Treaty at Doona Page 16

  “Go ahead. I have done it. Why do you have so much zrouble producing waste wazzer?” asked Hrriss, amused.

  “Doing it under these circumstances—with them watching the whole process, is slightly inhibiting,” Todd said, annoyed with himself, Hrriss, and the whole affair. He turned his back and shortly was able to provide a sample. Panda and Grizz spoke in a crisp dialogue, their bass voices sounding excited. He hoped that they weren’t amused by his behavior. When he passed the specimen to Panda, he noticed that Hrriss was now holding his ears.

  “Are you all right?”

  The Hrruban’s forehead was drawn in long furrows of gold plush. “It is somezing about ze way zey talk. It is loud, but I am used to loud speech. We who live on Doonarrala have always used louder voices zan on Hrruba. Ze Gringg are not just loud but grating.”

  “Subsonics,” Todd said, snapping his fingers. “That could very well mean that they’re not hearing everything we say, either. I’d sure like to see an analysis of their hearing range.”

  He gestured toward his ears, and made faces so that the Gringg could understand that sound was causing him discomfort. Panda took a small scope from one of her pouches and looked in his ears. She grunted, puzzled.

  “That didn’t work, Hrriss. Aha!” he exclaimed, pointing at his friend. “Your voice is higher than mine.”

  “So?” Hrriss asked.

  “Talk in the highest register you can. Go up through falsetto. If their range is too low for us, chances are ours is too high for them.”

  Obediently, Hrriss began to hum in his own tenor range, then climbed gradually, a breath at a time, into a piercing shriek. Long before he topped the highest note he could reach, the Gringg were holding their ears. At the top of the range, they were looking at him closely. Grizz folded her thumb and forefinger together in imitation of a mouth and opened it to show she didn’t hear anything.

  “That’s it,” Todd said. “Up at that end they’re only seeing your mouth move.”

  Enlightened at last, Panda put the two Doonarralans onto a frequency generator and tested their ranges of hearing. Hrriss was capable of hearing a few cycles lower than Todd, but the lowest tones to which the machine was set were inaudible to both. They could only feel the cycles that Grizz indicated she was still hearing.

  “Zat one could shake my bones apart,” Hrriss cried, much agitated, waggling his hands for them to stop it.

  Grizz called for another scribe. When Grrala arrived, slow of movement but bright of eye, they were gestured to a table.

  “We’d better call this one Koala, so we don’t mistake her with Grizz,” Todd suggested in a low voice.

  Panda motioned Todd and Hrriss to sit at the table as Koala set up some kind of aural transponder and demonstrated how it worked.

  Using the settings on what Todd identified as a frequency generator, he demonstrated which tones he and Hrriss could hear, and which ones were painful. The Gringg did the same, and the scribe noted them down busily. The engineer, with a device like a round-screened pocket computer in her great paws, was clearly busy drafting a design.

  “Now I think we’re getting somewhere,” Todd said happily. “This thing should translate the tones they speak in to the ones we can hear, and vice versa.”

  “Zat will help mightily,” Hrriss agreed. “I do not zink we should miss any of zeir tonal qualities. We need to hear all to understand.”

  After a while, Koala signalled that she had enough to work on. She and the scribe excused themselves and went off.

  “Now, the question is, how long will it take them to whip up a frequency voder?” Todd said, grinning at Hrriss. As he moved on the table, his bare skin slid and he gave an exclamation. “Great snakes! I don’t need to stay in the buff any longer!”

  The Gringg watched him dress no less closely than they’d watched him disrobe. He winked at Weddeerogh, who squealed. Then Grizz stood up and stretched, allowing the visitors a splendid look at her fine, strong frame. Refreshed, she addressed the two Doonarralans.

  “Dodh, Rrss, kwaadchhs?”

  “Quadicks?” Todd asked, struggling to match her pronunciation.

  “Kwaadchhs,” Grizz repeated and, obviously demonstrating, moved her great arms in broad arcs, starting at her breastbone and pushing outward.

  “Could she mean swimming?” Hrriss asked, turning to Todd in surprise. Todd shrugged, grinning for Hrriss to answer. “Yes, we swim.”

