Kanti shrugged. “A week. Maybe two—if we survive and Bach and his friends don’t find us first.”
D-flat Seege would make its move well before then. How the hell, Greg asked himself, had he got himself into this? He had no communicator, no food, no weapons and the one Eponan ally they thought they had would probably kill them on sight.
But if they didn’t try to do something, the starbase would surely be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of a surprise Fay D-flat Seege attack. They would be forced to either kill thousands of Uther, or run. The former was unthinkable—but if they did the latter, there would be literally no limit to the Fay D-flat Seege’s ambition, and perhaps its revenge.
“I’m going to have to go in there. If they have human electronics in those Uther spacecraft, I might be able to fly one of them. Part of my job is to manage technology transfer—so I know both ends pretty well. But the voice interface would be Eponan. I’d like your help. It will be dangerous—damn dangerous.”
Kanti looked at him, eyes glistening, but her face determined. “I know how important this is. I’ll take risks. I already have.” She shook her head. “But I’m not too good with technology. I probably don’t even have the vocabulary. And I don’t want to commit suicide.”
Greg pursed his lips and thought for a moment. “There would be just a limited number of commands. Numbers, simple actions like on and off or increase and decrease, and nouns for rocket parts. Maybe you could teach me enough Eponan to do that.”
“I don’t know. It’s hard—especially if you can’t sing.”
“I can whistle. Try me.”
“OK, but I don’t think this will work.” She took a breath. “In the GCH dialect, which is what I know, position is indicated by dividing directions into threes; the high tonic—it’s not really a tonic, off by about a quarter tone, but that’s as close as I can describe it—tells you if the object is high, level, or low. The near subdominant chord tells you whether it is front, even, or back, and the dominant whether it is left, right, or center. That gives you one of twenty-six prime directions, and you can modify that by the pre-motes for more or less.” She sang three notes in rapid succession, the second higher and the third lower than the first. “I can’t sing three notes at once, but if I sing triplets with a rest between, they understand me. I just said ‘Object more high front right is.’ ”
Greg got a sinking feeling. This was very complicated, and he just wasn’t able to remember.
“They break distance,” Kanti continued, “into steps of near, away, and far three times. You’ve got to remember the order; near-away-far is closer to you than away-near-near.”
Greg shook his head—even though his life might depend on it, he couldn’t absorb it. He was tired and having trouble concentrating. He might, he thought, be able to work it out from a sketch, but he’d never absorb enough to use it quickly in a crisis. Besides…
“You said GCH dialect. This isn’t universal?”
She shook her head. “The concept is pretty much the same in other dialects, but the pitches may be different, and some sing range before direction.”
There would, he realized, be no quick study of Eponan for him. Without his translator, or Kanti, he would be an illiterate deaf-mute mime. Maybe he could get something, though.
“Could you sing the, uh, high tonic note for ‘near’ again?”
She did, and it was in his range. He tried to duplicate it. She laughed, and sang it again. This time he got it about right.
“Could I use that for a warning?”
“Maybe. If you do, sing loudly—that would let them know it’s important, and maybe an Eponan-speaking computer too. And repeat it three times—that’s the nearest possible.”
He tried it again and she smiled at him. “I think that’s barely adequate Eponan neonate talk. Want to try translating Shakespeare now?”
They both laughed, but the laughs had an edge to them.
“So, what do we do?” Kanti asked.
“I’d tell you what to say. Try, ‘increase the oxidizer to fuel ratio’ in Eponan.”
“Huh? Greg, I’d have to understand what you were saying in English to translate it. I’m afraid that learning that would be as hard for me as learning Eponan for you.”
Greg thought about it. How much would be automatic and how much user-selected? Would he have to deal with mix-ratios? Pump rates, or would it be pump pressure, or could one just select a specific impulse? How could he select an escape instead of an orbital trajectory? And if the latter, how could he specify an injection vector—he remembered Kanti’s description of how the Uthers indicated direction.
“Can you fly a ship without the computer?”
“Not a human spacecraft—but an Utheran? Maybe. They used to fly them manually. Anyway, I’ve got to try. There will be a holocaust if we don’t. Maybe, if I’m sneaky enough, I can spend a few hours in the cockpit unbothered and figure out the computer—or figure out the manual controls. At least I might blow it up and start a chain reaction, one ship explosion exploding another.”
That sounded very close to suicide, he realized.
Kanti looked at him and sighed. “After we get away?”
We? She was going in with him. “Yeah,” he said, not very convincingly.
After a long time she nodded.
He looked up and watched the pagoda trees sway in the cooling evening wind. Their helicopter vines twirled in the ruddy embers of the last rays. Greg felt the warmth of Kanti’s thigh against his right leg and memories of the kind of tingling sensation he used to get from that went through him.
Except that he shouldn’t feel that now, and, anyway Kanti was on his left side.
He tensed and looked quickly at his leg. A sheet of flesh had somehow moved from under the rock next to him and had flowed up the side of his leg. Out of this sheet of flesh poked a number of tiny stalks with little black dots on them.
“Yuk!” He jumped up and started rubbing his leg furiously. “Nothing like sitting there thinking everything is going to be all right in the world, then finding out that something’s eating you.”
Kanti laughed. “It’s just snail slime—the real strong stuff is further inside. Rub it with a roundleaf—they’ve got a natural neutralizer.”
Greg uprooted one of the ground cover plants—a kind of dwarf pagoda tree, he recalled—and rubbed its large, crinkly, leaf over this thigh. The stinging sensation, indeed, vanished. “I guess that’s a message that we’d better be about our business. First we have to get in. They’ve got sharp eyes and lots of surveillance—probably alerted now that we’ve escaped.” He looked at the snail that tried to eat him. “Maybe if we found a couple of big shells and crept up a little at a time.
“That’s an idea, but,” She looked at him with a mischievous grin, “how’s your stomach?”
“Why?”
“Are you up to being eaten alive?”
Halfway back to the disguised launching field, they found a snail big enough for both of them—a huge, ancient specimen covered with miniature parasitic pagodas. Its roughly hemispherical shell was almost two meters at its highest point, dented in numerous places and partly covered with the Eponan equivalent of moss as well as parasites. It looked like a big, old boulder.
Kanti dug through the loam and found a rock. Then she scraped part of the shell clear and began to chip away.
“I thought you wanted it alive!”
“I’m not killing it. We’ll just need a little hole to see out of, and some places to attach some slings. Our suits are pretty good, but we won’t be able to sit right on the stomach wall. Get a rock and help.”