"Feed it to me when you get something, please."
Keff sat down in the crash seat before the console and stared at the screen. He drummed his fingers on the console and tapped his toes in anticipation, feeling perfectly happy. This was a bonus, on top of the payoff for finding the civilizations on Ozran. To be able to observe an anthropological phenomenon heretofore unknown in human history: the first meeting of two different groups of the same race, divided for over a millenium. The linguistic diversity alone would provide him with the material for at least one blockbuster academic paper. Tall Eyebrow waddled over and hopped up to perch on the chair arm to watch with him.
"Anything yet?" Keff asked Carialle. "How about particle scans? How much activity is their spaceport seeing?"
"Patience, please. All I am seeing out there is a little debris, and some very old ion trails," Carialle said. The screen lit up with an overlay of green dust streaks that were scattered and stretched by the orbits of the planets in between. "I'd say no one's come through here in a long while."
"Always underfunded," Tall Eyebrow offered, with his hands turned slightly upward to show apology. "It is in the records. Resources small offered. Metal scarce. Volunteer work never enough, raw materials always short. Mission to Ozran one of three major projects to be funded in ten revolutions around the sun when my many-times ancestors had prepared for the journey to Ozran."
"Bureaucracy never changes anywhere," said Keff, sympathetically. Then he sat up straighter. "You don't mean you have memos dating from a thousand years back?"
"For every day," said the Frog Prince, with a satisfied gesture. "In all our troubles, that was never neglected. We have brought them with us for the perusal of the Cridi government."
Keff felt his jaw drop. The globe-frogs had loaded only a few containers into the cargo hold, and most had contained gifts. "In those little boxes you have a thousand years of records?"
"Communication system is kept frugally," Tall Eyebrow signed.
"I'm impressed with your systems," Carialle said.
"So am I," Keff said, with a whistle, promising himself a good rootle through the boxes when they were offloaded. "Talk about microstorage."
"Aha," Carialle announced. "It's sensed us. I'm receiving a hail from the orbiters."
She ran the data patterns through digital analysis, dividing the sum of on/not-on pulses by a range of prime numbers, formulae and logarithms, until she came up with a coherent 1028-unit wide digital signal. It wasn't a computer program, but a video transmission of an amphibioid wearing a glittering silver collar.
"Take a look at this," she said, and relayed it to the cabin screens. Keff was fascinated, but the three Ozranian globe-frogs were dumb with amazement.
"Not much obvious genetic difference, Cari," Keff said, staring at the image, looking at every detail. "Thank goodness for that."
The camera was centered on the Cridi's hands, rather than its face, which remained expressionless and still, staring at the video pickup with fixed, black eyes. The long hands snapped out signs in a quick sequence, then repeated it over and over again.
"I can read that. 'Identify yourself,'" Keff translated. " 'Do not proceed further.' "
"There's a spoken language, too," Carialle said. "Transmitted on either sideband of each copy of this signal on every frequency I tune into: wide band, narrow band, microwave, datasquirt, even a form of tight-beam. Very thorough. They want to make certain you don't miss it. Very musical, too. Listen." She put the sound over the cabin speakers. A pattern of peeps, creaks, chirps, and trills repeated over and over again. Keff squinted with concentration as he listened to the rhythmic squeaking.
"I bet it says exactly the same thing as the hand-jive." Keff's eyes gleamed. "Record it, please, Cari, and run it through the IT."
Keff's Intentional Translator program had been of assistance in learning the Cridi's sign language back on Ozran. He was constantly updating the system, which theoretically contained full grammar and vocabulary for every alien language that the Central Worlds had yet discovered. The program functioned with indifferent success most of the time. It rarely provided them with the key to an alien language when an explorer needed it. More often, someone found a key first, then used IT to build up a translation system from collected data. The IT was still full of bugs, Carialle thought cynically, but Keff never seemed to be bothered by them. Still, he had been improving its interpretation of the Cridi signs.
"Ah," Tall Eyebrow signed, his black eyes shining, "the language of science! We have all but forgone its use in the arid atmosphere of Ozran. The waters and the globes prevent sound from carrying, and we have had no amulets to broadcast it, so we let it drop except infrequently, in conclave."
"Interesting cultural redundancy," said Keff.
"Not at all. It makes sense for a technologically advanced race to develop some kind of oral language," Carialle said, thoughtfully. "Having to manipulate starship controls while signing home to mission control seemed to me like a difficult combination."
"But they had created remote power control," Keff protested.
Carialle's voice was sugared with sweet and insufferable reason. "What did they do before the amulets came along?"
"Sign is older," Long Hand explained, waving her hands for attention and interrupting the argument. "It was our first true trait of civilization. The small voice," here her hands went to her throat, and indicated diminuition with a finger and thumb, "does not carry as well as long sight. It came useful when science reached us, but not during our earliest years. Silence was essential to hunting together in the earliest days. We have good eyes and poorer ears. The wild food animals had good ears, but bad eyes. We must show silently to one another our intent. To us it meant survival."
"To which condition we were reduced on Ozran," put in Tall Eyebrow. "It has been so many generations since we did anything but survive. I am glad to see in the last year we have not forgotten how to think, how to invent with our hands. I shall not be ashamed to face my ancestors' other descendants." But the Frog Prince looked nervous all the same.
"But can you translate it?" Keff asked, almost bouncing with excitement. He gestured toward the screen where the silver-torqued amphibioid was still signing his message.
"If it has not changed since the mission to settle Ozran," Tall Eyebrow signed, "we may be able to." His hand waggled sideways to show uncertainty.
"This is a job for my all-purpose, handy dandy translating program." Keff flew to his console and opened the file. He sat listening avidly to the excerpt, keying in notes.
"But that trick never works," Carialle protested.
"Sure it does," Keff said with high good humor, purposefully ignoring her insult. "Especially, because this time I can cheat. I have a native speaker with me. TE, will you tell me what each of these sounds means?" He touched a control. "I'll slow it down, and you tell me where each phrase starts and stops, and then translate it for me."
"If I can," TE signed nervously. He slid his hand into his amulet to hover at the human's eye level.
They went through the recorded message together. Keff listened with his teeth clenched as the slowed-down chirrups grated through the speakers like chains being dragged up a gravel road. At the Frog Prince's signal, he tapped a computer key, designating the end of a word or phrase.
"It seems to be linear," he said to Carialle. "The IT is already beginning to crossmatch similarities between phrases on the tape. Multiple overlay of meaning beyond tense or gender would be more difficult to distinguish. Now, TE, what do they mean?"
Tall Eyebrow tried to translate each phrase into sign for them. He listened carefully, signing to Keff to replay each several times.