Chapter 43

"Good morning Joe, Akakha," she said as they walked up, each again bearing one of the flagons of water.

"Good morning," said Joe distinctly as he set down his jug. "Agnanga. Eeghanka." Her spirits took a decided turn for the better at the clear decision to return the greeting of friendship. They rose yet further when Akakha repeated the words. Igwanda picked up the cue immediately; "good morning," he said too.

"Tell now," said Akakha immediately. "We move mother in night?"

"Akakha, I forgot to ask," said the colonel. He moved his hand to his mouth.

"Why you do that?" asked Joe abruptly before he could speak.

"What is that?" Igwanda responded, surprised.

"Put hand to mouth. Why? Not need."

Meiersdottir intervened. "Joe, I began doing that when we first met to show you I was talking to someone else and not to you. We do it for that reason. But how do you know we don't need to do it?"

"Long time we think, not sure," said the native. "Yesterday you say ship hear all we say. I not talk hand, Akakha not talk hand. So we know."

"They do not miss much," murmured Igwanda.

"Well, I've thought it was polite," Meiersdottir said to Joe. "So you knew we weren't talking to you."

"We know," said Joe. "Voice different. Not need hand."

"All right," said the colonel, purposefully lowering his hand. "Sergeant, do you show they moved one of their mothers in the night?"

"No, sir," came Chavez' voice in his ear. "The locations are the same, the signal strengths are approximately the same, and we never saw any female signal moving."

"Our machine says you did not move any of your mothers last night." Igwanda spoke directly to Akakha. "Are we correct?"

"Not tell," responded Akakha immediately. Igwanda looked up in surprise, then gave a short burst of laughter.

"What's funny?" Meiersdottir asked him, surprised in her turn.

"They want to keep us guessing," he explained. "Did our trace function accurately? Or have they found a way around it so we may no longer rely on it? They are not going to help us with the answers."

"You teach, Eeghanka," Akakha said. "We meet first time, you make move to gun, I go quick protect, you not touch gun but you see. Then I do quick move. You go protect, but much slow. Important me, because when I attack in house you move much more fast, I not ready."

My Lord, do they not miss much! thought Igwanda. Of course, they are still amateurs; a professional would never reveal that observation. So they are not immune to showing off. Interesting. Aloud he merely said "That is so, Akakha."

"That lie?" said Joe.

"Yes, that was a lie," Igwanda began slowly.

"You say lie not tell all truth when truth important," Joe persisted. "Important you if machine work. That true?"

"Yes," said Meiersdottir, seeing where this was going. It isn't going to be an easy day, she thought.

"We not tell move mother, so you not know machine work. That lie?"

"It is a kind of lie, yes, Joe," she said.

"But you not angry like before, you laugh. Yesterday you say lie not bad if not important to other. These lies important to other. Why not bad?"

"Do you plan to attack us again, Joe?" Meiersdottir asked abruptly.

Both natives' eyes dilated appreciably, but Akakha merely answered "no."

"And we don't plan to attack you; I told you last night," she went on. "So your lie isn't important to us. And Igwanda's lie to you wouldn't have been important if you hadn't attacked us. Only because of that was it important. Do you understand the difference now?"

"Understand," said Joe. "Think not all, but understand this part."

Well, she thought, we're making headway. But this is going to be a long, slow process.

In the event, though, the early part at least went a lot more quickly and smoothly than she might have imagined. The alien collective had already grasped the idea that, at least in its relations with humans, it was a "single" among "singles." With that idea implanted, the sanctity of life and even of personal property were quickly grasped as the cornerstones of socialization, providing a solid starting point.

Laws and rules went down with a bit more difficulty, but Meiersdottir's explanation of them as institutionalized "customs" to which all subscribed soon disposed of that issue. Policing and criminality were only slightly more troublesome, once again explained as examples of the universal acceptance of those laws and rules.

It was at the notion of institutionalization itself—of government, of professional and social hierarchies, of organizational structures and the like—that things bogged down for a time. The more Meiersdottir tried to explain why one "single" would voluntarily obey or follow another, the deeper into a quagmire she seemed to tread. It took most of two hours before the difficulty became clear.

"Joe," she finally thought to ask, "do you think of yourself as a single that will be part of these relationships?"

"We single with you, how else work together? You say only way singles work together."

She gave a deep sigh of relief; it was easy now. "Joe, mostly we won't work together, you and we. We're too different. Instead we will trade."

There was a long silence.

"How many things do you do for yourselves?" she asked.

"Do all," he responded. "None else do for us."

"Yes, you have many, many arms and legs to use the tools and move the goods that you need and do everything else," she said aloud. "You can do all for yourselves. We'll teach you to do more, but you will be able to do those things for yourselves, too.

