Family Law 3: Secrets in the Stars (31 page)

"Indeed, I should add, I wasn't
broke
when I joined this voyage," Ha-bob-bob-brie said. "I served on several successful voyages of exploration before I retired. I had income. You do not impoverish me."

That was interesting. He'd never spoken of his situation to Lee, just their mutual loss of shipmates.

Talker looked shocked. "I can buy an estate," he said, flabbergasted. "While I am young even. Cash money is in short supply among Badgers and it will buy a great deal on the raw frontier."

"If you
want
an estate," Lee said. "I have land if I want to build and develop it. But I'm going to make sure my estate doesn't tie me down and own me. Given my experience with planets I value owning a ship much more than land."

"I can understand that, in the abstract, but the drive to own land has been held out as the ideal to me all my life. I
feel
it. It's a really basic drive of our whole culture. It would take a huge change to dull that desire at all," Talker admitted.

"Well, give it a try," Ha-bob-bob-brie suggested. "Get it out of your system and if you get tired of it or it doesn't turn out to be everything you expected, I imagine you can always sell it."

"You have no idea how Badgers
think
if you can imagine selling an estate. They'd probably declare me insane. I've never heard of it being done in modern times."

"Not to break up this amusing love fest, but if everybody is happy with this reply to the Caterpillars can we
send
the damn thing," Thor grumbled.

Lee and Talker looked at each other. There really wasn't anything to improve.

"Do it," they said in unison.

* * *

"I'd
never
say it that way," Hoot-hoót- hº ºt said, not trying to hide his disapproval.

"Neither would I, yesterday," Hoót-hoöt-hôôt agreed. "But it's perfectly clear and precise, isn't it? They are going back a different unknown route and have no idea exactly how many stars they will visit. Tell me any other way to read it. It leaves no ambiguity and would be a good statement for a navigator. I've seen much worse technical writing. So elegant you had no idea what it was saying."

"Yes, it has a certain unconventional elegance," Hoot-hoót- hº ºt agreed. "It just breaks, convention, so it is upsetting. It is so blunt it
jars
."

"Ha! They don't know convention. Perhaps there strange folk will be good for us. Maybe a few people too set in their ways will benefit from being upset."

"I wonder which of those strange races wrote this – thing?" Hoot-hoót- hº ºt said. "Do they have as much trouble speaking with each other? Surely not."

"Well we know the affirmative sound. And they almost know how to build a word. We'll get there eventually. We need to acquire their negative sound and we need to get them to build a matrix from the opposite corner instead of like a brain damaged grub. Any suggestions how?"

* * *

"Oh my God... They are correcting our grammar," Lee wailed.

"Well that's
good
," Talker insisted. I'd be happy to learn how to speak to them better. I didn't expect our first few efforts would be that good. Why so upset?"

"I loved my mother," Lee said defensively.

"I'm sure you did. I'm sure that is normal in most sapient species," Talker said, as kindly as possible, but it seemed a complete non sequitur to him.

"She taught me
so
much," Lee said, "But sometimes she was more... diligent than seemed necessary to never allow
any
error of speech."

"Ah, and you resented that?" Talker asked her.

"On... occasion. We'd be sharing some thought or just working, happy with each other, and then she'd correct something I said and it ruined the moment. Sometimes I'd repeat things I heard my father say and she'd correct that. When I was older I pointed she didn't correct them when he said them. She just said you don't correct your mate if you want a happy marriage. It made me feel – slighted. I had a hard time with that."

Talker nodded, a gesture he'd grown very comfortable using. "I understand a little. It's always a little harder in a non-consensual relationship. She had a choice to be with your father. You didn't have a choice to be with them."

"That sounds so ungrateful," Lee said.

"It's just a fact," Talker said. "It's not to say it was all bad, to allow that maybe bits here and there weren't perfect. I'm sure Tish has been unhappy with me on occasion. I don't have to guess. She's told me a time or two. But that doesn't mean we don't miss each other with me away so long."

