“What did she draw?” asked Dabeet. “Whether you think we’ll agree with you or not doesn’t matter. If you want access to Lab 3, with or without the llop, you have to tell me—or show me—what she drew.”
“Back when humans first came here,” said Andrew, “at least some of the llops engaged in conversation with at least some of the colonists. I think it terrified the pirates that llops could understand and reproduce human speech.”
“But they can’t,” said Dabeet.
“But they did,” said Andrew.
“How can you tell?” asked Dabeet. “Oral conversation doesn’t leave much of an archaeological record.”
“The letters again,” said Valentine.
“Not the letters,” said Andrew. “The fact that she understood me.”
“Because you know how to read llop body language,” said Valentine.
“I studied the exploratory teams’ reports about the llop on the way here,” said Andrew. “I knew what to look for.”
“I’ve read them many times,” said Dabeet, “and I don’t know.”
“Because the reports were written by people from E.S. who explained away all evidence of sentience as ‘simple animal communication,’” said Andrew. “But it was there. The llop understood human speech.”
“Because they left when somebody said the word ‘specimen,’” said Valentine.
“Yes,” said Andrew.
“What are you talking about?” asked Dabeet.
“Show him, please, Jane,” said Andrew.
Dabeet’s holodisplay turned on and in a moment, there were a couple of members of the exploratory team, conversing, with two llop peacefully lying on the ground nearby. Nothing was audible until the woman who was in charge said, “Protocol is that we study some specimens and report.”
Instantly, the two llop bounded to their feet and left the holofield.
“Coincidence,” said Dabeet.
“If they had said anything about vivisection,” said Andrew, “I wonder who would have vivisected whom.”
“Did your friend Yip-yip-grrr understand you?”
“I tried writing letters on the ground,” said Andrew.
“She corrected your spelling?” Valentine turned to Dabeet. “Andrew makes the silliest spelling errors sometimes.”
“Yes,” said Andrew. “But not the way you think. She stopped me from writing by wiping her foreclaw across the letters, and then pushing away my stick when I tried again.”
“So, art criticism?” asked Valentine. “Or literary criticism?”
“Then she drew something on the same patch of dirt.”
“Show me,” said Dabeet.
“Go ahead, Jane.” Andrew paused for a moment. “No enhancements. The clearest raw picture.”
The holofield showed the patch of dirt, horizontally. Both Dabeet and Valentine stood to get a clearer view.
The llop had apparently drawn with a single claw, because the lines were sharp and clear. But it looked like nothing at all to Dabeet.
“What are we supposed to be seeing here?” asked Dabeet.
“I think those are the wheels,” said Valentine. “It’s a mail delivery truck. She’s complaining that they haven’t had any letters for a while.”
“OK, Jane, now enhance it.”
Immediately some of the lines in the dirt grew light. Now it was a weird drawing of a four-legged creature with alligator jaws. But without perspective, absolutely flat as if the four legs all came straight down from the trunk of the body, and the jaws came out of a ball on one end.
“I wonder what other pictures you can find in that, by selecting the right lines,” said Valentine.
“Jane and I showed the enhanced version to her. She agreed.”
Dabeet was more impressed than he wanted to let on. “The lines are there,” he said. “But there are a lot of other lines.”
“I think some of them represent the fact that she didn’t think to lift her claw when moving from one part of the drawing to another,” said Andrew.
“Stray marks, then,” said Dabeet. “And she did this after stopping you from writing.”
“Let me show you the reason I want to get into Lab 3,” said Andrew.
At once, in yellowish light, the round head was highlighted, along with about a dozen stray lines coming out of it. Not the jaws of the llop, though. That remained the original color.
“I thought that was the head,” said Valentine.
“I still think it is,” said Dabeet.
“It may be,” said Andrew. “I don’t know. But I always intended to show you this before we went to Lab 3.”
“Why?” asked Dabeet.
“Because I asked her why this round thing didn’t look like her head.”
“What did she say?” asked Valentine facetiously.
“She trotted toward the E.S. compound,” said Andrew.
“Well, that’s clear,” said Dabeet.
“Everything she did looked to me like comprehension and an attempt to converse.”
“And trotting toward the compound meant…”
Valentine supplied the answer. “Andrew thinks it means the round thing is inside the E.S. compound.”
“The round thing,” said Dabeet, “is either a childish representation of the llop head, or it’s the sun with those yellow rays coming out.”
“Color choice, Jane,” said Andrew.
The yellow circle and its appendages turned pink.
“Well, that’s nauseating now,” said Valentine. “It looks like an extruded stomach.”
“A heart with veins and arteries coming out,” said Dabeet.
“If the free-association game is over,” said Andrew, “will you let me call her and bring her inside?”
“We’ve never let an alien creature inside an E.S. laboratory under its own power, without sedation or some kind of restraint system,” said Dabeet.
“It is forbidden?”
“Of course it is,” said Valentine.
“Not explicitly,” said Dabeet. “We’re told the protocols for sedation and restraint, but we’re not told explicitly…”
Valentine laughed. “You want to do this, don’t you, Dabeet?”
