“Did I ‘see’ LR out there?” I repeated the question and she nodded. All I could do was shake my head. “No, but out there is so big, so far, and we are so small.” I did my best to translate the thoughts, but only got a frown from Yinet.
Lizzy did better than I did, but she was accustomed to communicating larger ideas down to the simplest explanations.
I sat back as Lizzy cleared a space on the terrace, then from a nearby bush she plucked a hand full of leaves and a couple small twigs. She pulled one large leaf from her pile and put it on the ground between us. “Home… Hippotigris…”
“Don’t use that name, it was a bad joke.”
“Okaay… LR world. LR home.” She slapped the leaf, then held up one small leaf. “Star.”
“Tar.” Yinet knew that word, pointing to the sky and giving the sign for night.
With a flourish, Lizzy scattered the tiny leaves across the stone, around the larger leaf. “Many stars.” She took one twig and pretended to fly a space ship up and away from the planet, just as the picture had shown. “LR go to the stars.”
From another direction she flew in the other twig. “Here come the crazy humans.” She made a few stops at stars along the way, shaking her head and lifting off again, until she came to the large leaf. “And here we are. Human and LR.”
She went back to the LR stick, stopping at one star, then another, and another, but going further away, and not in the direction we came from. She went through them going away, our coming here and Yinet got it, nodding. “Many tar, go far.”
Lizzy went over to sit beside Yinet. “Too many stars.”
Yinet didn’t say anything for a minute or two. Finally she reached down to take the ‘human’ twig. “Human.” She broke the stick into two pieces and pointed one at me. “Ara.” She pointed out to the forest, the way we’d come the day before. “Ara.” She put the stick back on the leaf, pointing towards our camp.
She held out the other stick. “Human.” She said in in a lower voice and stared at me for another second, then pointed off towards distant mountains. She growled and put the other stick on the leaf, harder. “Many human.”
“What? No. No more humans!” I shook my head and started to reach for the stick, but Yinet’s long fingers wrapped around my wrist, stopping me. “Yinet. No more humans.” I pointed back in the direction of our camp. “Only in camp and here.”
“No. Many human.” She pointed again in the direction she had before. With her hand curled, she pretended to dig, growling. “Many human.”
“That’s not possible!” I looked out in the direction she pointed. She had no reason to lie, so what could she be talking about. “I don’t understand.”
I reached for the second stick again, and this time she let me pick it up. “Many human, over there, digging.” I picked up a nearby rock and held it out, then put it in my pocket. “Taking rock?”
Her head nodded.
“LR over there? LR village over there?” I pointed to her, to the face of their dwellings, then pointed in the same direction as she had.
“No LR.” She pointed further south. “LR hom.” Then to another mountain. “LR hom.” Whatever was happening was a distance between two more of these peoples’ villages, but close enough they knew about it.
She pointed down over the face of the cliff, down to the terrace where we’d joined her. “LR…” She growled something in her language. She repeated herself, but when I still didn’t understand the word, she lunged her head forward, baring her teeth, then quickly pulled back, returning to her usual calm expression.
It was terrifying. “Okay… Mad, ang… the LR are angry.”
My stomach flipped over at the thought. “Those other females. Tribal leaders. Came here to be angry, at us.” Lizzy translated with drawings. Yinet nodded. “Damn!” I tapped at my lapel. “Schaeffer, where are you?”
What if they brought us here for a reason? That was stupid. Of course they did. But they’d waited for me. Why?
“Schaeffer here, what’s wrong?”
“Where the hell are you, right now?”
“Getting a tour of the village. It wraps around the western ridge. There’s got to be thousands of LR here.” He sounded fascinated. “What’s got you all freaked out?”
“You tell me. Other than our camp, how many other humans are here, and why didn’t I know anything about it.”
“Because there aren’t. We’re the only ones here.” Now annoyed was the prevailing tone in his voice. “We got people in orbit.”
“No, we also got people at…” I used my scanner to get a reading on the distant mountains, even if I couldn’t pinpoint exactly where. “…150 degrees to the south. The LR aren’t happy about this, not one bit. Though it seems they still trust me to answer them. So, tell me again, why do we have another camp and why are they mining without permission.”
“Listen Kazan. I already told you. We don’t have anyone else here.” He paused. “We’re heading back your way. We’ll contact the ship and get them to do a scan. If you don’t like that answer, we’ll take the shuttle over to find out for ourselves. Deal?”
“Deal.” I turned down the pissed off dial. He wouldn’t compromise if he was pulling something, and I’d worked with him long enough to know when he was telling me the truth. But so was Yinet.
When I turned around, Lizzy had been busy, doing her interpreting of my argument and the plan. It seemed to placate Yinet. It also brought on a wave of jealousy as Yinet gave her a nuzzle. I’d spent countless months of my life here, hiding what I
