Chapter 13

The rest of the day went pretty much as it had begun, with total harmony all around. Several of the scientists—including the sometimes irrepressible Hill, Meiersdottir was pleased to see—had already become embroiled in serious discussions with their native counterparts, presumably about their respective disciplines.

Early on O'Brian had approached her a bit hesitantly. "Amanda, the one we've been calling Joetwo seems to have kind of latched on to me and he's starting to ask a lot of stuff about 'singles.' I'm not— I mean, where do you want me to go with it? Should I put him off until you're there?"

"Just stick with the program, but by all means go ahead and start talking with him," she said. They'd spent a good deal of time shipboard discussing the basic tack that she and John Toshimura, his counterpart on the first visit, had taken about social matters, and she felt comfortable that he'd pursue roughly the same agenda.

Of course, given the nature of the Edenites' collective and its "think-together" structure—the cognomen they'd taken to using for the telepathic linkage that allowed the natives to basically pool their individually limited mental powers into an awesomely powerful network—it mattered little to which individual a human might impart information or from which he or she might receive it. It was input from or output to the same central system, moderated by the "mothers" (females) who remained mostly bound by physiological limitations to their underground nests while the males alone fared abroad; but as soon as it might be spoken by a human, whatever was said was available to all the Edenites equally.

Though completely outside the realm of human experience, that was the structure that had enabled the aliens to progress in their development with phenomenal speed. And, Igwanda soon discovered, to apply that knowledge base to the comfort of the humans who were acting as their guides and teachers.

Akakha insisted on giving the colonel and his wife a tour of the refurbished pavilion and its environs. Some of the improvements were familiar to Igwanda; it was he and his troops, for example, who'd engineered a diversion of the nearby river to provide the encampment with a steady supply of flowing fresh water, although the natives' biologically based concrete—an extrusion from the males' porous hides—served as the lining of the "Carlos Canal," as it had been dubbed before, and kept the water largely free of sediment.

But the natives had gone much further in the humans' long absence. The first thing the colonel noticed was that the previous tent-like roof had been completely replaced by planks of native timber sealed by a thin layer of the extruded concrete-like substance. The guttering the colonel had contrived to divert rainfall had been carefully retained and re-attached, with a few small spans of thinly cast cement additions where the reconfiguration had made them necessary.

Then there were the sides. The natives' ordinary method of construction was to build largely solid walls, but for security reasons Igwanda had insisted on a much more open structure of widely spaced uprights surmounted by crossbeams and had retained that design for the additions. Now each space between the uprights had been filled in, but with, to the colonel's astonishment, paned glass! Late in their prior stay one of the chemists had shown the Edenites the rudiments of glass-making, but they'd clearly taken the lessons much further on their own; the glass was only slightly wavy, the equivalent of 18th or 19th century Earth technology if not better. Moreover, although the very top expanses were installed solidly, the lower two-thirds of each wall consisted of the equivalent of French doors that seated themselves tightly against the adjacent upright; in clement weather they could be left open, but the structure was now proof against even gusting precipitation.

And the flooring, too, had been much improved. When the two species had first collaborated on the original structure they'd simply built over bare vegetation, which in time had been trodden down to dirt. Then the natives overlaid the dirt with their own concrete, which had been extended to the expansions and annexes Igwanda had added as the planetside human contingent grew and which had been the status at the end of the first visit.

Now the entire area had not only been resurfaced but was covered with padded ... well, carpeting, material overlaying a thin cushioning of some sort. And on closer examination Igwan­da was flabbergasted to find that the material mostly in use was the swatches of cloth that had originally overlaid the floor and provided the roofing of the original pavilion.

He knelt down for a closer look; not only had the swatches been laid down, they'd been sealed and cut to fit.

"How did you do this, Akakha?" he asked in utter bafflement. "It takes our lasers to work this material, and I think we did not leave you any."

The native gave a brief snort, the Edenite equivalent of laughter. "You did not, Igwanda. So we must find another way."

Still befuddled, the colonel merely looked at him.

"Laser makes heat, we know this," the native continued after a moment of apparent enjoyment of the puzzle. "We cannot bring such heat to here. But we may take material to heat at our furnace where we do the iron. At first we do not think even that is hot enough, but we learn that if we do very slow it will work. We make in that way."

The colonel, who'd previously told the natives they'd be unable to work the material at all, found himself admiring their ingenuity. "Excellent inductive reasoning coupled with considerable creativity," he murmured to Meiersdottir.

"There is more," said Akakha proudly. He showed them a waterwheel-driven lift that elevated small containers of water several feet where they spilled into a series of downsloping clay troughs that provided continuously running water at two locations inside the main pavilion, with the excess being routed back to the canal. There were also numerous tables and chairs built to what were clearly human, not Edenite, specifications.

"Also these, for night rest," the alien finished, leading them to a neat stack of perhaps twenty-five or thirty pallets made of the same cloth the Edenites used for their attire and stuffed with what Igwanda suspected was batting made of dried vegetation of some sort.

"It's marvelous," Meiersdottir praised him. "You've gone to a great deal of trouble for us, and we thank you very much indeed."

"You give us much, much," Akakha replied. "You have said it is trade, but we have little to trade with you. We know that this is small, but it is a way for us to give you back a little for the teaching you make. We hope that you like what we have done."