They arrived in the Bronte system within the twenty hour window of when they had left Pa-Loana and established a distant synchronous orbit with the capitol city of Haifa. When the ship’s computer told him he had Shifted in good health, Rhys went immediately to the nearest viewport. Danetta had not exaggerated the situation on Velvet. The planet was literally under siege by what appeared to be four massed wings of large, graceful spacecraft.
He knew a moment of anxiety lest the Ceilidh’s arrival be taken for a hostile act, but the siege forces vacated a corridor, allowing a shuttle from the Human craft to make its way along a gravitic landing beam to the planet’s surface.
Danetta Price had told Rhys enough about the situation on Velvet to worry him and pique his interest. She had warned him about the OROB threat (which would have once been referred to as an “alien menace”), but she had not warned him that Velvet itself would all but assault his senses when he stepped from the bottom of the shuttle’s lev-tube.
“Good-God-Almighty,” murmured Rick Halfax inadequately. He blinked at the verdant landscape, seemingly boggled by the sheer audacity of the colors that stared back at him.
“Well, at least we needn’t have any questions about how the planet got its name,” Rhys commented. “Ah, and here’s our welcoming committee.”
He stepped away from the shuttle as they were approached by Danetta Price and a tall, distinguished looking fellow with skin the color of French Roast coffee. A natty dresser, too, Rhys noted, and felt a pang of sartorial inferiority. It passed quickly, allowing him to enjoy the other man’s bemused greeting.
“Your dress kilt, Rhys—really!” Danetta murmured as they sped toward the government offices in an impressive gravcar. “I am honored. And the overall look is much more... understated than I recall.”
Joseph Bekwe glanced from her to Rhys with transparent incredulity. How, he surely wondered, could a man in a Tartan kilt with sporran and matching sash and argyles be described as understated?
Rhys chuckled. “Well, a fluorescent headdress, I had to allow, was something only the Pa-Kai might appreciate. I did bring my tam, though, in case it’s necessary for my head to be covered.”
Danetta shook her head. “I think your flowing copper locks will do just fine on this assignment. The Tsong Zee don’t affect much in the way of headdress, although from what I’ve seen, the women tend to wear their hair bound and plaited if it’s very long.”
“The Tsong Zee?” asked Rhys. “That’s the other race of beings?”
Joseph Bekwe was nodding. “Yes. We have holo-playbacks of all our interactions with them, a full analysis of their language by the Dynamic Translation System, pics of each individual in the group, everything—I hope—that you’ll need to jump into this situation.... Danetta speaks highly of your ability to... navigate these delicate waters.”
“Professor Llewellyn is wonderful,” offered Yoshi earnestly. “He did the most amazing work on Pa-Loana. Such a challenge. So much of the communication was performed with minute facial signals and body language and even clothing that—well, it was an inspiration to me, personally.” She stopped, aware that everyone was staring at her.
Rhys patted the girl’s shoulder and smiled affably. “My public relations manager. Tell me about the OROB language. Danetta mentioned in her packet that it has some grammatical patterns in common with English.”
Joseph Bekwe nodded. “Yes. That is, it seems to. But when we engage in any complex communications with them, we get lost. The words we’re saying are the right words—according to the DT—but they don’t seem to illicit the responses we expect. It’s as if we’re being randomly misunderstood. As for our understanding them, well, right now it seems hopeless. They use words we think we know in a context that makes no sense whatsoever. For example, there’s this word ‘tsri-al’ that seems to mean ‘Leader’ or ‘Speaker.’ They use it to refer to themselves, yet when they’re trying to describe why they allegedly left Velvet, the word turns up in a context that indicates an opposite meaning.”
“Opposite?”
