was a geologist. He'd been out prospecting in the desert when he was surprised by the sight of vehicles on that little-used ingress spur. He saw we were in trouble and came immediately. The Ahgirr were like that?warm, friendly, outgoing… and very human. Their species was the closest to human that anyone, to my knowledge, had ever encountered on the Skyway. They were bipedal, mammalian, ten-digited, two-sexed, and breathed oxygen (Hokar's suit was merely a protection against bright sunlight, which his species couldn't tolerate). They had two eyes, one nose, one mouth, sparse body hair and lots of hair on the head?the whole bit. There were differences, though. You wouldn't mistake them for humans. They had joints in the wrong place. Their skins were translucent, and their odd circulatory systems gave them a distinct pinkish-purple cast. The eyes were huge and pink and structurally dissimilar to the human variety. Their long straight hair was the color and texture of corn silk. (Non Ahgirr?which meant, of course, the rest of the species?wore their hair in various styles. Coiffure was very important in distinguishing ethnic and nationality groups, of which there were many.) But after a while, it was hard not to think of the Ahgirr and their race as just an unusual variety of human beings.
The first task was to get Sam unstuck. The Ahgirr didn't have very much in the way of heavy equipment, but they put in a call (to a nearby faln complex, as we learned later), and an odd-looking towing vehicle came out by Skyway and did the job. We detached the trailer, and the towtruck hauled Sam over the desert to the mouth of the Ahgirr cave-community. Ariadne had to be left in the trailer, but Carl's buggy made the trip an its own power, which was a surprise to nobody. I was waiting for the thing to fly.
All interspecies communication up to this paint had been via the usual half-understood gestures and signing, but fortunately the Ahgirr were computer whizzes, and once they solved the problem of system compatibility, they waded right into Sam's language files?the dictionaries, word-processing programs, compilers, and such. In no time the Ahgirr were speaking to us in English that was completely understandable if a little fractured.
They gave us an apartment to stay in while the language barrier was being broken down. As it turned out, we stayed five weeks, and at no time did we feel as though we were wearing out our welcome. The Ahgirr were eager to make friends with beings similar to themselves. Word spread over the planet; we were something of a sensation.
The second task was to see about getting a new roller. That was going to be a problem. My rig was a bit unusual. It had been built to Terran specifications and design, but an alien outfit had manufactured it. I always had a hard time finding parts far it. Here, light-years away from Terran Maze, it might just be impossible. We were told that a few planets away there was a stretch of Skyway along which lay a number of used vehicle dealerships and salvage yards. We might try there. Carl and Roland volunteered to go and Hokar offered to act as guide. They were gone two days. Meanwhile, the rest of us set about the job of repairing the trailer. Fixing the buckled door wasn't so hard, but all the rear cameras and sensors had pretty much been totaled, which meant buying alien gear to replace them. And that meant a lot of fudging and jury-rigging. But we had to do it if we didn't want to be blind out our back side. We had to make a trip to a faln to buy parts.
Before we got around to that, Hokar, Roland, and Carl returned with an almost-new pair of rollers. A stroke of long-overdue luck.
'We scavanged through junkyard after junkyard,' Roland said over dinner in our suite of rooms within the Ahgirr cave-city. 'Nothing even remotely resembled the vehicles you usually see in Terran Maze or any of the contingent mazes. We were pretty discouraged, but Hokar said he was sure he remembered seeing vehicles similar to your rig, though not driven by humans. And sure enough-'
'We found a junked rig, just the cab, but very similar to yours,' Carl interrupted. 'Even had the same markings, same decals. '
'The owner of the wreck said the people who'd left it there hadn't looked anything like us, meaning they weren't human, of course,' Roland said.
'The front rollers were in good shape,' Carl went an, 'so we bought 'em. Got a pretty goad deal, too, with Hokar advising us on protocol.'
