which he could carry. But Orion… the boy hadn’t even seen snow before they got here, let alone knew how to move through it.
And all the while, when he was putting plans together, there was that one thought coiled up at the back of his mind: how much simpler it would be to leave Orion behind. There might even come a day when he didn’t have a choice. It wasn’t like he’d come searching for enlightenment or fulfillment like George and most of the others. He was on the paths for a reason. And God only knew what was happening back in the Commonwealth right now.
Ozzie walked across the main chamber and into the passageway that led to his cluster of rooms. The tochee was there, just coming out of the cavern they used to sleep in. It was the alien Ozzie had mistaken for a young Raiel the day he’d arrived at the Ice Citadel. At first sight it was a reasonable error. The tochee had a similar blunt body, like a squashed egg about three and a half yards long, and coming up to the middle of Ozzie’s chest. Its hide was a kind of bristly fur, a dark caramel in color, which looked as if it was about two sizes too big, the whole body was covered in wrinkles and creases, like a bulldog’s face. Strange little wizened black fronds grew out of the folds, as if it were sprouting seaweed.
The eye, or what people believed was its seeing organ, was a curved pyramid a yard or so behind its mouth, made up from three oval sections of translucent black flesh, with the one at the front twice as long as the other pair, curving down so it could follow the body-profile.
But it was the way the alien moved that was most interesting. Two fat ridges of rubbery tissue ran along its underbelly, for all the world like sled skis, except these rippled like snakes to push it along. The surface of the ridges was mottled, gray and bruise-brown, with some cracks oozing rheumy body fluid. Sara had said the tochee was in bad shape when they found it out on the edge of the crystal tree forest. Although the ridges were a sophisticated biological method of locomotion, their nature meant it couldn’t wear protective cladding. Its ridges were badly frostbitten from moving over the icy ground, where they suffered constant contact with the sub-zero soil. That was over two years ago, and the flesh still hadn’t grown back properly.
A second pair of ridges protruded from its back. They were shorter, extending only a little farther than its eye, and they were more bulbous. Ozzie had seen them swell out to grip cups and plates, or help lift objects too heavy for human arms, like giant amoebas shaping themselves into chubby tendrils or jaws. As tool users went, it was a high evolutionary concept.
In fact, it was only its manipulator flesh, along with a few high-technology artifacts it was carrying on a utility belt, that convinced the other Ice Citadel residents that it was sentient at all. In the whole two years it had been here, nobody had managed to communicate with it at all. It didn’t make any sound with its mouth, let alone speak. As far as they could tell, it was deaf. They’d tried chalking pictures on a slab, but it didn’t seem to understand them. All they had left were simple arm gestures: come, stay, go, lift, put down. It cooperated most of the time, as if it were a well-trained sheepdog.
They didn’t even know its true name, the Korrok-hi had named it the tochee, which in their language of hoots and whistles meant big fat worm.
“So what were you looking for in there?” Ozzie mused out loud as he stood in front of it.
The tochee’s snout waved slightly from side to side, putting Ozzie in mind of some animal awaiting castigation. To his eye it had the attitude of a whipped dog, but then, he supposed, if all he did every day was carry buckets of water from the fountain to the kitchen, on frostbitten toes, unable to talk to anyone, or know what was going on outside, he’d be seriously depressed, too.
“Okay, let’s go see.” He walked around the flank of the tochee and pushed the door curtain aside. He wasn’t sure, but he thought the security mesh had been moved around slightly, as if something had gently prodded it. “Come on then.” He beckoned the tochee with an exaggerated gesture. The big creature turned smoothly in the passageway, and slithered into the sleeping room. Once again, Ozzie was impressed by how agile the alien was; for something that size it could move quickly and precisely.
He sat on the cot, staring at the tochee, and gestured around expansively. “Go ahead.” The alien didn’t move. It kept its great front eye perfectly aligned on the human.
“All right then.” Ozzie went over to the security mesh and clicked the padlock’s combination code, covering the motion with his body. He still wasn’t that trusting. With the mesh open, he pulled out various articles, food, clothes, a kerosene lamp, his sewing kit, a handheld array, and set them down on the floor in front of the alien. The tochee’s locomotion ridges flattened slightly, lowering it down; then its manipulator flesh on the left side flowed out into a slim tentacle that picked up the array. The tip pressed each of the five buttons on top. But the unit remained dead.
“Ah-ha,” Ozzie said. Only someone familiar with technology would understand a button. “So you understand technology, but we can’t communicate. Why not?” He sat back on the cot and looked at the tochee again. It might be a human interpretation, but the alien seemed to slump in disappointment at the array’s failure. It slowly replaced it on the floor, little black fronds rustling like autumn leaves in a breeze.
