Elvene was trying her best to picture how she would be seen by them, as the fewer surprises she was faced with the easier it would be to deal with any situation. Preparation was the key to all enterprises, but being prepared assumed that one knew what was coming.
As they came into the beach she gave final instructions to Alfa. ‘Stay on alert, but don’t harm any life-forms unless something attempts to eat you. I can’t imagine that happening but one never knows.’
‘I understand, madam.’
‘I’m sure you do.’
‘Do you have a weapon?’
‘I have my stun guns.’
‘Very wise, madam.’
She smiled. ‘Glad you concur. Okay, remember our secret signal?’
‘Always, madam.’
She felt the ship strike the beach, and without instruction, Alfa opened a hatch that led straight onto the sand.
As soon as she stepped onto the shore, the hatch closed and the ship dislodged itself before heading silently out into the lagoon. Sometimes, Elvene thought, my relationship with Alfa is like one with a well trained horse. She knew he had all the facilities he required to defend himself. To her, Alfa was definitely male, not only because of his voice, but because she simply couldn’t bear the thought of having a ship of female gender. To her, Alfa was butler, pilot and personal bodyguard.
It was Sendra’s idea that they should go down to the beach. Myka would remember that later, that it was Sendra’s suggestion and not his. But he would never remember why they went there, because as soon as they arrived he saw his dream in the flesh. Not that the apparition on the water looked like it was flesh, though it certainly could have been. In fact in the middle of the day it looked more like a giant fish than a rock, but he knew straightaway that it wasn’t a fish.
He turned to Sendra, whom he could tell from the look on his face, wanted to run straight back to the village.
‘Stay here,’ Myka said. ‘I’m going out to have a look.’
Sendra looked at him as if he was mad, but Myka was already dragging his outrigger canoe towards the surf.
‘We should tell the Elders,’ Sendra said.
‘Not yet,’ Myka said, ‘I’m going out.’
‘Why?’
‘I can’t explain, but I have to.’
‘Why do you have to? It might kill you.’
‘No it won’t. I’ll prove it to you.’ And Myka struck off through the surf, with Sendra watching in fear and disbelief.
Myka knew he was being foolhardy, but more than anything else he wanted to test the dream. He needed to know if it was true or how true it was.
As he approached it, he realised that it was bigger than he thought. Close up, it looked even more like a big fish than a rock, but it was inanimate, he was sure of it. It was sort of a tear-drop shape and there seemed to be more of it below the water than above. He heard the water lap against its side, and he realised in an epiphany what it was: it was a boat, only it was like no boat he’d ever seen. It was like a giant egg and he could imagine it containing people inside. He’d once heard a legend of a giant wooden animal that contained warriors inside like an ant’s nest, and for the first time he felt fear, but then he remembered that that wasn’t in the dream, and for some reason he now trusted the dream implicitly.
Even so, he had to summon every bit of courage he had to climb up onto its skin. He climbed right up to the top of its dome. The whole thing was seamless, not a join or break anywhere that he could see or feel. And then it happened just as he expected: it started to sink, only very slowly without any fuss. Some bubbles seem to rise around its side as if it was breathing but he felt completely safe. It just submerged, leaving him floating on the surface with his canoe rocking nearby. He tried to see how far down it went but his underwater vision simply wasn’t good enough. He climbed back into his canoe and paddled ashore. When he reached the beach, Sendra was nowhere to be seen.
4. The Kiri
UNBEKNOWNST TO ELVENE, SHE WAS DISCOVERED WELL SHORT OF HER GOAL. A small party of men on the way to their boats observed her without revealing themselves. When they realised she was heading for their camp, they simply followed her without her knowing. In fact, Elvene’s bold approach could have easily backfired. Knowing how to deal with marauders in space and knowing how to deal with foreigners in their own world were not synonymous activities. The local inhabitants had weapons with poisonous tips and they had stealth and knowledge that she could not possibly possess.
When she arrived at the outskirts of their village, they simply surrounded her and stopped her in her tracks. They achieved this so quietly and adeptly that she was completely taken by surprise. Her sharp intake of breath and the immediate widening of her eyes told them that they had the upper hand, but she remained still and quickly regained her equanimity. She had deliberately worn a bright blue body suit that did not hide her shape, broken only by a slim utility belt with a pouch. She wore tight-fitting, broad, metallic bracelets around both wrists. Not surprisingly, they looked at her with outright suspicion and with more than a little apprehension. She must have appeared to them to be exactly what she was: a creature from another planet.
To her, the men appeared to be in very primitive attire, more than half naked, and some of them, she noted, carried weapons. She wasn’t aware, of course, that a spear was part of the Kiri’s normal attire, as they could never be sure of what they might meet.
She decided she should speak first. ‘My name is Elvene, I would like to meet your elders.’ As she expected, they didn’t understand a word she said, but she felt it was better to say something than nothing.
She reverted to a sign language that was a remnant of Old Earth. It was simple, eloquent and, she hoped, self-explanatory.
