Double Contact

CHAPTER 25

Using its power-hungry tractor beams in reverse rather than the noisy thrusters, Rhabwar had come in low and quiet to transfer Prilicla and the Trolanni casualties to the station before returning as it had come, to orbit where the captain would be able to watch the spider ships without them seeing him, or if they did, they wouldn’t know that the new star in their sky was watching them.

“There are three vessels,” it reported simultaneously to the med station and the waiting courier vessel, “but all are stationary with their bows resting on the beach. Five gliders are flying around them at low altitude, too low for the med station to spot them. A number of ship’s personnel have been moving about on the beach and under the nearby trees, but too few, I feel sure, for them to be mounting an attack. In any case, the personnel concerned and the gliders went back on board their ships about ten minutes ago and just before a rain cloud blotted out the area.

“Doctor,” it added, “have you any medical or other developments that you want me to relay to Courier Two?”

“None, friend Fletcher,” Prilicla replied.

'None?” the other said. “What about your missing pathol-°gist? What’s the shape-changer doing about finding her? With

the increased number of casualties I should think her presence is desirable right now.”

“It is…” he began, when Naydrad, who had been assisting him with Keet’s treatment, answered for him in its usual tactless disregard for the fact that the listening patient was wearing a translator.

“It is not desirable, Captain,” it broke in; “it is necessary. Physiologically the Trolanni are an unusually complex life-form. This one will survive but its mate will almost certainly not, unless Murchison, who is a specialist in other-species pathology, returns to us soon. We are all concerned for her safety and the possible loss of her unrivaled expertise.”

Unlike the Kelgian, who could not help saying exactly what it was thinking at any time, the captain tried to be more circumspect.

“Your medical team is two members short,” it said gently, “and Danalta would be of more use to you there than remaining in the vicinity of the bay. What I’m trying to say is that Pathologist Murchison may not be returning to you. Isn’t that a strong possibility, Doctor?”

Prilicla felt a tremor shaking his limbs and body, the significance of which Naydrad, but not Keet, would understand. He controlled his emotions with difficulty and stilled his body before he was able to speak.

“It is a possibility, friend Fletcher,” he said, “but I hope that it is a remote one. Danalta lost contact with Pathologist Murchison shortly after its capture and while it was still on the ground rescuing the communicator. The shape-changer has since been trying to discover the ship to which friend Murchison was taken and where within that ship it is being held, so far unsuccessfully-

“I shall not call off this search,” he went on, “because I have known Pathologist Murchison for many years. I know its personality, its warmth, sympathy, humor, its sensitivity, and in particular the intensity of feeling it holds for its life-mate, and many other qualities that cannot be put into words. Of even more irnportance, I know its emotional-radiation signature almost as well as I know my own.

“The spider ships are at extreme range for my empathic faculty.” he concluded, “and while I cannot honestly say that I sense its presence at any given moment, if friend Murchison was to terminate, I feel sure that I would know of it at once.”

The captain broke contact without speaking.

Murchison began with the approach long-hallowed by tradition, even in the days before mankind had learned how to leave Earth, by drawing pictures of the people and things she wanted to name. They were small and simple; small for the reason that she didn’t know whether or not the supply of broad leaves was limited, and simple because the ink ran like water and she had botched the first two attempts by overloading the brush. She held the leaf horizontally sketch-upwards for the few seconds it took the ink to dry, then showed it to the spider.

Pointing at herself and the body outline in the sketch, she said, “Human.” She repeated the gestures and the word several times before pointing at the spider and its outline and deliberately said nothing.

The silent questioning seemed to work because one of her captor’s clawlike digits moved down to touch the spider outline. It made a low, clicking and cheeping noise that sounded like, “Kritkuk.”

Ignoring the sketches, Murchison pointed at herself and then the spider, and repeated, “Human. Kritkuk.”

“Hukmaki,” it replied; and, more loudly, “Kritickuk.”