“Yes. Just as ‘angel’ and ‘devil’ are opposites. In fact, in its alternate context that’s just about what ‘tsri-al’ seems to mean ‘devil’ or... ‘liar’ or—” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Rhys nodded, his mind already whirling with possibilities. A challenge, indeed. “First off, I’ll want to see the holo-playbacks. Especially of exchanges you feel are particularly muddled or difficult. Then... we shall see what we shall see.”
o0o
The Tsong Zee were beautiful—or so Rhys Llewellyn thought. That not everyone shared his opinion was obvious from the antipathy displayed by a few members of the governor’s staff during their screening of the playback. He made a mental note to request that those individuals be dismissed from further negotiations and concentrated on the OROB physiology.
They were basically humanoid in form—possessing an upright bipedal stance, bilateral symmetry, and enough Human characteristics in form and face, Rhys thought, to make Humans think they could be easily communicated with. It was an easy mistake to make. Rhys did not concern himself with the obvious differences in musculature, nor did he stop to wonder how many hearts they had.
He was immediately taken with their faces. Faces were of paramount importance when it came to inter-Human communication. This was also largely true of the other humanoid races Terran mankind had encountered. Unfortunately, facial languages were often as dissimilar as verbal ones. And these faces...
For one thing they were a black that made Joseph Bekwe look positively pallid. They were a glossy, light-eating black that seemed to carry undertones of blue or violet. The texture of their flesh was smooth, slick, almost wet-looking. That made reading facial expressions extremely difficult—there were no telltale wrinkles or lines except at the very corners of their wide mouths, and those were extremely hard to detect. Below the sculpted dome of the head, which was in most cases topped by a literal mane of pastel hair, there was an expanse of forehead which displayed a delicate supra-orbital ridge, but no eyebrows. Another impediment to Human comprehension. The males wore their hair unbound and long; the females wore it cropped or ornately braided.
The Tsong Zee’s eyes were easily their most outstanding feature. They were, in all cases, huge, which contributed to the impression that the Tsong Zee were familiar. They had the classic “ET” look, which, growing out of the twentieth-century preoccupation with extraterrestrial visitors, had spawned myriad first contact movies and books. The eyes of these representatives came in a variety of shades, although gold seemed to predominate—of the eight members of the OROB team, three had gold eyes. The pupils were especially fascinating. They were vertical ellipsoids which behaved much like the pupils in a Terran cat’s eyes. A major difference was that the widening and narrowing of the Tsong Zee pupils seemed to be at the voluntary control of the individual. Rhys made a mental note to study close-ups of those extraordinary features. There wasn’t much to the Tsong Zee nose. It was a very slightly raised ridge that divided the face, beginning between the eyes and ending in two dainty vertically slit nostrils above the mouth.
Rhys leaned forward, his attention riveted on that important feature. The Tsong Zee mouth was exceptionally mobile. The thin upper lip was bifurcated; what was a Human birth defect referred to as a “hare-lip” was possessed by every Tsong Zee in the representative group. The mouths were, without exception, fairly wide and the lower lip was a fleshy pad of lighter skin. The color of the lower lip, Rhys noted, varied from a mauve in one individual to a rosy pink in another. The same color was displayed on the underside of what appeared to be roughly triangular ear-flaps that adorned both sides of each glossy head. High, patrician cheekbones were common in the group, but not the rule; jaws and chins gave the faces, with their universally-possessed widow’s peak hairlines, a roughly heart-shaped appearance, but there was enough variance in the group that Rhys could easily distinguish individuals.
He was nodding absen
tly, and Governor Bekwe pounced on the gesture of affirmation.
“You see something? Do you understand what the problem is?”
Rhys started. “Oh, I doubt you’re dealing with a single problem here, Governor. These people are just Human enough to make you anthropomorphize, just alien enough to make you uncomfortable.”
He silently watched the proceedings between Human and Tsong Zee for several more minutes, then asked that the playback be reset to cover the same sequence with close-ups of the various Speakers. He watched that silently too, only dimly aware of the tension tugging the atmosphere around him. Dimly aware, too, that every eye in the room was locked on his face.
Governor Bekwe caught him nodding again. “What is it?”
“Excuse me?”
“You look like you’ve found something.”
Rhys smiled wryly. “Governor, I’ve found a lot of things, but I haven’t yet solved your communication problem. I see its roots, though, in the simple fact that the Tsong Zee are not Human.”
