“Sure.” Ozzie took a couple of paces, then looked back. “George, you don’t happen to know any good chat-up lines, do you?”
George took a moment to examine his pipe. “If I did, I wouldn’t waste them on the likes of you.”
Ozzie left the workshop and headed back down to his rooms. George had made him remember the worst days of high school, the times when he wound up outside the principal’s office. The talking to that was always worse than any possible detention.
He could never tell George, or Sara come to that, but the reason he’d been considering the mass escape was Orion. The simple fact was, he couldn’t be sure about getting out if he took the boy with him. On his own it wouldn’t be a problem. He could ski, he’d even started carving himself a pair out of bone. No Silfen was going to get away from a human on skis no matter how fleet of foot they were. And he had his packaged food, and energy drinks, and lightweight equipment; all of which he could carry. But Orion… the boy hadn’t even seen snow before they got here, let alone knew how to move through it.
And all the while, when he was putting plans together, there was that one thought coiled up at the back of his mind: how much simpler it would be to leave Orion behind. There might even come a day when he didn’t have a choice. It wasn’t like he’d come searching for enlightenment or fulfillment like George and most of the others. He was on the paths for a reason. And God only knew what was happening back in the Commonwealth right now.
Ozzie walked across the main chamber and into the passageway that led to his cluster of rooms. The tochee was there, just coming out of the cavern they used to sleep in. It was the alien Ozzie had mistaken for a young Raiel the day he’d arrived at the Ice Citadel. At first sight it was a reasonable error. The tochee had a similar blunt body, like a squashed egg about three and a half yards long, and coming up to the middle of Ozzie’s chest. Its hide was a kind of bristly fur, a dark caramel in color, which looked as if it was about two sizes too big, the whole body was covered in wrinkles and creases, like a bulldog’s face. Strange little wizened black fronds grew out of the folds, as if it were sprouting seaweed.
The eye, or what people believed was its seeing organ, was a curved pyramid a yard or so behind its mouth, made up from three oval sections of translucent black flesh, with the one at the front twice as long as the other pair, curving down so it could follow the body-profile.
But it was the way the alien moved that was most interesting. Two fat ridges of rubbery tissue ran along its underbelly, for all the world like sled skis, except these rippled like snakes to push it along. The surface of the ridges was mottled, gray and bruise-brown, with some cracks oozing rheumy body fluid. Sara had said the tochee was in bad shape when they found it out on the edge of the crystal tree forest. Although the ridges were a sophisticated biological method of locomotion, their nature meant it couldn’t wear protective cladding. Its ridges were badly frostbitten from moving over the icy ground, where they suffered constant contact with the sub-zero soil. That was over two years ago, and the flesh still hadn’t grown back properly.
A second pair of ridges protruded from its back. They were shorter, extending only a little farther than its eye, and they were more bulbous. Ozzie had seen them swell out to grip cups and plates, or help lift objects too heavy for human arms, like giant amoebas shaping themselves into chubby tendrils or jaws. As tool users went, it was a high evolutionary concept.
In fact, it was only its manipulator flesh, along with a few high-technology artifacts it was carrying on a utility belt, that convinced the other Ice Citadel residents that it was sentient at all. In the whole two years it had been here, nobody had managed to communicate with it at all. It didn’t make any sound with its mouth, let alone speak. As far as they could tell, it was deaf. They’d tried chalking pictures on a slab, but it didn’t seem to understand them. All they had left were simple arm gestures: come, stay, go, lift, put down. It cooperated most of the time, as if it were a well-trained sheepdog.
They didn’t even know its true name, the Korrok-hi had named it the tochee, which in their language of hoots and whistles meant big fat worm.
“So what were you looking for in there?” Ozzie mused out loud as he stood in front of it.
The tochee’s snout waved slightly from side to side, putting Ozzie in mind of some animal awaiting castigation. To his eye it had the attitude of a whipped dog, but then, he supposed, if all he did every day was carry buckets of water from the fountain to the kitchen, on frostbitten toes, unable to talk to anyone, or know what was going on outside, he’d be seriously depressed, too.
“Okay, let’s go see.” He walked around the flank of the tochee and pushed the door curtain aside. He wasn’t sure, but he thought the security mesh had been moved around slightly, as if something had gently prodded it. “Come on then.” He beckoned the tochee with an exaggerated gesture. The big creature turned smoothly in the passageway, and slithered into the sleeping room. Once again, Ozzie was impressed by how agile the alien was; for something that size it could move quickly and precisely.
He sat on the cot, staring at the tochee, and gestured around expansively. “Go ahead.” The alien didn’t move. It kept its great front eye perfectly aligned on the human.
“All right then.” Ozzie went over to the security mesh and clicked the padlock’s combination code, covering the motion with his body. He still wasn’t that trusting. With the mesh open, he pulled out various articles, food, clothes, a kerosene lamp, his sewing kit, a handheld array, and set them down on the floor in front of the alien. The tochee’s locomotion ridges flattened slightly, lowering it down; then its manipulator flesh on the left side flowed out into a slim tentacle that picked up the array. The tip pressed each of the five buttons on top. But the unit remained dead.
“Ah-ha,” Ozzie said. Only someone familiar with technology would understand a button. “So you understand technology, but we can’t communicate. Why not?” He sat back on the cot and looked at the tochee again. It might be a human interpretation, but the alien seemed to slump in disappointment at the array’s failure. It slowly replaced it on the floor, little black fronds rustling like autumn leaves in a breeze.
“You don’t use sound, so what does that leave us with? Telepathy? Doubtful. Magnetic fields? Bees and trokken marshrats can sense them, but the Silfen are probably damping them here. Possible, then. Electromagnetic? Ditto for radio waves, the array is dead. Shapes? You’re visually perceptive, so that’s another possible. I can’t match that shapeshifting arm trick, though, and Sara said you didn’t understand pictures.” He cocked his head to one side. “Make that human pictures. I wouldn’t understand yours. That’s if you draw them. Now there’s a culture difference. Do you have art?” Ozzie stopped. He was feeling mildly foolish talking out loud to an alien that couldn’t hear. The tochee was still facing him, the front eye perfectly aligned. Ozzie shuffled a few inches along the cot. The tochee’s front body moved slightly, tracking him. “Why are you doing that? What can you be trying to say.”No, not what. How? Ozzie stared at that elongated oval of shiny black flesh that was pointing right at him. Not sound, but an emission of… “Shit.” He switched his retinal inserts to infrared, and the tochee’s body crawled with strange thermal signatures, hinting at the location of blood vessels and organs hidden below the flesh. He slowly worked up through the visual spectrum, until he reached ultraviolet. “Fuck!” Ozzie jumped backward in reflex shock, and fell off the cot.
The tochee’s forward eye was alive with complex dancing patterns of deep purple light shining straight at him.