Eve looked around. “I doubt if they do more than sleep in those places,” she noted. “No chimneys, roofs are salvaged slates, pitched thatch, or similar. The bigger buildings near the town center would have to be common barns, and I suspect that the area over there with the big covered pit and the stone slab tables and benches is the common kitchen.”
She was about to deduce more when several figures emerged from some of the houses and one of the large barnlike structures, carrying sacks over their shoulders or large jars on their heads, all heading towards the “common kitchen.” They all looked young and strong, wearing thin gray cotton one-piece dresses and little else, and they were all women and girls. They all had coal-black hair trailing down and reddish-brown skin and there was a definite racial kinship in the features, possibly due to close intermarriage.
Sexual division of labor, Eve noted mentally. She also noted that while some of the youngest girls looked no more than five or six, there were no babies or really small children in evidence and none of the teenagers appeared pregnant.
The young women caught sight of the strangers almost immediately and stopped, staring. They didn’t seem scared, more like people who have seen something they had never seen before and had not expected ever to see.
“Try calling to them,” Robey whispered to Eve, thinking that maybe woman to woman would be a better introduction.
“Hello!” Eve called to them. “Do any of you speak my language? Or what language do you speak?” The educated of most colonies had a working knowledge of some form of English, which had grown to majority usage way back on Old Earth as an international standard, even though the accents and local variations could be atrocious. Many of the ordinary folk, though, like these, tended to speak a local language or dialect. Eve had some working knowledge of seventeen Earth-derived languages, and John twelve, with only four overlapping, but beyond the primary set of English, Hindi, Spanish, and Mandarin the possibilities were endless. These people looked like what the old records gave as the Hindi speaking people, but you never knew. Certainly when they continued to gape at her she repeated her query in Hindi, but got no farther.
As the standoff continued in the increasingly hot midday sun, there came suddenly the far-off sound of what might have been a trumpet or similar horn, and then another on the other side of the village an equal distance away. They seemed to jolt the young women into some kind of furious action, in which they simply ignored the two strangers and began scurrying around, working hard, stoking up the fire pit, dumping out the food, starting the evident preparation of lunch. They did call, even shout to one another, but at first it sounded like gibberish.
“Mooka gan pickup brunin die!” one called to a small girl, who whirled and ran back off into the barn, giving the dumbfounded strangers a furtive glance as she went near.
“Not exactly filling them with awe and wonder,” Eve noted sourly as young women worked feverishly at their tasks.
“Well, they know we’re here, and I guess they figure we’re not going to attack them and they’ll have a whole town to feed pretty soon who’ll need to be fed regardless and they might get mighty pissed off at the lack of a meal and they will still be here tomorrow.”
“Did you catch any of the language?”
He shrugged. “I think it’s English, or a dialect of it, probably well removed long before these people’s ancestors got plopped down here and moving much further since.”
“You have any ideas? I certainly don’t want the town mad at us because we loused up the lunch routine.”
He nodded. “I think we sit over there in the shade, where there’s something of a breeze to take the stench away, and we let the anthropologists and computers up top figure out the language if they can. We’ll get noticed soon enough when the rest of the town gets here.”
She nodded. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
John took a small transmission rod from his equipment belt under his robe, put it on maximum and directional, and pointed it at the increasingly busy group of now fifteen or twenty people who were preparing the meal.
After a few minutes, the general channel opened and the receivers implanted in their ears returned data.
“Fairly basic English, not easily traceable as dialect although centuries before, the base was probably Cockney, as were half the English dialects of the world.”
“Can you give us a filter?” Robey asked them in a soft voice, not wanting to attract any more attention right now.
“Basic, yes. There’s a lot of words and terms that are certainly too localized, so until you can match them to things or actions they’ll still come out garbled, but we can get a basic pidgin for this group. You’ll have to pick it up yourself for speaking purposes.”
“Okay, send, both of us.”
All that would do was to use the receiver implants to reformat the language they were hearing into something more understandable. It simply helped figure out the sense of the sounds by making them a bit more familiar, correcting for speed and mispronunciations, and from that both the monitoring linguistic computer and their own skills would allow them to learn it well enough for conversation. This had been a part of training and simulation, since this sort of problem was quite common, but neither of them had ever actually had to use it before.
Some results were dramatic.
“Gala, hon, you be foot wash so dance the dough pit,” one woman’s instruction to a girl of eight or nine came through. Soon it was clear that there was a great deal of dough being prepared in a fixed stone-lined trough and the way it got kneaded was for Gala and several of her friends, after washing their feet, to simply jump in and start jumping up and down and kneading with their feet.
“ ‘Dance the dough pit.’ I kind of like that,” Eve commented. “It has a kind of lyrical charm.”
“I’m just happy they wash their feet first,” Robey responded, less impressed.
Soon the whole stoneworks was chugging along and the heat was building up on an already hot day, while the smoke wafted into the air. There were stone ovens along the sides that clearly were designed to keep different temperatures for baking, large open pots for simmering stews and the like on the sides of the central pit, and all sorts of oils and herbs put on fruits and vegetables that were mixed and heated and turned on the larger grates. It was quite impressive, and worked like clockwork, everybody knowing their part and doing it. When one of the younger ones would balk or slip, somebody else would be right there to make things right and then get everything back on track and schedule.
The fact was, the heat and smoke weren’t pleasant but when the wind did send them briefly their way, the two outsiders found the uglier smells of the village replaced with very good, sweet-smelling and even exotic-smelling odors.
“Think they will invite us to lunch, Brother John?” Eve asked him.
“I’m not sure if they’ll even acknowledge us,” he replied. “I have to admit, I was somewhat prepared for a hostile appearance, or the awestruck bit, or the fear of outsiders, but it never once occurred to me that we’d be almost completely ignored. No curiosity, no worries we’ll make off with the family jewels, nothing.”
She gave him a wry smile. “I doubt if they have anything even they would consider worth stealing other than maybe themselves and their kids, and that doesn’t look like anything you’d do here. And I think they’re curious, all right. It just isn’t their place to open up to us. Nobody wants to take the responsibility, particularly that group. Look at how very young they all are! Kids!”
“Kids are among the most curious of creatures, or haven’t you noticed?” he responded. “No, I think that it’s a little hard living here. Those ‘kids’ are an integral part of the whole and are as essential to survival as the bigger, older folks. They had to grow up almost immediately, and they know their place.”