by Scott Rhine
“What are you two smiling about?” Toby asked after a few weeks.
“We just tried wrangling our first herbivore,” Yvette replied. “The creature is sort of like a cross between a Shetland pony and an alpaca.”
“With really bad snot issues,” Oleander said, giggling. “Johnny wants the milk, and Rachael needs the manure pellets for fertilizer. So we’ve been trying to catch one.”
Covering her mouth, Yvette said, “When I first encountered the herd, they were huddled together with their necks in a totem-pole arrangement. I thought it was a mythological beast with four heads. They run like gazelles.”
“You’re so beautiful,” he blurted.
Yvette blushed, and Oleander cleared her throat. “Stick to business, Doc. Any suggestions?”
“First you need to name it. I categorized them in the order Artiodactyla—even-toed, hoofed mammals—and suborder Ruminantia, which has every grazer from deer to giraffes. Traditionally, you start with the discoverer’s name, then the unique Latin, such as Chenonceau’s xeno-hydra-bovidae. We’ll know more after closer observation. Lastly, you pick the common name such as hydra deer.”
“How do we corner one of those things at the rodeo and not get kicked?” Oleander asked.
“Find out what it likes. Try hand-feeding until it trusts you, and then slip a harness over its head. Grazers generally have a reflex to spook forward if you clap or make a loud noise behind them.”
“We never see you anymore in the scouts,” Oleander remarked to him. “What do they have you doing?”
“Well, we’ve already created an inhospitable zone, burning off any close vegetation on the mesa’s slopes,” Toby replied. “Herk has installed two drawbridges, one fifty meters from the bottom and one about that distance from the top. They’re rigged with explosives he cooked up.”
“I know about the subsonic speakers to scare native life away because we installed them around the perimeter,” Oleander noted.
“I’m scattering bones around the river paths when I’m done with them to make it look like a really nasty predator lives here. The next layer is the genmod stinging nettles at panda nose height. I only have a couple more months of work until I’ll be able to plant those. Things are going much faster with my new talent. They don’t need me to adapt the native food plants yet because Rachael decided to go with mostly Sanctuary transplants. So I’ll soup up the stink pods next. Herk wants sleep thorns, but I’ve explained how thick the panda fur and fat layer is.”
“Yeah. I can’t believe you measured that corpse in the jungle while you were wearing the armor,” Oleander said. “Shimmer gear is hot and awkward.”
“It was a golden opportunity. Those other two natives mauled the trader to death mere hours from here. Normally, ursoids posture: stand taller, stretch necks, and roar to give the intruder a chance to leave. This was an ambush with no honor. One grabbed the trader in a headlock to prevent the use of fangs in self-defense while the other slashed the victim with claws. When he was too weak to stand on his own—”
Yvette interrupted. “How do you know he was a trader?”
“His backpack was full of dried, aromatic leaves. They also stole the pouch at his hip, which I assume contained some sort of portable currency. I filmed the entire autopsy and dragged back samples of everything on the travois.”
She nodded, remembering how he had referenced the American Indian history books to build the cot-like frame he used to drag his treasure back. When Toby set his mind to something, he accomplished it.
“The entire experience was most illuminating. Scavengers cleaned the evidence I left behind within hours. I think he was about ten E years. I built several charts for bone and tooth growth based on the samples from the mass grave. The L pandas seem to mature more rapidly than humans. I placed the oldest bones at about twenty-five E years, a full solar cycle. He was probably a village elder by their standards. On Earth, pandas can live up to thirty-five years.”
Oleander said, “Herk would like it if we could mount the COIL on the mesa, surrounded by automated gauss guns.” The guns fired tiny shavings of metal accelerated by magnets to high speeds. They were designed for space to limit recoil and damage to ships. The dial could adjust from needle size to quarters, but each ammunition load ran out in one shot at the largest setting. Death by a thousand needles was far more economical.
“We might actually build a few more guns along with flash bangs. The grenades are very effective at discouraging the nocturnal fauna, a fact I discovered while hauling back the fresh meat and organs.”
Shaking her head in wonder, Oleander said, “You stood your ground against four of those cats. Aren’t you afraid of anything?”
“They were my samples,” Toby insisted, “and I had to get back to Yvette.”
Yvette felt flattered and queasy at the same time.
Deciding on the direct approach, Oleander asked, “So you want to get some sunshine tomorrow? The herd we’re trying to catch has wandered into the five-klick perimeter and keeps setting off low-level alarms. You’d be doing us a big favor.”
Gazing at Yvette as he answered, Toby said, “Of course.”
When he left so the two women could shower, Yvette elbowed her roommate. “Why did you do that?”
“The man earned his degree herding goats,” Oleander insisted. “He’ll be a big help.”
Yvette glared.
Oleander slipped out of her gear unselfconsciously. “I thought maybe if you saw him outside the lab, it might help. If he hadn’t flipped out before, would you date him?”
“Yes. Are you on his side?”
“This isn’t about sides. I happen to know you’ve been having him do your homework for you.”
“I have him working on a small, unofficial project,” Yvette admitted.
