«Hold it, Keff,» Carialle said. «I don't trust our captor.» Keff aimed his optical implants at each plate in turn. «Uh-huh. Just checking.»
«Thank you, lady dear. I count on your assistance,» Keff said subvocally. Placing the first plate on its tray in Plenna's lap, he handed the second filled dish and fork to Brannel before he settled on me weight bench to enjoy his own meal.
Brannel was still staring at the divided plate when Keff turned back.
«What's the matter?» Keff asked. «It's good. A little heavy on the carbohydrates, perhaps, but that won't spoil the taste.»
Wordlessly, Brannel turned fearful eyes up to him.
«Ah, I see,» Keff said, intuiting the problem. «Should I try some first to show you it's all right? We're all eating the same thing. Would you like my dinner instead?»
«No, Mage Keff,» Brannel said after a moment, glancing wild-eyed at Chaumel, «I trust you.»
If he had any misgivings, one taste later the worker was hunched over his lunch, shoveling in mouthfuls inexpertly with his fork. He probably would have growled at Keff if he had tried to take it away. In no time the dish was empty.
«You packed that away in a hurry. Would you like another plate? It's no trouble.»
Eyes wide with hope, Brannel nodded. He looked guilty at being so greedy, but more fascinated that «another plate» was no trouble. As soon as the second helping was in his hands, he began wolfing it down.
«Huh! Crude,» Chaumel said, fastidiously disregarding the male. «Well, if you want to keep pets . . .»
Brannel didn't seem to hear the senior mage. He sucked a stray splash of gravy off his hairy fingers and scraped up the last of the potatoes.
«How's my supply of synth, Cari?» Keff asked, teasingly. The worker stopped in the middle of a mouthful. «I'm teasing you, Brannel,» he said. «We're carrying enough food to supply one man for two years—or one of you for six months. Don't worry. We're friends.»
Plenna ate more sedately. She smiled brightly once at Keff to show she enjoyed the food. Keff patted her hand.
«Bingo!» Carialle said, triumphantly. «Got you. Gentlemen and madam, our feature presentation.»
A wow, followed by the hiss of low-level audio, issued from her main cabin speakers. Carialle diverted her main screen to the video portion of the tape. On it, a distant, spinning globe appeared.
«The scan is almost vertical across the width of the tape,» Carialle explained. «Very densely packed. You could measure the speed in millimeters per second, so where glitches appear there's no backup scan. Because this was done on a magnetic medium, some is irrevocably lost, though not much. I have filled in where I could. This is not the full, official log. I think it was a personal record kept by a biologist or an engineer. You'll see what I mean in the content.»
The tape showed several views of Ozran from space, including technical scans of the continents and seas. Loud static accompanied the glitches between portions. Carialle found the technology was as primitive as stone knives and bearskins compared to her state-of-the-art equipment, but she was able to read between the lines of scan. She put up her findings on a side screen for the others to read.
«Looks like a damned fine prospect for a colony,» Keff said, critically assessing the data as if it were a new planet he was approaching. «Atmosphere very much like that of Old Earth.»
«Ureth,» Plennafrey breathed, her eyes bright with awe.
Keff smiled. «Uh-huh, I see why they made planetfall. Their telemetry was too basic. We wouldn't miss aboveground buildings and the signs of agriculture from space, no matter how slight, but they did. Hence, first contact was made.»
The Bigelow's complement had been four hundred and fifty-two, all human. Keff fancied he could see a family resemblance to the flamboyant Mage Omri in the darkskinned captain's face.
Chaumel lost his veneer of sophistication when the first Old One appeared on screen. He stared at it openmouthed. Keff, too, was amazed by the alien being, but he could appreciate that, to Chaumel, it was analogous to the gods of Mount Olympus visiting Athens.
«I have never seen anything like them. Have you, Carialle?»
«No, and neither has Xeno,» Cari said, running a hasty cross-match through her records. «I wonder where they came from? Somewhere else in R sector? Tracing an ion trail at this late date would be impossible.»
What could not have been indicated by the still image in the folders which Keff has seen was that each of the aliens five eyes could move independently. The flat bodies were faintly amusing, like the pack of card-men in Through the Looking-Glass. The tapes compressed many of the early meetings with the host species, as they showed the crew of the Bigelow around their homes, introduced them to their offspring, and demonstrated some of the wonders of their seemingly inexplicable manipulation of power.
The Old Ones had obviously once had a thriving civilization. By the time the crew of the Bigelow arrived, they were reduced to two small segments of population: the number who lived singly in the mountains and the communal bands who tilled the valley soil. Being few, they hadn't put much of a strain on the available resources, but it wasn't a viable breeding group, either.
Keff listened to the diarists narration and repeated what he could understand into IT for the benefit of the Ozrans.
«The narrator described the Old Ones and how happy they were to have the humans come to live with them. He's talking about ugly skills possessed—no, fabulous skills possessed by these ugly aliens, who promised to share what they knew. Whew, that is an old dialect of Standard.»
An Old One was persuaded to say a few words for the camera. It pressed its frightful face close to the video pickup and aimed three eyes at it. The other two wandered alarmingly.
«I can understand what it says,» Chaumel said, too fascinated to sound boastful. «How it speaks is what we now call the linga esoterka. 'How joy find strangejoy find strange two-eyes folk,' is what this one says.»
«He's pleased to meet you,» Keff said with a grin. He directed IT to incorporate Chaumel's translation into his running lexicon of the second dialect of Ozran. «It sounds as though a good deal of Old One talk was incorporated into a working language, a gullah, used by the humans and Old Ones to communicate.»
The mystical sign language Keff had observed was also in wide usage among the green indigenes, but the narrator of the tape hadn't yet observed its significance. Keff could feel Carialle's video monitors on him, as if to remind him of the times that IT ignored somatic signals. He grinned over his shoulder at her pillar. This time, IT was coming through like the cavalry.
«So that is where the expression 'to look in many directions at once' comes from,» Chaumel said excitedly. «We cannot, but the Old Ones could.»
In his corner, Brannel was hanging on to every word. Keff realized that his three guests comprehended far more of the alien languages than he could. The two mages chimed in cheerfully when the Old Ones spoke, giving the meaning of gestures and words in the common Ozran tongue, which Keff knew now was nothing more than a dialect of Human Standard blended with the Old Ones' spoken language. Somewhat ruefully, he observed that, with Carialle's enhanced cognitive capacity, he, the xenolinguist, was the one who would retain the least of what was going by on the screen. Carialle signaled for Keff's attention when a handful of schematics flashed by.
«Your engineer identifies those microwave beams that have been puzzling me,» she said. 'They're the answerback to the command function from the items of power telling the Core of Ozran how much power to send. Each operates on a slightly different frequency, like personal communicators. The Core also feeds the devices themselves. Hmm, slight risk of radioactivity there.» One of Carialles auxiliary screens lit with an exploded view of one of the schematics. «But I haven't seen any signs of cancers. In spite of their faults, Ozrans are a healthy bunch, so it must be low enough to be harmless.»