“Lonely,” she whispered. “God, I’m so lonely! I’m all alone. Please. Help me. Come get me. Please!”
Late Dinadh daylight filtered chill through multiple windows, making puddles of grayed gold upon the floor. Three sat stunned, facing one another, only just returned from Perdur Alas, returned from fear, pain, hunger, cold. From weary loneliness.
“Well,” said the Procurator in an exhausted whisper. “At least we now know what they look like.”
They did not know whether they had been living Snark’s life for a day or two or three. Only when she reached the safety of her cave and curled into sleep had they turned off the retriever and let the Dinadh evening surround them once more. The Procurator’s words were the first intelligible ones any of them had made, though their experience had been punctuated by cries and grunts and indrawn breaths.
“Can’t we do something for her?” the ex-king asked, his voice breaking. “Send a ship or something.”
Poracious Luv arched her brows disbelievingly. “You? The King of Kamir, the practitioner of ultimate ennui? Touched by the plight of another human being?”
“She’s alone,” he blurted, flushing. “I’ve … I’ve been alone. It would touch anyone!”
The Procurator rubbed his forehead wearily. It ached from the battering he, Snark, had received. It had ached before, and now it was worse. He had, after all, sent her there. He was responsible for her.
He said, “Touched or not, right now there’s no ship to send. Even if there were a ship, we couldn’t risk it for one survivor.”
“Particularly inasmuch as we now have records of everything she’s picked up,” said Poracious Luv in a dry, cynical voice. “So there’d be no advantage to rescuing her.”
“Advantage,” Jiacare Lostre snarled. “Advantage!”
“Would you trade a hundred lives for one?” the Procurator said, looking him in the eye. “Surely you don’t think those …creatures would let us go to Perdur Alas and simply remove her? We’d have to send a cruiser at least. Would you trade a shipload of men on a gesture?”
“How do we know they wouldn’t?”
Poracious sighed. “We know what happened to ships in the Hermes Sector a hundred years ago. Any ship approaching a world that had been stripped was taken. They went, just as the people went. Gone. Whisk. Away. Nobody knew where. That’s what has happened to the evacuation ships this time, too.”
“I didn’t realize,” mumbled the ex-king. “Sorry. This is all … very new to me. I’ve tried not to care about anything for a very long time, but this …”
“Nothing like a heady dose of danger to wake one up,” Poracious agreed. “Well, Procurator? What do we do next?”
“With what we’ve seen happening currently, there must be dozens of episodes in the record that will warrant perusal by experts.”
“Experts.” She laughed. “Ha!”
“Well, by people who might have specialized insights, at least. Some other Fastigats than myself should see this. Also some linguists who specialize in sight languages.”
“Sight language?” Jiacare Lostre cocked his head curiously.
“There are, or were historically, several sight languages for people who couldn’t hear. Now, of course, such languages aren’t necessary, but we still have records of them. The girl mutters to herself a lot, so we can pick up clues as to what she’s thinking. She said ‘telling stories’; she said ‘ritual’; both in connection with that pictorial thing they do. I’d be interested in knowing what others think.”
“What do you think?” demanded the ex-king.
The Procurator considered. “The episode with the running woman had the feel of a story, didn’t it?”
“Was the woman actually her mother?” Poracious asked.
“Each time the woman appeared, she, Snark, subvocal-ized the word,” said the Procurator. “She said the word mother, and her throat and mouth sensed the shaping of the word. Whether she actually believes so, we don’t know. Her thoughts can’t be recorded. Only what she senses.”
Poracious mused. “If the woman was her mother, then the girl was a child there, on Perdur Alas. A survivor from the former Ularian crisis?”
The Procurator shook his head. “It seems impossible. She’d have to have been third or fourth generation.”
“We’ve found great-grandchildren of colonists before.”
“True.” He stared at his hands, surprised to find them trembling. “I’ve just thought, Lutha Tallstaff is a linguist. One of the best, according to my sources. I don’t know if she knows anything about sight languages, but it’s worth bringing her from wherever she was sent. What was the name of the place?”
“Cochim-Mahn,” said Poracious.
“We should be fetching her anyhow. She’s at danger if those two assassins are on the loose. And meantime, we should be bringing in some other experts to experience what this girl is going through.” The Procurator stared blindly at his companions. “Think of it. The first human contact with a life-form that speaks, and it speaks a nonverbal language.”
The ex-king remarked, “My Minister of Agriculture would say we don’t know that it’s speaking. It could be merely replaying things it has seen. My Minister of Agriculture would deny it thinks. He says the universe was made for man.”
Poracious stared at the wall, remembering. She didn’t believe it was a mere replay. There had been too much relish in the retelling. Reshowing. She went to the door and beckoned to the tassel-bearded rememberer waiting outside. He rose, bowing attentively as she said:
“Will you please send word to Cochim-Mahn that we need to get Lutha Tallstaff here, as quickly as possible.”
“And Trompe,” called the Procurator. “Bring him as well!”
The rememberer stared at the ceiling, shifted his feet, cleared his throat.
“Well?” demanded Poracious, suspiciously. “What?”
“Inasmuch as we had determined the assassins were no longer where they belonged, I took the liberty of communicating with Cochim-Mahn. While you were…occupied.”
“And? Come on, man. Spit it out. All this havering merely makes us itch.”
“They’re gone,” he blurted. “She, the boy, her companion. As well as Leelson Famber. Also a shadow woman. An eaten one.” He curled his lips around the word, whether in disapproval or disgust, she couldn’t