  “Rehmeh,” Grizz replied, and ushered them back to the elevator platforms.

  “Swimming?” Todd muttered to Hrriss as they ascended another level.

  When they followed her lead and stepped off in what must be the center of the ship, they could even smell the water. Even knowing that the probe had showed a mysteriously large quantity of water in the center of the Gringg ship, neither Todd nor Hrriss were prepared for what they saw.

  “Swimming,” muttered Hrriss in mild shock as they passed the transparent doors that led into the most astonishing room.

  Instead of weaponry or generators of any kind, the water-filled center of the ship turned out to contain a swimming pool, vast and deep. The central pillar containing the elevator system pierced straight through the heart of it, but also supported several levels above the water, on which a few Gringg lounged while dozens of others swam and sported in the pool.

  “This is absolutely spectacular!” Todd exclaimed, astounded, letting his face reflect his opinion. He bowed and grinned broadly at Grizz, who seemed pleased by his reaction. “That is some pool.”

  “More a lake,” Hrriss said, staring about him at the sheer size, and shaking his head at the quantity of water put to such use.

  “Greene’ll never believe this is what the water was for. Though what sort of a weapon requires water . . .” Todd trailed off, shaking his head.

  “I zink he would prefer anozzer explanation,” Hrriss said. “He is not a man to appreciate gracious living. Ah, but I can!”

  “And look at the range of colors in the Gringg,” Todd added, nudging Hrriss. “Pied, patched, white, brown, black, tan, gold. See the black fellow there with a white shirt-front and chin and white boots? My sister Inessa had a cat who looked just like him, remember?” Then he craned his head about, able to take in more details now that the first shock of the space-lake had passed.

  The room was, indeed, remarkable. A full, curved ceiling of a soft blue that arched benignly over the lakelet had been made to appear a natural sky. Hidden ventilators provided soothing breezes and the occasional surprise gust that made the water’s surface skip and quiver. Except for the toroid shape and the fact there was an elevator shaft running through it, it was hard to believe that the immense pool was situated in the heart of a space-going craft. The elegant homes of the very rich on Earth had once had such amenities, or so his father had told Todd, before living space on the planet became so constricted that such luxuries had been prohibited. Man-made lakes on the few resort areas were out-of-doors, and few would have been as large as this one. Todd wondered how close this approximated the living style of Gringg on their homeworld. He knelt to dip his fingers in the water and taste it.

  “It’s fresh, with only a slightly chemical taste,” he said to Hrriss. From his pouch, Hrriss took a little bottle and filled it for later analysis.

  Having enjoyed their reaction, Grizz now took off her collar, shoulder piece and belt, placed them on a rack filled with other such accouterments, and slid into the water. Beckoning with a long, slow wave of her arm, she signalled them to join her. Todd started to strip and was distracted by the workmanship of Grizz’s adornments. He picked up the collar and felt the material. It was smooth and supple like leather, though thin as vinyl.

  “Is this snakeskin?” he asked, showing the way a snake moved.

  “Morra,” said Grizz, and molded her face around a gaping mouth. She submerged, and Todd leaned close to the edg
e to see her. She opened and closed her mouth, using exaggerated motions of her lower jaw, and flapped her hands alongside her jowls for gills.

  “Oh,” Todd cried, enlightened, as she surfaced. “Fish. They must be whoppers!” He sketched a fish of great size with his hands.

  “Reh, reh,” Grizz said, adding another length to Todd’s. He whistled.

  “Oh, the one that got away,” he said.

  Squealing, Weddeerogh bounced off the side and landed bellyfirst in the water, splashing everyone. One of the adults swam quickly toward him, only its head and the line of a dark-brown-furred spine and rudderlike tail showing above the water. The cub paddled noisily toward his dam, but his pursuer caught up with him. As he made cries of mock distress, the larger Gringg picked him up, lifted him bodily out of the water, and tossed him. Weddeerogh laughed aloud all the way down.

  The resultant splash caught Todd and Hrriss full in the chest. “Agh!” Todd cried. “I’m soaked.”