She put her right hand on her chest and then held it out palm open, with her fingers closed, pointing up. Then she used a circular gesture to include all of them, finishing it by pointing at herself. Then she pointed straight ahead towards the village. ’Please will you escort me to your village?‘ was how she hoped it would be interpreted. She made the movements look ritualised; her body rigid but her hand moving with grace and confidence.
But the reaction from one of the men took her completely by surprise. He walked right up to her and looked her straight in the eye. Then he repeated her first gesture, ending with his hand out in front of him, palm outwards as she had done. On an intuitive impulse, Elvene put her hand against his. She felt him relax and so did she for the first time since the encounter. In silence she walked with them towards the village.
It was impossible for her not to create a scene. Everyone simply stopped and stared at her. She felt a hush as she passed by people followed by a murmuring in her wake. She held herself erect and kept her face neutral, as much as possible. She looked about her, made eye contact with the women, whose faces showed surprise mixed with puzzlement and shock. She was unsure how to make a good impression in this community, so she thought it was best not to try. She was taken before a group of men, and now the real difficulties would begin. With no common language between them, how could she explain where she came from, and how could she make herself be believed?
But she didn’t have to say anything; an adolescent ran into the village yelling in an excited voice. She realised straightaway that he had discovered her ship.
What she didn’t expect was that the group changed their expressions from surprise and bewilderment to anger and hostility. She suddenly became aware how unprepared she really was. The boy was not that tall, he had a stocky build and wild looking hair, but he looked at her in fear, and she would have given her Corps’ entire mission fee for a translator.
The men were now all standing, some were shaking their spears, and they were all talking to her in what she could only describe as gibberish. For possibly the first time in her entire life, Elvene was at a complete loss as to what to do.
Then everything changed again, just as dramatically, only the catalyst now was a second boy, possibly th
e same age as the first, but taller and thinner so he looked older to her, and he didn’t look the least bit scared of her, just awe-struck.
She hadn’t seen him enter the area but she could tell that, like the first, he had been running; running very hard, in fact. He seemed to be explaining something and for some unknown reason everyone calmed down, just as quickly as they had become aroused. When he finished he walked right up to her, at first looking her up and down, and then into her eyes as if they were magnets that he couldn’t pull away from. She thought his eyes revealed intelligence as well as a complete guilelessness. He spoke to her, but Elvene could only slowly shake her head and hold her hands out in a gesture of ignorance, and she hoped, openness. Somehow she had to communicate with him.
‘Yes, I am from the ship,’ she finally spoke, and then pointed back to the beach and nodded her head. To her amazement, he smiled. A smile that would light the darkest night, she thought, and spontaneously she returned his smile, so relieved she was to see it.
With the boy’s persuasion, she took the whole village down to the beach to see her ship. She watched the reactions on their faces and heard the murmuring and whispers as they took it in. Alfa was sitting out in the lagoon like a huge black whale, only he was more like a rock because he looked so immovable. Then Elvene did a very bold thing, as she was unsure how anyone would react.
She put her fingers to her mouth and she whistled strong and loud. Now she was creating theatre and everyone hushed as the ship responded. Slowly and silently, Alfa glided into the shore, right up onto the beach to her very feet.
Then she put her hand on the hull and the hatch opened, where there had not even been a join in the skin. It opened out like a gangplank and people gawked to look inside. She stepped onto the hatch and walked inside, giving a wave and a smile, before the hatch closed again. Then the ship silently moved back out into the lagoon. She watched them from inside to see what they would do, but no one left the beach. In the end she decided to go outside the reef and wait.
She was almost certain that no one would follow her out and she was correct. After making a spectacle of herself, she decided on another strategy altogether. On reflection, her direct approach had achieved its purpose, albeit a narrowly averted disaster. They now had some idea of who or what she was, and they would also associate the strange-looking vessel with her appearance. But most importantly, she had managed to remain completely non-threatening, even in the face of hostility. But for all that, she knew that without knowing their protocols or their language, she wouldn’t gain much by simply planting herself in their midst. Her approach now would be one of gradual habituation; besides she had good reason to believe that she had more than enough time to achieve it.
She stayed outside the cove for the rest of the day and the entire night. Only at sunrise did she enter the lagoon again. On the beach she saw one lone figure, and she was reasonably confident that she knew who it was. But what surprised her even more was when he dragged his canoe across the beach, pushed it into the surf, and paddled out towards her.
She opened the hatch so it created a landing on which she could stand or sit. The boy came up and simply gave her that smile again. What amazed her was that unlike anyone else in the tribe, he showed no fear or apprehension of her whatsoever. In fact, he behaved like he already knew her, but she knew that was just her imagination. He was a complete innocent. But how she wished she could just talk to him.
She pointed at herself. ‘Elvene,’ she said.
He pointed at her. ‘Elvin.’
She nodded her head. ‘And you?’ She pointed at him.
At first he looked as if he didn’t understand, then he pointed at himself. ‘Myka.’
‘Mikal,’ she repeated.
‘Mm,’ he grunted and grinned.
This was crazy, she thought. But the boy was happy, reassured almost that she was still here, and he paddled away back to shore. In fact she believed that was all he wanted. It was the reason he’d been on the beach, to see if she returned. For some reason, she slowly realised, she gave him some sort of hope. But why would that be when he had no idea who she was or where she was from?
