by neetha Napew
Todd, Ken, Hrriss and Hrrestan, separately or as teams, escorted Gringg visitors around Doonarrala or accompanied volunteer linguists up to the giant vessel to build vocabulary and language links for the translation voders. The Alreldep scout ship which had been assigned years before to Todd and Hrriss was back in service, shuttling people up without having to go through Barnstable, Greene or Castleton. Only the smaller Gringg, like Eonneh and Koala, were small enough to fit in the scout. Hrrestan tried hard to get permission to put a temporary grid in the Gringg cargo bay but Hrrto was totally opposed to the notion. Todd and Hrrestan did, over great Outcry from Barnstable and Prrid, give permission for the Gringg to use their own ship-to-surface transport, the smaller of the ones they’d seen on their initial visit.
It was a cumbersome vehicle like a great box and looked totally out of place on the Common of First Village where it had space to land.
Hearing about this, some of the more vocal dissidents made strenuous objections on grounds of noise, pollution and possible damage to the expanse of grass which doubled as a playing field. The vehicle was not only quiet, but also emitted no noxious fumes and used an air cushion for landing and resting, leaving no marks despite its mass.
The Gringg pilot, an oddly misshapen individual, smaller than any other adult Gringg, courteously asked for landing and departure permissions every time and remained in the vehicle, though Buddy, alias Buddeeroagh, was quite willing to show anyone through it.
Alec told his father that one day he had counted nineteen men and women, all of whom had the odd gait of spacefarers, requesting permission to board.
“None of “em are from any of the villages, Dad. Me, I think that old Admiral’s busting his britches to find out something against the bear people. Isn’t he?” Alec asked his father, cocking his head with a shrewd look in his eyes.
“You might think that, Todd answered cautiously, busy assembling the latest Gringg sounds on flash cards. Once again he thought that children often saw more than their parents. “Why were you counting in the first place?”
“Aw, Allie, ine, Hrr and Hrruni were chatting with Buddy. He kept getting interrupted by these jokers when he was showing us this neat game. You know, if we could charge “em for a visit, we’d make a pile!”
“You’ve been listening too much to your Uncle Jilamey, I think,’ Todd replied, half amused by his son’s acumen and privately embarrassed at such gall, “but we can’t charge for ah . . . cunosity!’ When his son’s face contorted in dismay, he added. “And the navy is here to protect us.
Alec gave a snort. “Ha! Then they should spend their time doing that instead of nosing about our planet’s guests!”
“Well said, Alec!’ and he ruffled his son’s tangled curls and then had to wipe his hand.
“What have you been in?” Alec fingercombed his hair, inspecting the results.
“Some sort of oiler something’. Musta got it when Buddy showed me how their drive works!” Alec beamed suddenly, but his eyes were twinkling with slight malice. “He didn’t show anyone but us kids!’ Todd decided he didn’t need to worry about the Spacedep’s interest in the Gringg vessel when the pilot displayed such discretion. He also decided that letting the Village children tag along with Gringg visitors would be a subtle way of disrupting the surveillance Barnstable and Greene had set up. What was the old tag? Qui custodiat?
Who watches the watchers? The kids of Doonarrala!
So the almost daily unofficial visits by Eonneh and one or more of his fellow scribes to gather information and understanding of their new friends took on a new perspective. Of course, there were some diehards who wouldn’t subject their children to “such influences’, but these were fewer than Todd expected. When Alec casually mentioned some youngsters Todd knew had been prohibited, he did have a qualm or two of conscience but decided their independence of mind should not be discouraged.
The positive reaction of the youngsters was also a grand buffer between the Gringg and the doomsayers who had managed to arrive from both Hrruba and Terra.
Somewhere underneath the busy exterior, Todd knew he was exhausted, but he’d hardly ever been so enthusiastic about a project in his life. Well, not since he’d been six.