“You don’t use sound, so what does that leave us with? Telepathy? Doubtful. Magnetic fields? Bees and trokken marshrats can sense them, but the Silfen are probably damping them here. Possible, then. Electromagnetic? Ditto for radio waves, the array is dead. Shapes? You’re visually perceptive, so that’s another possible. I can’t match that shapeshifting arm trick, though, and Sara said you didn’t understand pictures.” He cocked his head to one side. “Make that human pictures. I wouldn’t understand yours. That’s if you draw them. Now there’s a culture difference. Do you have art?” Ozzie stopped. He was feeling mildly foolish talking out loud to an alien that couldn’t hear. The tochee was still facing him, the front eye perfectly aligned. Ozzie shuffled a few inches along the cot. The tochee’s front body moved slightly, tracking him. “Why are you doing that? What can you be trying to say.”No, not what. How? Ozzie stared at that elongated oval of shiny black flesh that was pointing right at him. Not sound, but an emission of… “Shit.” He switched his retinal inserts to infrared, and the tochee’s body crawled with strange thermal signatures, hinting at the location of blood vessels and organs hidden below the flesh. He slowly worked up through the visual spectrum, until he reached ultraviolet. “Fuck!” Ozzie jumped backward in reflex shock, and fell off the cot.
The tochee’s forward eye was alive with complex dancing patterns of deep purple light shining straight at him.
When Orion returned to their rooms a couple of hours after lunch he found the tochee almost blocking the doorway. Ozzie was sitting on his cot, sketching furiously with a pencil on one of his notebooks. The rock floor was littered with scraps of paper, all with the weirdest patterns on them, like flowers drawn by a five- year-old, where every petal was represented by a jagged bolt of lightning.
“George Parkin’s been looking for you,” Orion began. “Why is that in here?”
Ozzie gave him a manic grin, his crazy hair fluffing out from his head as if he’d been hit by a big static charge. “Oh, me and Tochee here are just having a little chat.” He just couldn’t keep the smugness from his tone.
“Uh?” was all Orion managed.
Ozzie picked up one of the pieces of paper torn out of the notebook. The pattern was like a rosette of fractured glass, but there was a word scribbled on the top corner. Ozzie’s other hand held up a leather shoe. Half of the contents from their packs were scattered around. “This is its symbol for shoe,” he said jubilantly. “Yes, look, it’s repeating it. Course, it might just be the symbol for violated dead animal skin, but who the hell cares. We’re getting there. We’re building a vocabulary.”
Orion looked from Ozzie to the tochee. “Repeating what?”
“The symbol. There are other components to it, but they move the whole time. I can see them but I can’t draw them. So I’m just sticking to basics. I think the moving parts might be grammar codes, or context information.”
“Ozzie, what symbol?”
“Sit down, I’ll tell you.”
“It talks in pictures?” Orion asked ten minutes later.
“That’s the simple explanation, yes.”
“What’s the complicated one?”
“The pattern it projects is the visual language of the picture, sort of the same as we give names to objects. I imagine when two of them communicate together it’s extremely fast. There’s a lot of information in a pattern like that. I’m sure I’m only getting the fundamentals of it. In fact, I’m going to try and teach it the human alphabet. But I’m not surprised it didn’t understand the pictures Sara tried to draw for it, like the difference between drawing a stick man, and seeing a fully fledged color hologram of a man. Tochee will have to learn how to think down to our level, I’m afraid.”
“That’s good.”
“So why do you sound like it’s the world’s biggest bummer?”
“Well, it’s nice for Tochee, and everything, but writing notes isn’t going to get us off this stinking world, is it?”
“You think?” Ozzie grinned. “Know what the first thing tochee asked me? Can you get me out of here? That means we can team up. We’ll make a great team, the three of us.”
“How come?”
“Tochee is strong, and fast. And that’s what we need to keep up with the Silfen.”
“It can’t go outside, Ozzie. It freezes!”
“I’ve got some ideas about that. I’ll talk to George about them tomorrow.”
Orion gave the big alien a curious look. “You really think you can do that, get it to come along?”
“Hope so, man. We’ve just been fooling around so far, letting each other know we can talk. Now we’ve got to build a real communications bridge. I’ve got some programs in my inserts that are still working, kind of; they’re translation and interpretation routines, the type CST use when they encounter a new species for the first time. They’ll take you all the way from ‘the cat sat on the mat’ up to discussing metaphysics. Damn, this would be so much easier if my array was working.”
“Lucky your inserts are.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Ozzie, look!”
Tochee extended a thin tendril from its manipulator flesh, and picked a piece of paper off the floor. The pattern was close to a spiral of snowflakes, in the corner Ozzie had written array, or electronics in general?
“Why that one?” Ozzie muttered. He stared at Tochee’s forward eye that was flaring with fast-moving lavender patterns. “Ah, could be ‘communications device.’ I think Tochee wants me to get on with it.”
“Can I watch?” Orion asked excitedly. “It’s got to be better than the stables.”
“Yeah, you can watch. It might take a while, though.”
SEVENTEEN
It had taken days to cajole her father into supporting the weekend. Not that Justine Burnelli actually wanted him there, not as he was right now, barely six months out of rejuve. He was impossible at the best of times, but add his natural brute stubbornness to youthful vitality, and it made him damn near inhuman. However, she had to concede, his presence made the weekend a valid event; without him, the necessary players would never have turned up.