  “Zen come in alrreddy,” Hrriss said, teasing his friend. “You can get no wezzer zen you arrre.” He undid his belt and threw it across Grizz’s, and jumped in near Weddeerogh.

  “Here I come,” Todd said, hopping out of his shoes and hastily pulling off his clothes. “Damned nuisance. If I’d known I was going swimming . . .” Stripped again, he stood poised on the side of the pool. Then, as the Gringg audience watched with interest, he leaped up and cut a beautiful arc, entering the water with scarcely a ripple.

  When he surfaced, halfway across the pool, the Gringg applauded him, batting the water noisily with their palms.

  “Very prezzy,” Hrriss said. “I didn’t know zat was possible in zis grravity. I zink zey have not seen diving of zis sorrt.”

  “No,” Todd said, surveying his companions. “They’re not really built for swan dives and jackknifing are they?”

  At Grizz’s encouragement, Todd demonstrated more Hayuman-style dives, using the highest of the pillar islands to do a half-gainer. The Gringg were impressed, calling out their approval to him in loud, gruff voices.

  When he was worn out, he pulled himself onto a nearby level and lay back listening to a youthful male with a stringed musical instrument gutturally rendering songs requested by the other Gringg. Todd asked to see the instrument, which was not unlike a guitar.

  “But far heavier,” he told Hrriss. He bent his fingers around the long stem as well as he could. They didn’t reach the fretting, so he laid the instrument in his lap as if it were a dulcimer and tried to make chords. The resultant sounds were harmonious, but nearly inaudible. “These strings are heavier than baling wire. It’s more like playing tent spikes.”

  The doors swung open. Koala, followed by the scribe, padded into the swimming room carrying a crescent-shaped solid in one hand and, in the other, a device not unlike Todd’s recorder, with a slot intended to take the moon-shaped piece. The two Gringg settled down beside Todd and showed him diagrams on the reader’s round screen.

  “That was quick,” Hrriss said.

  “Let’s hope it works,” Todd replied. With a little stretch of imagination, Todd began to recognize the complex molecular structure of proteins.

  Koala pointed to one. “Ayoomnnn.”

  “Yes, if you say so,” Todd agreed with a grin. “And that’s Hrruban, right?” He put his finger on the other pattern.

  “Reh,” Koala said, and put a claw to a control on the viewer. The two patterns moved toward and then overlay one another. Atoms stuck out to either side of the chain, and Koala seemed puzzled.

  “Hayuman and Hrruban,” Todd explained, pointing to himself and Hrriss.

  The two Gringg conferred, and finally it fell to the scribe to draw pictures. With care, he sketched Todd and Hrriss, then began to draw in lines around them.

  “The quality of artwork is magnificent for such quick drawings,” Todd said. “Jilamey could make millions for this fellow in the Artists’ Corridor on Earth.”

  “And on Hrruba,” Hrriss added.

  The scribe’s sketch complete, he turned it toward them.

  “It’s a family tree,” Todd realized. The scribe dashed small symbols between the images of the two of them, pointing at one, then another, and asking for clarification.

  “He’s not sure if we are siblings or . . . mated?” Hrriss turned with twinkling eyes to his friend, dropping his jaw in amusement.

  “Uh, no,” Todd said, shaking both hands and head vehemently at the misunderstanding. With the scribe’s permission he took the tablet and stylus. While Koala watched closely, Todd drew two different family trees and peopled them with figures not much more detailed than stick figures, but clearly male and female of each species: one with tails, one without.

  “You are not as good an artist as he is,” Hrriss said.

  “Agreed, but let’s hope they get the message, and see the difference.” He patted his work to show it was finished and pushed the drawing to the scribe. “We’re two separate species! See—tails, no tails!”

  The revised drawing prompted another spate of conversation. The scribe depicted a planet with figures of Todd and Hrriss standing on top of it.

  “Ah. I presume he now wonders how we came to be on one planet,” Todd said. “How do I explain?” So he drew Earth, marking out the Western Hemisphere continents, then its moon and sun, added a creditable spaceship and a line leading it to Doona, depicting its distinctive continental masses. Then Hrriss took over the double-looped pen from Todd, and sketched Hrruba and its satellites, and a dotted line for a Hrruban ship’s journey to Doona. Todd jammed a forefinger onto Earth and held out his hand to Hrriss, who shook it, while with his free hand he pointed to his homeworld. Then they looked to see if the Gringg had understood the pantomime.

