Rogue Powers (11 page)

But fresh, sharp, and flexible minds did work best, and not just for humans. C'astille's mind fit that description just as well. C'astille's people had no concept corresponding to that of a military, though hers was not a particularly peaceful race. She knew what exploring was, though, and had dreamed of being the finder of a new thing. As a youth, she had at times worried that the world was too well known, that there would be no discoveries or explorations or new things to learn. All that had changed now, of course, and certainly there were now to be strange new things to fill more than a lifetime.

She found the humans themselves the most interesting. Even now, long after she had first set eyes on them, the sight of humans, especially walking in their bizarre bipedal gait, fascinated her. The sight both mesmerized and repelled practically any Outposter not used to it. A human parallel to this reaction could be found in the unpleasant, creepy thrill some humans got out of touching a snake. A nastier, more accurate, and more compelling analogy might be the giddy, horrified, stomach-knotting reaction humans often have when they see a member of their own species, unfortunate enough to have both legs amputated, forced to walk on hands instead of feet.

To the Outposters, the humans looked mutilated, a front half of a creature chopped from the whole. Given the cultural and biological background of the Outposters, the very sight of a human brought a whole constellation of unpleasant things to mind.

It
took
a flexible, educated psyche like C'astille's to accept the fact that these were natural, whole, and healthy creatures—probably evolved in a process similar to that which produced C'astille herself—and not monsters.

Calder and the other humans had an advantage without realizing it: They were used to the idea of seeing a creature that walked on four legs, and even had the comfortable, familiar, and not unpleasant legend of the centaur to help them get used to the shape and movements of the Outposters. The Outposters had no such comforting images. To C'astille and her fellow Low Assistances, the humans did not bring to mind a more-or-less friendly sort of mythical beast. A very mild analogy to what humans reminded them of would be the front half of Frankenstein's monster lurching off the laboratory slab.

Humans took some getting used to, and the older Outposters happily left direct contact with the halfwalkers to the younger set.

Her meal quickly finished, C'astille cantered across the clearing from the Outposter camp to the Talking House. The halfwalkers had built their part of it first, not long after C'astille had first met the human Calder. The human techniques of building had puzzled the Outposters. The methods seemed highly inefficient, but the human structures went up quickly enough.

A Guardian Army engineer's platoon had poured a concrete slab foundation, assembled a rather large prefab hut and simply bolted it to the slab. The hut was meant to keep the rain off and nothing else, and the slab to keep the hut from sinking into the soggy ground. A quiet-running portable generator was installed and lights were hung. No effort was made to make the hut airtight, but inside it, a more sophisticated structure went up. The artificers assembled a room-sized box of very tough and transparent plastic. It took up about a third of the interior of the prefab hut and
was
airlocked. The artificers added a few conveniences outside on the slab: racks to hold equipment, a hose-down station to get the mud off a suit before entering the airlock. The whole interior of the box was always visible from the outside, except for a portable toilet which could be hidden behind a screen when in use. Calder quickly named the plastic box the Crystal Palace, and was delighted to have it. Learning and teaching a wholly novel language was rough enough without having to stand in the middle of a soggy field in a pressure suit to do it. Gestures, expressions, movement were essential to learning, and all were infinitely easier out of a suit.

Of course, there was no practical limit to how long a pressure suit could be worn if survival was the only criterion. But the suits were heavy, tiring, restricting, they limited vision, and the speakers and mikes were only so good.

In the Palace she could relax, pace, even take a nap or go to the head between language sessions, grab a snack from the compact refrigerator or make a cup of coffee. Far more important, she could see and be seen. Pantomime was often vital to making sure she understood what a word meant, and it was a hell of a lot easier to have the props of language-learning—a drawing board, objects you wanted the names of, notepads and recorders and so on—safely under weatherproof conditions, and it was a double pleasure not to have to handle a pencil through a pressure suit's gloves.

C'astille understood the advantages of getting in out of the rain as well as anyone, and once she had gotten an accidental whiff of what the humans breathed for air she understand why they needed to stay in a suit or a glass box. Unlike humans, the Outposters could smell and taste carbon dioxide and nitrogen. Human air had too little for the former and too much of the latter. She too was glad to get her drawing and writing and recording things out of the rain, and even took the human lead in making the Outposter half of the Talking House as comfortable as possible. She and the other Low Assistances brought in work tables, lights, rest couches, and their own food stores and portable power sources.

As the language lessons went on, it became clear to both sides it would be wise to concentrate on teaching the humans C'astille's language. Things simply weren't working going the other way.

The Outposters had so much trouble learning English that at first Lucy Calder thought they were "hard-wired," as she put it. It seemed possible that Outposters inherited their language genetically, and were no more capable of learning an alternative to the sense of smell. Calder would have been pleased if that idea had been correct; it would have meant one language would be usable across Outpost.

But the Outposters weren't the problem; English was. The Outposters just couldn't seem to get the hang of it. Calder concluded the problem lay in the structure of English, the parts that tone and sound played in meaning. She had a hunch that the 'Posters would do better learning Chinese, but there was little point in teaching them a language no one else in the star system besides Cynthia

Wu understood. Might as well teach them one of the Australians aborigine dialects. Come to think of it, Calder had a feeling C'astille would do pretty well at the abo languages. But not at English.

