The scout ship threaded its way through an increasingly cluttered maze of junk and debris as they neared the rotating dumbbell shape of Station SSS-900. After viewing Keff's cause for alarm, Carialle put her repulsors on full to avoid the very real possibility of intersecting with one of the floating chunks of metal debris that shared a Trojan point with the station. Skiffs and tugs moved amidst the shattered parts of ships and satellites, scavenging. A pair of battered tugs with scoops on the front, looking ridiculously like gigantic vacuum cleaners, described regular rows as they seived up microfine spacedust that could hole hulls and vanes of passing ships without ever being detected by the crews inside. The cleanup tugs sent hails as Carialle passed them in a smooth arc, synchronizing herself to the spin of the space station. The north docking ring was being repaired, so with a flick of her controls, Carialle increased thrust and caught up with the south end. Lights began to chase around the lip of one of the docking bays on the ring, and she made for it.
». . . so that was the last we saw of the pirate Belazir and his bully boys,» Simeon finished, sounding weary. «For good, I hope. My shell has been put in a more damage resistant casing and resealed in its pillar. We've spent the last six months healing and picking up the pieces. Still waiting for replacement parts. The insurance company is being sticky and querying every fardling item on the list, but no ones surprised about that. Fleet ships are remaining in the area. We've put in for a permanent patrol, maybe a small garrison.»
«You have had a hell of a time,» Carialle said, sympathetically.
«Now let's hear the good news,» Simeon said, with a sudden surge of energy in his voice. «Where've you been all this time?»
Carialle simulated a trumpet playing a fanfare.
«We're pleased to announce that star GZA-906-M has two planets with oxygen-breathing life,» Keff said.
«Congratulations, you two!» Simeon said, sending an audio burst that sounded like thousands of people cheering. He paused, very briefly. «I'm sending a simultaneous message to Xeno and Explorations.
They're standing by for a full report with samples and graphs, but me first! I want to hear it all.»
Carialle accessed her library files and tight-beamed the star chart and xeno file to Simeon's personal receiving frequency. «This is a precis of what we'll give to Xeno and the benchmarkers,» she said. «We'll spare you the boring stuff.»
«If there's any bad news,» Keff began, «it's that there's no sentient life on planet four, and planet three's is too far down the tech scale to join Central Worlds as a trading partner. But they were glad to see us.»
«He thinks,» Carialle interrupted, with a snort. «I really never knew what the Beasts Blatisant thought.»
Keff shot an exasperated glance at her pillar, which she ignored. She clicked through the directory on the file and brought up the profile on the natives of Iricon III.
«Why do you call them the Beasts Blatisant?» Simeon asked, scanning the video of the skinny, hairy hexapedal beings, whose faces resembled those of intelligent grasshoppers.
«Listen to the audio,» Carialle said, laughing. «They use a complex form of communication which we have a sociological aversion to understanding. Keff thought I was blowing smoke, so to speak.»
«That's not true, Can,» Keff protested. «My initial conclusion,» he stressed to Simeon, «was that they had no need for a complex spoken language. They live right in the swamps,» Keff said, narrating the video that played off the datahedron. «As you can see, they travel either on all sixes or upright on four with two manipulative limbs. There are numerous predators that eat Beasts, among other things, and the simple spoken language is sufficient to relay information about them. Maintaining life is simple. You can see that fruit and edible vegetables grow in abundance right there in the swamp. The overlay shows which plants are dangerous.»
«Not too many,» Simeon said, noting the international symbols for poisonous and toxic compounds: a skull and crossbones and a small round face with its tongue out.
«Of course the first berry tried by my knight errant, and I especially stress the errant,» Carialle said, «was those raspberry red ones on the left, marked with Mr. Yucky Face.»
«Well, the natives were eating them, and their biology isn't that unlike Terran reptiles.» Keff grimaced as he admitted, «but the berries gave me fierce stomach cramps. I was rolling all over the place clutching my belly. The Beasts thought it was funny.» The video duly showed the hexapods, hooting, standing over a prone and writhing Keff.
«It was, a little,» Carialle added, «once I got over being worried that he hadn't eaten something lethal. I told him to wait for the full analysis—»
«That would have taken hours,» Keff interjected. «Our social interaction was happening in realtime.»
«Well, you certainly made an impression.»
«Did you understand the Beasts Blatisant? How'd the IT program go?» asked Simeon, changing the subject.
IT stood for Intentional Translator, the universal simultaneous language translation program that Keff had started before he graduated from school. IT was in a constant state of being perfected, adding referents and standards from each new alien language recorded by Central Worlds exploration teams. The brawn had more faith in his invention than his brain partner, who never relied on IT more than necessary.
Carialle teased Keff mightily over the mistakes the IT made, but all the chaffing was affectionately meant.
Brain and brawn had been together fourteen years out of a twenty-five-year mission, and were close and caring friends. For all the badinage she tossed his way, Carialle never let anyone else take the mickey out of her partner within her hearing.
Now she sniffed. «Still flawed, since IT uses only the symbology of alien life-forms already discovered. Even with the addition of the Blaize Modification for sign language, I think that it still fails to anticipate. I mean, who the hell knows what referents and standards new alien races will use?»
«Sustained use of a symbol in context suggests that it has meaning,» Keff argued. «That's the basis of the program.»
«How do you tell the difference between a repeated movement with meaning and one without?» Carialle asked, reviving the old argument. «Supposing a jellyfish's wiggle is sometimes for propulsion and sometimes for dissemination of information? Listen, Simeon, you be the judge.»
«All right,» the station manager said, amused.
«What if members of a new race have mouths and talk, but impart any information of real importance in some other way? Say, with a couple of sharp poots out the sphincter?»
«It was the berries,» Keff said. «Their diet caused the repeating, er, repeats.»
«Maybe that . . . habit . . . had some relevance in the beginning of their civilization,» Carialle said with acerbity. «However, Simeon, once Keff got the translator working on their verbal language, we found that at first they just parroted back to him anything he said, like a primitive AI pattern, gradually forming sentences, using words of their own and anything they heard him say. It seemed useful at first. We thought they'd learn Standard at light-speed, long before Keff could pick up on the intricacies of their language, but that wasn't what happened.»
«They parroted the language right, but they didn't really understand what I was saying,» Keff said, alternating his narrative automatically with Carialle's. «No true comprehension.»
«In the meantime, the flatulence was bothering him, not only because it seemed to be ubiquitous, but because it seemed to be controllable.»
«I didn't know if it was supposed to annoy me, or if it meant something. Then we started studying them more closely.»
The video cut from one scene to another of the skinny, hairy aliens diving for ichthyoids and eels, which they captured with their middle pair of limbs. More footage showed them eating voraciously; teaching their young to hunt; questing for smaller food animals and hiding from larger and more dangerous beasties. Not much of the land was dry, and what vegetation grew there was sought after by all the hungry species.
Early tapes showed that, at first, the Beasts seemed to be afraid of Keff, behaving as if they thought he was going to attack them. Over the course of a few days, as he seemed to be neither aggressive nor helpless, they investigated him further. When they dined, he ate a meal from his own supplies beside them.
