Crystal Heat

5

She lay in semidarkness, a damp compress spread across her eyes and dripping into her pillow. Despite the exo’s support, the days she’d spent on this world kept layering exhaustion on exhaustion so even in the best of circumstances, thinking would have been difficult. Now she had a moral dilemma to complicate matters.

If the nu didn’t know the Taalav Gestalts wereintelligent beings rather than beasts, they had to suspect it. So if she piped up like a good little phenom with her discovery, the least she could expect was a sudden accident that would leave her a grease spot on some mountain between here and Base. No wonder they wanted to erase all instances of the Taalav outside their control. Discovery of the Gestalt’s intelligence would complicate their lives enormously. And it wouldn’t help the Taalav all that much either. Instinct said this is slavery and it has to stop. Instinct was an ass.

Even if she managed to get them taken from the Kliu, how long would they last without an equally powerful protector? Protector? Call it what it was. Exploiter. Once they’re discovered, they’re going to be exploited. The only big weapon that small people have is Helvetia’s adamant stance against slavery. Getting that evoked would take a whole lot of proof not just her word.

There were a few comforting things she’d noticed. They seemed healthy enough, and the abundance of the tiny body forms meant that reproduction was continuing. She’d felt no rage or fear or frustration from that lot. And loathsome exploiters as the Kliu were, they were also protection as long as the Taalav kept producing their crystals.

Well, Digby, I think I’ve just quit. 1 can’t do this, but I can’t not do it either. Can’t take your pay and work against you. Can’t let the Taalav array be murdered. Because that’s what it would be. How do I I.

hmmm… I’m going to keep working to find that smuggler and hope I get to him before the Kliu. 1 wouldn’t put it past them to use a planet cracker on the place just to make sure they eradicated the array. Can’t leave them with that thief either. He’s no better than the Kliu… get them away… take them somewhere… they’ll need looking after for a while… Sar! What do I do with them? I have to think… hunk! Maybe I’d just better ask them what they want. If my head ever settles down…

The decision made, tension drained from her; her breathing slowed and she slept.

She sat in the chair on the creepier, listening to the Taalav chatter their symphonies and growing fonder of the odd, ugly creatures as the hours slipped past. They were as playful as otters, and they punned relentlessly in a langue that was a gift to wit-snappers and persifleurs. She nearly fell out of the chair in her efforts to stifle laughter when they threw quips back and forth describing the Kliu guard, especially when they were speculating about his sexual involvement with the creepier.

She sobered rapidly as the implications of that came clear. This new xenobi might be studying the Taalav, but the Gestalts were studying them back with an equal intensity and making some amazingly accurate deductions despite their isolation here.

They were more serious about her.

It took a while, gathering hints from the flow of their speech, to understand why. Their eyes were very good; they saw finer detail in the reddish twilight that was Pillory’s high noon than a hawk hunting in the brilliant light of a yellower sun. And they were clever at patterns, not just with words. They noted the basic similarities between her and someone else. They wondered if Shadith and this other woman were a separate species from the men in the lake place. They didn’t say men and women, of course, but talked about the diamond-shaped ones with the double-lumped high front and the wedge-shaped ones with the single smaller lump at the crotch.

They grumbled at her, wanting her to stand up so they could get a further comparison of heights. They speculated on the reason for the different skin colors of these two-bump people.

She glanced at the guard. He wasn’t technically sleeping on the job, but he’d let his body slump down on his support limbs and his secondary lids had slid across his eyes. She felt at him and came up with a sense of relaxation so deep he couldn’t be aware of much going on around him.

Still listening to him, she got carefully to her feet and walked to the lowering platform of the creepler.

They were excited about that, a little wary, but still not afraid even when the descent of the platform was finished and she stepped off of it.

She walked toward them, stopping when their nervousness increased sharply, then stood where she was and used the motors to help her stretch her arms out straight from her shoulders.

When she didn’t move, they edged closer, the biggest one taking the lead. It lifted its nose tube, hesitated, then brought it closer and closer to her, until it was finally nuzzling at her clothing and the metal skeleton of the exo.

Gentle touches. Tickling her. Getting very personal at times.

She twitched away, giggled-which they found fascinating so they repeated the touches. She lowered her arms slowly so she wouldn’t frighten them, moved the nose tubes away, then licked her lips and attempted a crude version of their langue, a kind of pidgin whistle talk.

Greet you tied to the land

I, Singer No-harm offered wanted

This one who stands here

They were enormously excited by this. It was the first time anyone had ever attempted to talk to them. They hurled a whole symphony of questions at her, not giving her a second’s opening to respond until the biggest one swung its armored tail about and made some peremptory clicking sounds.