Dabeet didn’t know why she was laughing. “Yes,” said Dabeet. “It could end my career. It could end our lives, if the llop goes crazy on us. But I think Andrew’s interpretation of that drawing is… the existence of that drawing…”
“Changes everything?” asked Valentine.
“Invites some unusual responses.” Dabeet turned again to Andrew. “Do you think she wants to get inside?”
“She kept trotting toward the compound,” said Andrew. “She’s waiting outside. But none of the others followed her.”
“Is that unusual?”
“She’s the matriarch,” said Andrew. “A parade of females and their young follow her wherever she goes.”
Valentine asked, with obvious curiosity, “I’ve never thought to ask. Do the llop nurse their young?”
“No mammary glands, no paps,” said Andrew. “But they do swallow some of their prey nearly whole, and then come back to the campsite and vomit it up for the young to eat. Several species on Earth do that.”
“Birds,” said Valentine.
“No, mammals too. Some dogs, for instance.”
“I didn’t know that was a mammalian thing,” said Valentine.
“As so many human males fail to understand,” said Andrew, “mammary glands are not the beginning and end of mammalian happiness.”
“Yes,” said Dabeet. “I’m going to chance it. But you can’t bring her in through the front. Come around the south side, and I’ll open the lab complex through the cargo door.”
“Any cameras pointed that way?” asked Valentine.
“Why don’t you want cameras?” asked Dabeet.
“I’m a historian,” said Valentine. “I want them everywhere. What if this is a complete failure? What if we end up chopped to bits lying around the lab, except for
whatever parts of us Yip-yip-grrr swallows so she can disengorge it for the babies back at camp? Somebody needs to know the magnitude of our stupidity.”
“If Ken hadn’t erased everything,” said Andrew, “wouldn’t our lives be simpler?”
“Maybe Ken wanted to prevent us from doing exactly what we’re doing.”
“He didn’t bring in a dog,” said Valentine. “To use the pirate term for them.”
“How do you know?” asked Andrew.
“Because he didn’t let one out. Nobody fiddled with the door record, and during the time when he erased everything, no door opened. Yet there was no llop inside. Ergo.”
“Sum,” said Andrew.
“Always you forget to cogito first,” said Valentine.
Their life was one long in-joke, Dabeet thought. Though at least he recognized this one—Descartes’ famous a priori statement, Cogito ergo sum. “I think, therefore I am.”
“Go get the llop, Andrew,” said Dabeet.
“Want company?” asked Valentine.
“No,” said Andrew.
“Want a collar and leash?” asked Valentine.
“I’ll just say ‘heel’ and she’ll come along,” said Andrew.
“Let’s go open the door for the boy and his dog,” said Valentine to Dabeet.
* * *
Dabeet had been around the llop many times, back when Ken Argon insisted on it, but it always made him uneasy. It especially made him tense this time, because the llop matriarch was not acting llop-like. She was more like a trained dog, staring intently at the door.
“It looks like she thinks this is the right place,” said Valentine.
“Maybe she smells something we can’t smell,” said Andrew.
“I’m about to open the door,” said Dabeet. “For the first time, I think, since Ken visited here right before he died.”
“We should be in hazmat suits,” said Andrew, “but I worry that might lose us some trust with our four-legged companion.”
“I think that whatever killed Ken wasn’t loose in the atmosphere,” said Dabeet, “because then he would have given us a warning. Ken was a decent guy. He wouldn’t have left things set like a trap for anyone who happened to come in.”
“Because people who have just absorbed a killing dose of alien venom are always thinking of the welfare of others,” said Valentine.
“People behaved pretty decently back in the First Formic War, when the aliens were on Earth,” said Andrew, “killing people and animals and plants with their defoliation spray.”
“Aren’t humans wonderful,” said Valentine.
Andrew grinned. “They kind of are,” he said. “Present company excepted, of course.”
Dabeet palmed the door code.
Nothing happened.
“Oh, this is anticlimactic, isn’t it,” said Valentine.
“Ken didn’t have the clearances to block me out,” said Dabeet. “When I came here, everything was rekeyed to my control by the E.S.”
“Ken Argon did a lot of things he didn’t have the power to do,” said Andrew.
Then Andrew reached out his hand, palmed the doorpad, and it opened.
Dabeet might have made some caustic comment about Andrew Wiggin having higher clearances than God, but the door was open, and the llop matriarch was padding slowly in.
Dabeet followed her. Andrew deferred to him, perhaps because he was embarrassed that he could open a door in Dabeet’s own bailiwick that Dabeet himself could not control.
The room showed no sign that a man had been envenomated here. Was Dabeet’s conclusion wrong? Was it possible that this wasn’t where Ken was working when he was attacked?
“Doesn’t smell awful or anything,” said Valentine. They were inside the room, now, too.
“Nothing knocked over,” said Andrew. “Nothing spilled, nothing broken.”
“Ken Argon died so tidily,” said Valentine.
“When he left here, he might not have been feeling the full effect of the venom, yet,” said Dabeet. “He might not even have realized it was going to be fatal.”
“Or this might not be where he was envenomated,” said Andrew. “Looks like he was cleaning up. That sponge.”