"At least you have a big family," Lee said. "She wasn’t waiting alone for you."

"You have a big family too," Talker said, and Lee cracked up laughing.

"OK, I didn't
mean
that to be funny," Talker said, slightly confused.

"Oh... My Derf relatives. I thought you were making a joke on Gordon's size," Lee admitted.

"That's OK. I'm glad I could make you laugh. May I ask
how
they corrected our grammar without upsetting you all over again?" Talker asked.

"Yes, I'm over it, but I do appreciate your talking to me. The big thing is they showed the same sequence we used but started in the opposite corner. They still go clockwise. They didn't change any of the images though. That surprises me," Lee said.

"If I were them, I wouldn't confuse it at this stage by making more than one change,” Talker said. "The images may not be perfect, but by only making one change they made sure we got the point. It's encouraging really. We had
nothing
for so long."

"And we still can't talk well enough to order a decent pizza," Thor grumped.

"Oh Thor," Lee said, still a little giddy from unburdening herself. "You can only order
squares
."

* * *

The stars blinked and reconfigured late in their shift. Brownie listened and declared it quiet. They pinged it with radar. The new star was unremarkable. The system, however, was unusual. There were two frozen planets out where gas giants would usually be. Neither were big. They were more like typical inner system rocky planets. One was technically a water world, but they wouldn't be leaving a claim marker for it or celebrating it with a blue voyage ring. It was an ice world. There might be something behind the star but they didn't have much hope for anything exciting or profitable.

"It's kind of creepy to be so empty," Jon Burris finally said.

"Yeah, let Ernie know we have an oddball system for him to study. Maybe he'll have some theory what could have happened to make it so different," Gordon said.

"Maybe it just never formed planets at the very start," Brownie guessed.

"Perhaps something passed through and perturbed the planets," Thor suggested. "Another star passing close or a free giant planet without a star."

"Or some aliens needed the material for something and mined the system for the mass," Lee said.

"I'm not comfortable with that idea," Gordon said, after a silence where they all thought about it.

"It seemed like a possibility," Lee said, defensively.

"Oh it could be true," Gordon admitted. "I'm still not
comfortable
with it."

"Amen," said Thor, who was not notably religious.

"Aliens who have fast kilometer-long ships are bad enough," Jon Burris agreed. "We're not ready for somebody who moves planets around or disassembles them."

"I sort of figured
we
would get to that point," Lee said. "Maybe not real soon, but I can imagine it. If you can imagine it the rest is engineering."

"Sometimes, you people do scare me," Talker admitted, in a small voice.

What was there to say to that? They stopped talking and were glad the other shift came on in a few minutes.

Chapter 20

"I'd like to try making a message with the corrections they showed us, but I'm not sure what we need to say," Lee told Talker. "I mean... there's
all kinds
of things we need to say, but I'm not sure what is within our ability yet. Showing them a travel itinerary is kind of hard to expand into anything real abstract. Gordon apparently taught them 'yes' but I'm not even sure how to teach them 'no'. I had a lot more success with you guys because I could do hands and fingers. I can't
do
tentacles."

"I think you are imagining barriers that aren't that important," Talker said. "You know Luke and his assistants went back to their other duties? They made the excuse we have the 3D setup here. But the truth was they sent a lot of different images and voice to the Caterpillars and didn't make any headway. They got absolutely zero response from the Caterpillars. And Gordon didn't argue with them at all. We may not be chatting like you and I do, but we at least got a response from just a couple messages."

Gordon raised an eyebrow at his name, but declined to get involved.

"OK, when we were first tried to talk with you guys, what worked that we could do with the Caterpillars? Did you see our transmissions? Were you in the loop back on Far Away?"

"I wasn't at first, but when I knew I was going to go meet you on the station I reviewed the recordings. Not just the accumulated vocabulary but how we got the first words. I was particularly amused and enjoyed watching when you cut a sandwich up on camera," Talker said.