When there was silence, it eased its head from under the hood, raised it on a thin muscular neck until the round naked head was almost level with hers; it stared at her for several moments. Then it spoke slowly, but did not try to mitigate the complexity of what it said, weaving the tones and undertones into a song. Though what Shadith heard the Taalav saying was simple enough when stripped of the qualifications and multiple meanings, it was also a great beauty that pierced her through and through.

The Taalav said:

where do stilter creep (our)

how do (the being that walk the

you are) clumsily

what are stranger invade this

space and hear us

topological landscape and bespeak us

stone/plant/we life and know what others

do not

Included in the question were asides that mentioned her coloring, her size and shape, the features that were like the Taalav and those that were radically different, the features (fewer) that she shared with the Kliu, her smell, her strange attempts at truespeak and other things that were too subtle even for that most subtle of instruments, the translator she’d inherited from Aleytys.

As she contemplated her answer, knowing it would be so crude that she’d better not try anything but the simplest response, she glanced at the guard and was startled to see two of the smaller Taalav standing close to him, making soft steady humming sounds; then one of them flipped its long tail forward and inserted the thorny tip between two folds of the Kliu’s skin. Amazing. They’d somehow understood that she didn’t want the Kliu aware of what was happening.

She sang/whistled:

This person I am that you are touching need

curiosity

Maker of songs called Shadow am I being here

liking you

The Gestalts chattered among themselves, sorting out to their satisfaction exactly what she meant by each nuance of sound, some of their conclusions making her grin, though she didn’t try to correct them.

There was a tickling around her ankles. She looked down. Several of the tiny body forms were starting to climb up her legs.

She didn’t try form a request, just whistled and pointed.

A few slaps of the nose tube by the largest Taalav and the curious infants scuttled away to hover under the legs of other adults and stared at her with tiny pinpoint eyes until she wanted to giggle again.

The Taalav fixed its eyes on her. When it spoke, it had carefully stripped away the harmonics and all it asked was, why?

She drew in a breath, sang/whistled to them:

A part of you adult forms taken away

family juvenile forms the one-bump stilter

plants/land/bugs eggs the two-bump stilter

Her face twisted in a fury of concentration, she told them of her need to find the missing array, stressing that she wished no harm either to them or to the others. She tried to impress on them that the others would be in great danger if she did not find them before those like him-she pointed at the dreaming Kliu-came across the absent and destroyed them…

this one before you politely

with no call on you asks to save the absent

but a desire to help you urgently

… so I ask you to tell me as much as you can about the two-bump person… female smuggler, she thought, just knowing that is a step up… what its colors are, how high it is… do they know about names? she asked the translator, ah! yes, I see they do. Names as descriptions, so intricately nuanced they can only belong to one Gestalt among the many… did you hear the name she gave herself, the sound of it?

Listening with such concentration her head started hurting again, she picked out of the weave of sound they gave back to her an astonishing amount of data:

There were too many sounds exchanged between the two-bump and the one-bump who studied them and whom they studied in their turn. Too many to remember. And they had no way ’of deciding what was name and what was just talk.

The two-bump was wider than Shadith, the bumps were rounder and bigger and it showed brighter colors than Shadith though it had a carapace very like hers.

The growth on its head was longer and thicker than Shadith’s and a different color, it was a shiny black and hung all the way to the bending part of its body; there were two white streaks in the black, very shiny, too.

It came on a flying thing, broad and flat like the creepier, but far more silent and more subtle.

It argued with the one-bump stilter; the argument made lots of noise, but the other stilters didn’t come out to see what was happening.

The speaker Taalav thinks the one-bump fed (untranslatable and untranscribable noise) to the others; this (noise) was the poison the Taalav collect in their stingsacs. The one-bump had taken sacs from Taalav in earlier days.

It took the one-bump most of four days to collect two full arrays and shift them on the transport. In all this time, none of the six legs or the other stilters appeared.

By the time this was done, Shadith was shaking with fatigue, sodden with sweat rolling down inside the exo, soaking the spongy cushions supposed to protect her body from the abrasion of the metal supports. She took a step toward the creepler, then turned again. She thought a moment, shaped a question, sang/whistled it to the Taalav: When I find your others, shall I bring them home to you?

She expected another cascading consultation, but the large one answered immediately.

Maker of Songs if they thrive, let them

be

Shadow plant the spirit/essence in

another place

Two-bump friend let them shape another

home

After she rode the platform up and settled herself in the reed chair, Shadith watched the Taalav arrays go spreading out beneath the trees, taking up the lives they’d put down to talk to her. She heard the Kliu guard’s breathing start to change and knew he was about to come awake.

She touched the sensor and set the creepier going on the trek back to the lake. A little tact and some patience and I’m off this stinking world. She smiled at the burp from the Kliu’s eating mouth. Sounds like, crocface there OD’d on (noise); may his gut rebel and his head feel worse than mine.