The Gringg and the majority of Doonarralans were as delighted as he, cooperating like a dream. Frictions that had been caused by disagreement about the space port were mainly discarded by the generally held desire to get on terms with the aliens. The barriers of speech and unfamiliar custom were dropping farther and farther every day.
Sumitral, far from exercising impatience with the laborious progress, made it a practice to interact every day with one of the male scribes or Grizz aboard the Gringg vessel. The Gringg captain herself had not yet set foot on Doonarrala, nor had any of her female department heads, preferring to save that portentous event, Todd was made to understand, for the day when she could make an official entrance, able to speak for herself.
Todd was grateful for her forbearance. His office received enough complaints from the very vocal Hayuman and Hrruban minority who reacted negatively to the tercel males who had requested permission to wander about. The gigantic females would cause a bigger stir and more friction. But he did identify most of the possible troublemakers and set up contingency plans to prevent trouble from those quarters.
Todd also had reason to be very grateful to Jilamey Landreau who set up entertainments and unofficial meetings at his hilltop home, well out of the way of Todd and those working on the language project.
Superficially, Jilamey seemed to be to be working both ends against the middle, soothing the disappointed members of the interrupted conference while he made no bones about his Gringgophilia.
He evidently made much of his being included in the first contact group.
The austere Barrington copted daily down to bring private and encouraging reports to Todd. Todd took these with a grain of salt, knowing Jilamey’s enthusiasms, but Barrington’s manner of reportage allowed him to hope that much of what Jilamey said was true.
Especially when Barrington relayed Jilamey’s firm opinion, one Barrington seemed to support, that the Gringg’s only objective was to establish trade relations.
It was on this point that Jilamey urged patience until the translation problem could be solved and how he managed to keep the frustrated delegates from leaving Doonarrala. Ironically, Tanarey Smith became one of Jilamey’s converts, especially after Landreau persuaded Eonneh to escort the shipbuilder around the Wander Den, the rough translation of the Gringg vessel’s name. There were those who read a more ominous interpretation of slightly ambiguous Gringg words, but they were few.
Todd could not ignore the undercurrents of dissatisfaction, even among Gringg supporters, that the talks of the space facility had been put on hold. When he had time, he gave some thought to that. As a child, he had absorbed his father’s views about co-habitation: as an adult, he shared his father’s opinion about any intrusive invasions of Hrruban lands on the planet. All right, it was Hayuman greed that his father feared and it was the Hrrubans who had initiated the space port project.
But did it matter which species encroached? If the rule applied on Doonarrala, it applied for both!
Had the arrival of the Gringg now altered the equation?
No, the Gringg had not been invited to take up holdings on Doonarrala. Although he was optimistic of the outcome, the Gringg hadn’t been officially allowed to open trade on Doonarrala. Todd, well conditioned by Captain Ali Kiachif over the years, considered trading a different matter entirely to occupation or habitation. The crunch came when “where’ the space port could be sited was discussed.
Todd knew how cramped and inadequate the old Hall at the space port was for the volume of commerce that flowed in and out of it.
Something had to be done to expand the facilities. No one wanted a larger complex at the original landing site, oozing towards the First Villages, ruining the peaceful valley. So a new location was imperative. Each time Todd m
ulled over the problem, he still found himself opposed to Siting a larger port anywhere on the lovely subcontinent that was now called Hrrunat. That should be left as the naturat memorial park to the old First Speaker that he, and all Doonarralans, had intended for it to be.
He’d leave the sore subject for another time, when he was thinking clearly and logically, not so emotionally nor - he admitted to himselfclose-minded. His brain was working overtime trying to cope with a difficult new language.
Gradually the daily sight of the large, shaggy strangers moving about with their Hayuman or Hrruban escorts took the edge off the “fearsome hairy monsters’ appellation. The Gringg became the “big bears’ or Bruins to most Doonarralans. But xe;iophobic pessimists somehow began arriving in from Terra and Hrruba and familiarity was not going to appease them. They visited every village, Hayuman and Hrruban, whispering against the “fiendish Gringg.” They muttered about “murders most vile’ and “devastated worlds’ but would slip away before they could be closely questioned.
