another. I've looked for inflection, gesticulation, anything that might supplement the vocal sound to make meaningful communication, but I simply can't pick anything up. I'm good at this, I know that, but they're so much better that I can't even draw a comparison. At this pace they'll be writing poetry in Standard before I can even ask them where the toilet is."

And there were other oddities. The aliens seemed extremely inquisitive about all things human, but remarkably vague at answering similar questions directed to them. On more than one occasion Igwanda, who had taken to wandering at random among the various conversation groups that formed and dissolved around the meeting ground, was struck by how swiftly the aliens changed the topic when specific questions were directed at them. There would be a generalized response and then a rapid redirection to other subject matter. The natives were extreme­ly forthcoming in helping the physical scientists develop an understanding of those aspects of their world, but more than a little reticent about sharing details of their own society and lives, so far as the colonel could tell.