Someone behind Rhys snorted. “You can say that again!”
Rhys gritted his teeth. “Look. I’m not saying they’re incomprehensible or inhuman or even alien in the truest sense of the word. All I’m saying is that, regardless of how Human they might be at the core, no matter how possessed of the same qualities that we are, those qualities are not necessarily communicated in the same way. For example, they very likely feel anger. All right. When a Human is angry, he scowls.” He suited action to word then pointed at the holo-column, frozen, now, in a timeless tableau—one race of beings meeting another for the first time. “The Tsong Zee face is not built for scowling. The forehead is smooth; no muscles seem to be dedicated to contorting that part of the face. How do you propose to tell if you’ve angered a Tsong Zee? How do you imagine they interpret a Human scowl with nothing to compare it to?”
Joseph Bekwe uttered an exasperated chuff. “What in heaven’s name can we do? We can’t read facial expressions we don’t have. Neither can they.”
Rhys looked back to the holo-column. “Just leave me alone with this for a while. Let me see if I can’t pick up some pointers. Then we’ll try communicating with them again.”
The governor nodded. “I guess we really don’t have much choice. We have to negotiate with them, Dr. Llewellyn. Leaving this planet now would be almost impossible and the only other alternative they seem to be offering is a military one.”
“Which is to say,” said Danetta Price, “none at all.”
o0o
“You are Speaker?” asked the tall Tsong Zee directly across from Rhys. He raised his chin and gazed down at the human through eyes of pale blue. His nostrils flared as if seeking a scent.
“I am.” Rhys raised his chin by about the same amount and tried to emulate the direct gaze.
“Then you will comprehend” —a four-fingered hand clenched— “that you must leave what is not yours.”
“We comprehend” —Rhys copied the clenching gesture— “that you desire us to leave.”
There was a pronounced stiffening of the Tsong Zee delegation and a hurried discussion between the four Speakers accompanied by much head-shaking and gesticulating.
Rhys cursed silently. He had apparently already committed a gaffe and wished he knew what it was. He went back over the sentence he had just uttered. There were no potentially inflammatory adjectives in the phrase, only...
The blue-eyed Tsong Zee Speaker, Javar, was facing him again. “We are pure in our desire to reclaim our world,” he said, his eyes blazingly wide, his pupils dilating slightly.
Rhys focused. It sounded like a defense—a protestation, as if... “We do not doubt the purity of your desire.” He gave his opposite the same wide-eyed stare and wished he could make his pupils react as well.
The Speaker gazed at him silently for a moment, then said, “If this is so, why did you suggest our desire was impure?” His eyes were half-hooded now, assessing or...
“I am sorry,” said Rhys. “I used the wrong word. I meant to say ‘desire.’” Eyes open wide. “Not ‘desire.’” Eye-lids at half-mast.
The Speaker glanced at his fellows, making a peculiar trilling noise with this bifurcated upper lip. A laugh? A sigh? He shifted in his seat and Rhys caught a whiff of some pleasantly spicy perfume that reminded him vividly of shaving and the tingle of icy cologne.
“This is difficult,” the Speaker said, and the corners of his mouth pulled downward. “I wish...” He paused and made a clearly dismissive gesture with his right hand—a flick-flick of the short, tapered fingers as if he was shooing away a flying pest. “But this is not possible. Let us continue. You now comprehend that our desire for our world is pure. We comprehend that you have conceived a desire (pure) for Tson, as well.”
“We are dependent upon it. That is, many of us are. It goes beyond simple desire (pure) for many of us. Some Humans have spent the last twenty-five years of their lives on this world. Some Humans have known no other world. They love it.” He waited. How did love translate to the Tsong Zee? The word, he already knew, was “preem-eh.” For all he knew, it might also translate as “liking”—the way a Terran would say, “I just love onions.”