The emphasis on the second word, she thought, might be due to irritation at her not pronouncing it correctly. But it wasn’t doing such a hot job of pronunciation on “human,” either. She led a different approach, knowing that it couldn’t understand any of the words yet, but hoping that it would get the message. “You are speaking too quickly for me,” she said in her normal speaking tempo, then went on slowly, “Please… speak… in… a… slow… and… distinct… voice.”

Plainly it had understood the message because this time, while the word didn’t seem to be that much slower, she was able to detect additional syllables in it.

She started to say it but the word choked off into a cough. Taking a deep, calming breath she tried again.

“Krititkukik,” she repeated.

“Krititkukik,” it agreed.

Pleased at her first linguistic success, but not wanting to waste time trying to teach it better Earth-human pronunciation, she knelt down on the folded hammock and, with a new leaf spread flat on the deck before her, she thought hard and began sketching again.

Drawing two circles to indicate their different planets in space might be too confusing at this stage although, being a sailor, her spider would certainly use the stars for navigation between its world’s many islands and might be well aware of the fact that its surface was round. Instead she drew a straight line to represent the horizon across the widest part of a new leaf, placed a small circle with wavy lines radiating from it to indicate that it was the sun and added the outline of the island. Around and below it she drew small, flatcrescent shapes to denote waves, and on one side of it she drew three flat domes to depict the spider’s ships and not to scale, a glider flying above them. She pointed to each of the symbols in turn.

“Sky,” she said. “Sun. Sea. Island. Ship. Glider.”

The spider supplied the equivalent word sounds, and a few of them she was even able to pronounce without being corrected, but the other began walking around her in a tight circle as if in agitation or impatience.

Suddenly it reached forward and took the brush from her hand and began slowly and carefully to add to her sketch. It drew three small, flat rectangles that had to be the buildings of the medical station on the other side of the island. It reversed the brush and used the dry end to point several times at the station.

She wasn’t giving away information that the spiders did not already know from their aerial reconnaissance and they would have been stupid if they did not already know that she had come from there, so she took another leaf and filled it with a drawing of the medical-station buildings in greater detail. She showed the sand below them sloping to the wavy lines of the sea and, on a clear area of sand, four stylized figures: herself; the cylindrical shape with many short legs along its base that was Naydrad; a featureless cone that was Danalta when it wasn’t being something else; and Prilicla. In outline the empath looked very much like Krititkukik except for the two sets of wings and the fact that it was a little distance above the ground. The spider remained motionless for the few seconds, either in surprise or because it was waiting for the ink to dry, then it pointed the brush first at Murchison herself, then used the end of its thin handle to touch her image in the sketch, followed by those of the others, and finally the station. It repeated the process, but this time when it touched each of the four figures it followed by touching the buildings, and ended by tapping repeatedly at the med station alone. Then it looked at her and made a chitter-ing, interrogative sound.

It was saying, she felt sure, that it knew all of them had come from the med station, but where had the med station come from?

One of the most important rules while opening first-contact proceedings with a less advanced species, was not to display a level of technology that would risk giving the other party a racial inferiority complex. Looking at this spider sea-captain, and considering the degree of bravery, resourcefulness, and all-around adaptability required for a profession that called for constant travel over a medium — water — that was an ever-present and probably deadly danger to them, she did not think that her spider would recognize an inferiority complex if it was to stand up and bite it in its hairy butt. This time she fetched the water container before selecting another, unmarked leaf. The horizon line she placed low down, with the island, three ships, and med station sketched in less detail. Then she poured a little water into her cupped hand, added a few drops of ink to darken it, and then filled in the sky with a transparent grey wash which, she hoped, would indicate that it was a night picture. When it was dry, instead of a sun she painted in a few large and small dots at irregular intervals. A sailor was bound to know what they were.

“Stars,” she said, pointing at each of the dots in turn.

“Preket,” said the spider.

She pointed to one of the domelike ships and carefully pronounced the spider word for it, “Krisit.” Then she drew another one of them, this time high in the night sky, pointed at it, then to herself and at the med station.