“Hmm-hmm. This way, he gets a date, and I get a few hundred kilos of tasty, little burgers-to-be.” The noise of the shower drowned out further complaints.
****
The next morning, Toby started by showing them how to tie harnesses. “I’ve herded goats, so I can show you the basic knots.”
The capture process went smoothly with Toby in the stealth armor and the women scaring the prey toward him. Over the course of the day, they retrieved four females and one male. Everyone helped haul the animals into the pasture the Herkemers had constructed.
“We weren’t expecting so many,” Rachael said as she fed and watered the animals. “I think we should build an overhang so they can have shelter when it rains. If we hurry, we can raise it before the suns go down.” Everyone else was roped into the impromptu improvement project while the three scouts were released to hit the showers.
Yvette told her roommate, “You can go first. I want to check the panda news feeds.”
Rubbing the green slime matting her hair, Oleander said, “Thanks. I owe you one.”
Since Toby was already entering a report on his computer pad, he handed the device to Yvette. “You can borrow mine.”
As she surfed the feeds, Yvette explained, “The pregnant female pandas move closer to the lake for weaving and threshing duty. Today the satellite caught one right after birth.”
He removed the armor and hung it neatly. Then he mopped his forehead with his shirt.
Flipping through, she squealed, “She had twins! They were so tiny. The mothers lactate just like we do, but we couldn’t see the breasts under all that fur.”
“It’s good to see you happy,” Toby said sincerely.
“New life always does that for me.” Yvette was at her softest after a delivery. Only when she returned his computer did she notice how buff Toby looked. He’d been exercising a lot in the higher gravity.
When he felt her physical attraction through the link, he swallowed hard. “I figured out how to return from the lake to here without being caught—”
“Shh!”
Oleander stepped outside a moment later, in clean gear and a breather. “Next.”
“Um . . . H
e’s going to show me how to decontaminate my footwear properly according to British Livestock Protocols,” Yvette improvised.
Raising an eyebrow, Oleander said, “Okay. I’ll be waiting outside in case you need me.”
Toby said, “You could hose off the suit.”
The tall blonde snatched the binoculars from his pack and focused on the working men in the distance. “No. If Rachael sees me run the hose from the greenhouse, she’ll put me to work hauling lumber. We have a linguistics briefing coming up in an hour. Till then, I just have to stay off her radar and watch the man candy.”
Once inside with Toby, Yvette asked, “How do we manage the trip back from Meteoropolis?” She could feel his thrill at the word ‘we’.
“Over the top,” he whispered.
“The desert? That’s insane.”
“It will be just after a flare, the safest time. Nothing will be there to attack me.”
“Let’s say you could manage the climb. There’s still no way you could carry enough water for the walk back. Even in a spacesuit, you’d fry.”
He raised his forefinger. “What if we put big tires on the rover?”
“Convert it into a dune buggy?”
“Yes. Zeiss has already approved a desert-rover expedition based on my research. He’s just waiting for someone to have spare cycles to man the rover controls. Once he signs off on the redesign, the rest is a simple matter for the engineers.”
It could work. The man was an evil genius. For a moment, she experienced a surge of gratitude, admiration, and a hint of lust.
****
Yvette walked into the briefing a couple minutes late and sat in the back next to Oleander, who was playing solitaire on her computer pad. The nurse whispered, “Toby will catch up after he neatens up some gene-sequencing notes on his desk.”
“I watched Out-of-body from down here,” Oleander muttered. “I’ve got your back.”
Yvette blushed. “Nothing happened.”
“Did you want it to?”
“A little. Do you think I’m crazy?”
“Wanting what you can’t have? Why should you be any different than the rest of us?”
On the big screen, Lou stood awkwardly in front of a board. “As far as Earth languages go, L panda is closest to aborigine in nature in that the language seems to have subtle variations based on the nomadic tribe, just like we have slang or regionalisms.” The next slide said, ‘Top Ten differences from Earth languages.’ “All I can give you for now is a very high-level feel for the nature of their language.”
Lou clicked to a picture of a pirate. “There are three different r sounds. Depending on how deep and resonant the growl, the same word can have different meanings. To help underscore the emotional subtext, we’ll draw Rs like claws.”
The picture changed to a panda with ears laid back. “Second, not all language is spoken. Like a good dirty joke, the eyes and ears can add inflection. Parts of their communication will not be captured in audio, so we want to add motion video to the surveillance.” Oleander groaned at the added complexity.
The next photo was of a bat. “Third, they have no long e sound, like eek.”
Yvette zoned out, wondering about the Toby issue until she heard Lou say, “The key take-away from phase one is that they appear to have no alphabet of their own.”
Several people moaned at this. Lou projected a copy of the Russian alphabet on the screen. “Not to worry. Early evangelists made up a language to translate the bible into fifty tongues. Like Cyrillic, it may take us a few passes to refine a written language for them. The remaining common panda phonemes have been rendered as twenty-five distinct letters for the first pass of our transliteration effort.”
“Are we supposed to learn to read and write this new language?” Johnny asked.
“Those of us in Olympus will. Your scouts should be able to use the oral-only Pimsleur method like I do. We’re also working on a good way to teach the new alphabet to the natives in an intuitive manner.”