Whatever the translation, he certainly had aroused some reaction among the Tsong Zee. They conferred again, briefly, and the Speaker changed. Now, Rhys was addressed by a delicate person with a musical voice and great, coppery eyes—a female named Parsa. She sniffed audibly and told him, “You cannot love Tson. You are not Tsong Zee. Only Tsong Zee can love Tson. Our blood rose from its waters. Yours did not. Even those who met bodies here carry in them the blood of another world.”
Rhys glanced at the governor, then back to the Tsong Zee. “Your people originated on this planet? That is your claim?”
Copper-eyed Parsa studied him for a moment, then tilted her head to the left. A second later, almost as an after-thought, she said, “Yes. That is our claim.” Her chin tilted upward on the last word.
Rhys made further mental notes. “If you are the children of this world, why did you leave it?”
To Rhys’s astonishment, the entire group of Tsong Zee uttered a beautifully harmonized keening sound, bowing their heads deeply. The spicy scent sharpened.
Rhys waited a moment for the keening to cease, then said, “I did not mean to distress you.”
The Tsong Zee raised their gleaming black faces in unison and Parsa deferred to yet another Speaker—a tall, slender male called Brasn whose near-transparent mane of hair fell well past the sashed and girded waist of his bright garment.
“You did not distress us. It is our ancestors who have brought us distress. It is through their error that no living Tsong Zee has been born on Tson. I shall sing of this,” he said and closed his eyes.
The other Tsong Zee focused their gazes upon him and began to hum a slow-moving pattern of harmonies that washed over the assemblage in soft waves.
Joseph Bekwe opened his mouth to interrupt, but Rhys silenced him with a quick shake of his head.
“Five Tribes,” intoned the Speaker. “Tillers of the soil, Walkers of the land, Traders in goods, Searchers of the earth and sky. We, the last, who search the soul and see it. We are the Five Tribes of Tson.”
“We are the Five Tribes,” intoned the others in harmony. “Those who till the soil hate those who walk the land.”
Brasn’s backing chorus trilled suddenly and Parsa chanted, “They trampled our crops, they tore down our fences, they slaughtered our creatures.”
“Those who walked the land hated those who tilled the soil,” sang Brasn, and Parsa responded, “We cut their paths, we damned the streams, we planted the land.”
“Those who walked the land cried to those who traded in goods,” said Brasn.
Now another Tsong Zee joined in—Keere, he was called. “‘Help us against the Tillers, they cried. Help us and you shall profit by our goods.’”
“The Traders helped the Walkers of the land.”
“We will fight the
Tillers,” sang Keere. “We must keep open the paths of the land. Such is our trade.”
“They fought,” intoned Brasn. “They fought while the world turned and land was destroyed and crops died and creatures starved. Then, the Tillers cried to those who search the earth and skies.”
Again, Parsa spoke: “‘Help us against the Walkers and the Traders. Help us and you shall profit by our goods.’”
“Some Searchers of the earth helped the Tillers of the soil.”
The original Speaker, Javar, chanted, “The Searchers of the earth will help the Tillers of the soil. We must have the yield of the land. Of such is our search.”
“They fought,” keened Brasn. “And while they fought, the Seers of the Soul prayed and the Searchers of the Sky sought their answers and the world turned and more land was destroyed and more crops died and more creatures starved. Then were people killed.”
The whole group, apprentices and all, burst into a trill of wild agitation punctuated with wails of apparent anguish.
Irrationally, Rhys found himself thinking about shaving again.
Brasn raised his four-fingered hands and brought them all to silence. “There rose a Speaker” —he lifted his chin— “from among the Seers of the Soul. He warned against the fighting. He exhorted the people to peace. Only the Searchers of the Sky listened, for another Speaker” — his head lowered— “rose among the Searchers and the Tillers and denounced him as evil.”
“We killed the Seer!” cried Parsa. “For he spoke against our desires!”
“Now, the Walkers and the Traders looked to the Searchers for one who would deal with them. They found such a one.”
It was Javar’s turn. “‘We know of a poison,’ he said. “‘A terrible poison. It will destroy the Tillers of the soil for it will destroy the soil.’”
Shaman Page 9