'Yes, the Nogon have strange rituals when it comes to bargaining,' Roland elaborated. 'You have to approach the seller on the pretext of wanting to buy everything he has to sell, at any price he chooses to set, and the seller in turn has to pretend that you couldn't possibly want any of the worthless junk he's got, no matter how low he's slashed the price.'
'Traveling salesmen must have it easy here,' I commented, reaching for a second helping of the delicious vegetable stew Darla had concocted out of the fresh produce Sean and Liam had brought along.
'As I said, it's all posturing. Pretty soon everyone's self-interest emerges crisp and clear, and then it's no holds barred.'
'Sounds healthy,' I said.
'Time consuming,' Carl said. 'Took an hour to close the deal'
I turned to Ragna, who was sipping thin gruel through a straw from a decorative ceramic bowl. 'I take it haggling is a high art with your people.'
Ragna stopped slurping, blinked his enormous pink eyes, then touched his blue headband, a biointerface gadget that was the closest thing to a universal translator I'd ever seen. It was merely a very-large-scale integration computer, but the software was powerful. However, my colloquialisms and abbreviated grammar gave it trouble now and then. Also, figurative speech gave the translation program headaches. But it was integrating our responses nicely.
'I am thinking that the haggling with my people is indeed, true, yes, a high or fine art, in the mode of hyperbole and colloquial exaggeration. In the literal or denotative mode, no, forget it, Charlie.'
I suppressed a smile. 'Ragna, your facility with the language improves daily. I must compliment you on it.'
'Of course I am undubitably thanking you.'
'I should think,' John said, 'you'll be able to doff that headband soon enough.'
'Oh, yes, this is quite a possibility I am thinking. Even now, you may be seeing… ' Gingerly, Ragna removed the flexible headband with both hands and laid it on the table. In a barely intelligible liquid slur, he said, 'Unassisting brain capability speaking quite good, is it not? Is aiding the biological analogue to being able to function, learning is this not so to be speaking?'
'Eh?' John said.
'Interrogatory remark, what?' Ragna's thin white eyebrows lowered in puzzlement.
We persuaded Ragna to put the headband back on.
The remainder of the meal was devoted to chitchat. When we were all sitting back drinking beer and burping, Suzie looked gravely at me.
'What is it, Susan?' I said.
'Where do we go from here?'
'Good question.' I fumed to Sean and Liam. 'What've you guys come up with in the map department?'
'Damn little,' Liam said, then nodded deferentially toward Ragna. 'Of course Ragna and Hokar and the others have been very helpful. It's simply that none of the mazes we've had a look at seem familiar.' He ran a hand through his mass of tousled blond hair, then sighed and pursed his lips. 'We're bloody well lost all right.'
I nodded. 'Darla, can Winnie help us?'
Winnie, seated by Darla, looked sad as she munched the remains of her meal of shoots and leaves.
'Afraid not,' Darla said. 'I think it's clear now that Winnie's knowledge of the Skyway isn't all-encompassing. And she's not going to lead us back to the proper path by sheer psychic power.'
'Well, I never expected her to,' I said. 'Roland, have we pinpointed where we are in the galaxy?'
'It was easy enough. The Ahgirr are about as advanced as we are in astronomy. Had a little trouble interpreting their maps, though…' Roland shifted his eyes toward Ragna, then looked up casually at the smooth rock ceiling of the cave.
I knew what he was implying. Every race does something badly; with the Ahgirr, it was cartography in particular, and graphics in general. I had seen their graphics on computer screens?plots and charts and such?and couldn't make head nor tail of them. You would think some symbology to be universal and cross-cultural. Wrong. Draw an arrow on a map for an alien, indicating which way he should go, and he'll say, Yes, that's very interesting. Whatever does it mean? The Ahgirr didn't know from arrows either. Their symbol for direction of motion, vectors, stuff like that, was a little circle at the beginning of the line. Interesting, but stupid. Of course, I'm human, therefore biased. It all made perfect sense to the Ahgirr, but we were having a hell of a time reading their roadmaps, both