Mercy interrupted. “Like typing ‘the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’ when you try out a new keyboard. We want to build a sentence that has all the letters at least once, and we’ll draw pictures to go along with it.”
“A Rosetta Stone comic book,” Herk suggested.
“Yeah,” Lou said, less than thrilled by the comparison. “The next phase is going from letters to words. The method I used is based on cryptoanalytic techniques. We count the number of times a word appears in the language, and the ones that appear most often are the most important.” He put up a table for English. People recognized the common ones: the, be, to, and, in, have, I. “The top twenty-five words make up a third of all printed material. The top hundred make up half. Each additional step will take us exponentially more effort. English has about 5000 in daily use. The typical person has about a 50,000 word vocabulary. There are on the order of 250,000 in Webster’s dictionary.”
Mercy chimed in again. “We’re making progress slowly because of limited input, but what we’re learning tells us enormous amounts about the L pandas’ value system. Remember that old story about the Eskimos having so many words for snow? It’s sort of like that. Lou, stop with the numbers and tell them about the natives.”
Lou scratched his head. “Well, obviously, pick and harvest are much more common words in Pandanese because it’s what they do all day. Also, because of agriculture, so are water, dirt, and seed. The word for crap is an onomatopoeia: thplut or ungsplut.” Several men in the crowd smiled.
Clearing her throat, Mercy urged him, “Word frequencies.”
“The word ‘make’ has a higher instance and ‘have’ lower than our languages. Part of this is lack of fancy tenses and helping verbs, but some is due to a general lack of possessions or ownership other than what they can carry. Most other words can be guessed by rate of occurrence and confirmed by context. ‘Bagdut’ we think is a unit of trade. The biggest kink for most of us translators is that pandas don’t use the word ‘is’ as often as Romance languages.”
“How is that possible?” asked Johnny.
“I think the language is ergative, which means there isn’t always a cause or object. Things just are. No accusative such as ‘he pushed her,’ just ‘she victim.’ These people are passive with no blame. The tool broke itself. Other than Tibetan, most Earth ergative forms are aboriginal or extinct.”
The camera panned the room as Yuki spoke up. “What about the astronomical influences you told me about?”
In the background, Mercy was playing with her hair, watching Lou with pride as he lectured.
Yvette leaned over to tell Oleander, “She really likes him researching language and teaching. It’s been a dream of hers for a while.”
“He’s growing up,” Oleander commented. “She’s been good for him.”
Lou lectured on, unaware of the commentary. “Because of the odd light cycles, there are a few new words, instead of just night. Day is the same, but when the giant starts to occlude the sun, we call that penumbra. During the eclipse, that’s umbra. Even when our camp is facing away from the sun, which is roughly half the time, reflected light from Daedalus will light our skies enough to read by. This period is called reflection. Some plants grow by this light as well. In Pandanese, they refer to the time we face empty space as true night.”
Standing behind Yvette’s chair, Toby spoke for the first time, startling the women by his presence. Softly, so only the two could hear him, he said, “When a good woman leads a man through true night, it changes him.”
“What brings you down here? I thought Lou bored you,” Yvette asked casually.
“I e-mailed Risa, and she replied during the meeting. She said that putting dune-buggy tires on the rover to make it strong enough to carry a human would be too much. It’s like the old joke about a bum who asked the housewife to sew a coat onto his button. The rover would be little more than the brain and steering control. We’d also need too much nanocircuitry from Sanctuary. Howev
er, I made a convincing case for a fast, remote-controlled buggy or submarine large enough to carry food, water, spare batteries, or even a spacesuit to scouts in the field. She’s making it a priority. I wanted to tell you as soon as I heard.”
His hopeful, puppy-dog eyes were desperate for approval. “A mini-submarine that could tow people—that might be extremely useful.” In payment, she let him hold her hand in public, even though several crew members stared.
Chapter 31 – Gift Conference
Yvette’s scout runs were growing longer and more dangerous each week. The next big debate in the direction of scouting took place between Toby and Lou. The two finally had to schedule a meeting to let Zeiss arbitrate. The women played games on computer pads while the men postured. Toby wanted to bug the birthing village. “They have domesticated animals there. That camp will give us technology items to check off and more vocabulary. We’ll be able to track births and deaths, giving us a feel for how the Greens are thriving and growing. Lastly, our scouts will be safer with a static location.” What he didn’t add was that this would give them a perfect chance to sneak toward the deep end of the lake to investigate.
“I disagree. A fixed location with higher population means a greater chance of discovery,” Lou insisted. “We in linguistics will subsidize his supply boats, but we need concrete data on the panda counting systems and craftsmen. That information can only come from traders. Following one trader with satellite support will be easier than outfoxing a whole village with superior smell. Plus, if there’s a tremor, the scout would have to run from the cave or risk being buried.”
Zeiss listened to both men for another few minutes and then ruled, “We can plant a listening device in the small village later. Toby, I agree that we can screen a cave effectively. However, Oleander’s Out-of-body projections and our scans can’t penetrate the caves in that area. I can’t go in blind. Once Lou reaches the 5000 word mark, we can shift priorities.”