"Now how many arms and legs do I have?" she asked.

"Two arm, two leg," he said.

"Yes. So I can't do all for myself. Even without all the things we have, even if I were here and lived as you do—as we humans once did long ago—I still couldn't do all for myself. I couldn't grow the food and harvest the food and cook the food and hunt for animals and build the house and make the clothes and mine the iron and work the iron and all the other things you do, not by myself. That's why I must work with some others and lead some others and follow some others, because I have no choice if I am to live. But you do have a choice."

"How if you teach us more, we have more?"

"You'll still be able to do all for yourselves," she said. "Even if you want some things we have that you can't make for yourselves, you can make more of things you have that we want and then trade for what you want. Because even though you are single with us, you are many together; but we who are also single are only one each."

Mercifully that satisfied the collective, and the subject slipped past without further detailing. And the day proceeded on.

Ultimately a weary Meiersdottir called an end to the discussion, this time somewhat earlier than the day before. Their talk was as intense as before and she was finding herself beginning to lose focus; furthermore, something was nagging uncomfortably at the back of her mind, and she wanted some time to dissect it. She cut short the usual Gardener debriefing, too, claiming fatigue. "We all need a little rest for the moment," she said. "Can we talk in the morning? I promise we'll be awake on time, but I'm really exhausted for now, and I know you all have been going without sleep a lot as well." And that session, too, ended quickly with the transmitters being turned off and Igwanda and she were alone again.

She lay back and closed her eyes, saying nothing, unmoving for a solid five minutes. It wasn't until then that he spoke.

"Amanda?" he said softly. She made no response, but the change in her breathing told him she was awake and had heard him. He simply waited until, finally, her eyes opened and she looked at him. She sat up abruptly.

"Carlos, how do you see Joe and Akakha and that collective mind that's behind them?" she finally asked.

"I am sorry, I do not understand what you are asking."

"Are they our enemies, to you? Our friends now, who may have once been our enemies but aren't now? What are they to you?"

"I do not know," he said. "For now they are not our enemies, though I feel I must still guard against them. If they were our enemies, they could have killed us or done whatever else is their will, and they have not. They are also not our friends, much as we try to treat them so, because they do not—no, that is not right—because they do not yet know enough of the concept of friendship to offer or accept it. They are ... they are as children, with the capacity of both and the experience of neither."

"'Children, '" she repeated. Then her tone took on a sudden briskness. "Carlos, I want to bounce some ideas off you. So let me talk, don't interrupt, I need to say it.

"You were right this morning when you told them on the ship that we, you and I, are immersed here in tactics and that there's a need to go beyond that and look at overall strategy as well," she began. "I've been focused on the tactics of how to bring a completely asocial mind, one that's never had a peer in its own environment, into the realm of socialized interaction with other minds.

"Anyhow, I didn't think a lot more about what you said right away, but it must have been rolling around somewhere inside my head because when they brought up that business of how they might participate in a society with us everything all of a sudden fell into place. I fobbed them off with all that bullshit about they'd never be part of a mutual society, that we'd be trading partners instead, but inside there was a thought process that had begun to rear a fairly ugly head."

She paused for a moment. Igwanda kept silent, letting her resume at her own pace.

"Carlos, what happened in human history every time a technologically advanced culture encountered one that was less so? Every damn time?" He still didn't speak, but his attention visibly heightened.

"You know, too, the expression on your face says so," she went on. "Every single fucking time the more advanced society wound up either exploiting the lower ones or doing its best to exterminate them. Go back as far as you like, it's an absolute. The Egyptians and the Nubians, the Israelites and the other Semitic tribes, the Romans and the Etruscans, the Vikings and the Picts, the Spaniards and the Aztecs, Europeans and what we oh-so-correctly call 'native Americans' today, other Europeans and Africans, still more Europeans and Polynesians, one more group of Europeans and Australian aborigines ... do I need to go on?"

"Amanda, this was all long ago—" he started softly.

"Yeah? And we've changed? Carlos, you know perfectly well there are still places you can go right now where they'll call you nigger to your face, and very few where at least some won't think it. And there are still slants, wops, kikes, redskins—hell, there are sports teams called that—gooks, wogs, towelheads, sand niggers, white-eyes, honkies and all the other foul names in the minds of so many. And we still use those names, and the inconsequential physical, social, religious, whatever differences they represent, to distinguish us, which is any self-defined superior grouping we associate ourselves with, from them, which is anybody else and is by that same definition ipso facto inferior. What's more, each of those groupings does its dead-level best to make sure all those 'inferior' others are held to at best second-rate social, educational, economic ... inferior status and achievement in all ways."

"You are speaking of a steadily diminishing number of ignorant individuals—" he started again.