Like wheelbarrow?
“That’s right.” He nodded, wondering if Sonny recognized that as an affirmative sign. “Like big wheelbarrow.”
One thing puzzled Sonny, though. Wheelbarrow wheels were small—his hands indicated the size—and single. These were big, and double.
“Let me show you this, Sonny.”
He squatted, took a pad and pencil from his pocket, and drew two pairs of wheels, and then put a wagon on them, and drew a quadruped hitched to it, and a Svant with a stick walking beside it. Sonny looked at the picture—Svants seemed to have pictoral sense, for which make us thankful!—and then caught his mother’s sleeve and showed it to her. Mom didn’t get it. Sonny took the pencil and drew another animal, with a pole travois. He made gestures. A travois dragged; it went slow. A wagon had wheels that went around; it went fast.
So Lillian and Anna thought he was the village half-wit. Village genius, more likely; the other peasants didn’t understand him, and resented his superiority. They went over for a closer look at the wheels, and pushed them. Sonny was almost beside himself. Mom was puzzled, but she thought they were pretty wonderful.
Then they looked at blacksmith tools. Tongs; Sonny had never seen anything like them. Howell wondered what the Svants used to handle hot metal; probably big tweezers made by tying two green sticks together. There was an old Arabian legend that Allah had made the first tongs and given them to the first smith, because nobody could make tongs without having a pair already.
Sonny didn’t understand the fan-blower until it was taken apart. Then he made a great discovery. The wheels, and the fan, and the pivoted tongs, all embodied the same principle, one his people had evidently never discovered. A whole new world seemed to open before him; from then on, he was constantly finding things pierced and rotating on pivots.
By this time, Mom was fidgeting again. She ought to be doing something to justify her presence in the camp. He was wondering what sort of work he could invent for her when Karl Dorver called to him from the door of the headquarters hut.
“Mark, can you spare Mom for a while?” he asked. “We want her to look at pictures and show us which of the animals are meat-cattle, and which of the crops are ripe.”
“Think you can get anything out of her?”
“Sign-talk, yes. We may get a few words from her, too.”
At first, Mom was unwilling to leave Sonny. She finally decided that it would be safe, and trotted over to Dorver, entering the hut.
Dave Questell’s construction crew began at once on the water tank, using a power shovel to dig the foundation. They had to haul water in a tank from the river a quarter-mile away to mix the concrete. Sonny watched that interestedly. So did a number of the villagers, who gathered safely out of bowshot. They noticed Sonny among the Terrans and pointed at him. Sonny noticed that. He unobtrusively picked up a double-bitted ax and kept it to hand.
He and Mom had lunch with the contact team. As they showed no ill effects from breakfast, Fayon decided that it was safe to let them have anything the Terrans ate or drank. They liked wine; they knew what it was, all right, but this seemed to have a delightfully different flavor. They each tried a cigarette, choked over the first few puffs, and decided that they didn’t like smoking.
“Mom gave us a lot of information, as far as she could, on the crops and animals. The big things, the size of rhinoceroses, are draft animals and nothing else; they’re not eaten,” Dorver said. “I don’t know whether the meat isn’t good, or is taboo, or they are too valuable to eat. They eat all the other three species, and milk two of them. I have an idea they grind their grain in big stone mortars as needed.”
That was right; he’d seen things like that.
“Willi, when you’re over in the mountains, see if you can find something we can make millstones out of. We can shape them with sono-cutters; after they get the idea, they can do it themselves by hand. One of those big animals could be used to turn the mill. Did you get any words from her?”
Paul Meillard shook his head gloomily. “Nothing we can be sure of. It was the same thing as in the village, yesterday. She’d say something, I’d repeat it, and she’d tell us it was wrong and say the same thing over again. Lillian took recordings; she got the same results as last night. Ask her about it later.”
“She has the same effect on Mom as on the others?”
“Yes. Mom was very polite and tried not to show it, but—”
Lillian took him aside, out of earshot of the two Svants, after lunch. She was almost distracted.
“Mark, I don’t know what I’m going to do. She’s like the others. Every time I open my mouth in front of her, she’s simply horrified. It’s as though my voice does something loathsome to her. And I’m the one who’s supposed to learn to talk to them.”
“Well, those who can do, and those who can’t teach,” he told her. “You can study recordings, and tell us what the words are and teach us how to recognize and pronounce them. You’re the only linguist we have.”
That seemed to comfort her a little. He hoped it would work out that way. If they could communicate with these people and did leave a party here to prepare for the first colonization, he’d stay on, to teach the natives Terran technologies and study theirs. He’d been expecting that Lillian would stay, too. She was the linguist; she’d have to stay. But now, if it turned out that she would be no help but a liability, she’d go back with the Hubert Penrose. Paul wouldn’t keep a linguist who offended the natives’ every sensibility with
