Wings beat. A creature that had been hovering, barely visible amidst low clouds, dropped straight toward the sixth noga. “A krippo.” Kathryn seized Flandry’s hand. “I wish I could’ve told you in advance. But watch. ’Tis wonderful.”
The nogas were presumably more or less mammalian, also in their reproductive pattern: the sexes were obvious, the females had udders. The krippo resembled a bird … did it? The body was comparable to that of a large goose, with feathers gray-brown above, pale gray below, tipped with blue around the throat, on the pinions, at the end of a long triangular tail. The claws were strong, meant to grab and hang on. The neck was fairly long itself, supporting a head that swelled grotesquely backward. The face seemed to consist mainly of two great topaz eyes. And there was no beak, only a red cartilaginous tube.
The krippo landed on the noga’s right shoulder. It thrust a ropy tongue (?) from the tube. Flandry noticed a knot on either side of the noga, just below the platform. The right one uncoiled, revealing itself to be a member suggestive of a tentacle, more than two meters in length if fully outstretched. The krippo’s extended equivalent, the “tongue,” plunged into a sphincter at the end of this. Linked, the two organisms trotted toward the humans.
“We’re still lackin’ a ruka,” Kathryn said. “No, wait.” The noga behind the plow had bellowed. “That entity’s callin’ for one. Heesh’s own ruka has to unharness heesh ’fore heesh can come to us.”
“But the rest—” Flandry pointed. Four nogas merely stood where they were.
“Sure,” Kathryn said. “Without partners, they’re dumb brutes. They won’t act, ’cept for the kind of rote job they were doin’, till they get a signal from a complete entity … Ah. Here we go.”
A new animal dropped from a tree and scampered over the furrows. It was less analogous to an ape than the noga was to a rhinoceros or the krippo to a bird. However, a Terran was bound to think of it in such terms. About a meter tall if it stood erect, it must use its short, bowed legs arboreally by choice, for it ran on all fours and either foot terminated in three well-developed grasping digits. The tail was prehensile. The chest, shoulders, and arms were enormous in proportion, greater than a man’s; and besides three fingers, each hand possessed a true thumb. The head was similarly massive, round, with bowl-shaped ears and luminous brown eyes. Like the krippo, this creature had no nose or mouth, simply a nostrilled tube. Black hair covered it, except where ears, extremities, and a throat pouch showed blue skin. It — he — was male. He wore a belt supporting a purse and an iron dagger.
“Is that a Didonian?” Flandry asked. “A ruka,” Kathryn said. “One-third of a Dodonian.” The animal reached the noga closest to the humans. He bounded onto the left shoulder, settled down by the krippo, and thrust out a “tongue” of his own to join the remaining “tentacle.”
“You see,” Kathryn said hurriedly, “we had to name them somehow. In most Didonian languages, the species are called things answerin’ roughly to ‘feet,’ ‘wings,’ and ‘hands.’ But that’d get confusin’ in Anglic. So, long’s Aenean dialects contain some Russko anyhow, we settled on ‘noga,’ ‘krippo,’ ‘ruka.’ ” The tripartite being stopped a few meters off. “Rest your gun. Heesh won’t hurt us.” She went to meet it. Flandry followed, a bit dazed. Symbiotic relationships were not unknown to him. The most spectacular case he’d met hitherto was among the Togru-Kon-Tanakh of Vanrijn. A gorilloid supplied hands and strength; a small, carapaced partner had brains and keen eyes; the detachable organs that linked them contained cells for joining the two nervous systems into one. Apparently evolution on Dido had gone the same way.
But off the deep end! Flandry thought. To the point where the two little types no longer even eat, but draw blood off the big one. Lord, how horrible. Never to revel in a tournedos or a pêche flambée—
He and Kathryn stopped before the autochthon. A horsey aroma, not unpleasant, wafted down a light, barely cooling breeze. Flandry wondered which pair of eyes to meet.
The noga grunted. The krippo trilled through its nostrils, which must have some kind of strings and resonating chamber. The ruka inflated his throat pouch and produced a surprising variety of sounds.
Kathryn listened intently. “I’m no expert in this language,” she said, “but they do speak a related one ’round Port Frederiksen, so I can follow ’long fairly well. Heesh’s name is Master Of Songs, though ‘name’ has the wrong connotations … ” She uttered vocables. Flandry caught a few Anglic words, but couldn’t really understand her.
I suppose all Didonians are too alien to learn a human tongue, he thought. The xenologists must have worked out different pidgins for the different linguistic families: noises that a Terran epiglottis can wrap itself around, on a semantic pattern that a Didonian can comprehend. He regarded Kathryn with renewed marveling. What brains that must have taken!
Three voices answered her. The impossibility of a human talking a Didonian language can’t just be a matter of larynx and mouth, Flandry realized. A vocalizer would deal with that. No, the structure’s doubtless contrapuntal.
“Heesh doesn’t know pidgin,” Kathryn told him. “But Cave Discoverer does. They’ll assemble heesh for us.”
“Heesh?”
She chuckled. “What pronoun’s right, in a situation like this? A few cultures insist on some particular sex distribution in the units of an entity. But for most, sex isn’t what matters, ’tis the species and individual capabilities of the units, and they form entities in whatever combinations seem best at a given time. So we call a partnership, whether complete or two-way, ’heesh.” And we don’t fool ’round inflectin’ the word.”
The krippo took off in a racket of wings. The ruka stayed aboard the noga. But it was as if a light had dimmed. The two stared at the humans a while, then the ruka scratched himself and the noga began cropping weeds.
“You need all three for full intelligence,” Flandry deduced.
Kathryn nodded. “M-hm. The rukas have the most forebrain. Alone, one of them is ’bout equal to a chimpanzee. Is that right, the smartest Terran subhuman? And the noga alone is pretty stupid. A three-way, though, can think as well as you or I. Maybe better, if comparison’s possible. We’re still tryin’ to find tests and measurements that make sense.” She frowned. “Do have the boys put away their guns. We’re ’mong good people.”
Flandry acceded, but left his followers posted where they were. If anything went agley, he wanted that trail held. The hurt men lay there on their stretchers.
The other partnership finished disengaging itself — no, heeshself — from the plow. The earth thudded to the gallop of heesh’s noga; krippo and ruka must be hanging on tight! Kathryn addressed this Didonian when heesh arrived, also without result though she did get a response. This she translated as: “Meet Skilled With Soil, who knows of our race even if none of heesh’s units have learned pidgin.”
Flandry rubbed his chin. His last application of anti-beard enzyme was still keeping it smooth, but he lamented the scraggly walrus effect that his mustache was sprouting. “I take it,” he said, “that invidi — uh, units swap around to form, uh, entities whose natural endowment is optimum for whatever is to be done?”
“Yes. In most cultures we’ve studied. Skilled With Soil is evidently just what the phrase implies, a gifted farmer. In other combinations, heesh’s units might be part of an outstandin’ hunter or artisan or musician or whatever. That’s why there’s no requirement for a large population in order to have a variety of specialists within a communion.”