“The first son. Dag Doglaska’ib is very ancient, and while physically sound his mind explores uncharted seas these days, in intense concentration. Borragil’ib is of my generation, and is still intrigued by the organization of things.” Drin headed for the corridor to the south dome, its opening artfully disguised by holo dust. Halfway through he realized Mary wasn’t with him.
He turned and stuck his head back through the insubstantial but opaque curtain. “Shall we?”
“Uh, Drin, this is just going to take some getting used to.”
What was troubling her? Holo dust was just standard Do’utian interior decoration, Drin thought, the technology was twice as old as Trimus, at least. Then he realized—
“I’m sorry, Mary. I forgot you don’t see at audio frequencies. Don’t worry. It’s just well-managed dust.” It must have looked to her as if he were sticking himself through solid rock.
This time she shook her head, gave him a nervous little giggle. “You guys are so huge, so elemental, so natural; and things are so basic at Trimus City, we forget to think of you as having such a technological heritage. It doesn’t fit the image somehow.”
“Image? Mary, there are branches of us, as there are of you, that are minds with no use for organic bodies, or even individuality.” Drin shuddered, slapping his tail against the side of the hall. “They are out there, and I think they watch us now and then—like we watch the lungfish.”
“I think I can handle the holo dust,” Mary said, “it just surprised me a little.” She followed the rest of him through the curtain. “Lungfish?” she added, shaking her head.
Borragil’ib spotted a Stingsnake, grabbed its neck with one branch hand in a lightning whip of his tongue, stuffed the long, thick body into his mouth, and pulled his hands in after, until only the flailing head of the poisonous beast projected outside his beak. Then he severed it with a judicious nip.
Drin had to admire his cousin’s technique. The Stingsnake was the largest Do’utian sea predator brought to Trimus, and its bite on the tongue could fester. A human would get a painful puncture, but the air breathing vertebrate’s venom had no effect on them. Did we make our oceans too safe? Drin wondered. Perhaps we need a little something to fear out here—besides each other.
Smooth, slim and sleek Borragil’ib seemed to fear him, or rather feared the questions he came to ask. His cousin swam with a classic grace, nowhere near matching Drin in strength, but still seemed to slip through the water as fast on half the effort.
They talked to each other in the old sonic language, symbols related to each other in two dimensions rather than just by linear grammar. When Mary had asked about this, Drin had reminded her of English sentence diagrams. She had nodded. “Very well,” he’d said, “substitute symbols for the phrases, nouns, and verbs. Then add a few more lines. It’s complicated and not necessarily any faster, but it handles a lot of subtleties. It’s especially good for mathematics.”
What Borragil’ib’s images told him was that Gonikli’ibida did not want to talk to Drin, and the family did not want Drin to press the issue.
The family? Drin imaged the long one.
Borragil’ib imaged a black sphere, a symbol for the unknowable, and a warning not to press that issue.
Gonikli’s research into primitive weapons?
The symbol of challenge was associated with Drin’s inquiry and Gonikli’ibida’s reluctance, and this tied to a response-to-challenge symbol.
A description of Do’utian psychology, Drin wondered, or a threat?
Kleth and Human were difficult to describe in these chirps and whistles, but there were conventions. Drin shot his tongue at a passing fish, grabbed it, and stuffed it down his throat. Then he composed the symbol for human (the symbol for a monkeylike Do’utian vertebrate plus the symbol for thought) and modified it by talking-of-other’s-deeds-of-words, and related it to the dead Kleth (a now non-thinking thinking flying creature). Drin related those to the dead Kleth’s maybe dead mate, and tied the human and the dead Kleth to Gonikli’ibida with friendship bond symbols. Finally, a question symbol was tied to the human’s position symbol.
Quickly an image returned negating Gonikli’ibida’s connection with the death.
Drin sent one negating that image, and another asking simply, “Where is Richard Moon?”
Borragil’ib broached for a breath, dove deep, and returned with the smell of a house-snail trailing him. He showed Drin a picture negating Gonikli’ibida’s knowledge of the human’s position, and associating Drin’s questions with challenge again.
Drin questioned the need to defend Gonikli’ibida from questions.
Borragil’ib raised the image of honor challenge.
“No,” Drin replied in the definite, linear logic of English, “I do not challenge your honor.”
“You swim in Do’utian seas now, Commander. Seek your information elsewhere.”
“Your protests have now convinced me that Gonikli’ibida is somehow more connected with this than simply being a way to find Richard Moon. I am bound by duty to learn what that connection is.”
“There is none! She is an artist and wants to be alone to think. She does not know where Moon is. Leave it at that.”
“Very well,” Drin said, smelling challenge. People as thoroughly civilized as the Ib would not be involved in beachmaster duels. But they had political influence that, if anything, could be more deadly. It was time, Drin thought, even at his level, for him to dip his beak. Perhaps Mary or the staff back at Trimus City would have some ideas.
Death is a common denominator of Trimus; our philosophy was to not extend individual consciousness indefinitely by cybernetic means. Some still might go elsewhere for this, and so cease to be Trimusians. But death here does not come from physical aging—Do’utians do not die of old age, and the human and Kleth had engineered that from their genes long before their first contact—but from accidents, or from choice. Humans and Kleth enjoy risk, and so had a median life span of just over three centuries (503 turns for Kleth, 472 for humans), at the time of founding. Do’utians who don’t have accidents at sea simply get longer and stranger, usually refusing to communicate or eat after seven or eight centuries. We revere the cycle of life, but, as intelligent tool-makers, we do so on our own terms.
—Karen Olsen, “A History of Trimus”
The facilities that Ibgorni had contrived for Mary at the spur of the moment included a pool of warm water, tiny by Do’utian standards, but a convenience they easily understood. It was not quite as long as Drin, but in it, Mary could swim several body lengths, sound, and even spout after a fashion; the warm moist air from her lungs quickly turned to steam in a room temperature meant for Do’utian comfort. She was swimming vigorously when he arrived back at their room, perhaps a little bit overfull from a night of hunting and feeding that had, he thought, gone a way to quiet Borragil’ib’s itchy-tailed hostility.
In the hot pool, Mary had no need of the artificial skin she normally wore to protect and insulate her, and Drin examined her anatomy with his usual discrete fascination. Mary, several times, had told him that it did not bother her in the slightest to be examined in this manner, and that, truthfully, she liked the attention, and if he were curious about what she felt like that would be fine as well.
Drin’s curiosity did not reach that threshold of intimacy yet.
Raising his tail for leverage, Drin reared up, put his foreclaws on the sill of room’s long window and looked out at the stars. The window faced away from Ember, which was cut in half by the horizon at this latitude and further dimmed by Trimus’s thick atmosphere.