So Lucy did the learning, slowly, gradually. More of it today, and she had some questions to ask. Dressed in a lightweight pressure suit, she walked the paved path from the human camp to the Crystal Palace. C'astille was there, her tail flicking with eagerness to begin. Calder grinned and waved. Every morning it was the same; the moment she saw the young Outposter, she was caught up in the other's unflagging enthusiasm for their work. She hurried through the lock cycle, stripped her suit off, and sat down at the field desk inside the Palace. She cleared her throat and forced her voice into the odd resonances of C'astille's tongue. "Your presence is sensed, C'astille." It made as much sense as
 
hello," and meant as much.

"And yours is sensed as well. Talk starts?"

"Talk starts. But word-learning remains deferred," Calder said. It was the passivity of the language that was the most difficult and bewildering. It was hard for her, and hard for her human students of the language, to bear in mind that action must be placed away from the speaker, or better still, removed entirely and the verb used to describe a state of being rather than an action. "Absence of knowledge continues for my Guidances. And yet word-learning and word-puzzlement are at its center. A thing is pointed to—this structure, my clothes, our vehicles, our path to the Talking House—and the humans say they got there by being made, or built. Sometimes the Outposters have things pointed to and it is said they are grown. Your recorders, your structures, your couch are called 'grown.' Is it that verbs 'grow' and 'make' or 'build' are the same, or are so many of your things formed from live things?"

" 'Grow' is not 'build.' My couch is grown, my house is built from walls and other parts of a material grown in sheets. But walls not
precisely
grown. Never living, but made by living things not of my species. Species are caused by my people, and these species are makers of much of our things.'

That was tangled, but Calder thought she had the gist. "And the new species that are caused. How many—" Lucy quickly checked her dictionary. No, she didn't have the word for "generation." "How many cycles from parent to offspring between the old species and a perfected new owner

C'astille pulled her head back on its long neck, an involuntary gesture of surprise. "Why, none... or perhaps accurately one. The old form is taken, the changes are made on its—again, the word is not yet given to you. It is
lasut.
Do you have the concept of small structures that are controllers of what a live thing is?"

"Humans have known of this concept long years."

"Here they are called
lasut."
Calder noted its phonetics down, had C'astille repeat it so she could record it and practice it later, and the conversation went on. Both were used to such circumlocutions and pauses by now.

C'astille continued. "The genes are changed, and the next thing to come from them is what is wanted."

"That is not our way," Lucy said. "Human skill with changing these genes exists, but I have suspicions it is quite modest when compared to yours. Much time, many tried, many cycles of parent and offspring between first effort and success. Also, humans seek not to bring forth a wall-growing life form, but just a stronger animal, a plant that will give more food."

"So are all your things made, as has been seen?"

"Highly close to true. A human is the maker, or the maker of a machine that is the maker of nearly all our things."

"Even your
secu werystlon?"

A tricky term. Literally, it translated as "outer memories," and seemed to cover both sound and sight recorders, computers, perhaps some other gadgets, perhaps even pencil and paper. It occurred to Lucy that the term was a Dad fit. It was their name for a class of things that had some equivalence to computers, and recorders. "Yes, if I understand with precision," Lucy said carefully. "These are not grown, but are themselves machines."

"Many of ours live."

Lucy had the sudden and ghastly vision of a disembodied brain inside a glass jar, hooked up to wires. No, it wouldn't be like that. But the image wouldn't fade.
You learn something new every day,
she thought, and the two of them got on with the language lesson.

The days passed, and both sides learned.

Gustav pounded away stolidly at the keyboard.

Alien Contact Status and Action Report 137

General Summary: Once again, no major changes since last report. CI Lucy Calder continues to make gradual progress on Outposter-l language. The Outposters have confirmed her earlier understanding that there are any number of different languages spoken by the Outposters
,
many of them mutually unintelligible. Previous theories to the contrary must be abandoned. Orbital examination and mapping of the surface continues to be hampered by cloud cover, but orbital work has located about 100 probable city sites on the planet, in widely scattered locations. Recent low-altitude atmospheric overflights, launched from Orbital Station
Ariadne,
of many of these sites have located definite small settlements. Many appear to be abandoned. The largest of these seems about as large as a human village of a few thousand. We at Contact Headquarters once again urgently request that these overflights be suspended, as they must be disconcerting to the locals. We do not wish to adversely affect relations with Outposter groups we have not yet met, and these overflights can tell us little more than they already have: that the Outposters have very many small settlements.

Specific Summaries:

Language: Calder has done excellent work, and has now established a reliable basic vocabulary of Outposter-l. At my instruction, she now divides her time between learning more O-l and teaching what she has learned already to the trainees sent from Capital. These trainees are already capable of some conversation with the locals. She is also involved in the effort to get a computer to serve as a translating device. All of these efforts will eventually succeed: Comer will become more fluent in O-l and she expects to be able to talk in related dialects; the trainees will learn the language as well; and the auto-translator device will be perfected. However, I must emphasize once again that all of these projects involve the most gradual and painstaking effort. By the very nature of the work
—
in large part patient trial-and-error-breakthrough simply are not possible. With all due respect, the work cannot be rushed, and I can assure everyone involved that we at Contact HQ are as eager for more results as anyone. But patience is required. We will be learning the subtle points of O-l for the next generation at least. Colder deserves nothing but praise for her efforts.