Keff brightened, sitting up straighter, ignoring the smell and the sog. "That's true. Alien Outreach chose us. It's us, partner, first and foremost, no matter what. I want to see everything. And I need to look sharp. I keep missing details."
"Well, that's what I'm here for," Carialle said complacently. "My drives haven't stopped humming for the last eighty hours. Just ask your friendly neighborhood shellperson for a free, money-back guaranteed review."
Keff grinned. "If only it was that easy. It has to be in my head, too. I wish I had extended memory banks." There was so much that was different in the way the Cridi lived on their homeworld than on Ozran. Isolated as he was, he felt as if he was only one more fact away from sensory overload.
At first he had wondered if the Cridian amphibioids had abandoned their amulet power system, since no amulets were in evidence. Carialle had been the first to point out the circuits, like fine gold filigree, that were either worn on, or bonded to the ends of the Cridi's long fingers. It was a tremendous advancement in the technology. To access Core power, the user merely positioned his or her hand, as if inserting the fingertips into the niches on a device, the way humans would use a virtual-reality glove, and they were in touch, so to speak, with the Core. Keff knew that Tall Eyebrow and the other Ozranian visitors were uncomfortable using their antique amulets in front of the homeworlders, but he'd assured them that they should be proud to display them, as symbols, if nothing else. The amulets represented hard-won equality after years of deprivation. Besides, their race had a natural prediliction for telekinesis, unlike their newfound allies, the humans. That was an advantage that no archaic equipment could devalue. It didn't dispel the Ozranians' discomfort entirely, but it helped. Keff would have given anything to be able to use an amulet, archaic or no, to be dry just for an hour. His boots were beginning to smell moldy. He considered hiking back to the ship through the rain to get a pair of sandals.
Carialle broke into his reverie.
"Oh, look. Company's coming. One of the 'eight great.' "
Keff glanced up. One of the dignitaries from the Cridi delegation made her way through the crowd and stopped before Keff. She wore a red cloak that was secured at her throat and wrists with gold bands instead of the silver bangles she had worn to meet the ship. Keff guessed from his limited knowledge of Cridi biology that she was fairly young, but still considered an adult. He tried to straighten the crumples out of his shirt.
The hands moved swiftly. "Can your mind reach me?"
Keff responded, "I sign your language, gentle-female."
She gestured a little impatiently. "Why you here?"
"To make a bridge between your world and ours. To make friends with another race who has its own science, its own space system. We have met many new peoples, but have always had to help them develop…"
He would have gone on, but he sensed that the female was getting bored. "What's wrong?" he asked.
"Too long," she replied, emphatically. "Old. Like three." She swung around to point at the Ozranian delegates in turn, lingering briefly on Tall Eyebrow. She turned again and fixed her beady gaze on him. "Old."
"Old? How would she know how old I…" Keff repeated, bewildered, then was enlightened. "Ah! You mean the language we are using is old. Antiquated." The concept was just out of the reach of his Cridi hand-vocabulary, so he had to reach for it. Encouragingly, the female frog watched him struggle with his explanation, nodding when he made sense to her. "We sound like ancestors to you?"
She tipped her little face up and stretched her neck slightly three times, like she was bobbing her head against something from underneath.
"Yes."
"Whew! So that's the problem," Keff said, running his hand back through his hair, and remembering just in time that the gesture wasn't going to offend the Cridi, having a neutral meaning like "low ceiling." "Hey, Cari, that's wonderful!"
"Ah," she said, sardonically. "You're not a monster. You're just dull."
"Yes, but think of it. This would be just the same as if I went back to Old Earth and addressed them in Latin. But you see," he continued, dropping back into Cridi for the female, "that is what I learned from Tall Eyebrow, and his society has had none of the global changes of your people. You must help us to learn the new way of speaking. We are willing."
His visitor launched into a flurry of hand signals that Keff could tell had been abbreviated from the ones he knew, plus complicated overtones in the language of science. He was glad he'd learned the long form first, or he'd never have recognized some of the subtleties. He prayed that his translation program was picking up all of her spoken words. Later he'd commune with the Intentional Translator and see what it would make of all the murmurs, squeaks, chirps and trills.
"Ah. See," she signed in her clipped style. The trills translated to a formula for condensing large numbers into small. "I apologize, but it boring watch the long forms. That is why none speaks you."
"That tells me something," Carialle said quietly in his ear. "It means that the Cridi weren't as dependent upon the power controller system when TE's progenitors left for Ozran. Otherwise they'd have had more voice and less hands then, too, the easier to communicate over remote frequencies. I predict that in another thousand years their language will be all verbal. Hand-sign will just be a topic for some doctoral dissertation."
"I'd love to take you up on a bet, Lady Fair," Keff said, wryly. "You'll just have to remember to check in another millenium for me."
"Ah, Sir Knight, I shall." Carialle's voice was tender.
"Who speak to?" Big Eyes asked.
"To Carialle," he said. "She's my partner. She lives in the ship that brought us here."
"Curious," she said. "Have scanned. Life support absolute?"
"Yes. Very efficient, too."
"Interested in engineering. Degreed."
"Really? What branch?" Keff was starting to get the hang of her abbreviated conversation.
"Aerospace," said her hands, and she added a long vocal trill. IT translated it as a complex navigation formula.
"There's luck," Carialle said in Keff's ear.
"I'll say. You must be the person we've been waiting for. Tell me about Cridi's space program," Keff said eagerly. Big Eyes waved away his request nonchalantly.
"None talk right now," she said.
"Won't she talk about it, or isn't there anything going on?" Carialle asked.
"I don't know," Keff said. "Listen to IT babbling about two potential meanings. Could it be another one of those 'don't tell the alien' subjects?" He broached this suggestion gently to Big Eyes, who openly ignored the question. In fact, she seemed impatient.
"Not now. I worst tell. Father. Much else to see now I know." She pointed at Long Hand, who was giving a dissertation on the farming techniques used on Ozran. "Observe. You asked. I help. Cut middles," she signed to him, lifting an imaginary section out of something with her flattened hands held parallel. Big Eyes repeated key phrases with sign language, and interspersed them with verbal signs that tightened up the long strings of symbolism to the few necessary. Keff had thought the Ozranian version of Cridi sign language was terse and to the point. Big Eyes reduced it still further, to the essence of meaning.
"Very efficient," Keff said, trying to match her gestures. "Cari, I can reprogram IT to give me two choices of expression-dialects, if you will, depending on which planet I'm on, Cridi or Ozran. This is worth at least one paper for Scientific Galactican or Linguistics Today."
"If Xeno will let you declassify this data so soon. Remember we're the diplomatic advance scout. You'll probably have to teach the combination languages to the reps yet to come."