Chapter 46

Igwanda brusquely cut short the next morning's communication with the Gardener.

"I know you have much to say, and we much to report," he told Shaw, who'd been on duty again when he activated the transmitter. "But we ask that you abide patiently for a small time more. We intend to meet with Joe and Akakha only briefly today. If all goes as we expect, we will then ask you to pilot the lander down to pick us up."

"Is anything wrong? Are you in danger?" asked the first officer.

"Quite the contrary," Igwanda replied. "And— Is this on the overhead?"

"Yes."

"Excellent. I will ask the members of the scientific contingent to find some process of selecting a new landing party of eight. At this juncture I cannot guarantee that we will actually land that many, but I think it probable. Expected departure will be tomorrow morning following a ship's meeting this afternoon."

"But— but—" stammered an obviously astonished Shaw.

"Please wait to dispatch the lander until I ask," Igwanda continued. "I am ending transmission now, will resume when the natives arrive." He cut off.

Meiersdottir shook her head. "We need to work on your communicator manners, dear," she chided.

He laughed. "In a way I sympathize with the collective's reluctance to use 'waste' words," he said. "There was nothing more of substance to be said, but they would have spent half an hour saying it anyway. I trust that their glee in being able to get some of their number down here will overcome any annoyance with my abruptness."

"Now I expect that's true," she said with a smile.

They ate a somewhat hasty meal before summoning the aliens; both were impatient to put their plan in action. Again Joe and Akakha arrived bearing flagons of water, unaware that it would not be needed. The four exchanged "good mornings."

"Joe, Akakha, I have a thing to discuss with you this morning," Igwanda began. "You have said you attacked us before because you wanted teachers, is that right?"

"That right, Eeghanka," Joe replied. "Want learn do things, make things, use things."

"Well—"

"Wait a minute, Carlos," Meiersdottir interrupted. "Before we get to that ... Joe, why do you speak the way you do?"

"Not say right?"

"I understood you. But you don't speak as we do, and I'm sure you know it. And I think you can speak as we do, can't you?"

There was a lengthy hesitation.

"Yes, Amanda, we know your speech now, though we do not have all of your words," Joe said. Prepared as they were by their own speculation, Meiersdottir and Igwanda both gaped; even the enunciation was dramatically better. They could only imagine the shock at the other end of the open communicator.

"If you can speak well, why have you not done so before?" she asked as she recovered from her astonishment. "Was it to deceive us, to trick us again?"

"At first we did not wish you to know how much we had learned, that is true," said Joe. "Then, after our attack went so badly and you threatened our mothers, we thought it would be best if you thought that we were more stupid and ignorant than we are. When you withdrew the threat, though, there was no longer any reason for us to keep our knowledge hidden but it still seemed—"

"You believed we had truly withdrawn the threat, then?" interrupted Igwanda.

"Yes, Igwanda," Joe replied, getting even that difficult pronunciation nearly correct. "You proved it the next day. I will tell you now, you were right that we did not move a mother in the night. The mothers are different from Akakha and me. It would be very risky, they would be sick a long time and might die from the move. The children, we would have lost many of them. But we were desperate, we could think of no other way. If you had not called us back that evening we would have tried to move one nest later, and it would have been terrible. We thank you again truly for that."

"You're welcome." Meiersdottir took over the discussion again. "But you were going to say why you continued talking as you did."

"That is not easy to say," Joe continued. "Partly it was because we did not want to look foolish by pretending to have more knowledge than we had. Much of your speech we took from hearing you talk with yourselves, and we did not wish to make errors. Please correct us now if we do."

"All right," she said. "It's 'talk among yourselves, ' not 'with yourselves, ' but everything else you've said has been exactly right."

"'Among yourselves, '" Joe said. "Because there are many?"

"Yes."

"We will remember. There is also more, but we do not know how to say this part."

There was a pause.

"It is all yours," he finally went on. "Your things—machines?" Meiersdottir nodded. "It is your machines, your weapons, your ideas, even your plan and your roof there where we wished to show you how well we could build." He gestured to the pavilion. "And it is your speech, too. But this is our home. It is perhaps foolish, but speaking as we did was a way to have something for us. Do you understand?"

"A far more eloquent and succinct explanation than my own," murmured Igwanda.

"Yes, Joe, I understand," said Meiersdottir gently. "I know how you must feel."

"Do you truly understand, Amanda?" Joe asked—a bit plaintively, she thought, though the tone was as unvarying as always. "Do humans have such feelings too?"

"Oh, yes," she said. "All the time."

"'All the time?'" Joe said questioningly.

"That's a way of saying frequently," she explained. "It's part of being single. There's the fear that because someone else has something you don't, or even many things, that ­person is better than you in all ways, and you don't want to feel you're less than the other person."

"Yes. You are better than us in all ways that we have seen," Joe said.

"No, we aren't," she replied. "Joe, let me start off by asking, if we tried hard to learn, could we talk in your language, your speech?"

"No," he said instantly. "We do not have enough words. We use speech for some things because it is easier, but only one to one." He gesticulated between himself and Akakha. "Even some of the words that Gus gave to Janet, it was only because she wanted them, they were pretend words we do not use. We do not have names, they are pretend too, just for you. The name I gave you first, Ghotogatogulagunga, is the name we say for all of us, and Khukhak, you say Gus, only means 'number two' and Akakha is 'number three.' After that we changed because we thought you would want our words for numbers and we knew you would guess too much if the numbers and the names were always the same, but we began that way."

Meiersdottir laughed briefly. "So much we have to learn about each other," she said, shaking her head. "Well, then, we can't use your speech, we must use ours. So that doesn't make us better, only different."

"That is true."

"As for the rest ... Joe, a couple of days ago I asked how long you had been thinking together, and you really didn't answer. Do you know?"

"Not exactly," the native said. "We gave it much thought after you asked, but our early memories are not clear. Our guess is that it was perhaps five hundred years, perhaps a little more."

She took a sharp breath. "And how long since you have been growing your crops, farming?"

"We know that," he said. "It is one hundred thirty-seven years."

"And how long since your first house?"

"It is the same, one hundred thirty-seven years. We did not need house before."

"Wow," she said. "Joe, we are ... older than that. Very much older than that. Not each one of us, but our people, humans. Do you know what a thousand is?"

"No."

"A thousand is ten hundreds. Now, we can't remember the way you do, but we have other ways of finding out about the past. We think humans like us lived perhaps forty or fifty thousands of your years ago, possibly a little longer. We think they began farming and building houses perhaps ten or fifteen thousands of your years ago. But we didn't begin to use iron until perhaps three thousands of your years ago. It took us all that time to reach where you are now. Do you still believe we are better than you in all ways?"

"We are fast, then?" asked Joe.