She stayed in the lagoon all day and, as she’d hoped, various people, all of them men, came out, usually in groups, and paddled around her. It was mainly out of curiosity, but it was exactly what she wanted. It was the only approach she knew: allowing them to become comfortable with her presence, and yet avoiding an outright intrusion.
At one side of the cove, on the left looking from the beach, there were some trees that grew out of the water like mangroves and she took the vessel over towards them in the belief that she’d be out of everyone’s way. She decided that over the next few days she would stay there, and only then would she start exploring the island.
Myka knew that, around the Ocean Woman, as the tribe now called her, he was just a big kid. Paddling out to greet her, he had the best intentions, but when he arrived and tried to talk to her, he just felt foolish. He’d gone to the beach at sunrise to see if she would return. It had been so important to him to know, yet he would never have been able to explain it to anyone. Myka knew little about women in the tribe, except that one day he would be ritually paired with a partner selected by the Elders, and so start a family like everyone else. Men tended to keep together, and once he had started growing hair on his body, he had had little to do with the opposite sex; it was the way of the Kiri. He saw women of all ages everyday, but he took no interest in what they did or what they had to say. But this woman, who had arrived in her other-worldly boat, had seized his attention from the moment he first saw her in her sky-coloured skin-tight costume. He knew that, in part, it was because of the dream; even though she had not appeared in the dream, she was its whole reason.
But from Myka’s perspective, the strangest and most tantalising aspect of her was not her craft or her attire, or even her language; it was her eyes, the colour of the sea from which she had come. And he would never forget her smile on that first day, when she had been so relieved to be understood – he felt her relief as well as saw it. He knew he had to find a way to communicate with her, and in the following days it would become an obsession.
Elvene had started recording the Kiri speech from the moment of her first encounter, but so far it had been of little help. Speech can be categorised under a number of parameters: phonemes, tone, pitch-dependent or non-dependent, grammatical structure and vocabulary range. Feeding what she had into Alfa’s immense database had proven to be a futile exercise. Alfa could find no correlation for all these parameters on any of the human languages and dialects he had in his memory, and, without any reference to a known language, Alfa couldn’t perform any translation. Elvene’s only conclusion was that, against all probability, the Kiri had developed their own unique language. Not an impossibility, she readily acknowledged, but another factor contributing to the mystery of their origins. Eventually she hoped to do DNA tests but she would wait until she could do it without being intrusive. Even DNA testing wasn’t going to tell her a lot; the human gene pool had been well-mixed a long time ago.
Despite this fundamental drawback, Elvene knew that she had to learn the Kiri language, and Alfa could still be of service; it was just that she could see no shortcuts in the process.
On the third morning Myka brought her a fresh catch of fish. She was not completely surprised by this, but she wondered if she was being courted or was he just naturally friendly and curious? Whatever his motives, she realised he was giving her an opportunity to communicate and she wasn’t going to let it go. She waved him to come aboard. He climbed out of his canoe onto the deck formed by the hatch. Behind the deck was a translucent skin.
He offered her the fish and said, ‘Avu pelay.’
She took them. ‘Thank you.’ Then pointing from her to him. ‘I thank you.’
‘You.’ He pointed at himself.
She laughed. ‘No,’ shaking her head. She took the boy by the arm and turned him round so he sto
od against her facing away. The top of his head was level with her chin. She took his right hand in hers and put it on his chest. ‘I,’ she said.
He patted his chest. ‘I,’ he repeated.
‘Very good,’ she said. Then she turned him round, pointed at him and said, ‘You.’
He looked puzzled, then smiled in revelation and put his hand on her chest. ‘You,’ he said. He held his hand there for a moment between her breasts, so she casually straightened herself a bit and pretended not to notice.
She smiled at him. This is going to be a long process, she thought. She picked up the fish. ‘Fish,’ she said.
He said, ‘Pelay.’ Then he pointed at his canoe, ‘Pelon.’
She touched the side of Alfa, ‘Ship’.
And that was how they started.
From her point of view, Myka obviously had a crush on her like a pupil with a favourite teacher, and a part of her said that she should not encourage him, but another part said she should take advantage. Given her situation, she felt compelled to take advantage. Besides, she found it impossible to turn away his smiling face.
So this became the first of many visits and they spent large parts of the day together trying to understand each other’s language; after all they had very little else to do. He would simply squat on the deck while she sat on a folding chair. The trees on the shoreline provided adequate shade and shelter.
Elvene also started going into the village and with rudimentary words and phrases she started to communicate with the adults, both women and men. They responded positively to her attempts at communication and she was beginning to be accepted in a restricted sense.
She realised that she had unusual access to the men; they treated her differently to the other women. She knew that this was partly due to her appearance, her androgynous look, but also because she was not one of them. The men realised that if she had knowledge and powers beyond their own, then they needed to know them and not the women, so they actually preferred that she spend her time with them. What they thought of Myka’s infatuation, she was unsure. They probably were willing to let it run its course. She had no idea what their mores were, and they probably saw the same advantages in the relationship that she did.
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