“Tread carefully, gentlemen. If what you tell me is true, if what I have told you is believable, it is likely Naumi will come to us, or someone will come on his behalf, if and when he, or they, consider the war college is a good idea. If Naumi chooses not to stand out, then I would suggest you let him…stand in, just where he is, where the Third Order recommended he be.”
I told Ferni about it, back at the dorm. He asked what the Third Order was.
“I never heard of it,” I said. “Honest, I never. But I was called for life-duty, so maybe…maybe it’s just something they want me for.”
“That makes you out to be pretty important,” Ferni said with a lofty look. I swear, sometimes the way he drew himself up that way you’d swear he thought he was king of the world.
I said, “Not necessarily, Ferni! A squirt of axle grease can be important if that’s what you need. That’s probably all I’m supposed to be. Something to help turn a wheel.”
We left it at that. I think Ferni forgot all about it. I put it away among my mental memorabilia and tried not to think about it, though sometimes I did, wondering what it all meant.
I Am Margaret/on Earth
Except for the rumors and whispers that followed the disappearance of our three classmates, college life was undisturbed for a time. I was fully focused on the final section of my “lateral studies,” those intended to broaden understanding of linguistic development. Everything known about the Pthas and their linguistic survivors had been reviewed; the aeon-long changes in the Quaatar language likewise; along with the accepted works on dialect development among Mercan and Omniont planets. The last thing on the list was to consider a speaking race that had lost its use of language, as recorded by a Gentheran exploration ship. My friend Sybil, Bryan’s sister, had made a vomit face when mentioning it, so I’d been putting it off.
Still, it was a required thing, so I settled my earpieces, keyed my didactibot, and faced a barren planet dotted with tall, irregular lumps. With a hiccup and purr, the lecture began in the same sweet, high voice I had heard at the meeting, Sister Lorpa’s voice. Or one of her kin.
“While on a routine journey of exploration, the Gentheran ship Pendaris Kuo happened upon an uncharted system with one live planet. Since the planet was occupied by a previously unknown race, a monitoring shuttle was implanted into a rocky area to provide a longitudinal recording of the inhabitants.
“The earthen towers you see are the homes of the only land animal living on this world. These clay mounds are analogous to the termite mounds found on Earth during the multispecies ages. Since there is no evidence of a precursor race on the planet, Gentheran historians researched the archives to determine how these creatures may have arrived there. An ancient Quaatar logbook entry may have described the ancestors of this population stowing away on a Quaatar ship, then fleeing the ship on this planet, ‘Into the thick vegetation that covered the world.’”
The point of view receded. “Assuming that one tower was built initially, and extrapolating from the growth rate observed by the buried ship, we see here how the towers spread, resulting in the complete deforestation of the planet. There is evidence of several natural disasters that virtually eliminated these creatures on this world, but each time forest growth returned, they also returned to destroy it.
“Gentheran researchers picked a tower at random and fed audio-optical leads and chemical sensors into it, using the ordinary microburrowers used by xenoarchaeologists. These fibers provide sufficient light to permit a pictorial record of life inside. Only the various types are distinguishable from one another. Members of each caste or type are identical.
“The first recording begins at dawn. The creatures you see before you are curled against a tunnel wall, sleeping. To give human students some sense of scale, each creature could easily be held in your cupped hands.”
I could see why Sybil had been disgusted by the creatures. So was I. They were naked and gray. They had large ears that were folded against the head, each head pillowed on one skinny arm. The legs were short and almost as thin as the arms. They had no noticeable sexual organs. The faces had a common bilateral pattern, one shared by many races: sight and scent organs grouped at the upper end above the ingestion aperture. These mouths were toothless, the creatures had no chins and no appreciable necks.
A second type of individual appeared, slightly larger, with a larger mouth. As it passed along the line, it uttered a sound, wakwak wakwak, as it kicked the feet of each sleeper. Those kicked stood up, each in sequence, as room was made by the previous riser. Uttering this continuous wakwak wakwak, the kicker went up the tunnel, while behind it the wakened creatures made a half turn to face the direction it had gone, moving their two legs in a steady rhythm while making a continuous sound: railev railev railev. The line began to move, slowly at first, then more quickly as space opened up between the awakened ones.
I yawned. Bryan and I had been together the night before, and I was sleepy. Covertly, with a guilty glance at the monitor, I keyed the lecture to fast-forward, stopping shortly before the end. “…the protolanguage these creatures may once have spoken has not been identified. The Gentheran expedition did not take genetic samples, since sampling of speaking races is forbidden by IGC rulings without the consent of the individuals. The Gentheran research team was unsure whether this population was or was not a speaking race, though their opinion was that language had once existed but had been lost, and the current sounds made by the creatures were mere flock-murmur, the sort of recognition noises made by