"I'm not sure the caterpillars would know what a sandwich was if they saw one," Lee said.

"You're getting hung up on the differences again. You had no idea if
we
ate sandwiches when you started disassembling them and cutting them into fractions. You weren't afraid to do it because we're so similar. A Badger like me is so like you it's easy to fool yourself into thinking he's just a Human in a furry suit and a funny nose."

"You
do
eat sandwiches. I saw them," Lee protested.

"That's not the point. You didn't know that at the time. But the language lesson still worked. It would have worked with a block of clay, which I doubt you have on a ship. Do you have something else semi-solid and homogenous aboard that can be cut in chunks?" Talker asked.

"Tofu," Thor supplied, distastefully. He'd been following the conversation.

Talker paused to look it up on the web fraction, and frowned. "It doesn't look very appetizing in the illustration. Maybe it's a poor photograph," he decided.

"
I
don't consider it food," Thor told him, "but you could cut it to demonstrate division. Maybe you've found an actual
use
for it."

"Even if they don't have hands and fingers, they still need to learn the words for them," Talker told Lee. "After all, we have words for their body parts. And we'll need their words too, of course."

"All right. I'm seeing it. I assume Luke tried sending pictures of a hand or doing something with his hand in video. So I still need to find a way to put it in a matrix."

"OK, that's our next goal then," Talker agreed.

* * *

The next system was binary with a faint companion around a bigger star. It also had a complex of satellites around a brown dwarf orbiting both stars, just like they'd found on the way out. It was great to find another, but having both the Badgers and Bills along worried Gordon. This was definitely within the cone of space aimed back at the regions of Human space they intended to cede. But would that hold up when they saw how rich the system was with the wealth of metals? Humans and Derf both had had wars across borders in their histories over resources.

After arranging for the fleet to take up station near the brown dwarf Gordon called Ernie Goddard in for a private consultation in his cabin. Ernie arrived looking like he was going to his own hanging, but relaxed when Gordon invited him to share lunch and got his private supply of Fargone rum out.

"Can you establish from our data how this system relates to the other brown dwarf systems?" Gordon asked. "If there is a line or arch we can find other such treasure troves along it would be of great benefit."

"I'll plot a 3D model of it for you. But you realize this will be one point widely separated from the others. You don't like to make detours, but if you could do a loop to either side and find another brown dwarf cluster it would establish it with much more certainty. Would you consider sending somebody on a loop between us and the other systems we found on our outbound leg?" Ernie asked.

"Perhaps. I was more interested in establishing if a line of them continued outside our territorial cone, out into the space we agreed with the Badgers would be open to everybody," Gordon said.

"Are you regretting they gave away too much too easily when they came to that agreement?" Ernie asked, alarmed. "It's the whole basis of their expectations in coming back with us. I realize I am very junior to you, but I'd think long and hard before doing anything that makes them think you'd try to get them to repudiate it. At the very least discuss it with your Mother and the Fargone Spox
privately
."

"No Ernie," Gordon said, a little hurt. "You think badly of me too easily. I'm worried about the opposite, that it may appear we got all the prime sources of metals between us and if their civilizations want any,
they
will have to repudiate it or war with us. As far as being junior, I've always welcomed advice and initiative from the crews."

"Oh good, and I thank you," Ernie said, relieved, "but even if they wanted to, the Badgers and all their friends couldn't start to wage war on us.

"Today," Gordon said, stabbing a finger on the lunch table between them. "Twenty years or a hundred in the future? We don't know. Do you imagine Humans thought Derf could ever wage war on them when they found us, planet bound, and much less a threat than these folk are right now? No, it's the future I'm worried about. I'd like them to know for a certainty that they aren't bargaining foolishly to impoverish themselves."

"Ah... well then, loop away from our claims and see what is in a line leading off into neutral space," Ernie agreed. "Perhaps even invite them to send the Dart to do so."