“Preket krisit,” she said.

The spider’s reaction was immediate. It backed away from her and began chittering loudly and continuously, but whether in surprise, excitement, fear, or some other emotion, she couldn’t say because it was speaking far too fast for her to understand any of the words even if she had already learned some of them. It came closer and jabbed a claw at the picture so suddenly that one edge of the leaf split apart. Again and again it pointed at its three ships and the island, at the starship and the medical station and then at the starship again. With the claw it pushed at the starship so violently that the leaf was torn in two.

Plainly the other was trying to tell her that the three ships and the island belonged to the spiders and that it wanted the strangers to go away. Thinking about the kind of people they were, armed fisherfolk with the capability for long-range reconnaissance, it was possible that they preyed on others of their kind as well as their ocean’s fish. The visiting starship, especially if they thought that it was manned by sea-raiders like themselves, had already established a base on their island. They would considerate it a threat that must be driven off, captured, or destroyed.

Somehow Murchison had to show them that neither the visiting ship nor the medical station were a threat and that they were in fact, the opposite. She held up both her hands, palms outwards, for silence.

When it came, she lifted the brush again and held it close to the other’s face, but this time she didn’t use it to sketch. Instead she snapped off a couple of inches of the handle, at the end opposite the hairs so that it remained usable, and held them apart for a few seconds. Waiting until it seemed that she had all of the spider’s attention, she brought the broken ends together and spat delicately on the join before handing both pieces back to the spider.

“Join it,” she said slowly. “Fix it. Mend it.”

While she was speaking, the other made sounds that seemed to have a questioning note, but immediately got the idea. Onto the join it spat a very small quantity of the sticky saliva it had used earlier to seal the knots of her restraining rope, and when it had hardened, handed the brush back to her. Apart from the small gob of hardened saliva where the repair had been made, the brush was a good as new. She began sketching with it again.

This time she didn’t bother showing the island, ships, or sun. At the left of the picture she drew instead a vertical line of four figures to represent herself, a spider, Naydrad, and Prilicla. Slightly to the right of them she placed a similar line of figures, except that her figure was divided by a narrow space at the waist and one of her legs was separated by a short distance from her body. The figure of the spider showed three limbs detached from its body, and similar radical dismemberment to the forms of the Kelgian and her Cinrusskin chief. A little farther to the right she drew a larger picture of the med-station buildings, followed by another vertical line of figures that were whole again. To make her meaning even clearer she drew four short arrows linking the damaged figures to the station, and another four pointing from it to the whole figures.

Again she indicated the join in the brush handle and said slowly, “We mend people.”

The spider didn’t appear to understand her at all because it pushed the sketch away before retying the rope around her ankle and sealing the knot. It left quickly without speaking.

Murchison threw the brush angrily at the discarded sketch. The rain had stopped and sunlight was shining through the narrow opening in the ventilation wall. She moved to it, hoping that more light would lighten her spirits, and wound down the ratchet until it was fully open.

Noise as well as light was pouring in, but the excited chit-tering of crew members and the creaking of wooden mechanisms could not drown out the single, loud clicking voice that was almost certainly that of the captain using a speaking trumpet. On the beach outside she could see spiders swarming over the other ships, opening their sail seals and raising the boarding ramps.

Something important was happening, Murchison thought, something that would almost certainly involve this armed fishing-fleet opening hostilities against the medical station. Angrily she returned to sit on the folded hammock, knowing that her lamentable recent attempt at communication was certainly responsible for it and that she deserved everything that was going to happen to her.

It was while she was glowering despondently at the empty doorway that she noticed something amiss. Beside it there had been an unlit lamp with single containers of water and sand on each side of it, and now there were three containers there. Feeling greatly relieved but completely undeserving of her sudden change in fortune, she spoke quietly.

“Stop showing off, Danalta,” she said, “which barrel of sand is you?”