Todd worked all the harder to get the one tool that would throttle doubters and doomsayers both, and allow the Gringg to speak for themselves. Couldn’t people wait for that? Instead of riling up unnecessary fears and forecasts?
The voder that Cardiff had designed with Koala was a brilliant piece of audio engineering. It made use of the tiny Gringg resonator, memory chips and other components from both Terra and Hrruba in common use on Doonarrala, all fitted into a compact case seven centimetres by two by five. Worn about the neck on a cord, it “heard’ what the wearer said and repeated it in Gringg. “Growl’ box, or simply, the growler, its creators nicknamed it.
Cardiff, with the help of two of the university engineers, worked long hours to turn out six of the voders so that Ken, Todd and Hrriss could discuss Gringg objectives with Grizz, Honey and Panda. The session was filmed and, although Barnstable had a fit at being excluded and the secrecy in which the interview was conducted, Sumitral remarked that not even he, as Alreldep head, had been included, in an attempt to provide as relaxed an atmosphere as possible. Once again, he reinforced the position of Reeve and Hrrestan to conduct their own planetary affairs. There had been some heated reminders that the Gringg vessel was the concern of Spacedep.
“I could agree with you if it carried armament,’ Sumitral had replied suavely. “It carries only peaceful visitors!” For Todd and Ken particularly, the conference was a golden moment for they established contact and exchanged meaningful data.
First: that, for many spans of time (which Todd and Ken thought meant generations since the Gringg travelled in family groups), the Gringg had been actively searching space for other sentient species as well as suitable resource planets. It was a particular joy for the Doonarralans to learn that the Gringg had eschewed planets which probes reported showing habitations suggesting the basic intelligence of indigenous species. The Gringg also required the availability of certain minerals and earths on a colonial world for, despite being omnivorous and able to digest more substances than Hayuman or Hrrubans could, they had to have a certain range of additives.
Two, they were quite open about the direction of their home world, galactically speaking, north by north-east, though the speed at which their ships moved was still not translating accurately. They provided “strips’ which, fed through a device, enlarged the data into star maps.
The difference in eye structure made these difficult for Hayumans or Hrrubans to decipher and Koala was working on an apparatus that would compensate for the different optics.
Three, they would be happy to establish trade with both Hayuman and Hrruban. Which put Todd right back on the hot seat of that unresolved dilemma of an adequate space port now there would be three species using it.
Four, they had found their way to this sector of space by following ion trails, detected by their own equipment.
When they had come upon the Doonarralan warning devices, they realized they had finally discovered a sophisticated culture which they approached cautiously, but openly. They were overwhelmingly relieved to discover they were not the only sentient species in the galaxy.
Even greater jubilation to realize that they had encountered two!
“We are joyous to not be alone,’ Grizz had said during the conference, bowing her head almost to her knees to signify deep emotion.
Hayuman and Hrruban were hard put not to burst out in cheers.
Instead, they gripped hands with the Gringg, allowing their broad grins to demonstrate how happy they were.
“All a little too pat,’ Admiral Barnstable told Greene and Castleton when they viewed the tape. “Buddy-buddy, lovey-dovey, but all too pat!” “Especially as we can’t read their star maps,’ Greene added as if that fact vindicated his distrust of the bearfolk.
“Considering they’ve come into this sector of space from a different quadrant, you couldn’t read them even if they had the same Optics as we do,’ Grace Castleton felt obliged to remark. She knew these two wouldn’t have believed anything the Gringg said, even if they’d agreed to drop buoys all the way back to their home world like crumbs to get Out of a cave in some old children’s tale. Even loosely translating their distances, the Gringg home world was one helluva way back in on this arm of the Milky Way.
When the tape was shown in every village on Doonarrala, there was considerable rejoicing - and some doubts were allayed. Copies were despatched by Courier to both Amalgamated Worlds and Hrruban High Councils. Inevitably that brought back the issue of a larger space port.