  The Gringg passed the drawing back and forth, mumbling in rapid bass notes with such intensity that Todd felt his ears itching, and Hrriss could not keep his tail still. When the sketch had done a complete circuit, the Gringg smiled and nodded their acknowledgment to the two friends.

  “Wish one of us could draw better,” Todd said.

  “Scrawl or not, zey seem to understand,” Hrriss said, but his tail tip kept twitching.

  * * *

  “Two races sharing a world in peace,” said Grzzeearoghh with a blissful sigh. “How wonderful! These are species I want to cultivate assiduously. We must learn from them how they contrived to co-exist so successfully. That harmony must explain why they are so willing to accept our peaceful intentions. Perhaps they cannot conceive that we might intend them harm. I hope this is so, for it will make our job much easier. This will be of great interest to all on the homeworld. Now, let us show our guests the entire ship so that they know there is nothing hidden on it to harm them or their mutual world.”

  They led the Doonarralans on an exhaustive tour of the ship, from the living quarters to the galley to the cargo holds, and finally to the bridge. Soon, the small beings began to tire.

  “Mama, perhaps they want to take a nap,” Weddeerogh suggested when Rrss yawned and attempted to conceal the gesture.

  Just then, however, Grzzeearoghh received a signal from Grrala. “First we will return to the infirmary, for Grrala has something she wants them to see,” she told her son.

  * * *

  “I’d say they deliberately trotted us up and down this ship to prove that they’re not hiding anything. I feel as if we haven’t missed a corridor or a single level,” Todd said wearily. “Certainly nothing resembled a weapons system anywhere. They didn’t even stop you when you opened that triangular hatch.”

  Hrriss wrinkled his nose. “No one is in danger from a compost heap. ‘Rhaddencch,’ Grizz called it. Zey seemed to let us go where we wanted to go. But it is so big a ship; to really explore would take weeks. Now, zat bridge was interesting, was it not? So vrrry casual.”

  Todd gave a soft snort. “Did you notice the configuration of the
switches, toggles, and buttons? No way either of us could manage that sort of control board . . . not unless we could grow foot-long fingers and treble our hand-spans.”

  “Zat does not worrrry me as much as ze absence of couches,” Hrriss said thoughtfully. “How do zey absorb ze g-force in takeoff and landing wizzout padded couches of some zort?”

  “Maybe there’s cushioning fat under their fur.” Todd suggested and bent over to rub his thighs. “Their normal g-force is enough to make my muscles ache.”

  Hrriss gave a snort. “It wasn’t ze diving you did?”

  “Come to think of it, I haven’t done much diving lately. But I know the difference between gravity-ache and muscle strain.”

  When Grizz guided them back to Panda’s office, Koala and Ursa, another engineer, had several small devices to show them. Ursa strapped one about her massive throat and offered Todd another one.

  “How do I operate it?” Todd asked. Out of the device resting against his larynx, his words came out in a basso profundo that made him jump. “Was that me?” he asked, and the device repeated it.

  “Dodh?” Ursa began. Her voice, instead of being a deep, chocolate baritone, had been raised to a pleasant tenor range.

  “Zat is much better,” Hrriss said.

  “Promising,” Todd agreed. He turned to Ursa. “Say ‘v va’arrel.’” He encouraged her comprehension of what he wanted by zooming his hand around like the shuttle. Ursa glanced at Grizz for permission.

  “Vamarrel,” the Gringg said, sounding faintly ridiculous in soprano.

  “Aha!” Todd said. “See, we were missing something. Now say the word for the big ship.” He gestured all around him. “Va’arrel?”

  “Vasharrel,” Ursa piped. “Wonderful! We’re on our way.”

  Ursa signed to Todd to take off the device collar and pass it to Hrriss. The Hrruban fastened the band, and tried a couple of words. “Spaceship, food, wazzer, rllama . . .”