“That sponge is round and beige with tendrils coming out,” said Valentine.
Dabeet understood at once. “The picture.”
The llop was already heading directly toward it, not eagerly, but with complete certainty. Dabeet was quite certain that this was what she had come for, what she had asked the speaker for the dead to do for her. Now he saw the picture as a depiction of a llop with a round parasite perched on its head, or perhaps covering it.
The llop’s head was at about the same level as the countertop. She picked up the sponge between her jaws with surprising gentleness, tipped her head back, and swallowed it.
“This was all about lunch?” asked Valentine softly.
The llop’s eyes went black.
Then a viscous liquid the same color as the sponge began to flow slowly out of the llop’s ears and nostrils. Defying gravity, the liquid flowed upward until it covered the crown of the llop’s head. In a very short time, it formed a globe from which the llop’s jaws protruded, along with holes for her eyes.
The llop turned to face Andrew. “Thank you,” she said.
The voice wasn’t human—far from it, and not machine-like, either. And not doglike. Too smooth for an animal, too high for a human, high enough that the effect was almost funny. Like having a dog speak with the voice of a very young child.
“Thank you,” she said to Dabeet. But not a word to Valentine. She knew who had been making the decisions, apparently.
“Am I talking to—” Andrew made the sound of the llop’s name.
“You’re talking to me,” said the llop. “Great Mother. But now I’ve found my voice again.”
“You’ve had this… companion before?” asked Andrew.
“I’m very old,” she said. “From a time when every woman had a voice.”
“No males, then?” asked Dabeet.
Great Mother ignored him. “My companion is dying,” she said. “Ah. Ah ah ah. We are too late.”
“We’re just in time,” said Andrew. “Say what you can.”
“For ten thousand generations we lived in this companionship. We kept our history then in songs. I barely remember them now, and have no time to sing them, not in this language. So hard to translate.”
“Why is your companion dying?” asked Andrew.
“They all died. All. But she is so sorry. So sorry to learn that Ken Argon is dead. She didn’t mean to.”
Dabeet could only assume that since connecting with—since extruding herself from—Great Mother, the parasite had been informed of Ken’s death. Or perhaps of every single thing in the llop’s mind.
“What did she do?”
“She thought Ken Argon was poisoning her. So she poisoned him back.”
“She’s venomous?” asked Andrew.
“Only at need. He had her in a jar. He sprayed her with something that made her feel very sick.”
Dabeet shook his head. “He was working on a cure for feline toxoplasmosis.”
“I know,” said Great Mother. “He told me. I knew he had this one here. He understood that if I joined with this one, I would also become infected and die, and in all likelihood I would spread the cat sickness to the others. The whole family.”
“So he was trying to cure it before you joined with it,” said Andrew.
Dabeet looked for anything written. There was a notebook. There were several vials with dry stains and dried-up residue in the bottom. Maybe the notebook had some information about what Ken was trying. The formula he had devised for curing the parasite of toxoplasmosis.
But the pages were blank. Knowing Ken, Dabeet realized that he would write things down only if the treatment worked.
“It was painful, what Ken sprayed onto your companion?” asked Dabeet.
“It felt like an agonizing dea
th,” said Great Mother, answering Dabeet at last.
“Is she still in pain?” asked Dabeet. “Obviously she didn’t die.”
“The pain is gone,” said Great Mother. “She was starving and drying out. She tried to guess which would kill her first. The nutrient solution was very rich at first, but for the past seventeen days it has been nothing but water, and not enough of that.”
“Nobody knew that the nutrient solution was exhausted,” said Dabeet. “Nobody knew there was anything alive in here.”
“Did Ken’s formula work?” asked Andrew.
“Did it cure her toxoplasmosis?”
“No,” said Great Mother. “She isn’t actively sick; she doesn’t have symptoms. But the disease forms cysts inside the body, and those are wakening now and spreading throughout my body. I will soon die.”
Only then did Dabeet realize that the llop had come here, if not expecting to die, then… then hoping to reconnect with the parasite that gave her a voice, even if it killed her.
“Do you have a way to record my song?” asked Great Mother. “I would like to sing it in our native language. I will start by telling you the meanings of a few words, and then you can learn the rest of my language from the songs I sing before I die.”
“Can’t you tell us if—” Andrew began.
“This is the last of her kind,” said Great Mother. “We will never have voices again. O Speaker for the Dead, please let me sing my own death, the death of my people.”
“We’ll leave now,” said Dabeet. “All humans will withdraw from—”
“Too late,” said Great Mother. “Now we’re no longer wise. If you want to leave, go. But not until you have killed all the cats. Don’t leave this world of ours to the cats.”
“Sing,” said Valentine, setting down her recorder. “This can hear you and record you for twenty hours.”
“I will be dead long before that,” said Great Mother.
“Do you want us to stay?” asked Valentine. “So you have someone to sing to?”
“No,” said Great Mother. “I will sing to my people. Take this recording and play it to them. Play it every day. Maybe some of them will understand even without companions. Maybe some of them will learn our language.”
“Let’s go,” said Andrew.
Immediately Valentine headed for the door.
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