“Zodd, we must resolve this between us, Hrriss said in Low Hrruban when he managed to find Todd alone in his office.
“Yeah,’ Todd agreed unenthusiastically, exhaling a long sigh as he tossed his pen across a desk covered by little piles of flashcards. He managed a half-smile for Hrriss, his dearest friend. “Can’t bury my head in a snake nest any longer. Not if we want to keep the Gringg.” “First of all, Zodd, you have to agree,’ Hrriss said patiently, settling on the edge of Todd’s desk as he had so many times in the past, “it is not Hrruban encroaching on unused space. It is Gringg needing space,’ and he dropped his jaw at his play on words, “for the very size of them. But, more importantly, they provide a neutral factor, cancelling the sort of single-race intrusion you dreaded. In a triangle, all sides are equal.”
“Only if it is equilateral,’ Todd said, weary to his bones with disputations and arguments, and mostly fearful of a resumption of the estrangement from Hrriss which had cost him much mental anguish.
“Equal sides,’ Hrriss repeated, his eyes liquid and pleading.
“Two of us don’t quite equal a Gringg.”
“What can equal a Gringg?” demanded Hrriss, throwing up his hands in comic dismay.
“They are to be friends, are they not?” Todd said, suddenly propelling himself out of his chair. He gripped Hrriss by the arms, needing to have all half-doubts dismissed. He had to proceed positively, thinking optimistically; by sheer willpower bringing about what he so intensely desired.
That method had worked before.
Hrriss’ hands returned his grasp and then pulled him forward into an embrace, thumping Todd on the back as was the Hayuman custom.
“Yesss, friend of my heart, yesss! Even as thou and I,’ Hrriss added in High Hrruban. Then, in the less formal speech, “As I have told you hundreds of times now, not all of the Hrrunatan is beautiful .
Todd frowned as he released his friend. “Where?” Hrriss gave a sigh. “Where we have always wanted to put it only you would never let me explain . .
“I knew, I knew,’ Todd flapped his hand dismissively but suddenly stopped himself and smiled with chagrin at Hrriss’ careful expression.
“I’m doing it again, aren’t I?
But you do mean that rocky area on the east coast where there was that massive subsidence?” When Hrriss nodded, relieved to see his dear friend for once willing to discuss the problem, “But that wouldn’t be large enough “If one filled in the lagoon that was formed
by the subsidence islands and extended a firm base to those little islands “ Hrriss said with the weary patience of someone repeating a well-rehearsed argument and waited for the reaction to the suggestion.
Todd turned away, shaking his head sharply from side to side but then slowing the motion as his common sense and fair play forced him to examine that compromise. “It would take years “To expand, yes, but not to set up the initial facility Again Hrriss watched his friend’s face, seeing indecision increasing. “The beautiful part of the Hrrunatan would be intact, untouched . . . untouchable!”
“If that could only be enforced. . - Todd began reluctantly.
“Why not?” Hrriss said, shrugging his tawny shoulders and dropping his jaw. “The terrain is perfect: the first precipice, where the subsidence began, is a natural barrier to the interior and we will see that the traders abide by our laws.”
“Traders are born to bend laws, Todd said but he knew that was a weak argument. He shook his head one more time. “All right. Put the port there but seal off the rest of the continent!” He shook a stern finger at Hrriss’ grinning countenance. “I find so much as an ounce of ship’s fiat or the trace of fuel discharge on the mainland. . .1 suppose you’ve got rough sketches all ready?” Hrriss growled a laugh. “Jilamey used them as a device to keep the discontented occupied while we struggled with our growls.
Todd made a disgusted noise in his throat and rolled his eyes at such complicity. “Only, I’ll have nothing to do with it. I hereby empower you to attend any meetings on my behalf! My heart simply isn’t in it and I’ve got to increase the working vocabulary. I’m much more useful doing that. And, one more thing, I don’t even want spaceships overflying the Hrrunatan. They come in from the east.